Notebook #18

December 2024 (Lake Grace) — July 2025 (Perth/AVA)

Culture preserves society, While society doesn’t preserve culture. — Steven Hicks

British Army Ranks

There are two ranks essential to the British Army. Sergeants & Captains. Sergeants to get between the officers and the men for the sake of the sanity of both, and Captains to get between the Sergeants & the paperwork so that they can actually get on with the job of Sergeanting.

• Private — on completion of basic training.
• Lance Corporal — 4 years as a private. 4 soldiers = a section.
• Corporal — 6–8 years service. Command of soldiers.
• Sergeant — 12 years service. 2IC. Platoon of 35 soldiers. Advise and assist junior officers.

Always Look For a No

Is this a bad idea? What’s the psychology? Re: Benjamin Franklin.

Senna

“The values that I have in my life are stronger than many other peoples desire to influence those values and to destroy these values.”

The Lazy Dogmatism of Sam Harris

Math and logic are deductive — they start with universal laws. Can science be inductive? Start with individual observations and universalise? Falsification vs Verification — e.g. Black swans: not only white — “all swans are white”.

“You need sufficient cooperation to implement that knowledge. All the progress we’ve made to arrive at anything like a universal conception of human flourishing and scientific rationality — all of that has been a matter of getting rid of dogma.” — Sam Harris

Physics

Nobody is denying that you could get this (the universe) with the right starting conditions. The question is: how do we have the right starting conditions?

Nietzsche & Heraclitus

600BC. Pre-Socratic “errors”. 2-worldism = “overcoming vast errors in thought.”

Book Notes: Centennials

8. Shake All Trees

Hire talent. Not CVs.

9. Get Better, Not Bigger

Think neighbourhoods, not cities. British Cycling — there was no single Eureka moment. Boardman’s success was the result of thousands of tiny step-by-step advances arrived at through constant analysis, experimentation and enquiry. Excellence can change the world. Growth on its own won’t. Max number = 300…economies of scale cease to function. Most comms is miscomms.

“We have a lot of people in responsible positions in the org, but the whole notion of a title puts you in a box, and worse, it puts you in a position where you assume that you have authority to command others in the organisation. So we resist this.” — Gore

10. X-Ray Everything

Everything has a formula. Decision makers were isolated and failed to listen. Seeking to legislate against individual problems was not sufficient. Try to scale success — easier than trying to fix failure. Positive deviants. Redirect attention from “what’s wrong” to “what’s right.” Knowledge comes first (the what and how). Wisdom develops as we start to understand context (the where, when, why). 40/70 rule: 40% understanding before action, no later than 70%.

11. Accidents

“Increase the chance of chance.” Bringing out new/innovative products every 2 years = a revenue advantage. Often the year before things tank, such companies enjoy great financial success. Cut costs as far as they can = lack of innovation starts to bite.

Book Notes: The Organised Mind

“Even if all knowledge could be found in books, where it is mixed in with so many useless things and confusingly heaped in such large volumes, it would take longer to read those books than we have to live in this life and more effort to select the useful things than to find them oneself.” — Descartes

We can handle 120 bits of information per second. 60 bits to listen to one person speaking — we can only just listen to two at once. Change and importance — attention is a limited resource. Difficulty of attentional switching comes at a high cost. Categorisation, attention and memory are functionally equivalent. Categories encode as much information as possible with the least amount of effort. Successful people are expert at categorising useful vs distracting knowledge.

Alexander Dugin / Florensky

The same hand of the same clock at the same time, seen from two sides of reality, simultaneously moves in the opposite direction. The spiritual mind and the material mind are each side of reality. They observe the same thing, but the coordinate system is reversed. One view of reality is true, the other is imaginary. The reality, however, is the same.

Blackstone’s Ratio

“It is better that ten guilty persons escape than one innocent suffer.” — William Blackstone, Commentaries on the Laws of England

Reagan / Nabokov Mashup

“We want to tell you all that we have learned. We want to paint for you our own experience so vividly that you’ll be able to avoid our heartaches, while you double and redouble our joys. And then we find we have nothing at our disposal but words…weak and feeble instruments. Still we must try.” — Ronald Reagan

Nabokov: “between the wolf in the tall grass, and the wolf in the tall story…there is a simmering go-between!”

George Orwell — Why I Write

“They (ready-made phrases) will construct your sentences for you — even think your thoughts for you, to a certain extent — and at need they will perform the important service of partially concealing your meaning even from yourself.”

“Let meaning choose the word, and not the other way about.”

Nassim Taleb

“Let us conjecture that the formation of moral values in society doesn’t come from the evolution of the consensus. No, it is the most intolerant person who imposes virtues on others precisely because of that intolerance. The same can apply to civil rights.”

General Ideas

So much of our world is built on facade. Vox populi, vox dei — the voice of the people is the voice of God. The last of the old will always beat the first of the new. The working class cannot rely on coercion.

Book Notes: The First Minute

8x good impressions will overturn a bad one. 15s → framing (context, intentions, clear headline). 45s → structured summary (goal & problem → solution). Don’t mix topics. Framing helps individuals interpret data.

Zettelkasten

Travelling notes with Ulysses. Alphanumerics. Attempt: events during the notebooks, statement tests (agree/disagree), travelling notes, breadcrumbs/threadcrumbs.

Steven Johnson Revisited

Where Ideas Come From — slow hunch (partials collide), adjacent possible, liquid networks, reef/city/web, error, exaptation, serendipity, platforms.

