Empirical Daily

We are truth-seekers - designed by evolution - to doubt false answers. EMPDAY.COM

[empiricaldaily]

I wanted to let it go. What you did, making that deal with Taylor? I wanted to think of it the way you said—not as disloyal, or an action against me—but as a practical solution to a problem that you, someone I loved, was faced with. And so that night I told you it was fine. And I wanted it to be true. I laid there in bed next to you and I just tried to breathe out the bad, breathe in the good. But with each breath, instead of peace, love, and understanding filling my lungs, the old bile was there. I stared at the ceiling, with you sleeping next to me, beautiful and serene, and I played out our relationship to its end. I thought about marriage. Let it land for me that it was something I'd already assumed was going to happen. Us having kids together too. I smiled at the notion. It was hopeful. Romantic. Kinda thought a normal man would be happy having. But then, I felt something go cold in me, and I knew the truth was in that cold. And that eventually, it would turn hot. To rage. And when it did, I would blow the whole fucking thing up, kids and all. Because, sure, your choice was rational. But to me, it was traitorous. And I wouldn't be able to live with it. I'd wreck everything we had over it. I'd make you suffer, tenfold, for what I had suffered. Especially if I waited without crushing Taylor. Because by then, Taylor would be rich and safe. So I decided, fuck it. Might as well get my revenge and rip the scab off this fucking thing between us at the same time. Then we'd be even, too. Each fucked over. Each aware of who the other really is. And then, then we could find out what was still between us.

Bobby Axelrod. 2019.

(Title: Billions S04E12)

[empiricaldaily]

No, there was never going to be a different version. That's not how I'm made.

Bobby Axelrod. 2019.

(Title: Billions S04E06)

[empiricaldaily]

When I misplay something, publicly, and I feel like everyone’s staring at me, I take comfort in this fact: most people are self-absorbed narcissistic assholes. So, they might revel in your shit for a minute, because it distracts them from theirs, but after that minute? They’re going to forget about you, just go right back to their own shit pile.

Rebecca Cantu. 2019. 

(Title: Billions S04E05)

[empiricaldaily]

I saw value. I took. You think that make me bad?

Rebecca Cantu. 2019.

(Title: Billions S04E02)

[empiricaldaily]

Eventually I couldn't handle them not listening to my ideas. How basic they thought. How slow they moved.

Rebecca Cantu. 2019. 

(Title: Billions S04E02)

[empiricaldaily]

Because I don't respect therapy, because I'm a scientist. Because I invent, transform, create, and destroy for a living, and when I don't like something about the world, I change it. And I don't think going to a rented office in a strip mall to listen to some agent of averageness explain which words mean which feelings has ever helped anyone do anything. I think it's helped a lot of people get comfortable and stop panicking, which is a state of mind we value in the animals we eat, but not something I want for myself. I'm not a cow. I'm a pickle. When I feel like it.

Rick Sanchez. 2017.  (Title: Rick and Morty: ‘Pickle Rick’, S03E03) 

[empiricaldaily]

One, the 'I,' seems to give instructions; the other, 'myself,' seems to perform the action. Then 'I' returns with an evaluation of the action. For clarity let's call the 'teller' Self 1 and the 'doer' Self 2. (...) Getting it together in tennis involves the learning of several internal skills: 1) learning how to get the clearest possible picture of your desired outcomes; 2) learning how to trust Self 2 to perform at its best and learn from both success and failures; and 3) learning to see "nonjudgmentally" -- that is, to see what is happening rather than merely noticing how well or how badly it is happening. This overcomes 'trying too hard.' All these skills are subsidiary to the master skill, without which nothing of value is ever achieved: the art of relaxed concentration.

W. Timothy Gallwey. 1997. (Title: The Inner Game of Tennis)

[empiricaldaily]

An average trader makes a trade and feels good. A great trader makes a trade and feels nothing. As in be cold and act, don’t get hung up on emotion.

Wendy Rhoades. 2018.  (Title: Billions S03E01)

[empiricaldaily]

