Input Without Quotes

I don’t actually take much stock in the collapsing culture bit. I’m beginning to see it instead as the conduct of life without input from your soul.

They offer me a space on the sofa next to them and the pain of them being so naturally kind is like appendicitis. I need to double over and hold myself because they are so kind and keep regenerating and recharging their kindness without any input from me. CROW

it made our workforce smarter. When you give low-level employees access to information that is generally reserved for high-level executives, they get more done on their own. They work faster without stopping to ask for information and approval. They make better decisions without needing input from the top.

He opened the door wearing an oversized wife-beater and dirty trunks to match. Funny, but he recognized me withouta struggle. Immediately, I assumed he was sober, which was a good thing. Yet, seeing me wasn’t expected or desired. For sure, I was the last person on his list of surprises. Jerry adjusted his head and sharpened his bloodshot eyes. It wasthen his booze-bated breath greeted me well before he did. Ok, he was in a stupor or maybe on the rebound. Next, soiled diapers stole the little oxygen I had left—and I was still OUTDOORS. Yet somehow, I mustered enough wind to greet my brother. I tried to beat him to the punch and said, “What’s up bruh?” What happened next stomped my soul me for years to come! He never bothered to truly acknowledge me. Yet, heresponded without hesitation, “You know I can’t have any company!” Then he violently slammed the door shut! Jerry was gone! I couldn’t differentiate from being stupid or dumbstruck. I just stood silent on his porch all alone for about five minutes. I’d dealt with Jerry’s nastiness many times before. But he would initially warm up before dropping his hammer. Without a doubt, l was lost, confused, and bewildered like a teen-age boy losing a prom date. Foolishly, I used logic to dissect my embarrassment. First, the guy scolded me as if I should’ve known better! To be fair, Jerry was the breadwinner. His wife left him years ago. That part I understood. Only a fool would have hung around his crazy ass. It was amazing they got together, let alone stayed that way long enough to create those children. Yet, all his kids were pushing the ages of twenty andabove. What the hell did he mean, “I can’t receive any company!” Of course, I heard those crying babies which madehim a granddaddy. That was strangely obvious to his existence. Yes, the cycle continues! Second, I really didn’t care to go inside. I didn’t want to be in his business. I just wanted his input on Aunt Kathy’s memorial.

I am not meant to function without multiple simultaneous inputs. If this was what being a human was like, it sucked massively.

God was thinking of you long before you ever thought about him. His purpose for your life predates your conception. He planned it before you existed, without your input! You may choose your career, your spouse, your hobbies, and many other parts of your life, but you don’t get to choose your purpose.

This means that, in some sense, free will is a fake. Decisions are made ahead of time by the brain, without the input of consciousness, and then later the brain tries to cover this up (as it’s wont to do) by claiming that the decision was conscious. Dr. Michael Sweeney concludes, “Libet’s findings suggested that the brain knows what a person will decide before the person does. … The world must reassess not only the idea of movements divided between voluntary and involuntary, but also the very idea of free will.” All this seems to indicate that free will, the cornerstone of society, is a fiction, an illusion created by our left brain. So are we masters of our fate, or just pawns in a swindle perpetuated by the brain?

Time had ceased to feel linear. She looked up through the crisscrossing branches, thick with buds, into the night sky. The stars tugged at her gaze, trying to pull her up among them, or she was pulling them down to her. She was on the verge of some great discovery, she realized, but she had no idea what it was, what it related to, whether it even had anything to do with her at all. Was she a participant, or an observer? Did the world center around her, or could it carry on quite easily without her input? Looking up at those stars, feeling the embrace of their light as it enfolded her, she felt both small and large, as though everything mattered and nothing did. When someone crouched down beside her it took years for her to turn her head to see who it was. All she could make out was a dark shape, a vague outline of head and shoulders silhouetted against the stars, the rest of the body lost in the shadows of the rose bushes.

One of the most difficult things to remember is to remember to remember. We forget that we live in a body with senses and feelings and thoughts and emotions and ideas. We get caught up in rumination and fantasy, isolating us from the world of colors, shapes, sounds, smells, tastes, and sensations constantly bombarding our input sensors. To stop and pay attention to the moment is one way of snapping out of these mindscapes, and is a definition of meditation. This awareness is a process of deepening self-acceptance. Whatever it observes, it embraces. There is nothing unworthy of acceptance.

...many women have almost always done it differently, power without control, leading without terrorizing, nurturing community and communal input and output like nurturing a family. Maybe that's one of the main reasons powerful men resist women in power; it's not just control they don't want to give up, not just privilege, but exploitation.

Reality went out the window the moment we started mediating sensory input through a nervous system. You want to actually perceive the universe directly, without any stupid scribbles or model-building? Become a protozoan.

I feel something snap and settle in me. It's the last piece of my heart, falling for him without any input from me at all.

From our first day alive on this planet, they began teaching society everything it knows and experiences. It was all brainwashing bullshit. Their trio of holy catechisms is: faith is more important than reason; inputs are more important than outcomes; hope is more important than reality. It was designed to choke your independent thinking and acting—to bring out the lowest common denominator in people—so that vast amounts of the general public would literally buy into sponsorship and preservation of their hegemonic nation. Their greatest achievement was the creation of the two-party political system; it gave only the illusion of choice, but never offered any change; it promised freedom, but only delivered more limits. In the end, you got stuck with two leading loser parties and not just one. It completed their trap of underhanded domination, and it worked masterfully. Look anywhere you go. America is a nation of submissive, dumbed-down, codependent, faith-minded zombies obsessed with celebrity gossip, buying unnecessary goods, and socializing without purpose on their electronic gadgets. The crazy thing is that people don't even know it; they still think they're free. Everywhere, people have been made into silent accomplices in the government's twisted control game. In the end, there is no way out for anyone.

You were already living quite capably without any input from him, and in fact while being actively sabotaged constantly.

If something happened to Suzanne I don’t think I would want to go through with finding somebody else either. I’d feel quite lost without her. It would be like separating Siamese twins, as we’ve been through everything together. Which can also be handy, as my memory isn’t what it used to be, so I use hers as my back-up memory drive. Meeting someone new would be like getting a new phone. You have to start again, input all of your information into them while trying to get to know their functions.

Classroom research has confirmed that students can make a great deal of progress through exposure to comprehensible input without direct instruction. Studies have also shown, however, that students may reach a point from which they fail to make further progress on some features of the second language unless they also have access to guided instruction.

