Rule
There is one rule that's very simple, but not easy: observe reality and adjust. -- Ran Prieur
Morrerás em breve. É incontestável. E quanta verdade morrerá contigo sem saberes que a sabias. Só por não teres tido a sorte de num simples encontro ou encontrão ta fazerem vir ao de cima - Vergílio Ferreira
There is one rule that's very simple, but not easy: observe reality and adjust. -- Ran Prieur
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The purpose of a system is what it does. There is after all, no point in claiming that the purpose of a system is to do what it constantly fails to do. -- Anthony Stafford Beer
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The truth lies directly before us in the reality surrounding us. However, we cannot use it as it is. An unbroken description of reality would be simultaneously the truest and most useless thing in the world, and it would certainly not be science. If we want to make reality and therefore truth useful to science, we must do violence to reality. We must introduce the distinction, which does not exist in nature, between essential and inessential. In nature, everything is equally essential. By seeking out the relationships that seem essential to us, we order the material in a surveyable way at the same time. Then we are doing science. -- Jakob von Uexküll
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In the end,
we will remember
not the words of our enemies,
but the silence of our friends.
-- Martin Luther King, Jr.
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The correct decision, given a trolley problem, is to switch the track, then wonder for the rest of your life whether you made the right decision. Anyone who could confidently switch the track and then never think about it again is a sociopath, as is anyone who fails to switch the track and believes his decision entirely exculpates him. Trolleys and certain deaths don't reflect moral decisions in the real world. Not only do you not know precisely the consequences of your actions ahead of time, you certainly don't know the consequences of the counterfactual. [...] The universe offers no moral guarantees. We make decisions, and live with them, and never know the results of the decisions we didn't make. This is the best we're offered. -- Andreas Schou
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Stallone turned down the huge sum of money [for another actor to be Rocky] because he had "establish[ed] business relations with poverty," as the Stoic philosopher Seneca put it. "The trick is,” Tom Rothman (CEO of Sony Pictures Motion Picture Group) says, “to be fiscally responsible so you can be creatively reckless." [As Bill Cunningham said:] "If you don’t take money, they can’t tell you what to do, kid… Money’s the cheapest thing. Liberty, freedom is the most expensive.” -- Billy Oppenheimer [link]
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The earth has, in principle, unlimited resources. They are just limited in the rate of sustainable extraction. And, of course, extraction costs put a limit on useful access to mineral resources -- Charles St Pierre
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Fascism is a counter-revolution against a revolution that never took place. -- The School for Dictators, Ignazio Silone
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School is mostly about indoctrination into the national identity. It is also about child care, and for older children, about keeping them out of the labour force. If we were honest we could talk about education policy with this in mind, though no one does (okay, there are some exceptions) -- Cameron K. Murray
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People have an unfortunate habit of assuming they understand the reality just because they understood the analogy -- Echopraxia, Peter Watts
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«Externalities» is a funny econ word that unintentionally identifies the root of the problem, imagining that there's an outside, external world upon which society acts, rather than being embedded in, a component of, even an expression of, the Earth's biogeochemical systems -- Peter Brennan
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There has been a lot of discussion using words like «war», «terrorism», «war crimes», «human shields» [...] The problem I wish to highlight is that words matter and, when discussing those topics, the vocabulary many of us have has been bent, twisted, and manipulated by various forces for their own benefit.
I’d like you to stop using fungible terms like «war crime», «ethnic cleansing», «collateral damage», etc., and stick strictly to the vocabulary used in International Humanitarian Law (IHL). There’s a simple reason for that: the vocabulary of IHL is extremely clear and deliberately freed of nuance and gray areas.
When does international humanitarian law apply?
International humanitarian law applies only to armed conflict; it does not cover internal tensions or disturbances such as isolated acts of violence. The law applies only once a conflict has begun, and then equally to all sides regardless of who started the fighting.
This wording is extremely carefully made. There is no reference to aggressor or invader or any of the terms that might indicate who started it. Because who started it is invariably a topic of discussion when someone is trying to minimize their side’s crimes against humanity, i.e.: those noncombatants wouldn't have gotten hurt if we hadn't had to do this awful thing.
When I speak and write about these issues, I try hard, in my words, to stick to simple concepts. There are no «terrorists», or «freedom fighters» and I barely acknowledge the existence of states – there are just combatants and noncombatants and their actions are either legal or they are crimes against humanity. [...] Noncombatants' actions are always legal, because they are not engaging in violence. Combatants' actions are extremely problematic, especially when combatants begin killing noncombatants as a matter of operations – then we're down to arguing whether the death was necessary or justified and that is extremely problematic. -- It's Just Words Marcus Ranum
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You do not get to target civilians because somebody else has targeted civilians. It’s nonreciprocal because your obligations are to the civilians. It’s not a deal between fighters. It’s a deal with humanity. -- Sari Bashi
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Psychologists have a name for this tendency to think we understand things better than we do: the «illusion of explanatory depth». [...] Think of it this way: for most of human history, we didn't know why things fall down. People trip, cups spill, buildings topple, and nobody had any good explanations for this, or at least not any true ones. If you didn't have an illusion of explanatory depth, you'd spend your days dumbfounded: “Why do things fall?? Why do you return to earth when you jump?? What's up with clouds—they don't seem to fall at all!!
You can't live your life if you're always getting stuck on mysteries like this. You'd get so mesmerized by the inexplicability of your porridge falling into your bowl and bubbles rising in your water that you'd forget to eat or drink and you'd die. That's why we need the illusion of explanatory depth: most things have to feel like they make sense, even if they don't, so that we can get on with the business of living.
And indeed, people born before the discovery of gravity understood this whole falling business exactly as well as they needed in order to survive. They knew that they'd fall and die if they walked off a cliff, that the things they throw in the air will fall down on people's heads, and that houses tip over if they aren't built properly. Maybe they thought they understood it better than they actually did, but for their purposes, they understood it perfectly well. [...] Okay, so an illusion of explanatory depth is extremely important to staying alive. It does, unfortunately, have a downside: it fools you into thinking the universe isn't full of mysteries.
This, I think, explains the curious course of our scientific discovery. You might think that we discover things in order from most intuitive to least intuitive. No, thanks to the illusion of explanatory depth, it often goes the opposite way: we discover the least obvious things first, because those are things that we realize we don't understand. That would fit with our incredible ancient progress in mathematics, because math is not obvious. -- On the importance of staring directly into the sun Adam Mastroianni
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No map represents all of its intended territory [...] Every map is at least a map of the map-maker (his assumptions, world-view...)
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A map is not the territory it represents, but, if correct, it has a similar structure to the territory, which accounts for its usefulness. If the map could be ideally correct, it would include, in a reduced scale, the map of the map; the map of the map of the map; and so on, endlessly, a fact first noticed by [Josiah] Royce. If we reflect upon our languages, we find that at best they must be considered only as maps. A word is not the object it represents; and languages exhibit also this peculiar self-reflexiveness, that we can analyze languages by linguistic means.
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