RSA Animate Revisited

Steven Pinker — Indirect Speech Act: Content vs maintaining relationship — the purpose of language. Innuendos provide individual knowledge, whereas direct speech provides mutual knowledge. Relationships are maintained or modified by mutual knowledge of the relationship type.

Philip Zimbardo — The Secret Powers of Time: 6 time orientations — Past (Regret vs Nostalgia), Present (Hedonistic vs Fatalistic), Future (Orientated vs Transcendental). Catholics (present/past) vs Protestants (future-oriented).

Drill Baby Drill — Landman

“Good and bad don’t factor into this, Rebecca. Our great-grandparents built a world that runs on this stuff right here (oil). Until it starts running on something else — we’ve got to feed it or the world stops.”

“It is precisely when your ultimate conviction is that there is no eternal that you’re most prone to absolutize the temporal.” — James K. A. Smith

“People in those old times had convictions: we moderns only have opinions. And it takes more than a mere opinion to erect a Gothic Cathedral.” — Heinrich Heine

“Yet sometimes when the sun comes through a gap, these men know God the father in a tree, the holy spirit in the rising sap, and Christ will be the green leaves that come at Easter from the sealed and guarded tomb.” — Patrick Kavanagh, The Great Hunger

General Notes 2

The worst of all worlds vs the best of both worlds. Abstraction = differences that don’t matter. Generalisation — need a weak definition vs a strong one. What is the difference that makes the difference? Those who can, do — those who can’t, manage.

“They make it muddy so that it seems deep.” — Nietzsche

“They see work as ironic rather than iconic!” — Mike Rowe

You are not required to complete the work, but neither are you free to desist from it.

Mashup

“While many people believe that your feelings precede, or are independent of your thoughts, the truth is that your feelings are the products of your thoughts.” — Iris Murdoch

The purpose of hierarchy is to reduce cognitive load across the organisation. Not to exert power — but to help originating subsystems do their jobs better.

Tradition is not the worship of ashes, but the preservation of fire.

“The logic of worldly success rests on a fallacy: the strange error that our perfection depends on the thoughts and opinions and applause of other men. A weird life it is indeed, to be always living in somebody else’s imagination, as if that were the only place in which one could at last become real.” — Thomas Merton

“A fool can put his own coat on better than a wise man can do it for him. The implication of that undermines most of the agenda of the political left.” — Thomas Sowell

JBP & Dr. Arthur Brooks

The idols that you choose beckon falsely in the present — they are self-defeating. Eliminate one at a time: Money, Power, Honour, Pleasure.

On Writing — David Perell

POP writing: Personal, Observational, Playful.

Ayn Rand

“When you see that trading is done, not by consent, but by compulsion. When you see that in order to produce, you need permission from men who produce nothing. When you see money flowing to those who deal not in goods, but in favours. When you see that men get richer by graft and pull than by work, and your laws don’t protect you against them, but protect them against you. When you see corruption being rewarded and honesty becoming a self-sacrifice, you may know that your society is doomed.”

Jordan Hall

Where to be? How to be? Blockers: the historicity of Christ, the meaning of the crucifixion, the mystery that explains everything else — echoes through all history. Trinity. Relational ontology over substance ontology. Paradox of free will & divine knowledge/determinism.

“I was sitting at the collapsing point where all these unify…and multiplicity emerges. This is the nature of reality AND reality at the same time.”

Productivity Cannibalisation

You can’t have your cake and eat it too. Judge themselves by their intentions, and others by their actions.

“There are no solutions, there are only trade-offs.” — Thomas Sowell

“Time is the only critic without ambition.” — John Steinbeck

China / Tariffs

3x their road network in 25 years = all the roads in the US. Every bridge in the US — built in 20 years. 38% household spending in China — why? Famines. 12 in 400 years, worst = 30 million people. 1 acre feeds 1 person for 1 year. WA wheatbelt = 8M ha = 20M acres.

Private Equity Troubles

Need to sell trillions in assets. Lack of distributions & struggle to exit = continuation funds. Investors are frustrated. Private credit is eating private equity at the moment.

Quote Mashup

They mistook leverage for genius. They leveraged their posterity and mistook it for genius.

Tradition

Recurring problem → eureka = solution found → solution becomes a tradition → future generations don’t have the problem, or can’t see the problem, think tradition is useless → tradition thrown away = progress → problem returns.

SvdL

“I do believe in destiny & fate. But I also believe that we are only fated to do the things that we choose.”

Vibe Coding

Coding, design, website management, databases → these are merging.

Steering the Craft — Ursula Le Guin

First person narrative is the ancestor of narrative in the limited third person. Abstract discourse is always in the present tense. People often use the passive voice because it’s indirect, polite, unaggressive — admirably suited to making thoughts seem as though nobody had personally thought them and deeds seem as if nobody had done them, so that nobody need take responsibility.

“If a writer of prose knows enough of what he is writing about he may omit things that he knows and the reader, if the writer is writing truly enough, will have a feeling of those things as strongly as though the writer had stated them. The dignity of movement of an iceberg is due to only 1/8 of it being above the water.” — Hemingway

Stand the Gap — The Ethical Skeptic

Stand alone where silence meets roar,
on a line unmarked — yet poignant more.
Not for glory, not for fame,
but for the ones without a name.
Their voices stilled by shadowed fears,
and cries dissolved in unseen tears.
Feel the weight they cannot bear —
a shield of will, a whispered prayer.
Yes, I may fall, but I will not flee,
for justice walks with unbended knee.
Though dragons may spit and cowards will sneer,
I stand the gap — and persevere.

“When I tell the Truth, it is not for the sake of convincing those who do not know it, but for the sake of defending those who do.” — William Blake