读书笔记：The Bed of Procrustes

tags
笔记
书籍
date
Apr 3, 2023
slug
the-bed-of-procrustes
status
Published
summary
年轻时候智慧如同年老时候的轻浮一样不吸引人。
type
Post
cover
  • To bankrupt a fool, give him information.
  • [[Academia]] is to [[knowledge]] what prostitution is to love; close enough on the surface but, to the nonsucker, not exactly the same thing.
  • If you know, in the morning, what your day looks like with any precision, you are a little bit dead—the more precision, the more dead you are. 可预测的人生，相当无趣
  • that elicit a “warm glow” or promise salvation
  • It is harder to say no when you really mean it than when you don’t. Never say no twice if you mean it. 真正的拒绝，只说一次
  • You never win an [[argument]] until they attack your person.
  • The opposite of manliness isn’t cowardice; it’s [[technology]].
  • Usually, what we call a “good[[ listener]]” is someone with skillfully polished indifference. 好的倾听者可以圆滑的表达不同.
  • It is the appearance of inconsistency, and not its absence, that makes people attractive.
  • When she shouts that what you did was unforgivable, she has already started to forgive you. 当她对你说：“不可原谅。”的时候，她已经原谅了你。
  • Wisdom in the young is as unattractive as frivolity in the elderly. 年轻时候智慧如同年老时候的轻浮一样不吸引人。
  • Some people are only funny when they try to be [[serious]].
  • What fools call “[[wasting time]]” is most often the best investment.
  • A man without a heroic bent starts dying at the age of thirty.
  • Modernity: we created youth without heroism, age without wisdom, and life without grandeur.
  • It is a good practice to always apologize, except when you have done something wrong. 一直道歉，除非你真的错了。
  • Don’t complain too loud about wrongs done you; you may give ideas to your less imaginative enemies.
  • I have the fondest memories of time spent in places called ugly, the most boring ones of places called scenic. 很适合用于回忆[[旅行]]
  • [[Charm]] is the ability to insult people without offending them; nerdiness the reverse.
  • They are born, then put in a box; they go home to live in a box; they study by ticking boxes; they go to what is called “work” in a box, where they sit in their cubicle box; they drive to the grocery store in a box to buy food in a box; they go to the gym in a box to sit in a box; they talk about thinking “outside the box”; and when they die they are put in a box. All boxes, Euclidian, geometrically smooth boxes.
  • It seems that it is the most unsuccessful people who give the most [[advice]], particularly for writing and [[financial]] matters.
  • [[Rumor]]s are only valuable when they are denied. 被否定[[谣言]]才有价值。
  • Modernity inflicts a sucker narrative on activities; now we “walk for [[exercise]],” not “walk” with no justification; for hidden reasons.
  • Social media are severely antisocial, health foods are empirically unhealthy, [[knowledge]]workers are very ignorant, and social sciences aren’t scientific at all.
  • The three most harmful addictions are heroin, carbohydrates, and a monthly [[salary]].
  • If you need to listen to [[music]] while walking, don’t walk; and please don’t listen to [[music]].
  • [[Technology]] can degrade (and endanger) every aspect of a sucker’s life while convincing him that it is becoming more “[[efficient]].”
  • The difference between [[technology]] and [[slavery]] is that slaves are fully aware that they are not free.
  • With terminal [[disease]], [[nature]] lets you [[die]] with abbreviated suffering; medicine lets you suffer with prolonged [[dying]].
  • For everything, use boredom in place of a clock, as a biological wristwatch, though under constraints of politeness. 用无聊来代替时钟
  • [[Skill]]s that [[transfer]]: street [[fight]]s, off-path hiking, seduction, broad erudition. Skills that don’t: school, games, sports, laboratory—what’s reduced and [[organized]].
  • For most, [[work]] and what comes with it have the eroding effect of chronic injury.
  • [[Technology]] is at its best when it is invisible.
  • When I look at people on treadmills I wonder how [[alpha]] lions, the strongest, expend the least amount of energy, sleeping twenty hours a day; others hunt for them. Caesar
  • Every social association that is not [[face-to-face]] is injurious to your health. 不能面对面的社交只会影响你的健康。
  • [[Writing]] is the art of repeating oneself without anyone noticing.
  • Most people[[ write]] so they can [[remember]] things; I write to [[forget]].
  • You need to keep reminding yourself of the obvious: [[charm]] lies in the [[unsaid]], the unwritten, and the undisplayed. It takes mastery to control [[silence]].
  • Hard [[science]] gives sensational results with a horribly boring process; [[philosophy]] gives boring results with a sensational process; literature gives sensational results with a sensational process; and [[economics]] gives boring results with a boring process.
  • A [[genius]] is someone with flaws harder to [[imitate]] than his qualities.
  • With regular books, [[read]] the text and skip the [[footnote]]s; with those written by [[academic]]s, read the [[footnote]]s and skip the text; and with business books, skip both the text and the footnotes.
  • [[Loser]]s, when commenting on the works of someone patently more impressive, feel obligated to unnecessarily bring down their subject by expressing what he is not (“he is not a genius, but …”; “while he is no Leonardo …”) instead of expressing what he is.
  • What we call “[[business]] books” is an eliminative category invented by bookstores for writings that have no depth, no style, no empirical rigor, and no linguistic sophistication.
