Quotes

1. “I do not live for what the world thinks of me, but for what I think of myself.” (Jack London)

2. “You got three choices in life: be good, get good or give up. You’ve gone for column D; why? The simple answer is: if you don’t try, you can’t fail. Are you really that simple?” (House)

3. “There are many things that are worse than war. They all begin with defeat.” (Chris Durnell)

4. “In elementary school I found out that doing well just landed you harder work. I have found the same thing in grad school.” (Andrew’)

5. “No one may have the guts to say this, but if we could make better human beings by knowing how to add genes, why shouldn’t we?” (James D. Watson)

6. “Varicose veins are the result of an improper selection of grandparents.” (William Osler)

7. “Grown-ups never understand anything by themselves, and it is tiresome for children to be always and forever explaining things to them.” (Antoine de Saint Exupéry)

8. “It is better to be envied than pitied.” (Herodotus)

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April 28, 2011 - Posted by US | quotes

3 Comments »

1. I’d like to add: “I am free, no matter what rules surround me. If I find them tolerable, I tolerate them; if I find them too obnoxious, I break them. I am free because I know that I alone am morally responsible for everything I do.” – Heinlein

2. I am torn on “House”. I like Greg House for what he could be, and mostly was at the beginning. However, the point of the show has increasingly becomes to show how pure superior intellect is (and more importantly *should be*, because it makes him *human*) oh-so vulnerable to the little emotional failings and blackmails of his boss, underlings, and patients. This must have added a ton of female audience, but it lost me – NTTIAWWT.

3. “I cede to pacifists a right to sacrifice themselves for their ethical position, but I do not cede to pacifists a right to put their feelings before my safety or that of my neighbors.” – Internet comment. Most people idiotically conflate “violence” with “initiation of violence”. The latter is the abominable one, not the former, and because of the initiation element, not because of the violence element.

4. My experience has been quite the opposite of Andrew’s. In elementary and high school, doing well and then some, got me an amazing amount of leeway and control over my workload (part of this may have to do with the peculiarities of the grading system in Eastern Europe, which relied heavily on voluntary and involuntary oral exams). In one of the more outrageous cases, in 9th grade, we had a written in-class assignment with 75 min allotted to write an essay on some aspect of Macbeth – I forget the exact topic. The test was supposed to count for roughly 1/2 of the term’s grade. I had not even read Macbeth, but had picked up bits and pieces about what it was about during class discussions and oral exams of my peers. I wrote instead an essay titled “Why I refuse to write on the topic assigned”. I got the equivalent of A-, with a note by the professor that if I had supplied more quotes from “Macbeth”, it would have been a straight A. “I (have) found the same thing in grad school”, as Andrew says. What a teacher thinks you know matters a whole lot more than what you actually know.

5. I agree with Watson. I just do not think it would be as effective as he seems to think it would be, because human genetics is mind-numbingly complex. From what I understand about it, often we do not even know what questions to ask of the data we have, and even when we do, the answers are not of the “this produces a smarter human” type, but more like “gene X, IN ISOLATION, is associated with 4% higher average IQ in 10% of cases, given the handful of variables we have data on, and half of those we cannot control for physically, but only statistically; it also results in 6% higher risk of brain cancer in 8% of cases; in order to properly study gene X, we only need a sample of 10^50 individuals, tracked over 10^12 years.” Given how optimized humans already are, the vast majority of natural mutations that take place in the human genome are likely “harmful” anyway, so I do not think Watson would do much worse with his artificial mutations; but I do not think he’d do much better either.

6. Funny, but… loses its snark and becomes trivially true if you add “by the other grandparents”.

7. Meh. Grown ups are, on average, fairly unimpressive intellectually, true enough. Children, though, are by and large just growups minus the (limited) benefits of rudimentary command of logic and experience. Romantic quotes like this tend to melt down to nonsense when you observe a child grab a hot plate it has been warned not to touch.

8. True enough, but ignores the third choice: how about being neither, by virtue of being unknown, and thus left alone?

Comment by Plamus | April 30, 2011 | Reply
Good comment.

2a. I chose the quote because of the “if you don’t try, you can’t fail”. I know that sentiment very well. I’m torn too as to the show. Some might argue they jumped the shark at the beginning of season 4. They’ve changed the target audience somewhat – there’s no arguing they’ve done a lot of stuff to get a hold of more female viewers in the newer seasons of the show.