Won’t you look at me, Camilla Hect?” Camilla murmured something that Nona could not hear. The body said, “I died, and you carried me. I gambled, and you covered my bet. You kept the faith, and were the instrument of both my vengeance and my grace. And now I have fought through time, and the River, and Ianthe the First—fought and bested Ianthe the First, and I hope I never fight her ever again…Will you not look at me now, Cam, and know me?” Camilla raised her chin. She looked at the dead face. She said quietly—“Yes Warden. I will always know you.” Their foreheads touched. Camilla reached out with her slippery hand, and Palamedes clasped it with Ianthe Naberius’s cold, gloveless one. Because both of their hands were very messy, it made an embarrassing squelch, but neither of them appeared to notice or care. Nona had to look away. She heard Palamedes say, in the voice of Ianthe Naberius—“Pyrrha, I can barely do anything. I’m only the hand in a sock puppet. I don’t think I could unpick a single ward, and I can’t do a damn thing for Cam’s bleeding—thank God nothing’s protruding.” Cam said, without opening her eyes, “Don’t worry about me, Warden. I’ll walk it off.” “Yes, thank you for your input,” said Palamedes pleasantly. “I’ve taken it under advisement and will add it to the next agenda.” Camilla smiled that wonderful hot-metal smile that Nona loved as long as she had been alive. “Jackass.

Right away, I’m hit with a prickle of guilt over this morning’s activities. Not only did I fantasize about her body, I had the nerve to pick out dinnerware without her input.

What we need is to love without getting tired. How does a lamp burn? Through the continuous input of small drops of oil. What are these drops of oil in our lamps? They are the small things of daily life: faithfulness, small words of kindness, a thought for others, our way of being silent, of looking, of speaking, and of acting. Do not look for Jesus away from yourselves. He is not out there; He is in you. Keep your lamp burning, and you will recognize Him.

In many ways, industrialization is a straitjacket. The suite of industrial technologies improves literacy and mobility and reach and wealth and health, but without the inputs of oil, natural gas, iron ore, phosphates, bauxite, lead, copper, and so on, the whole process collapses in upon itself.

The cerebral processing of that visceral input as a signal of death was accurate. Without the kinds of therapy that had been developed over the decades, this cancer would have been fatal. Hope, then, is constructed not just from rational deliberation, from the conscious weighing of information; it arises as an amalgam of thought and feeling, the feelings created in part by neural input from the organs and tissues.

We rarely touch this. We rarely contact this simple moment. So used to constant input and excitement, we lack fine-tuning into all the subtleties of this instant, the ability to register a quiet aliveness without the stirring of expectation.

You go out into your world, and try and find the things that will be useful to you. Your weapons. Your tools. Your charms. You find a record, or a poem, or a picture of a girl that you pin to the wall and go, "Her. I'll try and be her. I'll try and be her - but here." You observe the way others walk, and talk, and you steal little bits of them - you collage yourself out of whatever you can get your hands on. You are like the robot Johnny 5 in Short Circuit, crying, "More input! More input for Johnny 5! as you rifle through books and watch films and sit in front of the television, trying to guess which of these things that you are watching - Alexis Carrington Colby walking down a marble staircase; Anne of Green Gables holding her shoddy suitcase; Cathy wailing on the moors; Courtney Love wailing in her petticoat; Dorothy Parker gunning people down; Grace Jones singing "Slave to the Rhythm" - you will need when you get out there. What will be useful. What will be, eventually, you? And you will be quite on your own when you do all this. There is no academy where you can learn to be yourself; there is no line manager slowly urging you toward the correct answer. You are midwife to yourself, and will give birth to yourself, over and over, in dark rooms, alone. And some versions of you will end in dismal failure - many prototypes won't even get out the front door, as you suddenly realize that no, you can't style-out an all-in-one gold bodysuit and a massive attitude problem in Wolverhampton. Others will achieve temporary success - hitting new land-speed records, and amazing all around you, and then suddenly, unexpectedly exploding, like the Bluebird on Coniston Water. But one day you'll find a version of you that will get you kissed, or befriended, or inspired, and you will make your notes accordingly, staying up all night to hone and improvise upon a tiny snatch of melody that worked. Until - slowly, slowly - you make a viable version of you, one you can hum every day. You'll find the tiny, right piece of grit you can pearl around, until nature kicks in, and your shell will just quietly fill with magic, even while you're busy doing other things. What your nature began, nature will take over, and start completing, until you stop having to think about who you'll be entirely - as you're too busy doing, now. And ten years will pass without you even noticing. And later, over a glass of wine - because you drink wine now, because you are grown - you will marvel over what you did. Marvel that, at the time, you kept so many secrets. Tried to keep the secret of yourself. Tried to metamorphose in the dark. The loud, drunken, fucking, eyeliner-smeared, laughing, cutting, panicking, unbearably present secret of yourself. When really you were about as secret as the moon. And as luminous, under all those clothes.

Reason is the champion of the emotional underdog, enabling what Hume called “calm passions” to win out over “violent passions.” Reasoning frees us from the tyranny of our immediate impulses by allowing us to serve values that are not automatically activated by what’s in front of us. And yet, at the same time, reason cannot produce good decisions without some kind of emotional input, however indirect.

But creativity has a hard time flourishing without enough inputs. Every plant needs to revive its soil to thrive, not just a base level of water and sun. I’ve needed this reset—I need some inspiration and to get out of the rut my conversation with my boss has left me in.

2. The Right Not to be Emotionally Coerced I have the right to not be your rescuer. I have the right to ask you to get help from someone else. I have the right to not fix your problems. I have the right to let you manage your own self-esteem without my input. I have the right to let you handle your own distress. I have the right to refuse to feel guilty.

God was thinking of you long before you ever thought about him. His purpose for your life predates your conception. He planned it before you existed, without your input!

I need to double over and hold myself because they are so kind and keep regenerating and recharging their kindness without any input from me.

But none of them could help me walk again or get to the level of fitness I’ve got to without my input.

Nothing of significance was ever achieved without negative input from other people.

The successful manufacturing power of the future will need to not simply secure inputs and production and consumption, but ideally co-locate them.

I am an introvert, but I hate solitude. I do now, at least. The quiet of it. My inner voice, without external input, can get lost in chaos.

As Allan Kelly says, “software developers love building platforms and, without strong product management input, will create a bigger platform than needed.

the sensation of touching your finger to your nose. We experience the contact as simultaneous, but we know that it can’t be simultaneous at the level of the brain, because it takes longer for the nerve impulse to travel to sensory cortex from your fingertip than it does from your nose—and this is true no matter how short your arms or long your nose. Our brains correct for this discrepancy in timing by holding these inputs in memory and then delivering the result to consciousness. Thus, your experience of the present moment is the product of layered memories.

She wondered if this is what it meant to be a mother. To ache for a life that was not your own, to long for a child who could, without the slightest input from you, fall completely out of view.

