Good Entropy

Tony Campolo quotes – Art Quotes

Most of us are tiptoeing through life so we can reach death safely. We should be praying, ‘If I should wake before I die.’ Life can get away from you. Don’t be satisfied with just pumping blood. (Tony Campolo)

“I can’t stand the slow suicide of not doing the thing that pumps my heart” – Valentino Rossi

William Shockley on what makes a person who publishes a lot of papers (and the superstar researcher system) | Dynamic Ecology

Another conclusion is that if you are really bad at just one factor (p_i close to zero for just one i), it sinks your overall productivity. This is innate in the multiplicative model (it is analogous to the ecological concept of bet hedging*). Being moderately good at everything is better than great at some and terrible at others (the oft heard “I’m terrible at writing but really good at coming up with ideas” doesn’t cut it but nor does the opposite).

Jonathan Haidt on Psychology and Politics | The Volokh ConspiracyThe Volokh Conspiracy

Jonathan Haidt on Psychology and Politics

On the Relatively Low Salaries of Relatively Essential Workers

Among other facts, this theory clearly explains that we in modern society should be pleased that so many occupations that are essential to the maintenance of human life and civil order pay those who work in those occupations so little relative to what workers in many other and less-’essential’ occupations are paid.

Book Review: Hemingway’s Boat – WSJ.com

There are two sentences that sum up what happened to Hemingway. They were written neither by himself nor by Mr. Hendrickson but by Fitzgerald, whose own weaknesses Hemingway, his friend and rival, admirer and denigrator, threw in his face. They were words that Fitzgerald gave to Dick Diver in “Tender Is the Night” to explain his decline: “The change came a long way back—but at first it didn’t show. The manner remains intact for some time after the morale cracks.”

That people should wish to be relieved of the bitter choice which hard facts often impose upon them is not surprising. But few want to be relieved through having the choice made for them by others. People just wish that the choice should not be necessary at all. And they are only too ready to believe that the choice is not really necessary, that it is imposed upon them merely by the particular economic system under which we live. What they resent is, in truth, that there is an economic problem.

F. A. Hayek. The Road to Serfdom: Text and Documents–The Definitive Edition (The Collected Works of F. A. Hayek, Volume 2) (Kindle Locations 1705-1708). Kindle Edition.

George F. Will – A recoil against liberalism

The progressive agenda is actually legitimated by the incomprehension and anger it elicits: If the people do not resent and resist what is being done on their behalf, what is being done is not properly ambitious. If it is comprehensible to its intended beneficiaries, it is the work of insufficiently advanced thinkers.