  • To grasp the difference between Universal and Particular, consider that some dress better to impress a single, specific person than an entire crowd.
  • The [[fool]] generalizes the particular; the [[nerd]] particularizes the [[general]]; some do both; and the wise does neither.
  • [[True love]] is the complete victory of the particular over the general, and the unconditional over the conditional.
  • Corollary to Moore’s Law: every ten years, collective wisdom degrades by half.
  • Never rid anyone of an [[illusion]] unless you can replace it in his mind with another illusion. (But don’t work too hard on it; the replacement illusion does not even have to be more convincing than the initial one.)
  • The [[fool]] views himself as more unique and others more generic; the wise views himself as more generic and others more unique.
  • What made medicine fool people for so long was that its successes were prominently displayed and its mistakes (literally) buried.
  • The sucker’s trap is when you focus on what you know and what others don’t know, rather than the reverse.
  • Medieval man was a cog in a wheel he did not understand; modern man is a cog in a complicated system he thinks he understands.
  • The calamity of the information age is that the toxicity of data increases much faster than its benefits.
  • [[Randomness]] is indistinguishable from complicated, undetected, and undetectable order; but order itself is indistinguishable from [[art]]ful randomness.
  • Most people need to wait for another person to say “this is beautiful [[art]]” to say “this is beautiful art”; some need to wait for two or more.
  • Just as no monkey is as good-looking as the ugliest of humans, no [[academic]] is worthier than the worst of the [[creator]]s.
  • If you want to annoy a [[poet]], explain his poetry.
  • [[Meditation]] is a way to be narcissistic without hurting anyone.
  • We find it to be in extremely bad taste for individuals to boast of their accomplishments; but when countries do so we call it “national pride.”
  • You can only [[convince]] people who think they can [[benefit]] from being convinced.
  • Even the cheapest misers can be generous with [[advice]].
  • If you [[lie]] to me, keep lying; don’t hurt me by suddenly telling the truth.
  • Don’t trust a man who needs an [[income]]—except if it is minimum wage.
  • Avoid calling [[hero]]es those who had no other choice. 选择成为英雄的，才是真的英雄。
  • When conflicted between two [[choice]]s, take neither.
  • [[Academic]]s are only [[useful]] when they try to be [[useless]] (say, as in mathematics and philosophy) and [[dangerous]] when they try to be useful.
  • For the robust, an [[error]] is information; for the fragile, an error is an error.
  • Passionate hate (by nations and individuals) ends by rotation to another subject of hate; mediocrity cannot handle more than one enemy. This makes warring statelings with shifting alliances and enmities a robust system.
  • warring statelings with shifting alliances and
  • When you beat up someone physically, you get exercise and stress relief; when you assault him verbally on the Internet, you just harm yourself. Just as smooth surfaces, competitive sports, and specialized work fossilize mind and body, competitive academia fossilizes the soul.
  • [[competitive]] [[academia]] fossilizes the soul.
  • [[Game]]s were created to give nonheroes the [[illusion]] of winning. In real life, you don’t know who really won or lost (except too late), but you can tell who is [[heroic]] and who is not.
  • They read Gibbon’s Decline and Fall on an eReader but refuse to drink Château Lynch-Bages in a Styrofoam cup. #纸质书
  • The imagination of the genius vastly surpasses his intellect; the intellect of the [[academic]] vastly surpasses his imagination.
  • The four most influential moderns: Darwin, Marx, Freud, and (the productive) Einstein were scholars but not academics. It has always been hard to do genuine—and nonperishable—work within institutions.
  • It is wiser to wait for [[self-destruction]].
  • In Plato’s Protagoras, Socrates contrasts philosophy as the collaborative search for truth with the sophist’s use of rhetoric to gain the upper hand in argument for fame and money. Twenty-five centuries later, this is exactly the salaried researcher and the modern tenure-loving academic. Progress.
  • A mathematician starts with a problem and creates a solution; a consultant starts by offering a “solution” and creates a [[problem]].
  • What they call “risk” I call opportunity; but what they call “low risk” opportunity I call sucker problem.
  • Suckers think that you cure greed with money, addiction with substances, expert problems with experts, banking with bankers, economics with economists, and debt crises with debt spending.
  • The worst damage has been caused by competent people trying to do good; the best improvements have been brought by incompetent ones not trying to do
  • Mediocre men tend to be outraged by small insults but passive, subdued, and silent in front of very large ones.
  • The only definition of an [[alpha male]]: if you try to be an alpha male, you will never be one.
  • The magnificent believes half of what he hears and twice what he says.
  • The classical man’s worst fear was inglorious death; the modern man’s worst fear is just death.
  • You know you have influence when people start noticing your [[absence]] more than the presence of others.
  • When someone says “I am not that stupid,” it often means that he is more stupid than he thinks.
  • When a woman says about a man that he is intelligent, she often means handsome; when a man says about a woman that she is dumb, he always means attractive.
  • What organized dating sites fail to understand is that people are far more interesting in what they don’t say about themselves.
  • We expect places and products to be less attractive than in marketing brochures, but we never forgive humans for being worse than their first impressions. 如果你不相信产品宣传册，那么你也不应该相信“第一印象”。
  • [[Love]] without [[sacrifice]] is like theft.

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