STATE model to communicate without provoking anger or defensiveness: 1. Share your facts—Facts are less controversial, more persuasive, and less insulting than conclusions, so lead with them first. 2. Tell your story—Explain the situation from your point of view, taking care to avoid insulting or judging, which makes the other person feel less safe. 3. Ask for others’ paths—Ask for the other person’s side of the situation, what they intended, and what they want. 4. Talk tentatively—Avoid conclusions, judgments, and ultimatums. 5. Encourage testing—Make suggestions, ask for input, and discuss until you reach a productive and mutually satisfactory course of action.

the job of the brain is to constantly monitor and evaluate what is going on within and around us. These evaluations are transmitted by chemical messages in the bloodstream and electrical messages in our nerves, causing subtle or dramatic changes throughout the body and brain. These shifts usually occur entirely without conscious input or awareness: The subcortical regions of the brain are astoundingly efficient in regulating our breathing, heartbeat, digestion, hormone secretion, and immune system. However, these systems can become overwhelmed if we are challenged by an ongoing threat, or even the perception of threat. This accounts for the wide array of physical problems researchers have documented in traumatized people. Yet our conscious self also plays a vital role in maintaining our inner equilibrium: We need to register and act on our physical sensations to keep our bodies safe.

This automatic feedback is another reason extreme athletes have found flow so frequently, but what if we’re interested in pulling this trigger without help from the laws of physics? No mystery here. Tighten feedback loops. Put mechanisms in place so attention doesn’t have to wander. Ask for more input. How much input? Well, forget quarterly reviews. Think daily reviews. Studies have found that in professions with less direct feedback loops—stock analysis, psychiatry, and medicine—even the best get worse over time.

With so little input from labor, the proportion of this wealth that flows back to the machine owners—in this case, the venture investors—is without precedent. It’s no wonder that a venture capitalist I interviewed for my last book admitted to me with some concern, “Everyone wants my job.

If we closely examine our “personal” failings, it soon becomes clear that they are not there by choice. Typically, outside circumstances conspired to form our particular patterns without our input. If you had control over your maladaptive thoughts, emotions, and behaviors, you wouldn’t still have them. You would have already jettisoned your dark, anxious, neurotic persona and become a calm, confident ray of sunshine. Clearly you don’t have complete control over your actions, or else you’d only act in ways that you approved of. So why are you judging yourself so harshly for the way you are?

The neurons in the gut are so innumerable that scientist are now calling the totality of them "the second brain"... In fact, recent research is revaling that our second brain may not be second at all. It can act independently from the main brain and control many functions without the brain's input.

We'd gotten onto the concept or morality and Frida had just asked Theresa how she could have any sense of morality without a deity to define what was or was not moral. [...] "What deities give you aren't rules of morality," Theresa responded. "They are just rules. Do this and you will be rewarded. Do that and you will be punished. That's how we teach our pets not to relieve themselves in the house. One would hope that true morality involved more than learning not to poop on the rug by being rapped on the nose!" [...] "In fact", Theresa continued, "I believe that it is only possible to acquire true morality without input from a deity. It is only when you do something because you believe it is the right thing to do, instead of because of any moral desserts, that you are acting morally. Likewise, it is only when you refuse to do something because of the golden rule, rather than because of a threat of punishment, that you are behaving in a moral manner.

Moreover, the slightest ‘mutation’ of an algorithm (say a slight change in a Turing machine specification, or in its input tape) would tend to render it totally useless, and it is hard to see how actual improvements in algorithms could ever arise in this random way. (Even deliberate improvements are difficult without ‘meanings’ being available.

The corporatization of U.S. agriculture and the growth of international free markets squeeze growers such that they cannot easily imagine increasing the pay of the pickers or improving the labor camps without bankrupting the farm. In other words, many of the most powerful inputs into the suffering of farmworkers are structural, not willed by individual agents. In this case, structural violence is enacted by market rule and later channeled by international and domestic racism, classism, sexism, and anti-immigrant prejudice. However, structural violence is not just a simple, unidirectional phenomenon; rather, macro social and economic structures produce vulnerability at every level of the farm hierarchy.

The truth was that, at the age of thirty-six, Lacy was content to live alone, to sleep in the center of the bed, to clean up only after herself, to make and spend her own money, to come and go as she pleased, to pursue her career without worrying about his, to plan her evenings with input from no one else, to cook or not to cook, and to have sole possession of the remote control.

The most important thing to understand is that the job of a big company executive is very different from the job of a small company executive. When I was managing thousands of people at Hewlett-Packard after the sale of Opsware, there was an incredible number of incoming demands on my time. Everyone wanted a piece of me. Little companies wanted to partner with me or sell themselves to me, people in my organization needed approvals, other business units needed my help, customers wanted my attention, and so forth. As a result, I spent most of my time optimizing and tuning the existing business. Most of the work that I did was “incoming.” In fact, most skilled big company executives will tell you that if you have more than three new initiatives in a quarter, you are trying to do too much. As a result, big company executives tend to be interrupt-driven. In contrast, when you are a startup executive, nothing happens unless you make it happen. In the early days of a company, you have to take eight to ten new initiatives a day or the company will stand still. There is no inertia that’s putting the company in motion. Without massive input from you, the company will stay at rest.

When you smell that, how do you... how do you process that? Is it just a list of chemicals?' 'I'm not sure. I'll find out.' Sidra took the tin, manoeuvred it to the kit's nose, and pulled in air. The image was there without warning, leaping to the front of all other external input - a sleeping cat, sprawled on its back in a puddle of sunlight, fur mussed, pink toes splayed sweetly - then gone, just as fast.

Choosing to own our vulnerability and do it consciously means learning how to rumble with this emotion and understand how it drives our thinking and behavior so we can stay aligned with our values and live in our integrity. Pretending that we don’t do vulnerability means letting fear drive our thinking and behavior without our input or even awareness, which almost always leads to acting out or shutting down.

If an economy has a stagnant labor force operating at a constant level of productivity, it will have constant output but no growth. The main drivers of labor force expansion are demographics and education, while the main drivers of productivity are capital and technology. Without those factor inputs, an economy cannot expand. But when those factor inputs are available in abundance, rapid growth is well within reach.

In fact,” Theresa continued, “I believe that it is only possible to acquire true morality without input from a deity. It is only when you do something because you believe it is the right thing to do, instead of because of any moral desserts, that you are acting morally. Likewise, it is only when you refuse to do something because of the Golden Rule, rather than because of a threat of punishment, that you are behaving in a moral manner.

