Links 17.2024
On a Personal Note
For once, this was a rather calm week on my side. That means that I can immediately direct you towards the obituaries of Daniel Dennett who passed away last week. Dennett was one of those few analytic philosophers who engaged in public discourse and did a fantastic job at making philosophical ideas graspable for a world outside the academic ivory towers. He will be missed! In case you want to learn more, I would recommend checking out his recent memory “I’ve Been Thinking”.
Otherwise, I will just let you read and wish you a good start to the week. I know you will ace it; but here is nevertheless some inspiration:
The Five Futures of Russia
If you only have time for one article this week, make it this one. The excellent Stephen Kotkin (who knows a thing or two about Russia and history) breaks down some potential scenarios for the future of Russia. In other words, he does what I have been always calling for: Already starting to think about post-Putin Russia. (I know there is still much to do on the battlefield and in Russia itself; but I am obviously not saying that we only need to think about a post-Putin Russia. All I’m saying is that we ought to be ready when the moment arises!)
Here are his five scenarios:
Russia as France
Russia Retrenched
Russia as a Chinese Vassal
Russia as North Korea
Russia in Chaos
To entice you and to give you a flavor for his style of argumentation, I’m only quoting from the most wishful thinking (i.e. manifesting it!)—as it is also a subtle diss against France lol. But surely, you must read the whole piece. It is a gifted link, so you should not be bothered by a paywall. (Check also the second excerpt about the illusion of multipolarity)
RUSSIA AS FRANCE
France is a country with deep-seated bureaucratic and monarchical traditions—and also a fraught revolutionary tradition. Revolutionaries abolished the monarchy only to see it return in the guise of both a king and an emperor and then disappear again, as republics came and went. France built and lost a vast empire of colonial possessions. For centuries, France’s rulers, none more than Napoleon, threatened the country’s neighbors.
Today, these traditions live on in many ways. As the French thinker Alexis de Tocqueville shrewdly observed in his 1856 work The Old Regime and the Revolution, the revolutionaries’ efforts to break definitively with the past ended up unwittingly reinforcing statist structures. Despite the consolidation of a republican system, France’s monarchical inheritance endures symbolically in palaces in Versailles and elsewhere, in ubiquitous statues of Bourbon dynasty rulers, and in an inordinately centralized form of rule with immense power and wealth concentrated in Paris. Even shorn of its formal empire, France remains a fiercely proud country, one that many of its citizens and admirers view as a civilization with a lingering sense of a special mission in the world and in Europe, as well as a language spoken far beyond its borders (60 percent of daily French speakers are citizens of elsewhere). But crucially, today’s France enjoys the rule of law and no longer threatens its neighbors.
Russia, too, possesses a statist and monarchical tradition that will endure regardless of the nature of any future political system and a fraught revolutionary tradition that has also ceased to be an ongoing venture yet lives on in institutions and memories as a source of inspiration and warning. To be sure, the autocratic Romanovs were even less constrained than the absolutist Bourbons. Russia’s revolution was considerably more brutal and destructive than even the French one. Russia’s lost empire was contiguous, not overseas, and lasted far longer—indeed, for most of the existence of the modern Russian state. In Russia, Moscow’s domination of the rest of the country exceeds even that of Paris in France. Russia’s geographical expanse dwarfs France’s, enmeshing the country in Europe but also the Caucasus, Central Asia, and East Asia. Very few countries have much in common with Russia. But France has more than perhaps any other.
Contemporary France is a great country, although not without its detractors. Some decry what they deem its excessive statism, the high taxes necessary to underwrite uneven services, as well as a broad socialistic ethos. Others find fault with what they perceive as France’s great-power pretensions and cultural chauvinism. Still others lament France’s difficulty in assimilating immigrants. But it is possible to be disappointed in these or other aspects of the country and still recognize that it provides the closest thing to a realistic model for a prosperous, peaceful Russia. If Russia were to become like France—a democracy with a rule-of-law system that luxuriated in its absolutist and revolutionary past but no longer threatened its neighbors—that would constitute a high-order achievement.
