Month: May 2011

A few months ago, I decided to buy a Kindle. Really, I combined a gift card and credit card points towards getting the toy. It’s been great. Since I got it in the mail, I’ve been using it for all of my reading. I don’t know if it’s made me read more, but it has a wonderful feature that lets me highlight and export text right from the device, letting me see what has struck me in what I’ve read.

Taking this a step further. I’m now going to share what I’ve been reading here. Ideally, I’ll keep this updated weekly, but you know how life is. I’ll do my best to include links to the articles from the web or to links to where you can find the source of the book I have excerpted. I have cut down significantly on the highlights represented. I do not feel compelled to share everything I’m reading, but want to leave behind a good collection of the more significant passages. Also, I’ve maintained the original order of the highlights, so there is going to be some jumping around from article to article.

Keep in mind that the highlights below are not my own writings. Some of the ideas contradict my own beliefs, but, when I was reading them, stood out to me. So, without further introduction, I offer you the first installment of the series on what I’m reading.

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Jesus and Divine Evolution (kk.org)

Added on Monday, May 02, 2011, 01:47 PM

Both the radical atheists and fundamentalist Christians are drinking the cup of the same error: that evolution = no god. In a weird way the radical atheists and fundamentalists are agreeing with each other, and feeding each other this unnecessary mistake: that evolution must be godless.

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Jesus and Divine Evolution (kk.org)

Added on Monday, May 02, 2011, 01:48 PM

the unrolling creation of evolution requires a much larger God, a creator outside of time who unfolds the cosmos and life and mind an ongoing process.

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Jesus and Divine Evolution (kk.org)

Added on Monday, May 02, 2011, 01:48 PM

Personally and collectively we are defined by our understanding of where we come from. If we believe in a fearful angry-father God, our society will angry and fearful. If we believe in directionless randomness as God, then our society will be directionless.

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Do the Work (Steven Pressfield)

Added on Monday, May 02, 2011, 02:13 PM

Any project or enterprise can be broken down into beginning, middle, and end. Fill in the gaps; then fill in the gaps between the gaps.

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China’s DNA (kk.org)

Added on Wednesday, May 04, 2011, 09:31 PM

Science will go where there is the least resistance to it. It is borderless, constantly seeking the fewest restrictions and the most investments.

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Emergence (en.wikipedia.org)

Added on Wednesday, May 04, 2011, 09:36 PM

emergence is the way complex systems and patterns arise out of a multiplicity of relatively simple interactions.

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Do the Work (Steven Pressfield)

Added on Thursday, May 05, 2011, 01:09 PM

Resistance Arises Second The sixth principle of Resistance (and the key to overcoming it) is that Resistance arises second. What comes first is the idea, the passion, the dream of the work we are so excited to create that it scares the hell out of us. Resistance is the response of the frightened, petty, small-time ego to the brave, generous, magnificent impulse of the creative self. Resistance is the shadow cast by the innovative self’s sun. What does this mean to us—the artists and entrepreneurs in the trenches? It means that before the dragon of Resistance reared its ugly head and breathed fire into our faces, there existed within us a force so potent and life-affirming that it summoned this beast into being, perversely, to combat it. It means that, at bottom, Resistance is not the towering, all-powerful monster before whom we are compelled to quake in terror. Resistance is more like the pain-in-the-ass schoolteacher who won’t let us climb that tree in the playground. But the urge to climb came first. That urge is love.

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THE MYTH OF THE RULE OF LAW (faculty.msb.edu)

Added on Thursday, May 05, 2011, 08:21 PM

citizens understand that the laws under which they live are a product of political forces rather than the embodiment of the ideal of justice.

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THE MYTH OF THE RULE OF LAW (faculty.msb.edu)

Added on Thursday, May 05, 2011, 08:22 PM

The frequent condemnation of the judiciary for “undemocratic judicial activism” or “unprincipled social engineering” is merely a reflection of the public’s belief that the law consists of a set of definite and consistent “neutral principles” (5) which the judge is obligated to apply in an objective manner, free from the influence of his or her personal political and moral beliefs.

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THE MYTH OF THE RULE OF LAW (faculty.msb.edu)

Added on Thursday, May 05, 2011, 08:23 PM

I believe that, much as Orwell suggested, it is the public’s ability to engage in this type of doublethink, to be aware that the law is inherently political in character and yet believe it to be an objective embodiment of justice, that accounts for the amazing degree to which the federal government is able to exert its control over a supposedly free people.