Many organizations and militaries use VUCA as an acronym to describe the disruptive state of the world, given its Volatility, Uncertainty, Complexity, and Ambiguity. UN-VICE is an updated way of capturing the state and velocity of the world, with our acronym for UNknown, Volatile, Intersecting, Complex, and Exponential: - UNknown: Recognizing that you can’t know anything perfectly, and that many of our decisions are based on assumptions. Increased uncertainty lowers the value of ad-vice and requires increased self-reliance. - Volatile: Our world, and change itself, is evolving faster than ever before. Volatility is not inherently good or bad; it is simply impactful. In volatility we see shifting speed, texture, and magnitude of the changing environment. - Intersecting: The broader our filters, the more we realize that what we observe overlaps with other things. Boundaries are disappearing, connecting new areas through combinations. - Complex: These more-than-complicated systems have unreliable input-output relationships and cannot be summarized or modeled without losing their essence. Unpredictable situations with unknown unknowns. - Exponential: A nonlinear type of change that increases in its growth rate. To an observer, this change may happen gradually, then suddenly. Rapid acceleration of seemingly-small shifts.

which Trump released as one of the last acts of his presidency, on Martin Luther King Day. Written without input from any scholars who specialize in American history, it sought to reinforce the exceptional nature of our country, and to put forth a “patriotic” narrative that downplays racism and inequality and emphasizes a unity predicated on seeing slavery, segregation, and ongoing racial injustice as aberrations in a fundamentally just and exceptionally free nation.21

Museums hold collections in trust for future generations. It is our responsibility to see that these objects—representing the cultural heritage of more than 8,000 years of civilization—are passed on to the next generation . . . . The next generation may choose to look at objects afresh—without our carefully collected input—and form its own opinions about their purpose, history or intended use. What is important is that future observers have at their disposal the records of what was known or believed at the time.

The types of photographs we post need ground rules as well. For example, it is wise to make sure no personally identifying information is accidentally put into a photograph. This includes things like license plates on your cars, the names of your kids’ schools, or your home address. Permission should be sought before posting a photo of someone else. In the case of minor children, this is even more important. It is not fair to them to create a digital trail of their lives that is publicly accessible without their input.

There is one itty-bitty ray of hope in the coming global fertilizer—and from that, food—shortage: most studies by most agricultural scientists suggest that most farmers have been overfertilizing for decades, especially when it comes to potassium fertilizers. This would suggest that at present most farms in most places have a potassium surplus baked into the soil. This would further suggest that most farmers can reduce their inputs of fertilizer without sacrificing yields by all that much. The question is, for how long?

the planned destruction of Iraq’s agriculture is not widely known. Modern Iraq is part of the ‘fertile crescent’ of Mesopotamia where man first domesticated wheat between 8,000 and 13,000 years ago, and home to several thousand varieties of local wheat. As soon as the US took over Iraq, it became clear its interests were not limited to oil. In 2004, Paul Bremer, the then military head of the Provisional Authority imposed as many as a hundred laws which made short work of Iraq’s sovereignty. The most crippling for the people and the economy of Iraq was Order 81 which deals, among other things, with plant varieties and patents. The goal was brutally clear-cut and sweeping — to wipe out Iraq’s traditional, sustainable agriculture and replace it with oil-chemical-genetically-modified-seed-based industrial agriculture. There was no public or parliamentary debate for the conquered people who never sought war. The conquerors made unilateral changes in Iraq’s 1970 patent law: henceforth, plant forms could be patented — which was never allowed before — while genetically-modified organisms were to be introduced. Farmers were strictly banned from saving their own seeds: this, in a country where, according to the Food and Agriculture Organisation, 97 per cent of Iraqi farmers planted only their own saved seeds. With a single stroke of the pen, Iraq’s agriculture was axed, while Order 81 facilitated the introduction and domination of imported, high-priced corporate seeds, mainly from the US — which neither reproduce, nor give yields without their prescribed chemical fertiliser and pesticide inputs. It meant that the majority of farmers who had never spent money on seed and inputs that came free from nature, would henceforth have to heavily invest in corporate inputs and equipment — or go into debt to obtain them, or accept lowered profits, or give up farming altogether.

Nearly two decades later, on his final day in office, President Clinton had issued Rich a highly unusual pardon. It was unusual because the pardon was given to a fugitive, which was, to my knowledge, unprecedented. It was also unusual, and suspicious, because it had not gone through the normal review process at the Department of Justice. The pardon had only been seen by then–Deputy Attorney General Eric Holder, who, without seeking input from the prosecutors or agents who knew the case, cryptically told the White House he was “neutral, leaning positive.” The New York Times editorial board called the pardon “a shocking abuse of federal power.

Thus three conclusions emerge from the eye story: (1) it is easier to inherit a ‘vision acquisition device’ than a full-blown hard-wired visual analyser; (2) the visual analyser, once ‘set up’, is refractory to radical restructuring—hence the existence of a critical period in its development in cats; (3) the eye seems to have evolved in steps from a light-sensitive, innervated cell to our complex organ by common evolutionary mechanisms. Something similar may have been taking place in evolution of the language organ, and may be occurring during individual development. An argument, put forward forcefully by Noam Chomsky and his followers, refers to the ‘poverty of stimulus’. Most permutations of word order and grammatical items in a sentence leads to incomprehensible gibberish. There is no way that children could learn without some internal ‘guide’ which sentence is grammatical and which is not, only on the basis of heard examples. To make matters worse, many parents do not correct their children’s grammatical mistakes (they seem to be much more worried about the utterance of four-letter words). Recent investigations clearly confirm that children’s ‘instinctive’ understanding of grammatical intricacies, between the ages 2 and 4, is far better than one would expect from a conventional learning mechanism. Thus there seems to be a ‘language acquisition device’ (LAD) in the brain, which must be triggered by linguistic input so that its working ultimately leads to proper language. It is the LAD, and not a fully developed linguistic processor, which seems to be innate.

go. In order for the data-inputting side of her job to be both profitable and bearable she had to work fast. The first time an accountant gave her a job, he’d told her it was about six to eight hours’ work. She’d done it in four, charged him for six. Since her first job she’d gotten even faster. It was like playing a computer game, seeing if she could get to a higher level each time. It wasn’t her dream job, but she did quite enjoy the satisfaction of transforming a messy pile of paperwork into neat rows of figures. She loved calling up her clients, who were now mostly small-business people like Pete, and telling them she’d found a new deduction. Best of all, she was proud of the fact that she’d supported herself and Ziggy for the last five years without having to ask her parents for money, even if it had meant that she sometimes worked well into the night while he slept. This

The fundamental problem is that every technology embeds the ideologies of its creators! Who made the Internet? The military! The Internet is the product of the Defense Advanced Research Projects Agency! We call it DARPA for short! Who worked for DARPA? DARPA was a bunch of men! Not a single woman worked on the underlying technologies that fuel our digital universe! Men are the shit of the world and all of our political systems and philosophies were created and devised without the input of women! Half of the world’s population lives beneath systems of government and technological innovation into which their gender had zero input! Democracy is a bullshit ideology that a bunch of slaveholding Greek men constructed between rounds of beating their wives! All the presumed ideologies of men were taken for inescapable actualities and designed into the Internet! Packet switching is an incredible evil!

