Thoughts for the Day: Monday 21 June 2021

Mastermind

Maria Konnikova

“That process starts upon the supposition that when you have eliminated all which is impossible, then whatever remains, however improbable, must be the truth,” [Quoting "Sherlock Holmes"]

Mastermind

Maria Konnikova

I raise this . . . to point out one somewhat obvious and yet absolutely central element of the human mind: we never stop learning. The Holmes that took the case of a mysterious lodger and ended up embroiled in a saga of secret societies and international crime rings (for that is the meaning of Red Circle: a secret Italian crime syndicate with many evil deeds to its name) is no longer the same Holmes who made such seemingly careless errors in “The Yellow Face.” Holmes may have his Norburys. But he has chosen to learn from them and make himself a better thinker in the process, ever perfecting a mind that already seems sharp beyond anything else. We, too, never stop learning, whether we know it or not.

Metabolical

Robert H. Lustig

In a population where 88 percent have some level of metabolic dysfunction, the entire concept of healthy has been obfuscated.

The Children of Light and the Children of Darkness

Reinhold Niebuhr

Marxist social theory betrays striking similarities to Rousseau's conceptions. It fails to anticipate the rise of a ruling group in a socialist society.

Ultrasociety

Peter Turchin

A successful upstart who wants to become king needs something extra. His authority cannot be maintained by force alone; he needs to persuade others that he has legitimate authority.

Strangely enough, it is easier to become a god-king than merely a king.

To become god-king the successful upstart needs several things. Obviously, he must be at the top of the military chain of command. But he also needs to become the ritual leader, so that he controls the religious hierarchy—large-scale ritual cults that evolved to cement tribal alliances. Finally, the king-in-the-making needs a fanatically loyal retinue that will follow his orders without question and compel others to do the same. The king needs loyal warriors to protect him from assassination, and to put to death any commoner who shows insufficient respect and obedience. Basically, the king and his retinue are a coalition of upstarts, with the king as the alpha male and his followers as lesser upstarts, but who also do quite well out of the deal.

The Shape of Ancient Thought

Thomas McEvilley

In Heraclitus’s statement that the restraining of impulse is difficult but necessary to the soul’s health lies the source of the Stoic emphasis on intervening in the mental process that leads from sensation to action. And in Democritean athambia is found the root of Epicurus’s ataraxia. Most Greek philosophies, like most Indian philosophies, were, in their ethics anyway, philosophies of retreat.

The Principles of Art

R. G. Collingwood

One paints a thing in order to see it People who don’t paint, naturally, won’t believe that; it would be too humiliating to themselves. They like to fancy that everybody, or at least everybody of refinement and taste like themselves, sees just as much as an artist sees, and that the artist only differs in having the technical accomplishment of painting what he sees. But that is nonsense. You see something in your subject, of course, before you begin to paint it (though how much, even of that, you would see if you weren’t already a painter is a difficult question); and that, no doubt, is what induces you to begin painting; but only a person with experience of painting, and of painting well, can realize how little that is, compared with what you come to see in it as your painting progresses.

Thoughts for the Day: Sunday 6 June 2021

 

The Wedge

Scott Carney, Amelia Boone, and Dave Asprey

Now we are masters at repairing physical injuries. Break a leg or show up in the emergency room with a gunshot wound, and you’re pretty likely to survive. Yet for all those achievements, Western medicine is pretty darn bad at managing chronic illness.

N.B. But we're damned good at creating chronic illness,!

Dark Star Rising

Gary Lachman

What is this strange need to lead, and the equally strange one to follow? What is this will to power? Why do we pursue it? Must it always corrupt? Charismatic leaders cast a spell over their followers in the same way that a magician casts one over those he wants to enchant. The power of the image, of glamour, of one’s self-confidence, is at work in both—as it is in the confidence trickster. The medium is the imagination, whether in its traditional forms or in its new electronic version.

The Force of Character

James Hillman

Some thinkers would discard “consciousness” altogether. They call it the ghost in the machine; they assert that the relation between consciousness and brain is an insoluble problem, or that the problem results from the wrong question. They are right—so long as consciousness is undefiled by qualities, a sheer abstraction. To conceive of consciousness as energy aware of itself makes matters worse. It defines the one abstraction by means of three others: energy, awareness, and self.

