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Sep. 3rd, 2023 11:44 amIn the Sirens adventure, Odysseus with some help from the gods solves the diagonal argument.
“Social learning. Our species is the only one that voluntarily shares information: we learn a lot from our fellow humans through language.
“ In our brains, by contrast, the highest-level information, which reaches our consciousness, can be explicitly stated to others. Conscious knowledge comes with verbal reportability: whenever we understand something in a sufficiently perspicuous manner, a mental formula resonates in our language of thought, and we can use the words of language to report it. ”
One-trial learning. An extreme case of this efficiency is when we learn something new on a single trial. If I introduce a new verb, let’s say ”
“To learn is to succeed in inserting new knowledge into an existing network.”
--- Stanislas Dehaene. “How We Learn.”
...the simplicity of the perceptual judgment on which the setting up of the proof culminated is what made the difference and carried conviction. Pasteur was not stinting in the laboratory and outside in concentrating interest and discussion on a few extremely simple perceptual contrasts: ab sence/presence; before/after; living/dead; pure/impure.
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even if the Pasteurians developed a biology in the laboratory, they did not practice a laboratory biology. They did not leave to others, as apparently happened in England, the job of using or applying their results, contenting themselves with "pure science."
--- BL, TPoF, 1993.
“IV. (9) The understanding forms positive ideas before forming negative ideas. V. (108:10) It perceives things not so much under the condition of duration as under a certain form of eternity, and in an infinite number; or rather in perceiving things it does not consider either their number or duration, whereas, in imagining them, it perceives them in a determinate number, duration, and quantity.”
When it was the Seven Hundred and Forty-seventh Night,
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King Al-Samandal asked, “With what object dost thou gift me with this gift? Tell me thy tale and acquaint me with thy requirement. An its accomplishment be in my power I will straightway accomplish it to thee and spare thee toil and trouble; and if I be unable thereunto, Allah compelleth not any soul aught beyond its power.”
So Salih rose and kissing ground three times, said, “O King of the Age, that which I desire thou art indeed able to do; it is in thy power and thou art master thereof; and I impose not on the King a difficulty, nor am I Jinn-demented, that I should crave of the King a thing whereto he availeth not; for one of the sages saith, ‘An thou wouldst be complied with ask that which can be readily supplied’. Wherefore, that of which I am come in quest, the King (whom Allah preserve!) is able to grant.”
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O King, thou knowest that the Princess Jauharah, the daughter of our lord the King must needs be wedded and bedded, for the sage saith, a girl’s lot is either grace of marriage or the grave.
https://gutenberg.org/files/3441/3441-h/3441-h.htm#chap18
“...he [Lincoln] managed polarities: they didn’t manage him.
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Scale sets the ranges within which experience accrues. If, in evolution, edges of chaos reward adaptation; if, in history, adaptation fortifies resilience; and if, in individuals, resilience accommodates unknowns more readily than rigidity, then it stands to reason that a gradual expansion of edges better equips leaders for the unexpected than those that shock, leaving little time to adapt, or those inherited, which breed entitlement and arrogance, its companion.
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Space is where expectations and circumstances intersect."
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Tolstoy suggests, in the last pages of War and Peace, that the interdependence of time, space, and scale simultaneously reflects choice and necessity: the illusion of agency causes us to believe in free will even as inexorable laws deny the possibility. ”
---John Lewis Gaddis. “On Grand Strategy.”
Gradations,
--- John Lewis Gaddis. “On Grand Strategy.”
“as Thucydides warned two thousand years earlier, words in crises can lose their meaning, leaving in the “ability to see all sides of a question [an] incapacity to act on any,”82 then Shakespeare and his Great Queen found safety in multiple meanings, some repetitive, some opposed, but all so implanted as to make them unforeseeably applicable. Hendiadys positioned a culture against paralysis in a world that was to come.”
--- John Lewis Gaddis. “On Grand Strategy.”
"Pivoting requires gyroscopes,...