In any ranking of near-term worries about AI, superintelligence should be far down the list. In fact, the opposite of superintelligence is the real problem. Throughout this book, I’ve described how even the most accomplished AI systems are brittle; that is, they make errors when their input varies too much from the examples on which they’ve been trained. It’s often hard to predict in what circumstances an AI system’s brittleness will come to light. In transcribing speech, translating between languages, describing the content of photos, driving in a crowded city—if robust performance is critical, then humans are still needed in the loop. I think the most worrisome aspect of AI systems in the short term is that we will give them too much autonomy without being fully aware of their limitations and vulnerabilities. We tend to anthropomorphize AI systems: we impute human qualities to them and end up overestimating the extent to which these systems can actually be fully trusted.

I can hardly believe that our nation’s policy is to seek peace by going to war. It seems that President Donald J. Trump has done everything in his power to divert our attention away from the fact that the FBI is investigating his association with Russia during his campaign for office. For several weeks now he has been sabre rattling and taking an extremely controversial stance, first with Syria and Afghanistan and now with North Korea. The rhetoric has been the same, accusing others for our failed policy and threatening to take autonomous military action to attain peace in our time. This gunboat diplomacy is wrong. There is no doubt that Secretaries Kelly, Mattis, and other retired military personnel in the Trump Administration are personally tough. However, most people who have served in the military are not eager to send our young men and women to fight, if it is not necessary. Despite what may have been said to the contrary, our military leaders, active or retired, are most often the ones most respectful of international law. Although the military is the tip of the spear for our country, and the forces of civilization, it should not be the first tool to be used. Bloodshed should only be considered as a last resort and definitely never used as the first option. As the leader of the free world, we should stand our ground but be prepared to seek peace through restraint. This is not the time to exercise false pride! Unfortunately the Trump administration informed four top State Department management officials that their services were no longer needed as part of an effort to "clean house." Patrick Kennedy, served for nine years as the “Undersecretary for Management,” “Assistant Secretaries for Administration and Consular Affairs” Joyce Anne Barr and Michele Bond, as well as “Ambassador” Gentry Smith, director of the Office for Foreign Missions. Most of the United States Ambassadors to foreign countries have also been dismissed, including the ones to South Korea and Japan. This leaves the United States without the means of exercising diplomacy rapidly, when needed. These positions are political appointments, and require the President’s nomination and the Senate’s confirmation. This has not happened! Moreover, diplomatically our country is severely handicapped at a time when tensions are as hot as any time since the Cold War. Without following expert advice or consent and the necessary input from the Unites States Congress, the decisions are all being made by a man who claims to know more than the generals do, yet he has only the military experience of a cadet at “New York Military Academy.” A private school he attended as a high school student, from 1959 to 1964. At that time, he received educational and medical deferments from the Vietnam War draft. Trump said that the school provided him with “more training than a lot of the guys that go into the military.” His counterpart the unhinged Kim Jong-un has played with what he considers his country’s military toys, since April 11th of 2012. To think that these are the two world leaders, protecting the planet from a nuclear holocaust….

a. If you ask someone a question, they will probably give you an answer, so think through to whom you should address your questions. I regularly see people ask totally uninformed or nonbelievable people questions and get answers that they believe. This is often worse than having no answers at all. Don't make that mistake. You need to think through who the right people are. If you're in doubt about someone's believablilty, find out. The same is true for you: If someone asks you a question, think first whether you're the right person to answer it. If you're not believable, you probably shouldn't have an opinion about what they're asking, let alone share it. Be sure to direct your comments or questions to the believable Responsible Party or Parties for the issues you want to discuss. Feel free to include others if you think that their input is relevant, while recognizing that the decision will ultimately rest with whoever is responsible for it. b. Having everyone randomly probe everyone else is an unproductive waste of time. For heaven's sake don't bother directing your questions to people who aren't responsible or, worse still, throw your questions out there without directing them at all. p379

1. Value my ability to see the world from a unique perspective. (Find ways to appreciate and make the most of my strengths, even when I annoy you). 2. Remember, we need compelling problems to solve, not just chores to do. (Don't be the "big boss." I'll respect your authority more when you tell me the point). 3. Ask for my input; keep me in the informational loop. (Give me some ownership in the process and the outcome). 4. Protect our relationship - you won't get much from me without one. (Respect and value who I am, and I'll cooperate with you most of the time). 5. Smile at me more often. (Keep your sense of humor and try to smile, even when you don't like me). 6. Don't let me push you around, but don't push me around either. (Don't be afraid to stand up to me; just don't run over me). 7. Speak to me respectfully, but firmly. (Use your voice wisely; it's a powerful resource). 8. Choose your battles - don't sweat the small stuff. (Decide what's really worth it). 9. Give me some control over my own life and circumstances. (Allow me to share control with our surrendering your authority). 10. Remind me how much you love me. (Find subtle ways to keep reminding me your love will always be there).

The computer scientists Jeff Clune, Jean-Baptiste Mouret, and Hod Lipson did what computer scientists do: they designed computer simulations.23 They used well-studied networks that had sensory inputs and produced outputs. What those outputs were determined how well the network performed when faced with environmental problems. They simulated twenty-five thousand generations of evolution, programming in a direct selection pressure to either maximize performance alone or maximize performance and minimize connection costs. And voilà! Once wiring-cost-minimization was added, in both changing and unchanging environments, modules immediately began to appear, whereas without the stipulation of minimizing costs, they didn’t. And when the three looked at the highest-performing networks that evolved, those networks were modular. Among that group, they found that the lower the costs were, the greater the modularity that resulted. These networks also evolved much quicker—in markedly fewer generations—whether in stable or changing environments. These simulation experiments provide strong evidence that selection pressures to maximize network performance and minimize connection costs will yield networks that are significantly more modular and more evolvable.

When I come home from work and my dog rushes out to greet me, wagging his tail and jumping up and down, why exactly is it that I am so confident that he is conscious and indeed that there is a specific content to his consciousness, he is happy to see me? The usual answer given to this question is that because his behavior is so much like that of a happy person I can infer that he is a happy dog. But that seems to me a mistaken argument. To begin with, happy people do not in general wag their tails and try to lick my hands. Furthermore, and more importantly, someone might easily build a robot dog that would wag its tail and jump up and down without having any inner feelings whatever. What is so special about the real dog? I think the answer is that the basis on which I am confident that my dog is conscious and has a specific content to his consciousness is not simply that his behavior is appropriate, but that I can see that the causal underpinnings of the behavior are relatively similar to mine. He has a brain, a perceptual apparatus, and a bodily structure that are relevantly similar to my own: these are his eyes, these are his ears, this is his skin, there is his mouth. It is not just on the basis of his behavior that I conclude that he is conscious, but rather on the basis of the causal structure that mediates the relation between the input stimulus and the output behavior.

