An online commonplace book
Filmmaking is about creating immediate and profound connections with people. I have a rather biblical-sounding axiom for you: to be a filmmaker you need to know the heart of men.
– Werner Herzog
Cronin, Paul. Werner Herzog – A Guide for the Perplexed. London: Faber & Faber, 2020. pp238
Brilliant weirdos Alexey Guzey and Brian Timar explain morale. Worth bookmarking this one for discouraging moments. It could help you figure out why your morale is low.
First, ponder this idea:
Morale is your motive force, and you live or die by its maintenance.
Brian Timar & Alexey Guzey
Alexey and Brian go on to share a list of 10 + things that increase and decrease morale.
Three Four morale boosters from their list that resonate:
11. doing
35. making a decision
3. going outside
13. stopping a thief
Three morale sappers to be wary of:
4. being a coward
5. punting decisions
9. spending time on a task and not feeling closer to finishing it
Consider morale booster #11 – doing. Don’t only read these, go on and create your own list of morale increasers.
Some increasers (sunlight) are perennial, but many more will be personal. Same applies with morale sappers (sleepiness).
Read the piece in full here. Also, pair with Guzey’s post: Why You Should Start a Blog Right Now
Your only search guaranteed to fail is the one you never run
Gwern
Use Verbatim mode for literal matching.
Who knew? Gwern.
Explore the Internet’s attic. I didn’t even know the Internet Archive existed!
The Internet Archive (IA) deserves special mention as a target because it is the Internet’s attic, bursting at the seams with a remarkable assortment of scans & uploads from all sorts of sources—not just archiving web pages, but scanning university collections, accepting uploads from rogue archivists and hackers and obsessive fans and the aforementioned Indian/Chinese libraries with more laissez-faire approaches.5 This extends to its media collections as well—who would expect to find so many old science-fiction magazines (as well as many other magazines), a near-infinite number of Grateful Dead recordings, the original 114 episodes of Tom and Jerry, or thousands of arcade & console & PC & Flash games (all playable in-browser)? The Internet Archive is a veritable Internet in and of itself; the problem, of course, is finding anything…
So not infrequently, a book may be available, or a paper exists in the middle of a scan of an entire journal volume, but the IA will be ranked very low in search queries and the snippet will be misleading due to bad OCR. A good search strategy is to drop the quotes around titles or excerpts and focus down to
site:archive.organd check the first few hits by hand. (You can also try the relatively new “Internet Archive Scholar”, which appears to be more comprehensive than Google-site-search.)
View your Evernote or OneNote stash like a personalized search engine. Excellent way to think about those tools.
Clippings: note-taking services like Evernote/Microsoft OneNote: regularly making and keeping excerpts creates a personalized search engine, in effect.
This can be vital for refinding old things you read where the search terms are hopelessly generic or you can’t remember an exact quote or reference; it is one thing to search a keyword like “autism” in a few score thousand clippings, and another thing to search that in the entire Internet! (One can also reorganize or edit the notes to add in the keywords one is thinking of, to help with refinding.) I make heavy use of Evernote clipping and it is key to refinding my references.
Snore. Snore. I know, everyone is tired of the AI conversation. But how do these search techniques change with Chat GPT 4 or tools like Perplexity?
Read all of Gwern’s Internet Search Tips here. Table of Contents included!
h/t Tyler Cowen?
The entire essay is noteworthy, but this small section of quotes made me look at questions in a new way.
#1 – Really good questions are partial discoveries:
One of the biggest misconceptions about new ideas is about the ratio of question to answer in their composition. People think big ideas are answers, but often the real insight was in the question.
Part of the reason we underrate questions is the way they’re used in schools. In schools they tend to exist only briefly before being answered, like unstable particles. But a really good question is a partial discovery. How do new species arise? Is the force that makes objects fall to earth the same as the one that keeps planets in their orbits? By even asking such questions you were already in excitingly novel territory.
#2 – Revisit the questions from your youth.
Do you remember yours?
People talk a lot about the importance of keeping your youthful dreams alive, but it’s just as important to keep your youthful questions alive.
#3 – After answers, more questions.
This excerpt reminds me of the Haitian proverb, after the mountain, more mountains.
It’s a great thing to be rich in unanswered questions. And this is one of those situations where the rich get richer, because the best way to acquire new questions is to try answering existing ones. Questions don’t just lead to answers, but also to more questions.
Graham, Paul. “How to Do Great Work.” Paul Graham, 2023. http://paulgraham.com/greatwork.html. Accessed 3 July 2023.
Quit your complaining. It’s not the world’s fault that you wanted to be an artist. It’s not the world’s job to enjoy the films you make, and it’s certainly not the world’s obligation to pay for your dreams. Nobody wants to hear it. Steal a camera if you must, but stop whining and get back to work.
– Werner Herzog
Good to have our wise old uncle Werner dispense the real talk.