To deconstruct this characterless, senseless world without color, taste, or sound means letting it decompose into its multitudinous qualities. It means taking the world as it is, a cornucopia of phenomena, and saving the phenomena from abstractions. Nature does indeed abhor a vacuum. A world defined by its qualities and perceived as qualities requires the same richness of its observers. Like knows like. If the world is a messy many, then the definition of consciousness follows one proposed early in the twentieth century by the French philosopher Henri Bergson: “qualitative multiplicity.”

The knower becomes a bundle of traits and capacities, the ability to abstract merely one among many equally valuable potentials. The inmost nature of this knower, character, could no longer be contained within a single central core. It, too, would be imagined as an interplay of many characteristics. Consciousness would no longer be conceived as a clear light hovering over the face of the deep, observing each thing in its kind. Rather, the light would fracture, fluctuate, show variegations that reflect the characteristics of the world, our consciousness replying to its character. We would conceive of consciousness to be as multitudinous as the world, a microcosm of the macrocosm: as without, so within.

Commanding Hope

Thomas Homer-Dixon

"All of us…are preparing a renaissance beyond the limits of nihilism. But few of us know it." --Albert Camus

A Few Lessons From Sherlock Holmes

Peter Bevelin

“It is of the first importance...not to allow your judgment to be biased by personal qualities...The emotional qualities are antagonistic to clear reasoning. I assure you that the most winning woman I ever knew was hanged for poisoning three little children for their insurance-money, and the most repellant man of my acquaintance is a philanthropist who has spent nearly a quarter of a million upon the London poor.”--"Sherlock Holmes" in The Sign of the Four

Thoughts for the Day: Sunday 24 January 2021

Commanding Hope

Thomas Homer-Dixon

And if we’re going to reimagine and reinvigorate hope in ways that help us, we must think carefully about the relationships between time, imagination, possibility, and prediction.

A Secret History of Consciousness

Gary Lachman

We may indeed be passing through what the historian Arnold Toynbee called a “time of troubles,” the period of challenge and difficulty that precedes the disintegration of a civilization. Toynbee argues that a civilization in peril reacts in specific, recognizable patterns. One is to seek safety by a “return to the past,” by reviving a “primitive,” “archaic” way of life. The various “back to nature” and fundamentalist philosophies that have emerged in the last fifty or so years suggest something of this sort.

Apologies to the Grandchildren

William Ophuls

We face a stark choice. We can expend our waning stocks of fossil fuels, our scarce capital, and our limited political will in a vain attempt to maintain industrial civilization as it exists, or we can use those same resources to effect a necessary transition to a radically different type of civilization. But we cannot do both, and we must choose reasonably soon.

Apologies to the Grandchildren

William Ophuls

Niccolò Machiavelli: "Wise men say, and not without reason, that whoever wishes to foresee the future must consult the past; for human events ever resemble those of preceding times. This arises from the fact that they are produced by men who have ever been, and ever will be, animated by the same passions…."

Mastermind

Maria Konnikova

[F]or [Sherlock] Holmes, education means something more. Education in the Holmesian sense is a way to keep challenging yourself and questioning your habits, of never allowing System Watson to take over altogether—even though he may have learned a great deal from System Holmes along the way. It’s a way of constantly shaking up our habitual behaviors, and of never forgetting that, no matter how expert we think we are at something, we must remain mindful and motivated in everything we do.

Meditations of a Buddhist Skeptic

B. Alan Wallace

Nothing inherently exists, with its own parts and attributes, independently of our conceptual designation.

The Soul's Code

James Hillman

[T]here is no escape from necessity. It will not yield, cannot submit: ne + cedere. Kant defined necessity’s German equivalent, Notwendigkeit, to mean that which “could not be otherwise.” This makes the understanding of our lives remarkably easy: whatever we are we could not have been otherwise. There is no regret, no wrong path, no true mistake. The eye of necessity reveals what we do to be only what could have been. “What might have been is an abstraction / Remaining a perpetual possibility / Only in a world of speculation. / What might have been and what has been / Point to one end, which is always present” (T. S. Eliot) [Burnt Norton]

As we perform an act, make a choice, we believe there are options. Options, Personal Agency, Choices, Decisions—these are the catchwords Ego thrives on. But if we look up from the engagement for a moment and speculate, Necessity’s implacable smile says that whatever choice you make is exactly the one required by Necessity. It could not be otherwise. At the moment the decision falls, it is necessary. Before it is decided, all lies open. For this strange reason, Necessity guarantees only risk. All is at risk in each decision, even though what is finally decided upon at once becomes necessary.