We have learned from Ludwig von Mises how to respond to the socialists’ evasion (immunization) strategy. As long as the defining characteristic— the essence—of socialism, i.e., the absence of the private ownership of the factors of production, remains in place, no reform will be of any help. The idea of a socialist economy is a contradictio in adjecto, and the claim that socialism represents a higher, more efficient mode of social production is absurd. In order to reach one’s own ends efficiently and without waste within the framework of an exchange economy based on division of labor, it is necessary that one engage in monetary calculation (cost-accounting). Everywhere outside the system of a primitive self-sufficient single household economy, monetary calculation is the sole tool of rational and efficient action. Only by being able to compare inputs and outputs arithmetically in terms of a common medium of exchange (money) can a person determine whether his actions are successful or not. In distinct contrast, socialism means to have no economy, no economizing, at all, because under these conditions monetary calculation and cost-accounting is impossible by definition. If no private property in the factors of production exists, then no prices for any production factor exist; hence, it is impossible to determine whether or not they are employed economically. Accordingly, socialism is not a higher mode of production but rather economic chaos and regression to primitivism.

forgot about my huge goal. I focused on what I could control: what I did every day. After a little experimentation and a lot of thought, I settled on a process. Because the Internet never sleeps, here’s what I did every day: Write a new post. Without fail. No excuses. Build relationships. I contacted three people who tweeted my posts that day, choosing the three who seemed most influential, the most noteworthy, the most “something” (even if that “something” was just “thoughtful comment”). Then I sent an e-mail—not a tweet—and said thanks. My goal was to make a genuine connection. Build my network. I contacted one person who might be a great source for a future post. I aimed high: CEOs, founders, entrepreneur-celebrities . . . people with instant credibility and engaged followings. Many didn’t respond. But some did. And some have become friends and appear in this book. Add three more items to my “list of great headlines.” Headlines make or break posts: A great post with a terrible headline will not get read. So I worked hard to learn what worked for other people—and to adapt their techniques for my own use. Evaluate recent results. I looked at page views. I looked at shares and likes and tweets. I tried to figure out what readers responded to, what readers cared about. Writing for a big audience has little to do with pleasing yourself and everything to do with pleasing an audience, and the only way to know what worked was to know the audience. Ignore my editor. I liked my editor. But I didn’t want her input because she knew only what worked for columnists who were read by a maximum of 300,000 people each month. My goal was to triple that, which meant I needed to do things differently. We occasionally disagreed, and early on I lost some of those battles. Once my numbers started to climb, I won a lot more often, until eventually I was able to do my own thing. Sounds simple, right? In a way it was, because I followed a self-reinforcing process:

As Coates explains, hedges like these “are used to respect the face needs of all participants, to negotiate sensitive topics, and to encourage the participation of others.” These interpersonal tools are especially handy for women, who almost always dive into sensitive territory at some point during their discussions. Coates collected some enlightening data on how women hedge with one another from a group discussion among female friends about Britain’s notorious Yorkshire Ripper case of the early 1980s. The speakers were recalling how, during the hunt for the perpetrator, the police asked the public to consider their family members as suspects. At one point, a woman named Sally revealed that she once thought for a second that the killer might have been her husband. The hedges in her statement are underlined: “Oh god yes well I mean we were living in Yorkshire at the time and I—I mean I. I mean I did/ I sort of thought well could it be John?” These hedges here are not representative of Sally’s indecision—she isn’t hedging or breaking off her sentences due to, as Otto Jespersen said, “talking without having thought out what [she is] going to say.” Sally knows exactly what she wants to get across. But because the topic at hand is so sensitive, she needs the wells and I means so she doesn’t come off as brusque and unfeeling. “Self-disclosure of this kind can be extremely face-threatening,” Coates explains. “Speakers need to hedge their statements.” This is true in so many situations. For instance, saying something along the lines of, “I mean, I just feel like you should maybe, well, try seeing a therapist” is a gentler, easier-to-hear way of saying, “You should see a therapist.” The latter statement, though direct, could come across as cold in the context of a heart-to-heart conversation. The hedged version is more tactful and open, inviting of the listener’s point of view, and leaves space for them to interject or share a different perspective (unlike “You should see a therapist,” which is closed off and doesn’t make room for anyone else’s input).

To be free requires that we are not marionettes whose strings are pulled by physical law. Whether the laws are deterministic (as in classical physics) or probabilistic (as in quantum physics) is of deep significance to how reality evolves and to the kinds of predictions science can make. But for assessing free will, the distinction is irrelevant. If the fundamental laws can continually churn, never grinding to a halt for lack of human input and applying all the same even if particles happen to inhabit bodies and brains, then there is no place for free will. Indeed, as is affirmed by every scientific experiment and observation ever conducted, long before we humans came on the scene the laws ruled without interruption; after we arrived, they continued to rule without interruption. To sum up: We are physical beings made of large collections of particles governed by nature’s laws. Everything we do and everything we think amounts to motions of those particles. Shake my hand and particles constituting your hand push up and down against those constituting mine. Say hello, and particles constituting your vocal cords jostle particles of air in your throat, setting off a chain reaction of colliding particles that ripples through the air, knocking into the particles constituting my eardrums, setting off a surge of yet other particles in my head, which is how I manage to hear what you’re saying. Particles in my brain respond to the stimuli, yielding the thought that’s a strong grip, and sending signals carried by other particles to those in my arm, which drive my hand to move in tandem with yours. And since all observations, experiments, and valid theories confirm that particle motion is fully controlled by mathematical rules, we can no more intercede in this lawful progression of particles than we can change the value of pi. Our choices seem free because we do not witness nature’s laws acting in their most fundamental guise; our senses do not reveal the operation of nature’s laws in the world of particles. Our senses and our reasoning focus on everyday human scales and actions: we think about the future, compare courses of action, and weigh possibilities. As a result, when our particles do act, it seems to us that their collective behaviors emerge from our autonomous choices. However, if we had the superhuman vision invoked earlier and were able to analyze everyday reality at the level of its fundamental constituents, we would recognize that our thoughts and behaviors amount to complex processes of shifting particles that yield a powerful sense of free will but are fully governed by physical law.

