Goodhart's Law

When a metric becomes a target, it ceases to be a good metric.

Path to Rome - Hillaire Belloc

 

Rephrenology

Phrenology, as everyone knows, is a way of reading someone’s character, aptitude, and abilities by examining the bumps and hollows on their head. Therefore–according to the kind of logical thinking that characterises the Ankh-Morpork mind–it should be possible to mould someone’s character by giving them carefully graded bumps in all the right places. You can go into a shop and order an artistic temperament with a tendency to introspection and a side order of hysteria. What you actually get is hit on the head with a selection of different size mallets, but it creates employment and keeps the money in circulation, and that’s the main thing.

Terry Pratchett, Men at Arms

Fox and the Hedgehog

This is Erasmus' Adagia commentary on the one-skilled Hedgehog vs the many-skilled Fox. The original adage (likely a fragment from a fable) was written by Greek lyric poet Archilochus of Paros (ca. 680-640 BC) "The fox knows many tricks, the hedgehog only one. One good one."

Parable of the Sparrow

 

King Lear Act 3 Scene 2

LEAR
Blow, winds, and crack your cheeks! Rage, blow!
You cataracts and hurricanes, spout
Till you have drenched our steeples, drowned the cocks!
You sulfurous and thought-executing fires,
Vaunt-couriers of oak-cleaving thunderbolts,
Singe my white head! And thou, all-shaking thunder,
Smite flat the thick rotundity o' th' world,
Crack nature’s molds, all germens spill at once
That make ingrateful man!


FOOL
nuncle, court holy water in a dry house is better than this rainwater out o' door. Good nuncle, in, and ask thy daughters blessing. Here’s a night pities neither wise man nor fool.

LEAR
Rumble thy bellyful! Spit, fire! Spout, rain!
Nor rain, wind, thunder, fire are my daughters.
I tax not you, you elements, with unkindness.
I never gave you kingdom, called you children.
You owe me no subscription. Why then, let fall
Your horrible pleasure. Here I stand, your slave—
A poor, infirm, weak, and despised old man.
But yet I call you servile ministers,
That will with two pernicious daughters joined
Your high engendered battles 'gainst a head
So old and white as this. Oh, ho! 'Tis foul.

Dazexiang uprising

"What's the penalty for being late?" 

"Death." 

"What's the penalty for rebellion?" 

"Death." 

"Well -- we're late."

As Dead As Robert Blum

The power to tax is the power to destroy

AUTHOR: Daniel Webster (1782–1852)
QUOTATION: The power to tax is the power to destroy.
ATTRIBUTION: This quotation comes from the words of DANIEL WEBSTER and those of JOHN MARSHALL in the Supreme Court case, McCulloch v. Maryland.

Webster, in arguing the case, said: “An unlimited power to tax involves, necessarily, a power to destroy,” 17 U.S. 327 (1819).

In his decision, Chief Justice Marshall said: “That the power of taxing it [the bank] by the States may be exercised so as to destroy it, is too obvious to be denied” (p. 427), and “That the power to tax involves the power to destroy … [is] not to be denied” (p. 431).

Je vous ai compris

“How fleeting are all human passions compared with the massive continuity of ducks.”

― Dorothy L. Sayers, Gaudy Night

Zen and the Art of Motorcycle Maintenance: An Inquiry Into Values

That's all the motorcycle is, a system of concepts worked out in steel. There's no part in it, no shape in it, that is not out of someone's mind [...] I've noticed that people who have never worked with steel have trouble seeing this—that the motorcycle is primarily a mental phenomenon. They associate metal with given shapes—pipes, rods, girders, tools, parts—all of them fixed and inviolable., and think of it as primarily physical. But a person who does machining or foundry work or forger work or welding sees "steel" as having no shape at all. Steel can be any shape you want if you are skilled enough, and any shape but the one you want if you are not. Shapes, like this tappet, are what you arrive at, what you give to the steel. Steel has no more shape than this old pile of dirt on the engine here. These shapes are all of someone's mind. That's important to see. The steel? Hell, even the steel is out of someone's mind. There's no steel in nature. Anyone from the Bronze Age could have told you that. All nature has is a potential for steel. There's nothing else there.”


― Robert M. Pirsig,

Navigare necesse est, vivere non est necesse

“Pompey …….. was ready to start on his voyage home, (when) a great storm arose upon the sea, and the captains of the ships were reluctant to set sail. But he led the way himself and ordered them to weigh anchor, shouting out to them: “We have to sail, we do not have to live“. So, with good fortune assisting his own daring and energy, he filled the sea with ships and the markets with grain. In fact he provided so much of it that there was a surplus left over for the use of people outside Italy, the supply overflowing, as it were from a welling fountain, in all directions.”

This was in 56 B.C. Although Plutarch’s text is in Greek, Pompey presumably spoke Latin. Apparently the Latin version, something like navigare necesse est, vivere non est necesse, first appeared during the Middle Ages. According to Büchmann the form navigare est necesse, vivere necesse non est occurs in Antonius Tudertinus’ translation [of Plutarch presumably], Venice, 1478.