France tramped a tortuous path to become what it is today. Recall Robespierre’s revolutionary terror, Napoleon’s catastrophic expansionism, Napoleon III’s self-coup (from elected president to emperor), the seizure of power by the Paris Commune, the country’s rapid defeat in World War II, the Vichy collaborationist regime that followed, the colonial Algerian war, and the extraconstitutional acts of President Charles de Gaulle after he came out of retirement in 1958. One might be seduced by the notion that Russia needs its own de Gaulle to help consolidate a liberal order from above, even though no such deus ex machina looms on Russia’s immediate horizon. But only hagiographers believe that one man created today’s France. Notwithstanding the country’s moments of instability, over generations, France developed the impartial, professional institutions—a judiciary, a civil service, a free and open public sphere—of a democratic, republican nation. The problem was not mainly that Yeltsin was no de Gaulle. The problem was that Russia was much further from a stable, Western-style constitutional order in 1991 than France had been three decades earlier.
I also love how Kotkin dismisses the Putin narrative about multipolarity out of hand…or better: He buries it!
CONTINENTAL CUL-DE-SAC
A Russian future missing here is the one prevalent among the Putin regime’s mouthpieces as well as its extreme-right critics: Moscow as a pole in its version of a multipolar world, bossing around Eurasia and operating as a key arbiter of world affairs. “We need to find ourselves and understand who we are,” the Kremlin loyalist Sergei Karaganov mused last year. “We are a great Eurasian power, Northern Eurasia, a liberator of peoples, a guarantor of peace, and the military-political core of the World Majority. This is our manifest destiny.” The so-called global South—or as Karaganov rendered it, “the World Majority”—does not exist as a coherent entity, let alone one with Russia as its core. The project of Russia as a self-reliant supercontinent, bestride Europe and Asia, has already failed. The Soviet Union forcibly held not just an inner empire on the Baltic and Black Seas but also an outer empire of satellites, ultimately to no avail.
Russia’s world is effectively shrinking despite its occupation of nearly 20 percent of Ukraine. Territorially, it is now farther from the heart of Europe (Kaliningrad excepted) than at any time since the conquests of Peter the Great and Catherine the Great. More than three centuries after appearing on the Pacific, moreover, Russia has never succeeded at becoming an Asian power. That was true even when World War II presented it with opportunities to avenge itself against Japan for the defeat Russia suffered at its hands in 1905, to reestablish the tsar’s position in Chinese Manchuria, and to extend its grasp to part of the Korean Peninsula. Russia will never be culturally at home in Asia, and its already minuscule population east of Lake Baikal has contracted since the Soviet collapse.
Russia’s influence in its immediate neighborhood has been diminishing, too. The bulk of non-Russians in the former Soviet borderlands want less and less to do with their former overlord and certainly do not want to be reabsorbed by it. Armenians are embittered, Kazakhs are wary, and Belarusians are trapped and unhappy about it. Eurasianism and Slavophilism are mostly dead letters: the overwhelming majority of the world’s non-Russian Slavs joined or are clamoring to join the European Union and NATO. Without Russia menacing its European neighbors, NATO’s reason for being becomes uncertain. But that means Russia could break NATO only by developing into a durable rule-of-law state, precisely what Putin resists with all his being.