Henry, there’s something I would like to tell you, for what it’s worth, something I wish I had been told years ago. You’ve been a consultant for a long time, and you’ve dealt a great deal with top secret information. But you’re about to receive a whole slew of special clearances, maybe fifteen or twenty of them, that are higher than top secret. I’ve had a number of these myself, and I’ve known other people who have just acquired them, and I have a pretty good sense of what the effects of receiving these clearances are on a person who didn’t previously know they even existed. And the effects of reading the information that they will make available to you. First, you’ll be exhilarated by some of this new information, and by having it all—so much! incredible!—suddenly available to you. But second, almost as fast, you will feel like a fool for having studied, written, talked about these subjects, criticized and analyzed decisions made by presidents for years without having known of the existence of all this information, which presidents and others had and you didn’t, and which must have influenced their decisions in ways you couldn’t even guess. In particular, you’ll feel foolish for having literally rubbed shoulders for over a decade with some officials and consultants who did have access to all this information you didn’t know about and didn’t know they had, and you’ll be stunned that they kept that secret from you so well. You will feel like a fool, and that will last for about two weeks. Then, after you’ve started reading all this daily intelligence input and become used to using what amounts to whole libraries of hidden information, which is much more closely held than mere top secret data, you will forget there ever was a time when you didn’t have it, and you’ll be aware only of the fact that you have it now and most others don’t … and that all those other people are fools. Over a longer period of time—not too long, but a matter of two or three years—you’ll eventually become aware of the limitations of this information. There is a great deal that it doesn’t tell you, it’s often inaccurate, and it can lead you astray just as much as the New York Times can. But that takes a while to learn. In the meantime it will have become very hard for you to learn from anybody who doesn’t have these clearances. Because you’ll be thinking as you listen to them: “What would this man be telling me if he knew what I know? Would he be giving me the same advice, or would it totally change his predictions and recommendations?” And that mental exercise is so torturous that after a while you give it up and just stop listening. I’ve seen this with my superiors, my colleagues … and with myself. You will deal with a person who doesn’t have those clearances only from the point of view of what you want him to believe and what impression you want him to go away with, since you’ll have to lie carefully to him about what you know. In effect, you will have to manipulate him. You’ll give up trying to assess what he has to say. The danger is, you’ll become something like a moron. You’ll become incapable of learning from most people in the world, no matter how much experience they may have in their particular areas that may be much greater than yours.

This brings me to an objection to integrated information theory by the quantum physicist Scott Aaronson. His argument has given rise to an instructive online debate that accentuates the counterintuitive nature of some IIT's predictions. Aaronson estimates phi.max for networks called expander graphs, characterized by being both sparsely yet widely connected. Their integrated information will grow indefinitely as the number of elements in these reticulated lattices increases. This is true even of a regular grid of XOR logic gates. IIT predicts that such a structure will have high phi.max. This implies that two-dimensional arrays of logic gates, easy enough to build using silicon circuit technology, have intrinsic causal powers and will feel like something. This is baffling and defies commonsense intuition. Aaronson therefor concludes that any theory with such a bizarre conclusion must be wrong. Tononi counters with a three-pronged argument that doubles down and strengthens the theory's claim. Consider a blank featureless wall. From the extrinsic perspective, it is easily described as empty. Yet the intrinsic point of view of an observer perceiving the wall seethes with an immense number of relations. It has many, many locations and neighbourhood regions surrounding these. These are positioned relative to other points and regions - to the left or right, above or below. Some regions are nearby, while others are far away. There are triangular interactions, and so on. All such relations are immediately present: they do not have to be inferred. Collectively, they constitute an opulent experience, whether it is seen space, heard space, or felt space. All share s similar phenomenology. The extrinsic poverty of empty space hides vast intrinsic wealth. This abundance must be supported by a physical mechanism that determines this phenomenology through its intrinsic causal powers. Enter the grid, such a network of million integrate-or-fire or logic units arrayed on a 1,000 by 1,000 lattice, somewhat comparable to the output of an eye. Each grid elements specifies which of its neighbours were likely ON in the immediate past and which ones will be ON in the immediate future. Collectively, that's one million first-order distinctions. But this is just the beginning, as any two nearby elements sharing inputs and outputs can specify a second-order distinction if their joint cause-effect repertoire cannot be reduced to that of the individual elements. In essence, such a second-order distinction links the probability of past and future states of the element's neighbours. By contrast, no second-order distinction is specified by elements without shared inputs and outputs, since their joint cause-effect repertoire is reducible to that of the individual elements. Potentially, there are a million times a million second-order distinctions. Similarly, subsets of three elements, as long as they share input and output, will specify third-order distinctions linking more of their neighbours together. And on and on. This quickly balloons to staggering numbers of irreducibly higher-order distinctions. The maximally irreducible cause-effect structure associated with such a grid is not so much representing space (for to whom is space presented again, for that is the meaning of re-presentation?) as creating experienced space from an intrinsic perspective.

an American farmer today grows enough food each year to feed a hundred people. Yet that achievement—that power over nature—has come at a price. The modern industrial farmer cannot grow that much food without large quantities of chemical fertilizers, pesticides, machinery, and fuel. This expensive set of “inputs,” as they’re called, saddles the farmer with debt, jeopardizes his health, erodes his soil and ruins its fertility, pollutes the groundwater, and compromises the safety of the food we eat. Thus the gain in the farmer’s power has been trailed by a host of new vulnerabilities. All this I’d heard before, of course, but always from environmentalists or organic farmers.

an American farmer today grows enough food each year to feed a hundred people. Yet that achievement—that power over nature—has come at a price. The modern industrial farmer cannot grow that much food without large quantities of chemical fertilizers, pesticides, machinery, and fuel. This expensive set of “inputs,” as they’re called, saddles the farmer with debt, jeopardizes his health, erodes his soil and ruins its fertility, pollutes the groundwater, and compromises the safety of the food we eat. Thus the gain in the farmer’s power has been trailed by a host of new vulnerabilities.

There is no great success and outstanding achievement on earth without the input of friendship.

A lightweight review tool would look much like the 360 tool I described above. It would ask managers to rate their employees for each category, and ask them to input text when the employee is in the bottom or top two ratings. The overall rating would be automatically calculated, and the manager’s rating distribution would be compared to the expected distribution. If the manager’s distribution falls outside of what’s expected, the manager must explain.

Poseidon looked over at Mordred. “You expecting me to do something because you insulted my girlfriend?” Mordred asked. “She could pull your lungs out through your asshole. I think she’s good without my input.

dealing with the role of difference within the lives of american women: difference of race, sexuality, class, and age. The absence of these considerations weakens any feminist discussion of the personal and the political. It is a particular academic arrogance to assume any discussion of feminist theory without examining our many differences, and without a significant input from poor women, Black and Third World women, and lesbians.

There are ways of farming beef and chicken that may even help to sequester carbon, and many agroecological systems that farm without chemical inputs and in which grazing and browsing animals help to build soil health and natural capital in a way that supports the local and global ecosystem. But it’s doubtful that these methods can produce enough meat to match our current and growing appetite.# If we keep eating more meat, it will require the destruction of more tropical forest, which in turn will drive pandemic disease and climate change.

We could at least imagine a system arranged around agroecological farming and the consumption of a diverse range of fresh and minimally processed whole foods.47 Such a system would promote biodiversity and has the capacity to produce enough healthy food for a growing population on a lower land footprint than today with massive climate benefits. We would need to eat significantly less meat, but the modelling is clear that it is possible.48-53 With this new, organic farming system, fresh and minimally processed whole foods would be more abundant and possibly cheaper. But such a system wouldn’t favour the monocultures required for UPF that do so much damage. By fixing the agricultural system so that it becomes sustainable, the production costs of whole foods should fall (without the requirement for fossil-fuel-based agrochemical inputs) – and those of UPF would rise.

