Notes

As Rilke says, there are no classes for beginners in life, the most difficult thing is always asked of one right away.

Objects have their shape and weight, their color, and beyond this a dimension for which there is no scale, their importance.

Solitude. One knows instinctively it has benefits that must be more deeply satisfying than those of other conditions, but still it is difficult. And besides, how is one to distinguish between conditions which are valuable, which despite their hatefulness give us strength or impel us to great things and others we would be far better free of? Which are precious and which are not? Why is it so hard to be happy alone? Why is it impossible? Why, whenever I am idle, sometimes even before, in the midst of doing something, do I slowly but inevitably become subject to the power of their acts.

I have not gone deep enough, that’s the thing. In solitude one must penetrate, one must endure. The icy beginning is where it is worst. One must pass all that. One must go forward all the way, through bitterness, through righteous feelings, advancing upon it like a holy city, sensing the true joy. I try to summon it to me, to make it appear. I am certain it is there, but it does not come easily. Of course not. One must waver. One must struggle. Beliefs are meant to cleave us to the bone.

Some thoughts a few chapters in:

• the prose is so lyrical. there is no connective tissue, it's all jump cuts. no establishing shots. Dreamlike, feverish (vivid, yet vague at the same time), pure sensation instead of information.
• why does this remind me of Pulp Fiction

Do you know the word otium in Latin, meaning, “doing nothing”? The Roman people were all laid back. In all the pictures, they were all laying around. They were doing nothing, just staring. In the winter on a Sunday afternoon, I can spend six hours in front of the fireplace, just looking at the flames and thinking. In the evening, I’m drunk with beautiful thoughts. My wife says to me, “What are you looking at?” I say, “The fire.” We have to take a step backward.

“a theory of good judgment”: self-critical thinkers are better at figuring out the contradictory dynamics of evolving situations, more circumspect about their forecasting prowess, more accurate in recalling mistakes, less prone to rationalize those mistakes, more likely to update their beliefs in a timely fashion, and—as a cumulative result of these advantages—better positioned to affix realistic probabilities in the next round of events

"Go work in an industry where the founders of that industry are still working"

"what do you do when you’ve captured your objective, only to find it abandoned and bad weather on the way"

Napoleon in Moscow, 1812: He got the thing he was marching toward: the enemy's capital, and it gave him nothing. The Russians had left, much of the city burned, and there was no one to sign the surrender he'd assumed the capture would produce. The objective turned out not to be connected to any outcome that mattered, and now winter was coming for an army that had staked everything on being done by then.

This reveals the difference between having an objective and having a strategy. An objective is a place on a map; a strategy is the alignment of what you want with what you can actually do, and crucially, a clear sense of what the objective is for.

Napoleon's aspirations were effectively unlimited while his means (men, supplies, time, weather) were stubbornly finite, and he had no mechanism for keeping the two in proportion. So he kept advancing on the logic that the next objective would be the decisive one, until he arrived at a prize that was hollow precisely because it had become detached from any purpose beyond itself.

So "what do you do" is partly a trick question. In the abandoned city with the storm rolling in, your options are already bad: Napoleon's retreat destroyed the Grande Armée regardless of how he managed it. The honest answer lives upstream: the discipline is to keep asking, before you commit, whether taking the objective actually delivers the thing you want, and to size your ambitions to your capabilities rather than assuming momentum will cover the gap.

“The test of a good theory lies in its ability to explain the past, for only if it does can we trust what it may tell us about the future.”

“But Xerxes failed to establish a proper relationship between his ends and his means. Because ends exist only in the imagination, they can be infinite: a throne on the moon, perhaps, with a great view. Means, though, are stubbornly finite: they’re boots on the ground, ships in the sea, and the bodies required to fill them. Ends and means have to connect if anything is to happen. They’re never, however, interchangeable.”

He could have warned Xerxes of the depleted rivers, hungry lions, sudden squalls, resentful locals, fierce fighters, cryptic oracles, avid rowers, and sinking nonswimmers awaiting him across the Hellespont: because their causes were knowable, their consequences were predictable. But only individually, for not even the canniest seer can specify cumulative effects.

Little things add up in unpredictably big ways—and yet, leaders can’t let uncertainties paralyze them. They must appear to know what they’re doing, even when they don't.

The tragedy of Xerxes and Artabanus is that each lacked the other’s proficiency. Xerxes was right. If you try to anticipate everything, you’ll risk not accomplishing anything. But so was Artabanus. If you fail to prepare for all that might happen, you’ll ensure that some of it will.