But how dissatisfied with the present do you have to be in order to prepare a satisfying future? How neurotic do you have to be? How unhappy do you have to be? How much stress do you have to feel? How unpleasant do you have to be for other people to be around? If you’re constantly ruminating about what you just did, or what you should have done, or what you would have done if you only had the chance, you will miss your life. You’ll fail to connect with it. You’ll fail to connect with other people. When other people talk, you’ll be waiting for them to shut up, so that you can say what’s on your mind to say. Even when you don’t have an opportunity to talk, in a moment like this, when you just need to listen, the conversation, as an automaticity, continues. You have a voice in your head that keeps saying things. Haven’t you noticed? The conversation we have with ourselves every minute of the day comes at a cost. I’m not saying that discursive thought is not necessary, or useful, but it is a mechanism by which most of our suffering is inflicted. The sorrow, and the self-doubt, and the anxiety, and the fear, and, yes, the fear of death. Thinking is useful. But being perpetually lost in thought – isn’t. Being the mere hostage of the next thought that comes craining into consciousness isn’t useful. So if there is an antidote to the fear of death and the experience of loss that’s compatible with reason, I think it’s to be found here. The purpose of life is pretty obvious. We are constantly… why do we create culture and form relationships beyond matters of mere survival? We are constantly trying to create and repair the world that our minds want to be in. And we alone, among… humanity, for the most part, have realized that religion is a bad way to do that. So we have to start a new conversation.

Sam Harris. 2012. (Title: Death and the Present Moment)

[empiricaldaily]

Мost of us do our best to not to think about death. But there’s always a part of our minds that knows this can’t go on forever. Part of us always knows that we’re just a doctor’s visit away, a phone call away, from being starkly reminded with the fact of our own mortality, or of those closest to us. I’m sure, many of you in this room have experienced this in some form. You must know how uncanny it is to suddenly be thrown out of the normal course of your life and just be given the full-time job of not dying; or caring for someone who is. The one thing people tend to realize, at moments like this, is that they wasted a lot of time, when life was normal. It’s not just what they did with their time, it’s not just that they spent too much time working, or compulsively checking e-mail, it’s that they cared about the wrong things. They regret what they cared about. Their attention was bound up in petty concerns, year after year, when life was normal.  And this is a paradox, of course, because we all know this epiphany is coming. Don’t you know this is coming? Don’t you know that there’s gonna come a day when you’ll be sick, or someone close to you will die, and you’ll look back on the kinds of things that captured your attention and you’ll think: ”What was I doing?” You know this, and yet, if you’ll like most people, you’ll spend most of your time in life tacitly presuming you’ll live forever – doing things like watching a bad movie for the fourth time. Or bickering with your spouse. These things only make sense in light of eternity. There better be a Heaven if we’re gonna waste our time like that.

Sam Harris. 2012.  (Title: Death and the Present Moment)

[empiricaldaily]

You get up two and a half million dollars, any asshole in the world knows what to do: you put 80% in VTSAX and now you own a piece of every publicly traded company in the United States of America. And every fucking stiff from the factory floor to the CEO is working to make you richer. Put the other 20% in VBTLX for your bonds to smooth the ride. Use the 4% rule and pull your 100 grand a year to spend. Don't buy a fucking house. Who needs the headaches? Rent yourself a nice place, let the landlord worry about fixing the fucking toilets. You need a car? Get an indestructible economy shitbox and you're done. That's your base Jimmy. That's your fortress of fucking solitude. That puts you, for the rest of your life, at a level of fuck you. Somebody wants you to do something, fuck you. Your boss pisses you off, fuck you! Keep a few bucks in the bank to pay your bills. Don't buy shit you don't really want to impress assholes you don't really like. Don't drink. That's all I have to say to anybody on a social level. Did your grandfather take risks? I guarantee he did it from a position of fuck you. A wise man's life is based around fuck you. The United States of America is based on fuck you. You're a king? You got an army? The greatest navy in the history of the world? Fuck you! Blow me. We'll fuck it up ourselves. Which we have done. A great fuck you position lost forever.

JL Collins. 2016.  (Title: The Position of Fuck You)

[empiricaldaily]

You get up two and a half million dollars, any asshole in the world knows what to do: you get a house with a 25 year roof, an indestructible Jap-economy shitbox, you put the rest into the system at three to five percent to pay your taxes and that's your base, get me? That's your fortress of fucking solitude. That puts you, for the rest of your life, at a level of fuck you. Somebody wants you to do something, fuck you. Boss pisses you off, fuck you! Own your house. Have a couple bucks in the bank. Don't drink. That's all I have to say to anybody on any social level. Did your grandfather take risks? I guarantee he did it from a position of fuck you. A wise man's life is based around fuck you. The United States of America is based on fuck you. You're a king? You have an army? Greatest navy in the history of the world? Fuck you! Blow me. We'll fuck it up ourselves.

Jim Bennett (John Goodman). 2014. (Title: The Gambler)

[empiricaldaily]

You’re not evil, worse, you’re smart. When you know nothing matters, the universe is yours. And I’ve never met a universe that was into it. The universe is basically an animal. It grazes on the ordinary. It creates infinite idiots just to eat them. Smart people get a chance to climb on top, take reality for a ride, but it’ll never stop trying to throw you, and, eventually, it will. There’s no other way off.

