Category: Reading

1. Stand up straight, with your shoulders back
   • We battle for dominance with each other but not too hard lest we exhaust ourselves too much in the fight
   • Resting places are important
   • Lobsters have chemical jets under their eyes that they can squirt at other lobsters to exchange information about size, sex, and health
   • Physical dominance only lasts for so long
   • Building relationships with others in the troop is important to continued dominance
   • Fear of death and social embarrassment are the worst
   • Tyranny tends to grow when there is no push-back
2. Treat yourself like someone you are responsible for helping
   • Oddly, people are better at filling and administrating prescriptions to the pets than they are to themselves
   • Pain matters more than matter matters
   • We see the world as animated with purpose and intent
     • Perception of things as tools happens as quickly as we perceive them as things
     • We see what things mean just as fast, or faster, than we see things as they are
     • We see the “personality” of things (or actions) of others before we see the action themselves
   • Meaning is found when we are balanced in order and chaos, this is when time flies and we feel fulfilled
     • “The Way” is fixed in a place of order, surrounded by chaos
     • We need both the order to be secure and chaos to grow
   • We can either make children safe or strong, not both
   • We coevolved with snakes
   • Be ready to give up something lower for something better
   • Once you know you are vulnerable, you realize how to torment yourself and others… This is the knowledge of Good and Evil
   • Evil often comes as a result of continued rejected sacrifices
   • PTSD usually happens from something done not something seen
   • Problems tend to be forgotten after they are solved
3. Make friends with people who want the best for you
   • New places allow us to reset ourselves and circumstances
   • Make sure you want the best for your friends
   • Things fall apart on their own… But we often help things along
4. Compare yourself to who you were yesterday, not to who someone is today
   • If the cards are always stacked against you, even by yourself, perhaps the game
   • Talking yourself into irrelevance is not good
   • Anything worth doing can be done better or worse
   • Resentment either means immaturity or tyranny
     • Ask your resentment what it needs
   • To see, we must aim
   • What you aim at determines what you see; what you see determines where you go
   • Our wants often conflict with each other, so we have to rank them
   • Obedience is a good starting point, but not an end
5. Do not let your children do anything that will make you not like them
   • Too much chaos breeds too much order
   • Habitual occurrences may feel trivial but really make up our lives
   • Children need interaction with adults to grow-up
   • Proper discipline is a combination of mercy and long-term strategy
   • People often ask the wrong, opposite psych question: “Why do people do drugs?” Drugs are the default; Violence is the default, peace is the mystery
   • We push supposed limits until we find the real boundary
   • “Old age and treachery can always overcome youth and skill.”
   • Angry cries are different from hurt cries
   • Discipline is different from punishment
   • Children need to be socialized to fit into society
   • Limit the rules to the minimum needed; Excess and seemingly arbitrary rules lowers respect for all the other rules
   • Aim for the minimum needed force
   • “No” really means, “Stop or I will make your life unpleasant because I have the power to do so”, this either needs to be physically or mentally as required by the child
6. Set your house in perfect order before criticize the world
   • Hurricanes are acts of god… Failure to prepare when we have been warned is our fault
   • Just because you do not know why you know something does not mean it is wrong
7. Pursue what is meaningful not what is expedient
   • Sacrifice is delaying now for future reward
8. Tell the truth or, at least, don’t lie
   • This includes lying to yourself
   • Lies warp our perceptions to fit an ideal, this tends to eliminate our drive
   • Vitality requires original contribution
   • We need to experience new things in order to be fully activated
   • By playing the game, you admit the game is important
   • Any weakness can be magnified into crisis with enough deceit
   • Reason, rationality, is best seen as a personality as it has its own motives and ego
   • Totalitarianism is when Reason has all powers
   • If you have no aim, anything can be everything, this is anxiety inducing
   • A man’s worth can be determined by the truth he can tolerate
   • The Big Lie is what corrupts, wrapping all other lies in it
   • Most lies are acted out, not told
9. Assume the person you are listening to might know something you do not
   • Genuine conversation is sharing, listening, and strategizing
   • Each of us is a walking cacophony of integrated experiences
   • A sufficiently happy ending can make all the bad stuff that came before make sense
   • Memory is a tool to guide the future
   • Super saturated liquid
   • Try to not steal problems from others
   • We simulate our world with little avatars of ourselves
   • We find ourselves compelled to evaluate because listening alone is too dangerous
   • Try restating before continuing
   • Give the devils their due so you can hone your own position
10. Be precise in your speech
    • Communications requires admission
    • There is little in a marriage that is so little it is not worth fighting about
    • Are we so afraid of failure that we refuse to define success so we never know when we fail
    • Precision is very important
11. Do not bother children when they are skateboarding
    • Kids need playground that are dangerous enough to engage them
    • We need a degree of danger to live well so we can feel invigorated
    • It is often not that we love the poor but that we hate the rich that we seek to socialize
    • Without some dangerous experience, it is easier to reject humanity entirely
    • Women tend to want to marry equal or better, men do not care
    • Competence, not power, tend to be the primary indicator of dominance
    • Group identity can fractionated down to the individual level
    • Healthy women want men, not boys
    • “If you think tough men are dangerous, wait until you see what weak ones can do”
12. Pet a cat when you encounter one on the street
    • People tend to favor those in their group, even when groups are arbitrarily chosen
    • We love people, in part, because of their limitations
    • Set aside time to talk or think about the worry, daily, so it will not consume you
    • Your brain is more interested in the fact there is a plan, not the details of the plan