Another way to foster a sense of belonging for employees is to form teams that are encouraged to engage in collective problem-solving. This affords regular opportunities for all members of the teams to express their views and contribute their talents. But leaders of these teams should establish the norm that colleagues treat each other with respect, making room for everyone in discussions and listening thoughtfully to one another. As we saw with high-status students leading the way in establishing an antibullying norm in schools, managers, as the highest-status member of a team, can set powerful norms. A key goal is foster what leadership scholar Amy Edmonson calls psychological safety, which she describes as "the belief that the environment is safe for interpersonal risk taking. People feel able to speak up when needed--with relevant ideas, questions, or concerns--without being shut down in a gratuitous way. Psychological safety is present when colleagues trust and respect each other and feel able, even obligated, to be candid." No matter how ingenious or talented individual team members are, if the climate does not foster the psychological safety people need to express themselves, they are likely to hold back on valuable input.

bought pretty much every decent piece of clothing I own… the jeans, the shirts, the sweaters, the jacket, the shoes. She even bought me new some new pajamas and some new underwear as well. And she chose it all without any input from me.

By nature of routine, our mind allows us to leverage patterns; repetition permits us to perform remedial tasks without much active thought or input.

People hate feeling ignored. Unfortunately, when you ask for input and appear to ignore it, employees feel frustrated, devalued, and powerless. In contrast, when you are clear about who owns the decision and how it will be made, people will readily contribute and are far more likely to own the outcome.

Then I’ve got some bad news for you. Reality went out the window the moment we started mediating sensory input through a nervous system. You want to actually perceive the universe directly, without any stupid scribbles or model-building? Become a protozoan.

Without ownership, your inputs are very closely tied to your outputs. In almost any salaried job, even one paying a lot per hour like a lawyer or a doctor, you’re still putting in the hours, and every hour you get paid. Without ownership, when you’re sleeping, you’re not earning. When you’re retired, you’re not earning. When you’re on vacation, you’re not earning. And you can’t earn nonlinearly.

The human brain, for all its sophistication, would be useless without its link to the outside world. Consider one experiment that illustrates this point. Volunteers hallucinated when they were deprived of sensory input by being blindfolded and suspended and warm water in a sensory deprivation tank. One saw charging pink and purple elephants. Another heard a chorus, still others had taste hallucinations. Our very sanity depends on a continuous flow of information from the outside.

Take more risks by acting without first getting input from your supervisor. Begin with small, low-profile decisions. It helps to factor in the combination of data and feelings when taking a risk. If you have all the data you need and you feel really good about it, it isn’t really a risk at all.

The mechanisms that sustain conscious phenomena evolved in tandem with a constant stream of physical feedback, mooring them to time. Without that input, things get weird.

Kant noted that we typically apply labels or concepts to the world to classify sensory inputs that suit a purpose. ... Beautiful objects do not serve ordinary human purposes, as plates and spoons do. A beautiful rose pleases us, but not because we necessarily want to eat it or even pick it for a flower arrangement. Kant’s way of recognizing this was to say that something beautiful has purposiveness without a purpose’.

Physical states create psychic ones and not vice-versa. The James-Lange theory was later undermined by research on patients with spinal cord injuries that prevented them from receiving any somatic information from their viscera—people who literally could not feel muscle tension or stomach discomfort; people who were, in effect, brains without bodies—yet who still reported experiencing the unpleasant psychological sensations of dread or anxiety. This suggested that the James-Lange theory was, if not wholly wrong, at least incomplete. If patients unable to receive information about the state of their bodies can still experience anxiety, then maybe anxiety is primarily a mental state, one that doesn’t require input from the rest of the body.

What we get from nature is fundamental to our economy, and without these inputs we would in fact produce nothing. Yet most political debates are still framed in the context of environmental protection being “nice to have” if we can afford it.

It had time to itself. Time to think and figure things out—without outside input. Without an internet connection constantly bombarding it with information.

Instead, she went over the data again and again until she could recite the exact alignment numbers for the telescope input without looking, then slept for an hour to avoid spending half the night with her forehead on the keyboard again, and finally drove back up Mouna Kea. Its switchbacks twisted her through the cloud line after three-quarters of an hour, giving her a beautiful, turkey-red sunset with long streaks on the horizon for the last 20 minutes of driving. They looked like the fingers of a doomed deity clinging hotly to the Earth. The majesty of the sight plucked a chord in her that her intense dream on the keyboard of her workstation had strummed and never let go. The universe was still a fascinating place—whether out there among the stars, or down here on the blue paradise they called Earth

You deserve time to process the information you were given without anyone’s input, even without mine. I know you love me. Doesn’t matter if it’s been two days or—” “Nine hundred and twenty-three days.

They found that, while typical brains without SPD, often called neurotypical by people in the sensory field, habituate to a noise or stimuli of some kind, meaning that they stop paying attention to it shortly after it starts, people with SPD never really do. It’s as if the sensory input is new each time it occurs.

Lacy was content to live alone, to sleep in the center of the bed, to clean up only after herself, to make and spend her own money, to come and go as she pleased, to pursue her career without worrying about his, to plan her evenings with input from no one else, to cook or not to cook, and to have sole possession of the remote control.

The mind operates most efficiently by relegating a good deal of high-level, sophisticated thinking to the unconscious, just as a modern jetliner is able to fly on automatic pilot with little or no input from the human, ‘conscious’ pilot.

There is a marked difference between brilliance and intellectuality. Some of us use both words interchangeably to describe people who can use big words. A number of people are grandiloquent but not wise. A person can be verbose but not esoteric. Just as literacy does not equate to intelligence. There are two types of learnt people in the world. Some persons are scholars and others are alchemist. Let me further my thesis on intellectuals. Now you have a scholar and an alchemist. The scholar passes exams, memorizes words and phrases, the alchemist has the intellectual prowess to start a whole new fundamental truth, discipline and school of thought because they can create concepts from their own minds without no external inputs. Alchemist pass exams without studying because they just know how things work or they use context clue. For that reason not every smart person is a genius. Alchemist use their brains to change or improve the world with ingenuity and originality. The alchemist has a way with words, when they speak you stop and listen. The alchemist is witty in any language (Creole or patois). Let’s renounce the colonial concept that using Anglo-Saxon words is a mark of intelligence. Eg. Kartel speaks English- Kartel intelligent yuh fawk.

One of the greatest threats to a democratic organization is for the members to become apathetic and let a small group of the membership do all the work. This creates divisions and promotes authoritarianism. Another threat is for a small group to work secretly behind the scenes to accomplish its own goals or its own agenda and then push it through without the rest of the membership having an input either through discussion or through the investigative process. Such actions cause mistrust and hostility.