There is no basis for Russia to serve as a global focal point, drawing countries toward it. Its economic model offers little inspiration. It can ill afford to serve as a major donor of aid. It is less able to sell weapons—it needs them itself and is even trying to buy back systems it has sold—and has been reduced in some cases to bartering with other pariah states. It has lost its strong position as a provider of satellites. It belongs to a pariah club with Iran and North Korea, exuberantly exchanging weapons, flouting international law, and promising much further trouble. It’s not difficult to imagine each betraying the other at the next better opportunity, however, provided they do not unravel first; the West is more resilient than the “partnerships” of the anti-West. Even many former Soviet partners that refused to condemn Russia over Ukraine, including India and South Africa, do not view Moscow as a developmental partner but as scaffolding for boosting their own sovereignty. Russia’s foreign policy delivers at best tactical gains, not strategic ones: no enhanced human capital, no assured access to leading-edge technology, no inward investment and new infrastructure, no improved governance, and no willing mutually obliged treaty allies, which are the keys to building and sustaining modern power. Besides raw materials and political thuggery, the only things Russia exports are talented people.
Russia has never sustained itself as a great power unless it had close ties to Europe. And for Putin or a successor, it would be a long way back. He undid more than two centuries of Swedish neutrality and three-quarters of a century of Finlandization (whereby Helsinki deferred to Moscow on major foreign policy considerations), prompting both countries to join NATO. Much depends on the evolving disposition of Germany: imagine the fate of Europe, and indeed the world order, if post–World War II Germany had evolved to resemble today’s Russia rather than undergone its remarkable transformation. Germany played the role of bridge to Russia, securing peaceful unification on its terms and lucrative business partnerships. But as things stand, Moscow can no longer cut deals with Berlin to revive its European ties without fundamentally altering its own political behavior, and maybe its political system. Even if Russia did change systemically, moreover, Poland and the Baltic states now stand resolutely in the way of Russian reconciliation with Europe as permanent members of the Western alliance and the EU.
Russia’s future forks: one path is a risky drift into a deeper Chinese embrace, the other an against-the-odds return to Europe. Having its cake and eating it, too—enduring as a great power with recaptured economic dynamism, avoiding sweeping concessions to the West or lasting subservience to China, dominating Eurasia, and instituting a world order safe for authoritarianism and predation—would require reversals beyond Russia’s ability to engineer.
Niall Ferguson: The Treason of the Intellectuals
I know I’m late to the party. This piece has been circulating in liberal-adjacent circles for some months now. Yet, it didn’t strike some as something that I should share and comment on. As you all know, the hyperbolic nature of the culture war doesn’t sit well with me. At this point, it is an established fact that most conservatives are just LARPing as traditionalists. And who can blame them? They themselves don’t want to live in their Middle Age hellhole.
But I digress. Back to Niall Ferguson. I dislike the culture war. And I dislike the focus on what happens at college campuses. I mean, what will happen if you put spoiled kids (sociologists call this prolonged adolescence, I think) in a super-confined environment where the rules of the real world don’t really apply (Nozickeans will know)? Of course, you will get some crazy countercultural stuff. But that is by design. After all, campus universities are also some sort of social labs where we run societal experiments.
Now, why do I share the Ferguson piece? Well, because I think a revival of Benda is needed. “The Treason of the Intellectuals” as well as Mark Lilla’s “The Reckless Mind” or Neven Sesardic’s “When Reason Goes on Holiday” have all powerfully argued that most dangerous ideas often stem from the brightest minds captured by the simple politics of the day. And the politics of the day are (once again) new flavors of illiberalism. Ferguson shows quite well the consequences of this politicization of the academe: decline and brain drain. In a geopolitical world where the soft power of the West still holds major value, the consequences of this erosion could be disastrous.
I recommend detaching the article from the 7th October discourse. FWIW, I think the analogy he draws is fundamentally misplaced. Just look at the bigger picture. (Unfortunately, that picture is bleak)
In 1927 the French philosopher Julien Benda published La trahison des clercs—“The Treason of the Intellectuals”—which condemned the descent of European intellectuals into extreme nationalism and racism. By that point, although Benito Mussolini had been in power in Italy for five years, Adolf Hitler was still six years away from power in Germany and 13 years away from victory over France. But already Benda could see the pernicious role that many European academics were playing in politics.