Machiavelli, thinking gyroscopically, advised his prince to be a lion and a fox, the former to frighten wolves, the latter to detect snares. Elizabeth went him one better by being lion, fox, and female, a combination the crafty Italian might have learned to appreciate. Philip was a grand lion, but he was only a lion. Such princes can through conscientiousness, Machiavelli warned, become trapped. For a wise ruler “cannot observe faith, nor should he, when such observance turns against him, and the causes that made him promise have been eliminated. . . . Nor does a prince ever lack legitimate causes to color his failure to observe faith.”
---- John Lewis Gaddis. “On Grand Strategy.”
To plug the widening demographic gap, Germany needs more than 400,000 net immigrants a year, the country’s Federal Employment Agency estimates. However, economists expect half that level amid limited social and political willingness to accept high immigration in the aftermath of the 2015 refugee crisis. Language, professional qualifications and bureaucratic hurdles are also obstacles.
https://www.wsj.com/articles/aging-germany-is-running-out-of-workers-putting-europes-largest-economy-at-risk-11640180607
It is said that Ja'afar the Barmecide was one night carousing with Al Rashid, who said, "O Ja'afar, it hath reached me that thou hast bought such and such a slave-girl. Now I have long sought her for she is passing fair; and my heart is taken up with love of her, so do thou sell her to me." He replied, "I will not sell her, O Commander of the Faithful." Quoth he, "Then give her to me." Quoth the other, "Nor will I give her."
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Now when the Imam was admitted to the presence, Al-Rashid rose to receive him and seated him on the couch beside himself (where he was wont to seat none save the Kazi), and said to him, "We have not sent for thee at this untimely time and tide save to advise us upon a grave matter, which is such and such and wherewith we know not how to deal." And he expounded to him the case. Abu Yusuf answered, "O Commander of the Faithful, this is the easiest of things." Then he turned to Ja'afar and said, "O Ja'afar, sell half of her to the Commander of the Faithful and give him the other half; so shall ye both be quit of your oaths." The Caliph was delighted with this and both did as he prescribed. Then said Al-Rashid, "Bring me the girl at once,"—And Shahrazad perceived the dawn of day and ceased to say her permitted say.
--- https://www.gutenberg.org/cache/epub/3438/pg3438-images.html#chap16
The Sons of Ivaldi, who High adds are dwarfs, crafted the ship and gave it to Freyr. High continues that the ship is big enough for all of the gods to travel aboard it with wargear and weapons in tow, and that, as soon as its sail is hoisted, the ship finds good wind, and goes wherever it need be. It is made up of so many parts and with such craftsmanship that, when it is not needed at sea, it may be folded up like cloth and placed into one's pocket.
They put their hopes in time especially, and in the vicissitudes of fortune, since they knew not how to save themselves by their own efforts, but turmoil, terror, and rumours of evil possessed the city [of Rome]. At last something happened that was like what Homer often mentions, although people generally do not wholly believe it...
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people despise Homer and say that with his impossible exploits and incredible tales he makes it impossible to believe in every man's power to determine his own choice of action. 5 This, however, is not what Homer does, but those acts which are natural, customary, and the result of reasoning, he attributes to our own volition ...
...while in exploits of a strange and extraordinary nature, requiring some rush of inspiration, and desperate courage, he does not represent the god as taking away, but as prompting, a man's choice of action; nor yet as creating impulses in a man, but rather conceptions which lead to impulses, and by these his action is not made involuntary, but his will is set in motion, while courage and hope are added to sustain him. 7 For either the influence of the gods must be wholly excluded from all initiating power over our actions, or in what other way can they assist and co-operate with men? They certainly do not mould our bodies by their direct agency, nor give the requisite change to the action of our hands and feet, but rather, by certain motives, conceptions, and purposes, they rouse the active and elective powers of our spirits, or, on the other hand, divert and check them.
--- Plutarch, Lives (Coriolanus 32).
https://penelope.uchicago.edu/Thayer/E/Roman/Texts/Plutarch/Lives/Coriolanus*.html