• True “forest” trees share resources amongst each other via roots, equalizing what they produce
• Connectivity determines resource distribution
• Conifers produce every year where deciduous trees decide, together, each year if they will blossom the next year or not
• Oak and Beech trees create such masses of seeds that it affects the birth rates of foraging wildlife
• On average, each tree successfully produces one offspring during its life
• Tree canopies are so thick, seedlings can barely grow a stem and a few leaves
• Slow growth while young is necessary for strong, aged trees
  • This keeps the wood cells tiny preventing air and fungus from breaking them
• If the tree is wider than tall, the tree is waiting patiently
• Saplings lack sugar and so are more bitter
• Trees on snowy slopes are pushed over by slowly moving snow while it continues to grow up, causing the truck to bow then straighten
  • The same thing can happen where the ground is slipping
• Trees are constantly shedding bark, like we do skin cells
• The deeper the bark cracks, the more reluctant the tree is to shed its bark
• Chemical processes are managed by the roots
• Mites and weevils are critical for forest processing
• We are liberating CO2 faster than the debris accumulate
• Less CO2 = Longer tree life span
• We need to let trees grow old to capture maximum CO2
• Trees will morph their environment to suit there needs; for example, growing tall and thick blocks the wind which reduces evaporation and increases moisture
• Deciduous trees are designed to direct rain fall down the leaves, through the branches, down the trunk to their roots
• Inland rain falls are thanks to tree transpiration
• Fall color changes include the relocation of resources back to the trunk
• Oak and beeches need rest, which is why we cannot grow them inside
• Trees cannot sleep until their leaves are shed
• Quaking aspens have leaves that can photo synthesize on both sides
• Green light is rejected light that the chlorophyll cannot process

• “This is because illusions don’t happen in our eyes, they happen in our brains.”
• “[O]ur dramatic instincts—are causing misconceptions and an overdramatic worldview.”
• Beware of averages… The can make a huge gap out of a sea of overlap
• “Your most important challenge in developing a fact-based worldview is to realize that most of your firsthand experiences are from Level 4; and that your secondhand experiences are filtered through the mass media, which loves non-representative extraordinary events and shuns normality.”
• News is, by definition, novel and not routine
• “To control the gap instinct, look for the majority.”
• “Remember how simple it is to construct a story of crisis from a temporary dip pulled out of its context…”
• “Don’t assume straight lines. Many trends do not follow straight lines but are S-bends, slides, humps, or doubling lines. No child ever kept up the rate of growth it achieved in its first six months, and no parents would expect it to.”
• We want to consume dramatic information
• “You can spot stories about them in the news every day:
  • physical harm: violence caused by people, animals, sharp objects, or forces of nature
  • captivity: entrapment, loss of control, or loss of freedom
  • contamination: by invisible substances that can infect or poison us”

Rules

1. A chart should be considered a visual argument, not an illustration
2. Baselines should show 0
3. Good charts have good scaffolding
4. Pay attention to scale labels
5. Include:
   1. Data source citations
   2. Measurements, units, and scales
6. Never trust a chart that does not disclose its sources

Notes

• Any chart will lie if you are not paying attention to it
• Be wary of means, they can mask extremes
• “Instead, they should design a chart that finds an aspect ratio that neither exaggerates nor minimizes the change. How is that so? We are representing a 35% increase. That’s 35 over 100, or 1/3 (aspect ratios put width first, so in this case it would be 3:1).”
• “A chart shows only what it shows, and nothing else.”

• “When the people have to manage dangers from inside the organization, the organization itself becomes less able to face the dangers from outside.”
• “Every single employee is someone’s son or someone’s daughter. Like a parent, a leader of a company is responsible for their precious lives.”
• Chemicals in our body
  • Endorphins to mask pain, for a time
  • Dopamine to feel good, right now, and imagine things
  • Serotonin for contentment and pride
  • Oxytocin for lasting love and trust
  • Cortisol for Flight, Fight, or Freeze, and blocking oxytocin
• Faking status improvements lowers one’s morale
• We expect well-compensated leaders to offer good protection; we feel betrayed when they do not
• (It would behoove leaders to make sure we know they are sacrificing for us, how else would we know to trust them?)
• Abstracting people allows us to mistreat them (laying off “FTEs” is easier than laying off “people”)
• Customer testimonials can have a powerful boost in customer productivity, much more than telling employees how they will benefit from meeting a goal
• Abundance can lead to greed and the application of resource to tilt things in our favor