I do not recommend reading his essay before you’ve read Daodejing, for all he includes extensive excerpts from its key chapters to illustrate his points, but it is an interesting exploration to further your thinking after first exposing yourself to Daodejing’s insights.
Systems, Morals, Rulers, and Rebels
When I shared that notion – that evil is a matter of mismatched expectations – with some colleagues in a conversation, they thought I was making a joke. It’s not intended as one. Indeed, it is a somewhat frightening, and certainly disconcerting, idea to countenance
Magical Explanations
Magic stops being magical when it’s explained, but physics becomes more magical the more we understand it.
Creating Room for Creativity
When we are willing to disrupt the status quo, we create space for something new.
Complexity and Entropy – Two Sides of a Coin?
In the functional information hypothesis, high complexity is not the opposite of high entropy, but more of a different way of looking at the probability or phase space of a system to describe its entropic states.
Next Level Fruit
They propose a “universal limit on technological development” as a solution to Fermi’s paradox based upon a notion of diminishing research returns and increasing civilizational complexity.
Creativity is Overrated
Lewis asserts that medieval artists would see the drive for creativity and originality in art as, not the pinnacle of artistic achievement, but the scraping of the bottom of the artistic barrel.
Dispelling Myths about Mythology
Myth is a way of interacting with the world via story, and is as dynamic as the people who tell the stories, whether oral, written, or in any other form. Stories are not themselves the myth – the myth arises from the conversation between stories set within its ecosystem.
A Bias of Good Deeds
Better to be a moral individual, in whatever sphere, than to refrain from doing good for fear that you may not do enough good.
The Physicist’s Rabbit Hole
A good storyteller, like a good engineer, needs to know what assumptions to make, and be aware of the assumptions which could undermine a project.
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