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Above all, don't lie to yourself. The man who lies to himself and listens to his own lie comes to such a pass that he cannot distinguish the truth within him, or around him, and so loses all respect for himself and for others. And having no respect he ceases to love, and in order to occupy and distract himself without…
Peace doesn't come by stiffening against life, but by realizing there's no one to stiffen. The waves rise and fall and the ocean never minds. In the same way, anger, irritation, frustration, they come and go, but they are not you. To be unbothered is not to build a wall around yourself, but to see that there was never…
“We really expect our romantic partners to have this shared reality — a similar view or understanding of the world to ours,” Van Duyn said. “It is much more important in romantic relationships than in other types of relationships because we are more dependent and interwoven in our day-to-day lives with our partners…
In a purely oral culture, intelligence is often associated with aphoristic ingenuity, that is, the power to invent compact sayings of wide applicability. The wise Solomon, we are told in First Kings, knew three thousand proverbs. In a print culture, people with such a talent are thought to be quaint at best, more…
Aldous Huxley's Brave New World. Contrary to common belief even among the educated, Huxley and Orwell did not prophesy the same thing. Orwell warns that we will be overcome by an externally imposed oppression. But in Huxley's vision, no Big Brother is required to deprive people of their autonomy, maturity and history…
The reason top tech companies often hire foreign-born & first-generation engineers over “native” Americans isn’t because of an innate American IQ deficit (a lazy & wrong explanation). A key part of it comes down to the c-word: culture. Tough questions demand tough answers & if we’re really serious about fixing the…
If it [the Truth] is already manifest, what's the use of meditation? And if it is hidden, one is fust measuring darkness. (20) Mantras and tantras, meditation and concentration, They are all a cause of self-deception. Do not defile in contemplation thought that is pure in its own nature, But abide in the bliss of…
...the function of negative knowledge is not unlike the uses of space-the empty page upon which words can be written, the empty jar into which liquid can be poured, the empty window through which light can be admitted, and the empty pipe through which water can Bow. Obviously the value of emptiness lies in the…
It was a basic Confucian principle that "it is man who makes truth great, not truth which makes man great." For this reason, "humanness" or ''human-heartedness" ( fen a ) was always felt to be superior to "righteousness" ( i b ), since man himself is greater than any idea which he may invent. There are times when…
If any have offended against thee, consider first: What is my relation to men, and that we are made for one another; and in another respect, I was made to be set over them, as a ram over the flock or a bull over the herd. But examine the matter from first principles, from this: If all things are not mere atoms, it is…
If thou art pained by any external thing, it is not this thing that disturbs thee, but thy own judgement about it. And it is in thy power to wipe out this judgement now. But if anything in thy own disposition gives thee pain, who hinders thee from correcting thy opinion? And even if thou art pained because thou art…
We ught to consider not only that our life is daily wasting away and a smaller part of it is left, but another thing also must be taken into the account, that if a man should live longer, it is quite uncertain whether the understanding will still continue sufficient for the comprehension of things, and retain the…
The structure of the paper is as follows: in the first section, we outline how ChatGPT and similar LLMs operate. Next, we consider the view that when they make factual errors, they are lying or hallucinating: that is, deliberately uttering falsehoods, or blamelessly uttering them on the basis of misleading input…
The idea of ChatGPT as a bullshit machine is a helpful one when combined with the distinction between hard and soft bullshit. Reaching again for the example of the dodgy student paper: we’ve all, I take it, marked papers where it was obvious that a dictionary or thesaurus had been deployed with a crushing lack of…
The slogan which summarizes the demands of activism is ‘logocracy’, that is, the power of the intellect. Power to the intellect. The expression could well be translated as the power of the intellectuals. This conception of intellectuals has, in fact, become standard among left-wing intellectuals and it dominates their…
Remski, the host of Conspirituality, noticed a number of yoga teachers flirting with QAnon during the early months of the pandemic. At first, he suspected it was a marketing ploy. With yoga studios around the country suddenly closed, teachers were forced to compete for the same online audience. But as the pandemic…
I had long before remarked that, in relation to practice, it is sometimes necessary to adopt, as if above doubt, opinions which we discern to be highly uncertain, as has been already said; but as I then desired to give my attention solely to the search after truth, I thought that a procedure exactly the opposite was…
While most of us focus on consuming information that we won’t care about next month, let alone next year, Buffett focused on knowledge and companies that change very, very slowly or not at all. And because the information he was learning changed slowly he could compound his knowledge over time. And as Schroeder notes…
The study of mathematical uncertainty is called probability. According to Richard Epstein, "The word 'probability' stems from the Latin probabilis, meaning 'truth-resembling'; thus the word itself literally invites semantic misinterpretation." [1]What Epstein means by "semantic misinterpretation" is that if something…
Heretofore, the technological advance that most altered the course of modern history was the invention of the printing press in the 15th century, which allowed the search for empirical knowledge to supplant liturgical doctrine, and the Age of Reason to gradually supersede the Age of Religion. Individual insight and…