“Truth is beauty, and beauty, truth” —John Keats
I’ve been on a kick lately trying to understand what informs the concept of “taste.” When we say someone “has good taste,” what do we mean?
I’ll have more to say on taste later. But this thread of curiosity led me to reading on aesthetics and what constitutes beauty. Sir Roger Scruton’s Beauty is a great introduction to the subject, one I just finished earler this week.
In this short lecture, poet laureate Dana Gioia...
In the latest issue of Res Extensa, I dove into “Gall’s Law”, which says:
A complex system that works is invariably found to have evolved from a simple system that worked. A complex system designed from scratch never works and cannot be patched up to make it work. You have to start over with a working simple system.
Too often I see a team propose a solution to a problem that involves making what we’ve got more complicated. Adding more people, more processes, more tools. “Maybe if we start using Salesforce it’ll...
Jonah Goldberg on the brittleness of authoritarianism:
Authoritarian regimes are often very, very strong. But like marble they’re brittle. They can withstand enormous pressures, from within and without, but there’s no flexibility.
I’d say it’s like Aesop’s Oak and the Reed, except I think that’s a bit inapt as well. America ain’t no stinking reed. But to at least get some use out of the metaphor, authoritarian societies are like stands of oaks. They can withstand all the wind in the world so long as the wind isn’t...
This is a repost from my newsletter, Res Extensa, which you can subscribe to over on Substack. This issue was originally published in November, 2020.
In our last issue, we’d weathered TS Zeta in the hills of Georgia, and the dissonance of being a lifelong Floridian sitting through gale-force winds in a mountain cabin. Last week a different category of storm hit us nationwide in the form of election week (which it seems we’ve mostly recovered from). Now as I write this one, Eta is ✦
I recently finished Arnold Kling’s excellent Three Languages of Politics, which attempts to build a model to describe why different political viewpoints are so often not disagreeing as much as they are talking about different things entirely.
At one point Kling references this thought experiment proposed by economist Bryan Caplan — a Turing test for probing a person’s true ideology:
We don’t have to idly speculate about how well adherents of various ideologies understand each other. We can measure the performance of anyone inclined to boast about his superior insight.
...
I’ve been reading some of Hayek’s famous articles this week. This one is all about what he probably considered one of the most important concepts, since these basic ideas form a central thesis for most of his works. His argument was for bottoms-up, decentralized systems of decision-making instead of centralized, top-down systems:
The peculiar character of the problem of a rational economic order is determined precisely by the fact that the knowledge of the circumstances of which we must make use never exists in...
I thought this was a fantastic interview on EconTalk. David Deppner is a listener of the podcast that sent Russ a thought-provoking email question on the subject of leadership and what traits make for “good” qualities in a leader — whether a CEO, presidential candidate, or parent.
Anyone in a form of leadership role like this (which likely includes everyone in some context) struggles with this question. Do those you lead that look to you for guidance really want the truth? The truth is that no leader really has it all figured...
Seneca had great advice 2000 years ago on how to calm ourselves down:
“It is not to your benefit to see and hear everything. Many injuries ought to pass over us; if you ignore them, you get no more injury from them. You want to be less angry? Ask fewer questions.”
I read “ask fewer questions” metaphorically as “don’t feel compelled to engage in every single dialog”. Much of the media discourse fans these flames: show everyone incendiary content, get them annoyed, make it easy to respond, beget another response — an ever increasing turning of...
A list of broad laws that apply to all fields. Thoughtful stuff as always from Morgan Housel:
6. Parkinson’s Law: Work expands to fill the time available for its completion.
In 1955 historian Cyril Parkinson wrote in The Economist:
IT is a commonplace observation that work expands so as to fill the time available for its completion. Thus, an elderly lady of leisure can spend the entire day in writing and despatching a postcard to her niece at Bognor Regis. An hour will be spent...
Jonathan Haidt’s The Righteous Mind was one of my favorite recent nonfiction books I’ve read in the last few years. It’s one of the most objective, deep analyses of a question that’s interested me for years: why do people have such fundamental and deep disagreements on how the world works or should work? Why are political left and right seemingly so far apart from one another on such fundamental levels? Haidt’s perspective as an expert in moral psychology provides insights into the foundations of how we’re different and how we’re the same.
...
Many people are familiar with Occam’s razor, the principle summarized as:
Among competing hypotheses, the one with the fewest assumptions should be selected.
There’s a tendency you notice all over for people to overcomplicate situations early. Before even fully understanding a problem, they often dig into their toolbox of knowledge for the most involved, and “powerful” weapon in the arsenal. There must be a reason for this — perhaps the propensity to convolute problems makes people feel more comfortable with their lack of a solution? “I don’t know what to do because problem X is...
“Most people overestimate what they can achieve in a year and underestimate what they can achieve in ten years.”
My post from yesterday got me thinking about this piece I read recently on Farnam Street that dovetails with the thoughts on long-term benefit and the compounding nature of good habits.
The idea of “Gates’ Law”1 is that investments for the long-term can bear fruit sooner than you think. Why does this happen so frequently? And what does this have to do with playing the long game?
I...
“It may seem surprising but, in terms of digital media storage, our knowledge of language almost fits compactly on a floppy disk,” the authors wrote in the study. In this case, that would be a floppy disk that holds about 1.5 megabytes of information, or the equivalent of about a minute-long song as an Mp3 file. [3D Images: Exploring the Human Brain] The researchers estimate that in the best-case scenario, in a...
I love this brief piece from Shane Parrish about the decaying respect for experience and authority on intellectual topics:
This overwhelming complexity of modern life “produced feelings of helplessness and anger among a citizenry that knew itself increasingly to be at the mercy of smarter elites,” writes Nichols. And Hofstadter warns, “What used to be a jocular and usually benign ridicule of intellect and formal training has turned into a malign resentment of the intellectual in his capacity as expert. Once the intellectual was gently ridiculed because he was not needed; now he...
The nearly 2000 year old Meditations by Marcus Aurelius is likely the first ever entry in the “self help” publishing genre. During his last days as Roman Emperor, reigning from 161-180 AD, he wrote the 12 “books” that comprise the Meditations. It’s a personal journal he wrote to himself, never intended for publication, with thoughts, ruminations, reminders, and short stories from his life, all with the objective of serving his future self as a reminder of how to live and act.
There’s not much of a thematic arc from book to book — each numbered paragraph entry largely...
This is a 2005 commencement address delivered by the late David Foster Wallace at Kenyon College. Worth going back and listening to from time to time.