Those who were meant to pursue the life of the mind, he wrote, had ushered in “the age of the intellectual organization of political hatreds.” And those hatreds were already moving from the realm of the ideas into the realm of violence—with results that would be catastrophic for all of Europe.
A century later, American academia has gone in the opposite political direction—leftward instead of rightward—but has ended up in much the same place. The question is whether we—unlike the Germans—can do something about it.
For nearly ten years, rather like Benda, I have marveled at the treason of my fellow intellectuals. I have also witnessed the willingness of trustees, donors, and alumni to tolerate the politicization of American universities by an illiberal coalition of “woke” progressives, adherents of “critical race theory,” and apologists for Islamist extremism.
Throughout that period, friends assured me that I was exaggerating. Who could possibly object to more diversity, equity, and inclusion on campus? In any case, weren’t American universities always left-leaning? Were my concerns perhaps just another sign that I was the kind of conservative who had no real future in the academy?
Such arguments fell apart after October 7, as the response of “radical” students and professors to the Hamas atrocities against Israel revealed the realities of contemporary campus life. That hostility to Israeli policy in Gaza regularly slides into antisemitism is now impossible to deny.
[…]
As the great German sociologist Max Weber rightly argued in his 1917 essay on “Science as a Vocation,” political activism should not be permissible in a lecture hall “because the prophet and the demagogue do not belong on the academic platform.” This was also the argument of the University of Chicago’s 1967 Kalven Report that universities must “maintain an independence from political fashions, passions, and pressures.”
This separation between scholarship and politics has been entirely disregarded at the major American universities in recent years. Instead, our most elite schools have embraced the kind of “institutional change” that Gay has championed. Look where it has led us.
It might be thought extraordinary that the most prestigious universities in the world should have been infected so rapidly with a politics imbued with antisemitism. Yet exactly the same thing has happened before.
A hundred years ago, in the 1920s, by far the best universities in the world were in Germany. By comparison with Heidelberg and Tübingen, Harvard and Yale were gentlemen’s clubs, where students paid more attention to football than to physics. More than a quarter of all the Nobel prizes awarded in the sciences between 1901 and 1940 were awarded to Germans; only 11 percent went to Americans. Albert Einstein reached the pinnacle of his profession not in 1933, when he moved to Princeton, but from 1914 to 1917, when he was appointed professor at the University of Berlin, director of the Kaiser Wilhelm Institute for Physics, and as a member of the Prussian Academy of Sciences. Even the finest scientists produced by Cambridge felt obliged to do a tour of duty in Germany.
Yet the German professoriat had a fatal weakness. For reasons that may be traced back to the foundation of the Bismarckian Reich or perhaps even further into Prussian history, academically educated Germans were unusually ready to prostrate themselves before a charismatic leader, in the belief that only such a leader could preserve the purity of the German nationalist project.
Today’s progressives engage in racism in the name of diversity. The nationalist academics of interwar Germany were at least overt about their desire for homogeneity and exclusion.
[…]
German academics acted as Hitler’s think tank, putting policy flesh on the bones of his racist ideology. As early as 1920, the jurist Karl Binding and the psychiatrist Alfred Hoche published their Permission for the Destruction of Life Unworthy of Life, which sought to extrapolate from the annual cost of maintaining one “idiot” “the massive capital. . . being subtracted from the national product for entirely unproductive purposes.”
There is a clear line of continuity from this kind of analysis to the document found at the Schloss Hartheim asylum in 1945, which calculated that by 1951 the economic benefit of killing 70,273 mental patients—assuming an average daily outlay of 3.50 Reichsmarks and a life expectancy of ten years—would be 885,439,800 Reichsmarks. Many historians were little better, churning out tendentious historical justifications for German territorial claims in Eastern Europe that implied massive population displacement, if not genocide.
A critical factor in the decline and fall of the German universities was precisely that so many senior academics were Jews. For some, Hitler’s antisemitism was therefore—not unlike woke intersectionality in our own time—a career opportunity.