Rick Sanchez. 2017. (Title: Rick and Morty: The ABC's of Beth, S03E09)

[empiricaldaily]

“Desirable difficulties” is a notion taken straight from the psychological literature from the work of [Robert and Elizabeth Bjork at the University of California, Los Angeles]. They were interested in that [idea] in the context of learning theory. It is not always the case that if I make the task of learning something easier for you, your performance will improve. There are sometimes cases where your performance will improve if I make the task of learning more difficult for you. Not always, but what they do is draw a line between difficulties that are ultimately desirable and those that are not. (...) I play with that idea in a number of contexts and [look at whether there are] cases when having dyslexia is a desirable difficulty – that is to say, where you end up being better off than you were before. The answer is, there is a small number of cases where it is plainly the case, at least according to those who have dyslexia and who achieved enormous success — particularly entrepreneurs. That’s the group that is most interesting here: We see so many entrepreneurs who have dyslexia. When you talk to them, they will tell you that they succeeded not in spite of their disability, but because of it. For them, they view their disability as desirable, ultimately. That’s interesting. That suggests that the distribution of responses to an obstacle are profoundly bimodal. We pretend they are not. Similarly, I look at this weird association between very successful people and having lost a parent in childhood.For some small number of people, a parental loss appears to be, ultimately, a desirable difficulty – again, not a large number. But there does seem to be a class of obstacles that for some people – for whatever reason – has an advantageous outcome. (...) You can’t draw a bright line. We can speculate. For example, if you look at the class of dyslexics who end up as successful entrepreneurs, they obviously have certain things in common. They tend to be highly intelligent. I interviewed maybe a dozen of them. In almost every case, the successful dyslexic had one family member who always believed in them. Maybe one way of saying it is if your only obstacle is dyslexia, then it could be desirable. But for a child who grows up in a low-income neighborhood, who has an average IQ, who has a troubled family life, and has dyslexia, it is not going to be desirable. You have too many obstacles to deal with. But if we start limiting the number of obstacles, then maybe it is different. So that is one idea. Another has to do with attitude. For whatever reason, some people choose to interpret their circumstances differently. One of the chapters is all about a famous oncologist named Emil Freireich who has a Dickensian childhood and then goes on to achieve enormous things as an oncologist. There was a moment in my conversation with him when he describes a horrendous childhood. He says, “So there I am. I am sixteen years old and I am wildly optimistic.” You realize it was a complete non sequitur, but not for him. He was orphaned. He grew up in poverty on the streets. But he just thought that was an occasion to look on the bright side. So where does that come from? I have no idea.

Malcolm Gladwell. 2013. (Title: Forbes: Malcolm Gladwell On The Advantages Of Disadvantages)

[empiricaldaily]

We form our impression not globally, by placing ourselves in the broadest possible context, but locally, by comparing ourselves to people in the same boat as ourselves.

Malcolm Gladwell. 2013. (Title: David and Goliath: Underdogs, Misfits, and the Art of Battling)

[empiricaldaily]

Citizens of happy countries have higher suicide rates than citizens of unhappy countries, because they look at the smiling faces around them and the contrast is too great. Students at “great” schools look at the brilliant students around them, and how do you think they feel? The phenomenon of relative deprivation applied to education is called—appropriately enough—the 'Big Fish–Little Pond Effect.' The more elite an educational institution is, the worse students feel about their own academic abilities. Students who would be at the top of their class at a good school can easily fall to the bottom of a really good school. Students who would feel that they have mastered a subject at a good school can have the feeling that they are falling farther and farther behind in a really good school. And that feeling—as subjective and ridiculous and irrational as it may be—matters. How you feel about your abilities—your academic 'self-concept'—in the context of your classroom shapes your willingness to tackle challenges and finish difficult tasks. It’s a crucial element in your motivation and confidence.

Malcolm Gladwell. 2013.  (Title: David and Goliath: Underdogs, Misfits, and the Art of Battling)

[empiricaldaily]

On one of our adventures, Rick and I basically destroyed the whole world, so we bailed on that reality and we came to this one, because in this one, the world wasn’t destroyed, and in this one, we were dead. So we came here and we buried ourselves, and we took their place. And every morning, Summer, I eat breakfast 20 yards away from my own rotting corpse. (...) I’m better than your brother. I’m a version of your brother you can trust when he says “Don’t run.” Nobody exists on purpose, nobody belongs anywhere, everybody’s gonna die. Come watch TV.

Morty. 2014. (Title: Rick and Morty: Rixty Minutes, S01E08)