Business and Government

“The govt should not be in the business of doing business.”

-Adi Godrej (Source not available)

Stupidity

Like I say, India is not poor for nothing. It takes concerted cumulative stupidity over decades to bring a large economy to its knees. Behold the bureaucrats and marvel at their madness.

-Atanu

Confidence

I believe that the final bug in TEX was discovered and removed on November 27,1985. But if, somehow, an error still lurks in the code, I shall gladly pay a finder's fee of $20.48 to the first person who discovers it. (This is twice the previous amount, and I plan to double it again in a year; you see, I really am confident!)

-Knuth (in the preface of TeX: The Program)

Good Listener

"A good listener is not only popular everywhere, but after a while he gets to know something."

-Wilson Mizner

Happy Childhood

"A happy childhood is poor preparation for human contacts."

-Colette

Statistics

"The statistics on sanity are that one out of every four Americans is suffering from some form of mental illness. Think of your three best friends. If they're okay, then it's you."

-Rita Mae Brown

Appropriate Response

"Sometimes the appropriate response to reality is to go insane."

-Philip K. Dick

Understand

"It is difficult to get a man to understand something when his job depends on not understanding it."

-Upton Sinclair

Social cost of vehicles

First, there is the cost of building and maintaining roads, bridges and flyovers.
Second, traffic police and traffic lights cost large sums. No driver wants to pay for them. But when a power failure puts traffic lights out of action, traffic jams bring home to drivers their true value.
Third, we suffer hundreds of deaths and disabilities every year from road accidents.
Fourth, we suffer high costs of congestion.
Fifth, cars impose high social costs by occupying parking space
Sixth, vehicles impose high costs through pollution, which leads to respiratory and other disease. Respiratory disease is the number one killer in India. By subsidising petrol and diesel, we subsidise deaths by pollution.
Seventh, vehicular pollution causes smog that makes it impossible for planes to land in Delhi in winter, forcing them to travel to distant airports to dump their disgruntled passengers. This imposes high costs on the passengers, the airlines, and on tourism.

-Swaminomist

Freedom with a pinch of responsibility

I believe in the freedom of people to travel where and when they want. But this freedom imposes a wide array of hidden costs on a city economy, and car-owners should pay these costs in full. Otherwise we will be subsidising pollution, fuel adulteration, congestion, respiratory disease, and the disappearance of green spaces.

-Swaminomist

Gratitude

"Gratitude is merely the secret hope of further favors."

-Francois de La Rochefoucauld

Money

We are willingly part of a world designed for the convenience of what Shakespeare called "the visible God": money. When I say we have jobs, I mean that we find in them our home, our sense of being grounded in the world, grounded in a vast social and economic order. It is a spectacularly complex, even breathtaking, order, and it has two enormous and related problems. First, it seems to be largely responsible for the destruction of the natural world. Second, it has the strong tendency to reduce the human beings inhabiting it to two functions, working and consuming. It tends to hollow us out. It creates a hole in our sense of ourselves and of this country, and it leaves us with few alternatives but to try to fill that hole with money and the things money buys...

-Curtis White

Peak Oil

Humans have always sought perpetual motion, and for a moment, the petroleum industry has given it to us. The problem is that you have 300 million Americans who take $2.50 gasoline for granted in a country whose architecture, land use patterns, agriculture, prosperity, and cast of mind have been have been built around cheap oil. These oil tribe people, and their political leaders, don't care about peak oil, they care only about price. Meanwhile, the Chinese are where we were in 1910, with car sales doubling every three years.

-Randy Udall

Reasonableness

It is a firm conviction of mine that the characteristic which a college should aim above all to produce is reasonableness. What does reasonableness mean? Not skill in reasoning, though it is always the better for that. It is not even wholly a matter of the intellectual side of our nature, though a trained intelligence is essential to it. It is the pervading habit and temper of a mind that has surrendered its government to reason. On the intellectual side it shows itself as reflectiveness, the habit of examining the meaning of a proposed belief, and looking to its grounds and consequences, before accepting it. On the practical side it is justice, a scrupulous regard for the rights of others as well as of oneself. On the emotional side, it is partly good taste—such an adjustment of feeling to its object that one is never wrought up over molehills nor cavalier about mountains, and partly, again, that equanimity of mind which comes of having made one’s peace reflectively with the best and worst that life may bring. Reasonableness, in this complex sense, seems to me the finest flower of an education.