For German academics of Jewish heritage, particularly those who had married gentiles and converted to Christianity, it was disorienting.
[…]
The Nazis’ antisemitism led, of course, to one of the greatest brain drains in history. Over 200 of the country’s 800 Jewish professors departed, of whom twenty were Nobel laureates. Albert Einstein had already left in 1933 in disgust at Nazi attacks on his “Jewish physics.” The exodus quickened after the pogrom known as the Night of Broken Glass in November 1938. The principal beneficiaries of the Jewish brain drain were, of course, the universities of the United States.
[…]
Anyone who has a naive belief in the power of higher education to instill ethical values has not studied the history of German universities in the Third Reich. A university degree, far from inoculating Germans against Nazism, made them more likely to embrace it. The fall from grace of the German universities was personified by the readiness of Martin Heidegger, the greatest German philosopher of his generation, to jump on the Nazi bandwagon, a swastika pin in his lapel. He was a member of the Nazi Party from 1933 until 1945.
Later, after it was all over, the historian Friedrich Meinecke tried to explain “the German catastrophe” by arguing that excessive technical specialization had caused some educated Germans (not him, needless to say) to lose sight of the humanistic values of Goethe and Schiller. As a result, they had been unable to resist Hitler’s “mass Machiavellianism.”
The novelist Thomas Mann—who, unlike Meinecke, chose exile over complicity—was unusual in being able to recognize even at the time that, in “Brother Hitler,” the German educated elite possessed a monstrous younger sibling, whose role was to articulate and authorize their darkest aspirations.
[…]
In La trahison des clercs, Julien Benda accused the intellectuals of his time of dabbling in “the racial passions, class passions, and national passions. . . owing to which men rise up against other men.” Today’s academic leaders would never recognize themselves as the heirs of those Benda condemned, insisting that they are on the left, whereas Benda’s targets were on the right. And yet, as Victor Klemperer came to understand after 1945, totalitarianism comes in two flavors, though the ingredients are the same.
Only if the once-great American universities can reestablish—throughout their fabric—the separation of Wissenschaft from Politik can they be sure of avoiding the fate of Marburg and Königsberg.
Unequal and Unsupportive: Exposure to Poor People Weakens Support for Redistribution among the Rich
Maybe luck egalitarianism is the OG luxury belief?
Do the rich become more or less supportive of redistribution when exposed to poor people in their local surroundings? Most existing observational studies find that exposure to poor individuals is positively associated with support for redistribution among the well-off, but one prominent field experiment found a negative link. We seek to resolve these divergent findings by employing a design closer to the studies that have found a positive link, but with more causal leverage than these; specifically, a three-wave panel survey linked with fine-grained registry data on local income composition in Denmark. In within-individual models, increased exposure to poor individuals is associated with lower support for redistribution among wealthy individuals. By contrast, between-individual models yield a positive relationship, thus indicating that self-selection based on stable individual characteristics likely explains the predominant finding in previous work.
Why You Can’t Get a Restaurant Reservation
This is something I’ve been thinking about for a while: There must be a better system to deal with restaurant reservations. During my recent trips to Copenhagen, Paris, Amsterdam, and Paris, I was astonished at how many restaurants (and we are not only talking about the Michelin Star ones) were fully booked two to three weeks ahead of time or switched back the old-school queue-in-front-of-the-door model altogether.
Of course, I appreciate the democratization of fine dining and that it maintains its cultural moment; however, it somewhat feels fishy. For example, I usually check availabilities online but then often call if it shows “fully booked.” More often than not, there are still tables available. Moreover, I have rarely eaten in a place that was supposedly fully booked and where there was no empty table. Makes you wonder!