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THE MYTH OF THE RULE OF LAW (faculty.msb.edu)

Added on Thursday, May 05, 2011, 08:30 PM

unlike the laws of nature, political laws are not consistent. The law human beings create to regulate their conduct is made up of incompatible, contradictory rules and principles; and, as anyone who has studied a little logic can demonstrate, any conclusion can be validly derived from a set of contradictory premises. This means that a logically sound argument can be found for any legal conclusion.

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THE MYTH OF THE RULE OF LAW (faculty.msb.edu)

Added on Thursday, May 05, 2011, 08:33 PM

The assumption that there is a unique, correct resolution, which serves so well in empirical investigations, leads one astray when dealing with legal matters.

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THE MYTH OF THE RULE OF LAW (faculty.msb.edu)

Added on Thursday, May 05, 2011, 08:38 PM

Thus, legal conclusions are always determined by the normative assumptions of the decisionmaker. The knowledge that Kingsfield possesses and Arnie and Ann have not yet discovered is that the law is never neutral and objective.

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THE MYTH OF THE RULE OF LAW (faculty.msb.edu)

Added on Thursday, May 05, 2011, 09:16 PM

If four generations of jurisprudential scholars have shown that the rule of law is a myth, why does the concept still command such fervent commitment? The answer is implicit in the question itself, for the question recognizes that the rule of law is a myth and like all myths, it is designed to serve an emotive, rather than cognitive, function. The purpose of a myth is not to persuade one’s reason, but to enlist one’s emotions in support of an idea. And this is precisely the case for the myth of the rule of law; its purpose is to enlist the emotions of the public in support of society’s political power structure.

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THE MYTH OF THE RULE OF LAW (faculty.msb.edu)

Added on Thursday, May 05, 2011, 09:16 PM

People are more willing to support the exercise of authority over themselves when they believe it to be an objective, neutral feature of the natural world. This was the idea behind the concept of the divine right of kings. By making the king appear o be an integral part of God’s plan for the world rather than an ordinary human being dominating his fellows by brute force, the public could be more easily persuaded to bow to his authority. However, when the doctrine of divine right became discredited, a replacement was needed to ensure that the public did not view political authority as merely the exercise of naked power. That replacement is the concept of the rule of law.

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THE MYTH OF THE RULE OF LAW (faculty.msb.edu)

Added on Friday, May 06, 2011, 12:49 PM

As it is presently constituted, law is the production of order by requiring all members of society to live under the same set of state-generated rules; it is order produced by centralized planning.

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THE MYTH OF THE RULE OF LAW (faculty.msb.edu)

Added on Friday, May 06, 2011, 01:10 PM

The fact is that there is no such thing as a government of law and not people. The law is an amalgam of contradictory rules and counter-rules expressed in inherently vague language that can yield a legitimate legal argument for any desired conclusion. For this reason, as long as the law remains a state monopoly, it will always reflect the political ideology of those invested with decisionmaking power. Like it or not, we are faced with only two choices. We can continue the ideological power struggle for control of the law in which the group that gains dominance is empowered to impose its will on the rest of society, or we can end the monopoly. Our long-standing love affair with the myth of the rule of law has made us blind to the latter possibility. Like the Monosizeans, who after centuries of state control cannot imagine a society in which people can buy whatever size shoes they wish, we cannot conceive of a society in which individuals may purchase the legal services they desire. The very idea of a free market in law makes us uncomfortable. But it is time for us to overcome this discomfort and consider adopting Socrates’ approach. We must recognize that our love for the rule of law is unrequited, and that, as so often happens in such cases, we have become enslaved to the object of our desire. No clearer example of this exists than the legal process by which our Constitution was transformed from a document creating a government of limited powers and guaranteed rights into one which provides the justification for the activities of the all-encompassing super-state of today. However heart-wrenching it may be, we must break off this one-sided affair. The time has come for those committed to individual liberty to realize that the establishment of a truly free society requires the abandonment of the myth of the rule of law.

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Seeing the truth when it might be invisible (sethgodin.typepad.com)

Added on Friday, May 06, 2011, 01:14 PM

Merely because it’s invisible doesn’t mean it’s true—or false. Is it a skill to figure out what’s true, even if it’s invisible? I think it is, and a rare and valuable one.

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Who’s Your City (kk.org)

Added on Friday, May 06, 2011, 01:19 PM

When people—especially talented and creative ones—come together, ideas flow more freely, and as a result individual and aggregate talents increase exponentially: the end result amounts to much more than the sum of the parts. This clustering makes each of us more productive, which in turn makes the place we inhabit even more so—and our collective creativity and economic wealth grow accordingly. This in a nutshell is the clustering force.