4a. My experience has been the same as Andrew’s. I used to do more work anyway in part because the harder work was more interesting than the easy stuff (and of course because of status effects). It’s not anymore. It’s been years since the last time I considered any sort of work that I had to do ‘fun’, say like math problems were in the second grade. When I do work now, I do it because the likely outcomes from not working are worse also in the relatively short run, not because I derive any sense of pleasure from the work itself. Motivation is absense of pain, not joy. I’m always painfully aware that there’s a lot of other stuff I’d rather be doing when I’m working.

The doing well in school variable is increasing in the amount of work, but at a decreasing rate for all reasonable specifications of the problem. Sometimes the teacher requirements – which is a separate variable – are increasing (but at a decreasing rate) from 0 to some point x, then when you reach x the growth rate becomes negative and you can get away with doing less because the teacher thinks you’re already doing more than you should (more than he/she did(..?)). That’s not always the case and it depends on the teacher and whether and to which degree the teacher implicitly enforces work norm levels. Disregarding teacher requirements and looking at institutions though (one might consider this going from the micro level to the macro level) it becomes easier to see the pattern: If you don’t do all that bad during your first years in school, you’ll go to high school. Then if you do well in high school, people will want you to take classes at the university. If you do well when taking your BA, people will want you to take an MA (in Denmark). Then if you do well when getting the MA, they’ll want you to get a PhD. If you don’t do well in high school, you don’t need to do much more school work. You still need to work, yes, but the guy with the Master’s degree needs to work too when he’s finished, and in general he’ll work more hours than you after he’s finished his education.

7a. When I was a child, I sometimes thought like this. I think in general children often think like this. That’s part of being a child – thinking you know better than the grownups. It’s a common theme in books and movies for children. As to the difference between children and adults, only yesterday I tweeted (in Danish) something like: ‘I consider drunk people, like children, to be unpredictable.’ Drunk people and children have a lot in common, and I don’t deal well with either group.

8a. He might have argued that simply by virtue of being unknown, you ‘ought to be pitied’ and the fact that you’re not even being pitied makes you even worse off than the ones that are – or perhaps it makes it certain that you are pitied whether you’d like to or not, because people pity people who are unknown (i.e. because they consider them irrelevant). I don’t know..

Comment by US | April 30, 2011 | Reply
Re 8a: You are probably right, which is stunning if you have not had training in ancient Greek philosophy and literature. I had a teacher in the last year of high school who gave the few of us who cared enough a measure of insight into those. I’ll try to relay the gist of it here; no links, since I have not looked into this since, and apologies for failing memory.

In the times of Homer and the Iliad (and of course prior to that), the ancient Greek was not an individual. He (I’ll use a male form, as women were of no concern until Sappho) did not and could not define himself without the others around him – the main drivers of behavior were pride/honor/glory and shame (aidos).

[Sidetrack: If this part is of interest, look into the concept of kalokagatia (means kάλος(beauty)kάι(and)kaγάθοσ(good)). To the ancient Greeks a beautiful man = virtuous man = rich man = strong man = wise man = brave man. It was not conceivable to be ugly and virtuous (Thersites in the Iliad is not described as "bow-legged and lame, to have shoulders that cave inward, and a head which is covered in tufts of hair and comes to a point" by accident), or strong and cowardly. Even Sappho, the famous lyric poetess, wrote: ”Someone who is beautiful for my eyes maybe is good person but someone who is good person is at the same time beautiful”.]

This is why Achilles is not a tragic character – we think he could just have chosen not to go into battle and lived, but that was not really a choice he had. It would have meant shame and disgrace. This was not just believed, but internalized, to be worse than death with honor. When Achilles’ mother Thetis exhorts him to not go into battle, we perceive this as a touching display of motherly love. Homer’s audience viewed it as abhorrent.

By the time of Herodotus – most likely about 400 years after Homer – this paradigm had begun to break down, but only barely. The Greek lyric poets were the first to transcend the epic worldview, and see themselves as individuals with choice. For example, Archilochus (c. 680-c.645BC) wrote:

One of the tribesmen in Thrace now exults in the shield I abandoned
Reluctantly by a bush, for it was perfectly good,
Yet I did get myself out safely. What business have I with that shield?
Let it go. Some other time I’ll find another no worse.

As you can see, Archilochus is still struggling with shame (he abandons his shield “reluctantly”), but the disgrace is an acceptable outcome to him.

It is, of course, impossible to know, if Herodotus subscribed to those novel concepts of individuality, but it is unlikely. Odds are, as you surmise, that he would have viewed a man not praised as a man worthy of pity by default; you could not live outside the shame/glory framework.

Comment by Plamus | April 30, 2011 | Reply