Ben Sima

  • Alfred Korzybski

    Korzybski’s fundamental idea was that the structure of the language molds human thought process, often in a detrimental manner. From an article on Cut the Knot

  • Marcus Aurelius Quotes

    I’ve been working on a website that shows random sections from Marcus Aurelius’ Meditations: aurelius.co So far I’ve only added my favorite passages, the ones I’ve read over and over again. As of tonight, you can submit your own passages using this Google Docs form and I’ll add them to the website. I appreciate your […]

  • John Stuart Mill on truth and debate

    I just discovered this quote from one of Jordan Peterson’s videos: He who knows only his own side of the case knows little of that. His reasons may be good, and no one may have been able to refute them. But if he is equally unable to refute the reasons on the opposite side, if […]

  • Clever

    Lacan, Seminar II chapter III, addressing his students: In other words, the only criticism I have to make of you, if I may, is that you all want to appear too clever. Everybody knows you are. So why do you want to appear as such? And, in any case, what is so important, either about […]

  • Kwame Anthony Appiah and others on hierarchy

    The entire article is very good. Apart from their civic importance, hierarchies can be surprisingly benign in life more broadly. Hierarchy is oppressive when it is reduced to a simple power over others. But there are also forms of hierarchy that involve power with, not over. Daoism characterises this kind of power effectively in the […]

  • A new machine learning journal

    From Chris Olah, it’s called Distill: As people rush out new discoveries without putting effort into communication, they produce research debt. The field becomes noisy and energy draining to follow. In such an environment, I think it’s extremely valuable for there to be people focused on human understanding, clarity, and communication — a kind of […]

  • Memetic selection

    A short review of Dennett’s new book, From Bacteria to Bach and Back. And a quote explaining the main theme of the book: Yet, as Dennett and others argue, genetic evolution is not enough to explain the skills, power and versatility of the human mind. Over the past 10,000 years, human behaviour and our ability […]

  • *They Thought They Were Free* by Milton Mayer

    My notes from They Thought They Were Free by Milton Mayer. Published in 1955, this book is a collection of stories by Mayer, a Jewish-American, as he interviewed 10 Germans in Kronenberg. Each of them were involved with Nazism in some form, but none of them were very high in the ranks of leadership, in […]

  • Past times

    A quote I dug up in my notes from Arthur Conan Doyle’s Complete Sherlock Holmes He walked past the couch to the open window, and held up the drooping stalk of a moss-rose, looking down at the dainty blend of crimson and green. It was a new phase of his character to me, for I […]

  • Imported archives

    This afternoon I imported a ton of archives from previous years and a few different places. Some posts are about things I had forgotten I knew, but it’s so nice to re-read them, for example this old analysis of Christianity and Alcohol. My thinking hasn’t really changed much since 2011, to be perfectly honest. But […]