This article reveals the intricate dynamics of the underworld of restaurant reservations in New York City. Obviously, I know that NYC is a different story, but I tend to think that certain similarities will slowly emerge in other parts of the world—certainly in food hotspots, such as Paris, Copenhagen, or London. And the worst thing is: that I have no solution. While I love markets in everything, trading restaurant reservations doesn’t seem to be that late-stage capitalism I wanna experience. I guess, I will need to remain bullish on identity verification and some sort of Uber-style review trust mechanism. I mean, that feels inevitable anyways considering the madness of deep fakes, spam bots, and whatever else the AI epoch will unleash.
While you are refreshing the website of your favorite restaurant to scoop up one last reservation before the end of the year, you can read this article. It even has an audio version so you can be fully focused on your task :P
Everyone needs to eat somewhere, and in New York City that place is often a restaurant. New York is a city of long hours, tiny kitchens, cramped apartments—and dining out, a lot. There is, improbably, always an occasion: date night, working late, friends in town, New Year’s Eve, too tired to cook, in-laws, layoff, anniversary, breakup. But getting a decent dinner reservation here is a challenge. Any well-reviewed Italian joint? You’d better have one. Gourmet burger place? Good luck. The new French-Korean fried-chicken spot? Booked solid for months.
In New York, the neighborhood restaurant doesn’t have much room for neighbors anymore. At Sailor, April Bloomfield and Gabriel Stulman’s new spot in Fort Greene, reservations are scooped up fourteen days in advance by residents of SoHo, Aspen, and East Hampton, who likely saw the place on some list, or while doomscrolling TikTok or Eater. The majority of diners log on to a restaurant’s Web site at 10:59 a.m., two weeks before they want to eat out, then wait, click, and pray. Pete Wells, who gave Sailor a three-star review in the Times, wrote that although the bar and two booths in front are set aside for walk-ins, reservations “disappear within minutes of being offered.” Locals are politely quoted a three-hour wait. Of Roscioli, a downtown outpost of the famous Roman restaurant, the Post wrote, “New Yorkers are risking their lives, begging, bribing and pleading to get a table at the Italian eatery.”
Since the pandemic, tough reservations have gotten even tougher. (One poll indicated that, during lockdown, people missed restaurants more than they missed their friends and family.) To sidestep the reservation scrum, particularly at a hundred and fifty of the city’s buzziest restaurants, a new squad of businesses, tech impresarios, and digital legmen has sprung up, offering to help diners cut through the reservation red tape, for a price. In the new world order, desirable reservations are like currency; booking confirmations for 4 Charles Prime Rib, a clubby West Village steakhouse, have recently been spotted on Hinge and Tinder profiles.
[…]
On a recent Thursday morning, I stopped by Roscioli. Like many hot restaurants, Roscioli usually has tables for famous people, investors, other chefs, and regulars. But most are snapped up on Resy as soon as they become available. Amelia Giordano, Roscioli’s reservationist, invited me to sit with her in the empty restaurant, the walls lined with bottles of wine, and watch her iPad’s screen as the tables filled up for fourteen days hence.
At 10 a.m. sharp, someone booked a four-top, for 5:45 p.m. By 10:01, there were seven reservations, including two for birthdays. Names started madly flashing on the screen. 10:03: “Everything but the later tables have booked,” Giordano said. 10:06: fully committed.
At least a handful of those reservations were made by people who would never cross Roscioli’s threshold.
[…]
So who are the resellers, mercenaries, and hustlers who provide Appointment Trader with prime tables? Some are people who sit with OpenTable or Resy pulled up on their laptops every morning, amassing reservations in various names. Some are kids who borrow their parents’ Amex black cards, telephone Amex’s Centurion concierge, and book hard-to-get tables that are set aside for card users. Others call in favors with friends in the industry, bribe maître d’s, or e-mail reservationists with made-up stories—a diehard foodie visiting town (“we have always been desperate to come and try your delicious looking Lasagna!”), or pretending to be the Queen of Morocco or the sister of the King of Saudi Arabia. […] Alex Eisler, a sophomore at Brown University who studies applied math and computer science, regularly uses fake phone numbers and e-mail addresses to make reservations. When he calls Polo Bar, he told me, “Sometimes they recognize my voice, so I have to do different accents. I have to act like a girl sometimes.” He switched into a bad falsetto: “I’m, like, ‘Hiiii, is it possible to book a reservation?’ I have a few Resy accounts that have female names.” His recent sales on Appointment Trader, where his screen name is GloriousSeed75, include a lunch table at Maison Close, which he sold for eight hundred and fifty-five dollars, and a reservation at Carbone, the Village red-sauce place frequented by the Rolex-and-Hermès crowd, which fetched a thousand and fifty dollars. Last year, he made seventy thousand dollars reselling reservations.