Thoughts for the Day: Tuesday 13 October 2020

 

The Soul's Code

James Hillman

As the writer William Saroyan put it: “I resented school, but I never resented learning.”

9 Steps to Influence

Ehud Segev

Sherlock Holmes, said: “You see, but do not observe. The distinction is clear.”  Yes, the power of observation!

Extraordinary Lives

William Zinsser

“Let’s suppose I had never met Harry Truman and didn’t know anything about him and had never seen a photograph of him. How would you describe him to me?” There was a pause, and he said, “Complicated.” Of course, we are all more complicated than we appear. Everybody is hard to know, particularly someone in public life. But Harry Truman was a much more complicated and interesting person than most of us have been led to believe. He was far better educated, far more learned, far more placid, calm, conciliatory, thoughtful. He never raised his voice among those who worked for him. He was never known to dress anyone down in the White House, never known to fly off the handle or become abusive. He did not like confrontations. In his own family, he was known as “The Peacemaker.” (He came from a very, truly “feisty” family.)

Becoming Sherlock

Stefan Cain

Studies have shown that slowing down and focusing more attention on detail will actually train your brain to assimilate the good habit of becoming more observant and productive.

Empathy is a tool for building people into groups, for allowing us to function as more than self-obsessed individuals. —Neil Gaiman...

Essays in Understanding, 1930-1954

Hannah Arendt

Even in the personal sphere, where no universal laws can ever determine unequivocally what is right and what is wrong, man’s actions are not completely arbitrary. Here he is guided not by laws, under which cases can be subsumed, but by principles—such as loyalty, honor, virtue, faith—which, as it were, map out certain directions.

Thoughts for the Day: Saturday 29 August 2020

 

The Kennedy Imprisonment

Garry Wills

Charismatic authority is constructive only when it builds order from chaos. When it tries to supersede continuing forms of authority, it destabilizes despite itself. The more insistent became Kennedy’s personal call to follow him, the less compelling was any order that did not issue directly from him. The nontransferability of such personal authority was evident in the refusal of many Kennedy followers to treat President Johnson as fully legitimate. Johnson’s authority came from procedures and legal precedent, not from the personal charisma of his predecessor.

World Order

Henry Kissinger

...on April 11, 1951, President Truman relieved MacArthur of his military command for making statements contradicting the administration’s policy. On substance, Truman stressed the containment concept: the major threat was the Soviet Union, whose strategic goal was the domination of Europe. Hence fighting the Korean War to a military conclusion, even more extending it into China, was, in the words of the Chairman of the Joint Chiefs of Staff, General Omar Bradley, a combat leader in the war against Germany, “the wrong war, at the wrong place, at the wrong time, and with the wrong enemy.”

Bonds That Make Us Free

C. Terry Warner

Though none of us is responsible for the misfortunes that befall us, we are, thankfully, responsible for how we use those misfortunes. We cannot alter past events, it’s true. Not having been responsible for them, we cannot take responsibility for them. But we are responsible for the effect they have upon us—for the meaning we assign to them and the way we remember them. And we can learn and grow from them.

A Few Lessons From Sherlock Holmes

Peter Bevelin

“It is of the first importance...not to allow your judgment to be biased by personal qualities...The emotional qualities are antagonistic to clear reasoning. I assure you that the most winning woman I ever knew was hanged for poisoning three little children for their insurance-money, and the most repellant man of my acquaintance is a philanthropist who has spent nearly a quarter of a million upon the London poor.” (Holmes; The Sign of the Four)

The Songlines

Bruce Chatwin

“If this were so; if the desert were 'home'; if our instincts were forged in the desert; to survive the rigours of the desert - then it is easier to understand why greener pastures pall on us; why possessions exhaust us, and why Pascal's imaginary man found his comfortable lodgings a prison.”

A Few Lessons from Sherlock Holmes by Peter Bevelin

Small book, big ideas

Peter Bevelin’s short book is a compendium of quotes from the stories of Sherlock Holmes, other writings by Arthur Conan Doyle, and some writings of Doyle’s contemporaries. Before each set of quotes, Bevelin identifies a theme, such as “Practice is a good instructor and teaches us to where to look and what to look for”. (Bevelin, Peter (2013-06-24). A Few Lessons from Sherlock Holmes (Kindle Locations 156-157). MX Publishing. Kindle Edition.) The quotes, primarily from stories of Holmes, then illustrate or elucidate the theme. Perhaps that second most commonly cited source comes from Thomas McCrae, who published a work in a Canadian medical journal in 1914  titled “The Method of Zadig in the Practice of Medicine”, which discusses many of the themes common to Holmes’ methods. 

