"Computer science is no more about computers than astronomy is about telescopes"
- Edsger Dijkstra
tag > Philosophy
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“Those who make peaceful revolution impossible will make violent revolution inevitable” - John F. Kennedy (via)
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"The less effort, the faster and more powerful you will be." — Bruce Lee
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"Say nothing and you'll make a fortune" - Chinese saying
The sayings origins are unclear. Jiang Zemin (China's former leader who succeeded Deng Xiaoping) once said, "say nothing, and you'll make a fortune" in English. As usual, translation of such idioms is very tricky. The Chinese phrase "闷声发大财" can be translated into English as "Make a fortune quietly" or "Get rich quietly" or "Keep quiet and get rich.". This phrase conveys the idea of achieving financial success without drawing too much attention to oneself or one's actions. Jiang Zemin made the saying "The silent toad catches the fly." popular as well, quoting it to educate the journalist who was asking questions that were " too young, too simple, sometimes naive".
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"Esse quam videri" - a Latin phrase meaning "To be, rather than to seem". It and variants have been used as a motto by a number of different groups.
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"Who you are is determined at the moment of action - not by who you think you are or how others perceive you." - Richard Thieme
Related: Zero Day: Roswell - A short story by Richard Thieme
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Chronophobia is anxiety over the passage of time. Chronophobia is especially common in prison inmates and the elderly, but it can manifest in any person who has an extreme amount of stress and anxiety in their life.
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Twelve Ways to Win People to Your Way of Thinking
- The only way to get the best of an argument is to avoid it. Whenever we argue with someone, no matter if we win or lose the argument, we still lose. The other person will either feel humiliated or strengthened and will only seek to bolster their own position. We must try to avoid arguments whenever we can.
- Show respect for the other person's opinions. Never say "You're wrong." We must never tell people flat out that they are wrong. It will only serve to offend them and insult their pride. No one likes to be humiliated; we must not be so blunt.
- If you're wrong, admit it quickly and emphatically. Whenever we are wrong we should admit it immediately. When we fight we never get enough, but by yielding we often get more than we expected. When we admit that we are wrong people trust us and begin to sympathize with our way of thinking.
- Begin in a friendly way. "A drop of honey can catch more flies than a gallon of gall."[6]:143 If we begin our interactions with others in a friendly way, people will be more receptive. Even if we are greatly upset, we must be friendly to influence people to our way of thinking.
- Start with questions to which the other person will answer yes. Do not begin by emphasizing the aspects in which we and the other person differ. Begin by emphasizing and continue emphasizing the things on which we agree. People must be started in the affirmative direction and they will often follow readily. Never tell someone they are wrong, but rather lead them where we would like them to go with questions that they will answer "yes" to.
- Let the other person do a great deal of the talking. People do not like listening to us boast, they enjoy doing the talking themselves. Let them rationalize and talk about the idea, because it will taste much sweeter to them in their own mouth.
- Let the other person feel the idea is his or hers. People inherently like ideas they come to on their own better than those that are handed to them on a platter. Ideas can best be carried out by allowing others to think they arrived at it themselves.
- Try honestly to see things from the other person's point of view. Other people may often be wrong, but we cannot condemn them. We must seek to understand them. Success in dealing with people requires a sympathetic grasp of the other person's viewpoint.
- Be sympathetic with the other person's ideas and desires. People are hungering for sympathy. They want us to recognize all that they desire and feel. If we can sympathize with others, they will appreciate our side as well and will often come around to our way of thinking.
- Appeal to the nobler motives. Everyone likes to be glorious in their own eyes. People believe that they do things for noble and morally upright reasons. If we can appeal to others' noble motives we can successfully convince them to follow our ideas.
- Dramatize your ideas. In this fast-paced world, simply stating a truth isn't enough. The truth must be made vivid, interesting, and dramatic. Television has been doing it for years. Sometimes ideas are not enough and we must dramatize them.
- Throw down a challenge. The thing that most motivates people is the game. Everyone desires to excel and prove their worth. If we want someone to do something, we must give them a challenge and they will often rise to meet it.
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"All of humanity's problems stem from man's inability to sit quietly in a room alone" - Pascal
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Divide and rule (Latin: divide et impera), or divide and conquer, in politics and sociology is gaining and maintaining power by breaking up larger concentrations of power into pieces that individually have less power than the one implementing the strategy.
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How is Mathematics Truth and Beauty? - Interview with David Chalmers
#Comment: A fun chat about mereology (the study of parts and the wholes they form.). They ignore that all assumptions about a fundamental "upper ontology" rely on reality being finite, with a orderly flow of time/information/causality/etc. In an infinite reality where everything exists (including nothing), there is no fundamental upper ontology to be discovered.
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"Turtles all the way down" is an expression of the problem of infinite regress. The saying alludes to the mythological idea of a World Turtle that supports the earth on its back. It suggests that this turtle rests on the back of an even larger turtle, which itself is part of a column of increasingly large world turtles that continues indefinitely (i.e., "turtles all the way down").