Scott Fitzgerald’s test for a first-rate intelligence: "the ability to hold two opposed ideas in the mind at the same time, and still retain the ability to function."

One possible meaning for Fitzgerald’s opposites could be taking the best from contradictory approaches while rejecting the worst. How, though, might you do that? It’s easy to see how two minds can reach opposite conclusions, but can opposites coexist peacefully within one?

The best answer to this question comes from Isaiah Berlin. Ordinary experience, he pointed out, is filled with "ends equally ultimate, the realization of some of which must inevitably involve the sacrifice of others." The choices facing us are less often between stark alternatives — good versus evil, for instance — than between good things we can’t have simultaneously.

"One can save one’s soul, or one can found or maintain or serve a great and glorious State," Berlin wrote, "but not always both at once." Or, to put it in terms any kid would understand: you can’t gobble all your treats on Halloween without throwing up.

We resolve these dilemmas by stretching them over time. We seek certain things now, put off others until later, and regard still others as unattainable. We select what fits where, and then decide which we can achieve when. The process can be difficult: Berlin emphasized the “necessity and agony of choice.” But if such choices were to disappear, he added, so too would “the freedom to choose,” and hence liberty itself.

When Thaddeus Stevens asks the president how he can reconcile so noble an aim with such malodorous methods, Lincoln recalls what his youthful years as a surveyor taught him:
A compass will point you true north from where you’re standing, but it’s got no advice about the swamps and deserts and chasms that you’ll encounter along the way. If in pursuit of your destination, you plunge ahead, heedless of obstacles, and achieve nothing more than to sink in a swamp, then what’s the use of knowing true north?

Two of the very best ways to become intellectually indelible: The first is to be Delphic, a trick known to oracles throughout time. The second is to be Aesopian: turn your ideas into animals, and they’ll achieve immortality.

“You must remember what you are and what you have chosen to become, and the significance of what you are doing. ”

"It was as if he were a dead man animated by nothing more than a habit of stubborn will. Yet he was oddly aware of himself and of the places, persons, and events which moved past him in these few days; and he knew that he presented to the public regard an appearance which belied his condition. He taught his classes, he greeted his colleagues, he attended the meetings he had to attend--and no one of the people he met from day to day knew that anything was wrong.

But from the moment he walked out of Gordon Finch's office, he knew, somewhere within the numbness that grew from a small center of his being, that a part of his life was over, that a part of him was so near death that he could watch the approach almost with calm. He was vaguely conscious that he walked across the campus in the bright crisp heat of an early spring afternoon; the dogwood trees along the sidewalks and in the front yards were in full bloom, and they trembled like soft clouds, translucent and tenuous, before his gaze; the sweet scent of dying lilac blossoms drenched the air."

• Every new technology gets greeted with a moral panic: it's going to ruin society, ruin morality, and especially ruin the children. The bicycle was pre-feminism, so it was also going to ruin the women.
• The bicycle rolled out around 1870–1880, when towns were scattered 5, 10, or 15 miles apart and people didn't walk that far. Suddenly it was easy to ride five miles to the next town. Young people realized there were other young people one town over they didn't grow up with, and they headed out.
• Young women taking up the bicycle was the real threat. If the attractive young women in your town are riding over the hill to the next town, that's a problem for the young men.
• So the press invented "bicycle face." The lecture to young women was that exerting yourself on a bicycle makes an exertion face, and do it too much and your face freezes that way permanently.
• The payoff of the scare: with a permanent bicycle face, you'd never find a husband.

"There will be tons of businesses out there that are going to want an opinionated solution to help them solve real problems for the things that really matter to them. The way I think about it is that these underlying models, they're really good at a lot of different things. They're general purpose. And I think there's just going to be a big need for something that is purpose-built to help a customer achieve an outcome. And that's where products, even pure SaaS products, still have a right to really explore that and to really leverage the model capabilities to benefit the end customers."

• Bryant spent years in a visual builder at Webflow, so his instinct was that Ploy needed a panel to drag and drop, resize elements, and control the flow. The team stressed about how to bring that visual tooling into Ploy, then kept deferring it.
• They landed somewhere better. Give the models enough context, screenshots, and images, and you don't need the panel.
• The annotation feature lets you click on an element and say rewrite this copy, make it super bold. You send it off and the model handles it.
• The result is a web designer imbued in the product that absorbs your intention and turns it into the output.