This short (65-page) book is a compendium of wisdom that one can dip into at random to reinforce an inquiring and questioning mind. Its single sentence themes and brief quotes make it like a commonplace book. In its themes and conclusions (and often in its selections of quotes from the Holmes treasury), it’s very similar to Maria Konnikova’s Mastermind:How to Think Like Sherlock Holmes. But where Bevelin limits his quotes to Holmes and his contemporaries, Konnikova riffs into contemporary research and thought. Both are valuable and fun—how could they not be when led by the great detective?

Mastermind: How to Think Like Sherlock Holmes by Maria Konnikova

Few literary characters have the staying power of Sherlock Holmes, the creation of Arthur Conan Doyle. Years of book spin-offs, movies, and television don’t seem to have diminished our appetite for this rather bizarre fellow. Recent incarnations include the rather frenetic portrayal of Holmes by Robert Downey, Jr. in the two Guy Ritchie films, and Benedict Cumberbatch’s more recent (and to my mind more faithful) incarnation set in contemporary London (with Martin Freeman providing a superb Watson). Why are we so intrigued by this (almost) super-human misfit? I think because he is human and not super-human—that he does things that we can imagine doing. I think Maria Konnikova shares this perception. 

Ms. Konnikova is a psychologist who grew-up hearing Holmes stories read to her by her father in her native Russian. Now with a doctorate in psychology, she unpacks the dynamics of Holmes and his foil Watson to share with us ways in which we might emulate the great (fictional!) detective. For this task, Konnikova draws extensively on both the Holmes stories of Conan Doyle and cutting-edge psychological research. 

It turns out the Holmes-Watson pairing matches well with the “thinking fast and slow” paradigm of Daniel Kahneman (more prosaically designated as System 1 and System 2 thinking). Watson goes quick and instinctive, while Holmes thinks; Watson glances, Holmes observes. To put it in a nutshell, Holmes makes the sustained and energetic effort to observe and consider what he perceives, while Watson wants to cut to the chase (a surgeon, no doubt). 

Konnikova details the ways these two men go about their detecting work in light of what modern psychology has taught us. She highlights the scientific frame of mind used by Holmes that looks for evidence and tests hypotheses. She considers what information he puts (or doesn’t put) into his “brain attic”. Holmes is rather single-minded in his pursuit of information needed to make him the world’s only “consulting detective”, unlike Watson, who fills his mind with the drivel of the evening paper. But perhaps the most surprising difference between the two is that Holmes uses his imagination. He does so in a systematic and focused way, not in flights of fancy or mental woolgathering. Like Einstein’s thought experiments (riding that beam of light), Holmes tests and weighs alternatives in his mind based on the empirical evidence that he gathers and considers in the light of logic. We learn that imagination is at least as important, if not more important, than logic in resolving the problems that Holmes faces. 

We also learn that creativity plays a huge role in how Holmes operates. He improvises in each new situation, drawing on different mental practices as circumstances require—some need the magnifying glass, while others may constitute a “three-pipe problem” that mark an effort of sustained mental work. (Or a three nicotine-patch problem if you’re Cumberbatch’s incarnation in smoke-free London.) Konnikova emphasizes the dexterity and flexibility of the great detective’s mind. 

Konnikova concludes with the important point that Holmes never stops learning. He does err (rarely), but he reflects and learns from those errors, and he’s always getting his (non-mandatory) continuing education through his own self-guided study. How many times does Holmes cite a precedent to the unenlightened inspector or to Watson? He knows his subject matter! 

This is both an informative and immensely entertaining book. Large doses of Holmes mixed with intriguing perspectives from contemporary psychology make it fun to read. And, I hope, after having read it and reviewed it, we find ourselves a little more Holmes-like in resolving our problems, although, I hope with more social tact than our rather introverted detective. Also, I don’t think that I could ever match the eagle-eyed abilities that he possesses. As an aging, life-long four-eyes, I believe myself nearly hopeless in this regard!