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The wonders of being 70 (washingtonpost.com)

Added on Saturday, May 07, 2011, 02:25 PM

Happiness — herewith the distilled essence of 70 years of experience — is a talent, and one that, unlike hitting a curveball, anyone can develop. Considering that America exists to protect the individual’s pursuit of it, this pursuit is a pleasant duty. Finally, to be 70 is to have lived 30 percent of the life of this nation, which is almost enough time to begin to fully appreciate the inestimable privilege of being a legatee of those who first unfurled the republic’s sails and steered it toward the present. That is why — with homage to F. Scott Fitzgerald — as we beat on, boats against the current, we should be borne back ceaselessly into the American past: It is impossible for the young to know, but never too late to learn, that America truly is something — perhaps the only thing — commensurate with our capacity for wonder.

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Kevin Kelly — This New Economy (kk.org)

Added on Saturday, May 07, 2011, 03:12 PM

This new economy has three distinguishing characteristics: It is global. It favors intangible things—ideas, information, and relationships. And it is intensely interlinked. These three attributes produce a new type of marketplace and society, one that is rooted in ubiquitous electronic networks.

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Kevin Kelly — New Rules for the New Economy (kk.org)

Added on Saturday, May 07, 2011, 03:32 PM

The value of a network explodes as its membership increases, and then the value explosion sucks in yet more members, compounding the result.

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Kevin Kelly — New Rules for the New Economy (kk.org)

Added on Saturday, May 07, 2011, 03:33 PM

In the network economy, success is self-reinforcing; it obeys the law of increasing returns. The great innovation of Silicon Valley is not the wowie-zowie hardware and software it has invented. Silicon Valley’s greatest “product” is the social organisation of its companies, and most important, the tangled web of former jobs, intimate colleagues, information leakage from one firm to the next, rapid company life cycles, and agile e-mail culture. This social web, suffused into the warm hardware of jelly bean chips and copper neurons, creates a network economy.

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Kevin Kelly — New Rules for the New Economy (kk.org)

Added on Saturday, May 07, 2011, 03:33 PM

It’s a “hits” economy where resources flow to those that show some life. If a new novel, new product, or new service begins to succeed it is fed more; if it falters its left to wither.

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Kevin Kelly — New Rules for the New Economy (kk.org)

Added on Saturday, May 07, 2011, 03:36 PM

If goods and services become more valuable as they become more plentiful, and if they become cheaper as they become valuable, then the natural extension of this logic says that the most valuable things of all should be those that are ubiquitous and free. Following the free also works in the other direction. If one way to increase product value is to make products free, then many things now free may contain potential value not yet perceived. The only factor becoming scarce in a world of abundance is human attention.

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Kevin Kelly — New Rules for the New Economy (kk.org)

Added on Saturday, May 07, 2011, 03:40 PM

Change comes in various wavelengths. There are changes in the game, changes in the rules of the game, and changes in how the rules are changed.

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Kevin Kelly — New Rules for the New Economy (kk.org)

Added on Saturday, May 07, 2011, 03:42 PM

Every opportunity seized launches at least two new opportunities. Don’t solve problems, pursue opportunities. There is more to be gained by producing more opportunities than by optimizing existing ones. Productivity, however, is exactly the wrong thing to care about i <You have reached the clipping limit for this item.

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Emergence (en.wikipedia.org)

Added on Saturday, May 07, 2011, 04:03 PM

One reason why emergent behaviour is hard to predict is that the number of interactions between components of a system increases combinatorially with the number of components, thus potentially allowing for many new and subtle types of behaviour to emerge. For example, the possible interactions between groups of molecules grows enormously with the number of molecules such that it is impossible for a computer to even list the arrangements for a system as small as 20 molecules.