Well, in this matter of the reasonable spirit, the business of education is to put pictures on the wall, and point at them, and then hope that in our sluggish hearts and minds admiration will begin to stir. None of the pictures it holds up can show us fully what reasonableness is. But when it holds up Plato, for example, we can see in the play of that clear and all-encompassing intelligence what reflectiveness means at its best. When we turn to such figures as Marcus Aurelius and Abraham Lincoln, we see the reasonable mind in another aspect, the aspect of imperturbable justice and magnanimity. As for reasonableness in feeling, we have on the one hand the long line of entries from Longinus through Goethe to Eliot, from whom we may learn sobriety of taste, and on the other the long line of saints from Buddha to Schweitzer to tell us the secrets of inward peace. Qualitative existence means living in the presence of these people till we find ourselves thinking as they do, feeling as they do, and walking in their far-sighted ways.

-Brand Blanshard

Quantity and Quality in American Education

A fine masterpiece by Brand Blanshard, written about half a century back.

Americans have acquired a habit that, so far as I know, is theirs uniquely, of grateful and persistent giving to the colleges that nursed them.

We live in better days. Wherever the traveler goes in America, the evidences of public care for education strikes his eye.

The business of the state, said the philosopher Bosanquet, is not to produce the good life, which it cannot do, but to hinder the hindrances to the good life.

If the good life is to be lived with any fullness, it normally needs health of body and training of mind, and these things call for that unfortunate crass necessity, money. Here quality is more dependent on quantity than we may wish to think Sir Arthur Queller-Couch, after listing a dozen of the great poets of the last century, points out that nine of these were university men, with the background of means that this implies, and that of the remaining three, Browning was the son of a prosperous banker, Rosetti had a private income, and Keats, the only one without any sort of backing, died, broken with the struggle, at 25.

When quality is set over against quantity, two different things may be meant by quality. One is quality as such, as opposed to quantity as such. The other is higher quality as opposed to lower quality.

Plain men did not know what to make of the strange little German dominie and his bizarre announcement that we were living in a new world which was governed by the formula E = mc2, but when, aided by the magic of such formulas, there began to issue from the laboratories packets that could blast whole cities in a moment, they could only bow to a magic they could not in the least understand.

Have you noticed, again, how advertisers are aping the quantitative exactness of the scientists, whether it makes sense or not; we are assured that a soap will eliminate so many per cent more bacteria; I learned recently, as I listened to my radio, that if I used a new shampoo, the brightness of my hair would be increased up to 35 per cent.

We find every sort of cause or product urged upon us in language that seeks to borrow prestige from its use in physical science; and imitation is the sincerest flattery.

If we happen to want bright hair or red hair or curly hair, he can help us (though unfortunately not if what we want is just hair); but if we want to know whether it is of any importance to have one kind of hair or another, if we want to know what is worth reading, or feeling, or doing, if we want to know about the ends of life as opposed to the means, we find him silent. He is not only silent; he is deliberately and even ostentatiously silent.

This tendency to draw a sharp line between fact and value and to insist that knowledge or intelligence, identified with scientific method, has no concern with value, has been fortified by recent changes in the philosophy of science.

[Judgements] are expressions of the nonrational part of our nature.

When you call anything good or bad, the reflective man may interest himself in the cause or effect of your thus exploding into speech, but to consider whether your remark is true or not is to mistake the business of intelligence.

When you call anything good or bad, the reflective man may interest himself in the cause or effect of your thus exploding into speech, but to consider whether your remark is true or not is to mistake the business of intelligence.