Most of us don’t even need to steal a camera anymore. His words apply to any ambitious pursuit.
Print this out. Keep in view.
As quoted from:
Gilbert, Elizabeth. Big Magic: Creative Living Beyond Fear. New York: Riverhead Books, 2015. pp 115,116
On how the world is organized against mavericks:
Normally the world is organized around dull people. Most power is controlled in this world by people who are straight and narrow. Where as the personal and professional eclectic person like Oppenheimer, the maverick, this kind of person is treated as unsound and is held at a distance. And only at special moments the world seems to be able to use these people.
– Ajay Shah
And the type of person Oppenheimer would recruit:
When this kind of maverick was brought in to influence and around himself created an organization three thousand or six thousand interesting people, and you can imaging the kind of people who would rally around his recruitment efforts. When he would reach out and make the phone calls to people all over the world, what kind of people would he attract? He would look for the clever ones. He would not look for the obedient ones. And that’s how they did this amazing thing called the Manhattan Project. And then after the war ended the state did not need him and then you got back to the worst instincts of the people who start complaining that oh this guy is unsound in so many ways and do you know “x” about his personal life. And did you know he went and studied Sanskrit, and he takes interest in Hinduism and things like that.
– Ajay Shah
One of my favorite things about being a professor is learning. I love to teach because I love to learn. And I love to do that with students who do as well.
Scott Cunningham
If chatgpt is of interest download his syllabus here. H/T Marginal Revolution.
I think the syllabus is an underrated learning tool. If there’s a subject you’d like to learn creating your own syllabus would be an excellent starting point. Maybe a micro-syllabus?
There’s 6 assignments for the podcast class. The first I call “Memento Morit and the 20-year plan”. Memento Mori is latin for “remember you’re going to die. And so from that, I ask students to think about what goal they have for what they are doing in 2043, and why. Try to understand precisely what it is about that goal that matters, what feeling does it produce, and how would they feel if that feeling wasn’t produced, and then work backwards to 6 months from now. Then select an interviewee and write a short biography about them.
Cunningham, Scott. https://causalinf.substack.com/p/my-new-syllabus-for-my-new-class
I love how he’s incorporating a podcast assignment into his course. This is the first I’ve heard of it.
The Memento Mori exercise is one for (nearly) any age. What is your goal for what you’ll be doing in 2043?
Memento Mori.
To perfect the art of becoming such a reliable person, Franklin wrote out a “Plan for Future Conduct” during his eleven-week voyage back to Philadelphia. It would be the first of many personal credos that laid out pragmatic rules for success and made him the patron saint of self-improvement guides. He lamented that because he had never outlined a design for how he should conduct himself, his life so far had been somewhat confused. “Let me, therefore, make some resolutions, and some form of action, that, henceforth, I may live in all respects like a rational creature,” There were four rules:
- It is necessary for me to be extremely frugal for some time, till I have paid what I owe.
- To endeavor to speak truth in every instance; to give nobody expectations that are not likely to be answered, but aim at sincerity in every word and action–the most amiable excellence in a rational being.
- To apply myself industriously to whatever business I take in hand, and not divert my mind from my business by any foolish project of suddenly growing rich; for industry and patience are the surest means of plenty.
- I resolve to speak ill of no man whatever.
Happy Fourth of July!
If you were to write your own Plan for Future Conduct what would it be?
Four rules only!
Go.
From: Isaacson, Walter. Benjamin Franklin: An American Life. New York: Simon & Schuster, 2004. (see pgs. 229-230)
But the steam car is now again on its way. The engine will probably be hermetically sealed, requiring no lubrication, no makeup water. Its condenser will operate with a vacuum. It will use diesel oil as fuel, and will cause very little pollution. It will be quiet, flexible, powerful. It will get off from a cold start in 30 seconds. It will contain so little water that the danger of explosion will be made negligible. It will have a fire, in a furnace instead of inside cylinders, but this will be so shielded, in the manner of a miner’s lamp, that it will not present a fire hazard in the garage. The engine itself will be so light that one mechanic can pick it up in his arms. It will last for years without attention. When in full production, it will be cheaper to build, and to operate, than present cars. The steam car will not be built by the present automobile industry unless some unit of that industry suddenly sees a great light, or public pressure or foreign imports force the decision, or government orders subsidize a new unit in the industry. It will have competition, as I will discuss later. But in fact, if I were disinterested, and had to bet, I might bet on steam.
– Vannevar Bush
I’m surprised Vannevar didn’t bring the steam car to market himself. He speaks of its components with such clarity. It’s like he’s reading off the cad files.
I wonder why the steam car idea never persisted? Why were battery powered cars realized instead? Will the steam car idea revive if the demand for batteries increases?
Bush, Vannevar. Pieces of the Action. San Francisco: Stripe Press, 2022. (see pgs. 229-230)
Floodlights and Goalposts 