Welcome…
I grew up in Amherst and I live in Toulouse. I try to be curious.
These posts represent points of light that have illuminated the dark corners of my understanding.
260717
An Inscrutable Omen
In July 1992, I read The Road Less Traveled, and the last section of the book is about whether God exists.
I finished the book on a Sunday. I want to emphasize that I was really into the book, and after finishing I kept thinking about that last section about God.
· · ·
Monday morning I went to work at the Daily Camera newspaper, doing advertising design.
As usual, on my break I did the next day's crossword puzzle (a perk of working at a newspaper).
I couldn't get one square of the crossword. The clue was "a famous French Illustrator", G_DE. It was infuriating — the missing letter didn't have a second clue.
Then I read the next day's Calvin and Hobbes (also a perk of working at a newspaper):
I had moved to a new apartment over the weekend, and I had two boxes of books that I wanted to sell.
When my break came, I drove down to Pearl St. and double parked in front of the bookstore. I dropped off the two boxes, then came back out to move the car.
Returning to the bookstore on foot, I had to wait for two young women to walk by, in front of the door.
As they passed, one said (quite clearly) to the other: "Have you read The Road Less Traveled?"
I entered the bookstore, saw that the clerk was occupied, walked straight across the room and pulled a random book out of the shelves.
Litterally one second after hearing the two girls, I saw on the cover, much larger than the name of the author, "Illustrated by André Gide".
tags: #philosophy #spirituality
261002
A Key Quest of Human Existence
Adam Mastroianni, on why one shouldn't accept incentives as the main motivation for human behavior:
A key part of human development, I think, is figuring out what's right, what's wrong, and how you personally can increase the right and decrease the wrong to develop a value system.
This feels to me like a part and parcel of like the development of secondary sexual characteristics in adolescence — that happens, and meanwhile, you're also trying to do this thing.
This is part of the human mission as you go through life — to figure out "how do I slot into things? Like, where can I help? What's going wrong? How can I help something go right?"
And if you don't do that, if you outsource that process to a bureaucracy, to an incentive structure, to the ambient norms of the culture around you, you have declined a key quest of human existence.
And to me, that's just loser behavior… that is allowing someone else to colonize your value system in such a way that you are giving up this key part of your identity.
source: EconTalk Podcast