The realm of values is bundled up by the scientists and other custodians of knowledge and left like an unwanted child on the doorstep for some passer-by to pick up.

Plato says: “It is not the life of knowledge, not even if it included all the sciences, that creates happiness and well-being, but a single branch of knowledge—the science of good and evil. If you exclude this from the other branches, medicine will be equally able to give us health, and shoemaking shoes, and weaving clothes. Seamanship will still save life at sea and strategy win battles. But without the knowledge of good and evil, the use and excellence of these sciences will be found to have failed us.”

The fact is that the measurable things of the world—its dollars and ships and refrigerators—are of value only as they contribute to nonmeasurable things, such as justice and happiness and love and poetry and laughter. In the end the usefulness of useful things lies in the help they give us in getting these useless things.

That is a vicious circle, education for gadgets, for education, and how is one to escape from it? Not by crying out that things are in the saddle and ride mankind, or trying to live like Gandhi or Thoreau; it is too late in the day to secede from civilization.

No, the only feasible escape is to make quantity subserve quality, to accept this vicious circle as a ring that provides a solid setting for a pearl of incalculable price.

One feels at once that such a world would be shrunken and impoverished, for so much that we are and do is made possible by these things. Would life in such dreary poverty be worth living at all? Well, let me remind you that this was the world of Socrates and Sophocles and Aristotle, of Virgil and St. Augustine and Dante. There was nothing poverty-stricken about these minds; indeed it is to these minds precisely that men in other times turn when they want to escape from their own poverty.

It is for persons, for better and more sensitive persons, for the knowledge and love and goodness of persons, that all the machinery of civilization exists.

My conclusion is that the machinery of civilization is to be justified only so far as it contributes to the qualities of persons.

Yet dislike may have keen eyes.

Ivor Brown has remarked that “there are naturalists without wonder, scholars without awe, theologians without worship, economists without anger, historians who never laughed or hated or despaired. They may be wise, but who is jealous of their wisdom? It is possible to know everything and understand nothing.”

Consider the ideal drawn for the American college by James Russell Lowell at Harvard’s 250th anniversary. What the college should try to produce, said Lowell, is a type of man, “a man of culture, a man of intellectual resources, a man of public spirit, a man of refinement, with that good taste which is the conscience of the mind, and that conscience which is the good taste of the soul.” The crown of quantity, and its justification, is quality.

Important as it is not to confuse quality with quantity, it is still more important, and far more difficult, not to confuse second-rate quality with first-rate.

Consider first how strong the forces are that make the good the enemy of the best and the commonplace the enemy of the good.

Economically, we are still a society in which production is determined by profit. The man who is producing books knows that his profits depend on circulation; the man who is producing movies knows that his profits depend on the length of the line at the box-office. Now if what he wanted in both cases is the largest number of buyers, the proper course is not to appeal to this or that group, with this or that taste, but to the largest possible group. And how is that to be reached? The answer can be given in mathematical terms—by appealing to the lowest common denominator. And where is this common ground to be found? Hardly in thoughtfulness, or in moral or psychological acuteness, or an interest in delicate portraiture. It is found rather in what is primitive about us, in sex and fear and anger, in sensation in both meanings of the term, and in those infantile daydreams of ourselves as princesses or supermen that all of us have when young and some of us never lose. Hence publishers find it profitable to fill the racks in stations and drugstores with paperbacks celebrating violence.

Here you see in vivid form the effect of mass appeal in confusing values.

Many of our movie heroes rare incarnations of what a critic has described as “ferocity modified by fatuousness.” The heroines were all dolls of faultless face, form, and costume, mammoth wealth, and total absence of ideas.

The profit motive is not the only leveler of values. Another is our impulse to conformity, which seems to be stronger in these days than ever before.

Van Wyck Brooks says, “the desire not to be of the herd is in itself a herd desire. It is a recognition of the herd of which the original man is incapable.”

They dislike the exceptional man or woman, because such a person is a challenge to their own standards and ways of thought. We all feel the tug of this impulse; Bernard Shaw has remarked that “the best of us is nine hundred and ninety-nine per cent mob (Mr. Shaw was no mathematician) and one per cent quality.”