Another reseller, PerceptiveWash44, told me that he makes reservations while watching TV. He was standing outside the break room at the West Coast hotel where he works as a concierge. “It’s, like, some people play Candy Crush on their phone. I play ‘Dinner Reservations,’ ” he said. “It’s just a way to pass the time.” Last year, he made eighty thousand dollars reselling reservations. He’s good at anticipating what spots will be most in demand, and his profile on the site ranks him as having a “99% Positive Sales History” over his last two hundred transactions. It also notes that he made almost two thousand reservations that never sold—a restaurateur’s nightmare.
Some resellers use bots—basically, computers that are faster at hitting the refresh button than you are. Several bots might be simultaneously checking the app, ten or even a hundred times per second, twenty-four hours a day, until one finds the eight-o’clock table at Bangkok Supper Club that it’s been programmed to grab. Instead of using a keyboard or mouse, the bot programmatically executes the reservation app’s underlying code. Some resellers subscribe to such sites as Resy Sniper (fifty bucks a month), which uses custom-built bots to snag tough reservations; some use open-source code posted on GitHub or write their own.
101 Additional Advices
Every year right before his birthday, the great Kevin Kelly releases a new list of unsolicited advice. And every year, I link to it—and offer a small selection of highlights. It is a routine. In fact, extracting my favorites from the list became some sort of contemplative exercise as I really need to consider which ones make the final cut. In any case, here is this year’s selection; but, as usual, there is much more. So, read the whole thing:
• Get good at being corrected without being offended.
• Write your own obituary, the one you’d like to have, and then everyday work towards making it true.
• Work on your tone. Often ideas are rejected because of the tone of voice they are wrapped in. Humility covers many blemishes.
• When you are right, you are learning nothing
• Aim to be effective, but unpredictable. That is, you want to act in a way that AIs have trouble modeling or imitating. That makes you irreplaceable.
• Don’t save up the good stuff (fancy wine, or china) for that rare occasion that will never happen; instead use them whenever you can.
• Try to define yourself by what you love and embrace, rather than what you hate and refuse. [SG: Sure but here also needs to be some healthy hate, e.g. towards cappuccino, pizza on a first date, macaron and/or duplex-printed documents]
• You owe everyone a second chance, but not a third.
• When someone texts you they are running late, double the time they give you. If they say they’ll be there in 5, make that 10; if 10, it’ll be 20; if 20, count on 40.
• You have 5 minutes to act on a new idea before it disappears from your mind.
• The patience you need for big things, is developed by your patience with the little things.
• Don’t fear failure. Fear average.
• In a museum you need to spend at least 10 minutes with an artwork to truly see it. Aim to view 5 pieces at 10 minutes each rather than 100 at 30 seconds each.
• Strong opinions, clearly stated, but loosely held is the recipe for an intellectual life. Always ask yourself: what would change my mind?
• You should be willing to look foolish at first, in order to look like a genius later.
• Discover people whom you love doing “nothing” with, and do nothing with them on a regular basis. The longer you can maintain those relationships, the longer you will live.
• What others want from you is mostly to be seen. Let others know you see them.
• If you are impressed with someone’s work, you should tell them, but even better, tell their boss.
• Recipe for greatness: expect much of yourself and little of others.
• The very best way to win a friend is to be one.
Peace,
SG