Some say the quote served as motto of the Hanseatic League (which operated during the late Middle Ages), which statement appears to be founded on its decorating the gate – around a century ago, at any rate – of the ‘Marine Building’ in the German city of Bremen.

Fumagalli states that Mussolini, at a conference on aeronautics in Rome in 1923, modified it to volare necesse est.

According to a Dutch dictionary of quotations the phrase also serves as the motto of Rotterdam (which was not a Hanseatic city).

"You may not be interested in the dialectic, but the dialectic is interested in you."

Trotsky.

Wittgenstein "If a lion could speak, we couldn't understand him"

Two quotations clarify this koan-like remark.

First, from Philosophical Investigations #206:

Suppose you came as an explorer to a country with a language quite unknown to you. In what circumstances would you say that the people there gave orders, understood them, obeyed them, rebelled against them, and so on?

Shared human behaviour is the system of reference by means of which we interpret an unknown language.

And elsewhere in the manuscripts (MS 165, 97f):

What we call 'instructions', for example, or 'orders', 'questions', 'answer', 'describing' etc. is all bound up with very specific human actions and an order is only distinguishable as an order by means of the circumstances accompanying it.

Humans share both a perceptual and a conceptual apparatus. We also behave in broadly similar ways, i.e. we share what anthropologists call 'universals' and Wittgenstein calls 'forms of life'. Because we share all these things, we have language in common.

A lion doesn't share any of this with us. We have no idea what the world looks like, both literally and in a broader sense, to a lion. None.

Since, language depends, for intelligibility, on a common frame of reference, and humans and lions do not share a common frame of reference, we get: "If a lion could talk, we could not understand him."

William Faulkner - Banquet Speech

I feel that this award was not made to me as a man, but to my work - a life's work in the agony and sweat of the human spirit, not for glory and least of all for profit, but to create out of the materials of the human spirit something which did not exist before. So this award is only mine in trust. It will not be difficult to find a dedication for the money part of it commensurate with the purpose and significance of its origin. But I would like to do the same with the acclaim too, by using this moment as a pinnacle from which I might be listened to by the young men and women already dedicated to the same anguish and travail, among whom is already that one who will some day stand here where I am standing.

Our tragedy today is a general and universal physical fear so long sustained by now that we can even bear it. There are no longer problems of the spirit. There is only the question: When will I be blown up? Because of this, the young man or woman writing today has forgotten the problems of the human heart in conflict with itself which alone can make good writing because only that is worth writing about, worth the agony and the sweat.

He must learn them again. He must teach himself that the basest of all things is to be afraid; and, teaching himself that, forget it forever, leaving no room in his workshop for anything but the old verities and truths of the heart, the old universal truths lacking which any story is ephemeral and doomed - love and honor and pity and pride and compassion and sacrifice. Until he does so, he labors under a curse. He writes not of love but of lust, of defeats in which nobody loses anything of value, of victories without hope and, worst of all, without pity or compassion. His griefs grieve on no universal bones, leaving no scars. He writes not of the heart but of the glands.

Until he relearns these things, he will write as though he stood among and watched the end of man. I decline to accept the end of man. It is easy enough to say that man is immortal simply because he will endure: that when the last dingdong of doom has clanged and faded from the last worthless rock hanging tideless in the last red and dying evening, that even then there will still be one more sound: that of his puny inexhaustible voice, still talking.

I refuse to accept this. I believe that man will not merely endure: he will prevail. He is immortal, not because he alone among creatures has an inexhaustible voice, but because he has a soul, a spirit capable of compassion and sacrifice and endurance. The poet's, the writer's, duty is to write about these things. It is his privilege to help man endure by lifting his heart, by reminding him of the courage and honor and hope and pride and compassion and pity and sacrifice which have been the glory of his past. The poet's voice need not merely be the record of man, it can be one of the props, the pillars to help him endure and prevail.

'He who sells what isn't his'n. Must buy it back or go to pris'n' - Drew

To be governed

To be governed is to be at every operation, at every transaction, noted, registered, enrolled, taxed, stamped, measured, numbered, assessed, licensed, authorized, admonished, forbidden, reformed, corrected, punished. It is, under the pretext of public utility, and in the name of the general interest, to be placed under contribution, trained, ransomed, exploited, monopolized, extorted, squeezed, mystified, robbed; then, at the slightest resistance, the first word of complaint, to be repressed, fined, despised, harassed, tracked, abused, clubbed, disarmed, choked, imprisoned, judged, condemned, shot, deported, sacrificed, sold, betrayed; and, to crown all, mocked, ridiculed, outraged, dishonoured. That is government; that is its justice; that is its morality. 

Idée Générale de la Révolution au XIXe Siècle [The General Idea of the Revolution in the 19th Century] (1851); Proudhon

in the depths of winter, I found in me, an invincible summer

counterfeit paradise

"Given the choice between a good hell and a counterfeit paradise, what will people choose? Whatever you say, many people will believe that a counterfeit paradise has got to be better than a good hell. Though at first they recognize that the paradise is bogus, they either don’t dare or wish to expose it as such. As time passes, they forget that it’s not real and actually begin to defend it, insisting that it’s the only paradise in existence.” – Chan Koonchung