Since this repressive attitude is directed against difference as such, it operates against good as well as bad; indeed the nonconformist intellectual, described as an egg-head, is particularly suspected because he touches the springs of fear and envy.

There is another and related force that makes against the first-rate. It is the curious conviction, more often felt than clearly formulated, that the very notion that some persons and subjects are better than others is undemocratic.

Snobbishness, to be sure, is an unpleasant trait. But so is inverted snobbishness that resists as priggish the suggestion that some types of manners, mind, and moral ought to be accepted as true titles of nobility.

“For all practical purposes you know the answer already. There may be disputes about who is better than who on the level of the third-rate, but there is surprisingly little dispute about the figures at the top.”

It is of no use to hang golden apples beyond a student’s reach if there is no ladder by which he can get to them. The point I would emphasize is that putting the ladder in place is chiefly the student’s business rather than the teacher’s. Unless the student has a genuine specific levity which carries him upward, some authentic interest, ambition, or enthusiasm, the teacher has nothing to work with.

And if I were advising students about their programs, I would say, watch your enthusiasms; keep them alight; only by letting the flame grow brighter will you ever do anything first-rate.

Samuel Butler said there were two rules about human motive, a general rule and a special one. The general rule was that everyone could make anything of himself if he wanted to badly enough. The special rule was that everyone was more or less an exception to the general rule. But that general rule is a charter of life.

Then some day you see a piece in a journal and realize that a new writer has arrived, a writer of idiosyncrasy and power and grace. You, the teacher, have not taught him those things. Like so many others, he has found himself by falling in love; he has had an affair with English prose. He has achieved with delight and by himself a quality that no amount of instruction could convey.

It is a great thing for a university to turn out engineers and doctors in regiments. It is a fine thing for a given engineer or doctor to a mastery of his technique. But the highest tribute to a college is not to have produced masses of technicians with a perfect technique. It is to have stamped on its sons and daughters the priceless imprint of the reasonable mind.

Just one such person—thoughtful in his judgments, fair in all his dealings, unruffled in his sweetness of temper, fearless because he has looked before and after and made his terms with life and death—just one such person may give light to a whole community. His spirit is beyond price because you cannot buy quality with any amount of quantity. And if he lives at an altitude hard to reach, we may remind ourselves, with Spinoza, that all precious things are as difficult as they are rare.

- Brand Blanshard

Maslow Ladder

Physiological Needs – Food, water, sleep, air
Safety Needs – A home, family, physical security
Love Needs – Belonging to a group, being accepted by others
Esteem Needs – Feeling good about a level of competence, recognition for excellence
Self Actualization – Becoming all that one is capable of becoming, maximizing potential

Maslow says happiness is generally acquired by satisfying the above needs in the top-down order.

- Abraham Maslow

Cricket - the silly game

The proof that the game is silly is that the unthinking masses consider it significant. If that was not enough, the Indian government gets into the act as well, dictating who can play, who can broadcast the matches, and other trivial pursuits. You know that something is wrong with the whole exercise when the government of India has to get involved in a game. My antipathy towards government involvement in anything other than in law and order, money supply, and defense is deep and abiding.

-Atanu

Stuff and the State

We need to distinguish between employment and production, between money and income, between aggregate production and distribution. India’s economic policies have stressed employment and not production. That, in no small measure, is why India is poor. Until India’s economic policies shift away from employment and towards production, India’s fortunes are unlikely to change.

-Atanu

Stuff

If an economy produces a heck of a lot, and yet a significant percentage of the population is poor, then we know that there is a problem of distribution. In that case, we can improve the situation by a better distribution through transfer of stuff to those who are poor. But if the aggregate production of stuff divided by the total population is a small number, the economy will be a poor one irrespective of the distribution. Merely taking from Peter to give to Paul makes no difference to the aggregate amount of stuff available.