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Mad German Auteur, Now in 3-D! (gq.com)

Added on Saturday, May 07, 2011, 04:42 PM

“Oh, I don’t want introspection,” he demurs. “I don’t like to look at myself.” Why? “I’ve always been suspicious. I don’t even look into my face. I shaved this morning, and I look at my cheeks so that I don’t cut myself, but I don’t even want to know the color of my eyes. I think psychology and self-reflection is one of the major catastrophes of the twentieth century. A major, major mistake. And it’s only one of the mistakes of the twentieth century, which makes me think that the twentieth century in its entirety was a mistake.” What’s the mistake with psychology and self-reflection? “There’s something profoundly wrong—as wrong as the Spanish Inquisition was. The Spanish Inquisition had one goal, to eradicate all traces of Muslim faith on the soil of Spain, and hence you had to confess and proclaim the innermost deepest nature of your faith to the commission. And almost as a parallel event, explaining and scrutinizing the human soul, into all its niches and crooks and abyses and dark corners, is not doing good to humans. We have to have our dark corners and the unexplained. We will become uninhabitable in a way an apartment will become uninhabitable if you illuminate every single dark corner and under the table and wherever—you cannot live in a house like this anymore. And you cannot live with a person anymore—let’s say in a marriage or a deep friendship—if everything is illuminated, explained, and put out on the table. There is something profoundly wrong. It’s a mistake. It’s a fundamentally wrong approach toward human beings.” And so if humans persist in this way…? “They persist in stupidity, then.” And what will the consequence be? “For example, for me, I could never ever be with a woman who is three times a week with a psychiatrist. It’s like an iron curtain between us. Like venetian blinds rattling down.”

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Mad German Auteur, Now in 3-D! (gq.com)

Added on Saturday, May 07, 2011, 04:45 PM

“Three months traveling on foot, let’s say, which would be something like 3,000 kilometers,” he declares, “would have more value than three years in film school.”

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Emergence (en.wikipedia.org)

Added on Sunday, May 08, 2011, 07:50 AM

Swarming is a well-known behaviour in many animal species from marching locusts to schooling fish to flocking birds. Emergent structures are a common strategy found in many animal groups: colonies of ants, mounds built by termites, swarms of bees, shoals/schools of fish, flocks of birds, and herds/packs of mammals. An example to consider in detail is an ant colony. The queen does not give direct orders and does not tell the ants what to do. Instead, each ant reacts to stimuli in the form of chemical scent from larvae, other ants, intruders, food and build up of waste, and leaves behind a chemical trail, which, in turn, provides a stimulus to other ants. Here each ant is an autonomous unit that reacts depending only on its local environment and the genetically encoded rules for its variety of ant. Despite the lack of centralized decision-making, ant colonies exhibit complex behavior and have even been able to demonstrate the ability to solve geometric problems. For example, colonies routinely find the maximum distance from all colony entrances to dispose of dead bodies.

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Do the Work (Steven Pressfield)

Added on Sunday, May 08, 2011, 08:10 AM

Marianne Williamson: Our deepest fear is not that we are inadequate. Our deepest fear is that we are powerful beyond measure. It is our light, not our darkness, that most frightens us. We ask ourselves, Who am I to be brilliant, gorgeous, talented, fabulous? Actually, who are you not to be? You are a child of God. Your playing small does not serve the world. There is nothing enlightened about shrinking so that other people won’t feel insecure around you. We are all meant to shine, as children do. We were born to make manifest the glory of God that is within us. It’s not just in some of us; it’s in everyone. And as we let our own light shine, we unconsciously give other people permission to do the same. As we are liberated from our own fear, our presence automatically liberates others.

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Emergence (en.wikipedia.org)

Added on Sunday, May 08, 2011, 08:49 AM

Groups of human beings, left free to each regulate themselves, tend to produce spontaneous order, rather than the meaningless chaos often feared. This has been observed in society at least since Chuang Tzu in ancient China. A classic traffic roundabout is a good example, with cars moving in and out with such effective organization that some modern cities have begun replacing stoplights at problem intersections with traffic circles [2], and getting better results. Emergent processes or behaviours can be seen in many places, such as traffic patterns, cities, political systems of governance, cabal and market-dominant minority phenomena in politics and economics, organizational phenomena in computer simulations and cellular automata. Whenever you have a multitude of individuals interacting with one another, there often comes a moment when disorder gives way to order and something new emerges: a pattern, a decision, a structure, or a change in direction (Miller 2010, 29).[7]

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Emergence (en.wikipedia.org)

Added on Sunday, May 08, 2011, 03:47 PM

It has been argued that language, or at least language change, is an emergence phenomenon. While each speaker merely tries to reach her or his own communicative goals, she or he uses language in a particular way. If enough speakers behave in that way, language is changed (Keller 1994). In a wider sense, the norms of a language, i.e. the linguistic conventions of its speech society, can be seen as a system emerging from long-time participation in communicative problem-solving in various social circumstances. (Määttä 2000) Language and culture are treated as emergent phenomena in The Extended Mind: The Emergence of Language, the Human Mind and Culture.(Logan 2007)

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