-Atanu

Arithmetic

A bit of arithmetic is often all that is required to demonstrate the idiocy that pervades public discourse around the world.

-Atanu

Civilized Human Being

To my mind, the ability to make distinctions is one of the more important characteristics of a fully civilized human being.

-Atanu

Virtue of Education

Education inoculates the civilized person from the virus of fanaticism and despair. Education makes people productive and so stuff gets produced. When stuff gets produced, poverty is reduced. With material wealth, the necessary condition for development is satisfied. Educated people have a stake in the future and therefore have an interest in informing themselves about policies that are beneficial. They then make an informed choice among various leaders based on their policy prescriptions. This results in a peaceful and prosperous society.

-Atanu

Tribalism

“Rootless individual identity seeks to tie itself to some group with a large following, whether Scientology, Islam, cricket, movie star—the details are not important. It is primitive tribalism, a drive to be part of something that is much larger than oneself, a drive to belong to a group and thus inherit some of the power of that group.”

-Atanu

Stay in the middle

"We know what happens to people who stay in the middle of the road. They get run over."

-Aneurin Bevan

When something is wrong

"Some national parks have long waiting lists for camping reservations. When you have to wait a year to sleep next to a tree, something is wrong."

-George Carlin

Remember

"When we remember we are all mad, the mysteries disappear and life stands explained."

-Mark Twain

Men, again

"The average man, who does not know what to do with his life, wants another one which will last forever."

-Anatole France

I am only one.

“I am only one, but still I am one. I cannot do everything, but still I can do something; and because I cannot do everything, I will not refuse to do something that I can do.”

-Helen Keller

Nobody But Yourself

As a consequence of these inventions, and practice at using them, what has emerged is shared patterns of behaviour and activities, what we call culture. And because culture is social 'software', it can evolve much more quickly than the hard-wired 'hardware' parts of what makes us us – our bodies, our emotions and our instincts.

So we now live in a world where we are trying to employ 21st century social software while we remain trapped in bodies that are largely prehistoric – they evolve very slowly, and haven't changed much in tens of thousands of years. One obvious consequence of this is the physical and emotional illness that comes from our visceral reaction to stress: What used to be an evolutionary advantage (the ability to move very fast and strike very hard when you're about to be eaten by something bigger than you) has become an evolutionary handicap, a worse-than-useless vestige of our prehistoric past.

Unless we are extraordinarily diligent and extremely self-aware and self-competent, we give up everything that make us us – we give up being nobody-but-ourselves and we become everybody else.

-Dave

Nirvana

A dialogue in a medium that allows for effective communication between articulate people who have substantial shared context and understanding of each other's worldview is about as close to intellectual and emotional nirvana as it gets.

-Dave

Men

"When men are pure, laws are useless; when men are corrupt, laws are broken."

-Benjamin Disraeli

Social History

"Much of the social history of the Western world over the past three decades has involved replacing what worked with what sounded good."

-Thomas Sowell

To buy

"When buying and selling are controlled by legislation, the first things to be bought and sold are legislators."

-P.J.O'Rourke

Religion

The OED defines religion as "human recognition of superhuman controlling power and especially of a personal god entitled to worship and obedience".

-Dave

Vision and Action

If we have a bold, coherent, inspiring and realistic vision of the future, it will serve as the guide to purposeful action.

-Atanu

Culture

This Culture and these subcultures can now hardly be escaped – there is no place to go to get away from Civilization Culture, its artifacts, its messages – to be, as Cummings says, "nobody-but-yourself".

-Dave

Teach to Feel?

Almost anybody can learn to think or believe or know, but not a single human being
can be taught to feel. Why? Because whenever you think or you believe or you know,
you're a lot of other people: but the moment you feel, you're nobody-but-yourself.

To be nobody-but-yourself -- in a world which is doing its best, night and day,
to make you everybody else -- means to fight the hardest battle which any human being can fight;
and never stop fighting.

-EE Cummings.

Right

"To have a right to do a thing is not at all the same as to be right in doing it."

- G.K. Chesterton