Michael Levin Quotes

Having children makes you no more a parent than having a piano makes you a pianist.

Chemically speaking, chocolate really is the world's perfect food.

You know what my father said about innocent clients? ... He said the scariest client a lawyer will ever have is an innocent client. Because if you fuck up and he goes to prison, it'll scar you for life ... He said there is no in-between with an innocent client. No negotiation, no plea bargain, no middle ground. There's only one verdict. You have to put an NG up on the scoreboard. There's no other verdict but not guilty." Levin nodded thoughtfully. "The bottom line was my old man was a damn good lawyer and he didn't like having innocent clients," I said. "I'm not sure I do, either.

In evolutionary theory, this is called the Red Queen phenomenon,” Malcolm said. “Because in Alice in Wonderland the Red Queen tells Alice she has to run as fast as she can just to stay where she is. That’s the way evolutionary spirals seem. All the organisms are evolving at a furious pace just to stay in the same balance. To stay where they are.” Arby said, “And this is common? Even with plants?” “Oh yes,” Levine said. “In their own way, plants are extremely active. Oak trees, for example, produce tannin and phenol as a defense when caterpillars attack them. A whole grove of trees is alerted as soon as one tree is infested. It’s a way to protect the entire grove—a kind of cooperation among trees, you might say.

Our age,” says Kierkegaard, “will remind one of the dissolution of the Greek city-state: everything goes on as usual, and yet there is no longer anyone who believes in it. The invisible spiritual bond which gave it validity no longer exists, and so the whole age is at once comic and tragic—tragic because it is perishing, comic because it goes on.”2 Beckett’s works, at once tragic and comic in just this sense, are indeed works of and for our time.

After every major environmental change, a wave of extinctions has usually followed—but not right away. Extinctions only occur thousands, or millions of years later. Take the last glaciation in North America. The glaciers descended, the climate changed severely, but animals didn’t die. Only after the glaciers receded, when you’d think things would go back to normal, did lots of species become extinct. That’s when giraffes and tigers and mammoths vanished on this continent. And that’s the usual pattern. It’s almost as if species are weakened by the major change, but die off later. It’s a well-recognized phenomenon.” “It’s called Softening Up the Beachhead,” Levine said. “And what’s the explanation for it?” Levine was silent. “There is none,” Malcolm said. “It’s a paleontological mystery. But I believe that complexity theory has a lot to tell us about it. Because if the notion of life at the edge of chaos is true, then major change pushes animals closer to the edge. It destabilizes all sorts of behavior. And when the environment goes back to normal, it’s not really a return to normal. In evolutionary terms, it’s another big change, and it’s just too much to keep up with.

It was only twenty-five years ago that the philosopher Joseph Levine officially dubbed it the explanatory gap, which he later described in his book Purple Haze: We have no idea, I contend, how a physical object could constitute a subject of experience, enjoying, not merely instantiating, states with all sorts of qualitative character. As I now look at my red diskette case, I’m having a visual experience that is reddish in character. Light of a particular composition is bouncing off the diskette case and stimulating my retina in a particular way. That retinal stimulation now causes further impulses down the optic nerve, eventually causing various neural events in the visual cortex. Where in all of this can we see the events that explain my having a reddish experience? There seems to be no discernible connection between the physical description and the mental one, and thus no explanation of the latter in terms of the former.2

The takeover boom of the 1980s certainly had its share of unsavory and dishonest characters. Dennis Levine, Martin Siegel and Ivan Boesky were the best known, but they weren’t alone. All were made possible by the uncertainty and the market for information, legal and illegal, that federal and state regulation had created, for without government intervention in financial markets, they would never have been able to profit by this information during the wait periods imposed by tender offer regulation in the first place.

Tener hijos no nos convierte en padres, del mismo modo que tener un piano no nos hace pianistas.” Michael Levine

The Evolution of Adam: What the Bible Does and Doesn’t Say About Human Origins. Grand Rapids: Baker, 2012. *Goldingay, John. Theological Diversity and the Authority of the Old Testament. Grand Rapids: Eerdmans, 1987. Gorman, Michael. Reading Paul. Eugene, OR: Cascade, 2008. Hawk, L. Daniel. Joshua in 3-D: A Commentary on Biblical Conquest and Manifest Destiny. Eugene, OR: Cascade, 2011. *Japhet, Sara. The Ideology of the Book of Chronicles and Its Place in Biblical Thought. Ann Arbor: American Oriental Society, 2009. Jenkins, Philip. Laying Down the Sword: Why We Can’t Ignore the Bible’s Violent Verses. San Francisco: HarperOne, 2011. Johnson, Luke Timothy. The Real Jesus: The Misguided Quest for the Historical Jesus and the Truth of the Traditional Gospels. San Francisco: HarperSanFrancisco, 1996. Knight, Douglas A., and Amy-Jill Levine, The Meaning of the Bible: What the Jewish Scriptures and Christian Old

The connection between classroom dynamics and innate gender dimor­phism was widely recognized by educators before the subject became taboo. Since girls get information from words while boys get information by mani­pulating objects, have a shorter attention span, and begin to act up when forced to listen to teachers, the classroom situation overwhelmingly favors girls.

Feminist relativism has three sources. One is the embarrassment caused feminists by the biological and behavioral sciences. The only remaining barrier against the tide of evidence for important innate gender dimorphism is rejection of the idea of evidence. When reason goes against a man, said Hobbes, the man goes against reason. The second source is Marxism, which also rejects the idea of a world independent of human praxis. The third is unfamiliarity with science, including the work of female scientists.

If the overparticipation of males has distorted science, it is impossible to understand why airplanes, built on the basis of distorted male physics, should stay up.

The greatest discovery of feminist scholarship is so patently foolish, the arguments enlisted for it so meretricious, that, had its partisans been men unprotected by the guilt feelings of critics, it would have been laughed to silence.

Unlike male-female bonding, which excludes competing loyalties, male bonding is inclusive and builds small groups of men into effective fighting units. The brawling, drinking, athletic rough-house, vulgarity, and sexual braggadocio of young men in groups, incomprehensible to most women, are the rituals that cement the male bond. Young men in groups often risk death rather than be thought “screw ups” by their companions and male authority figures, another aspect of male bonding important in combat and incomprehensible to most women.

Tracing chivalry to biology is not to endorse it, but it is to point out the difficulties, perhaps the impossibility, of waging war with a significantly female force.

The CIA in its pursuit of intelligence and influence, often courts the same powerful figures [DEA] pursued as criminals . . . and intelligence wins precedence over law enforcement. The highly connected tuxedo-clad criminal is left in place to provide intelligence to the United States—and drugs to its citizens. —James Mills, The Underground Empire

On another day, when he was on inspection duty, Trump came upon fellow student Ted Levine’s unmade bed. Trump ripped the sheets off and threw them on the floor. Levine, a foot shorter than Trump, threw a combat boot at Donald, then hit him with a broomstick. Infuriated, Trump grabbed Levine and tried to push him out a second-floor window, Levine recalled. Two other cadets intervened to prevent Levine from falling.

The Bell Curve might have been called Why Intelligence Matters, explaining the connection of intelligence to life outcomes; this book completes the syllogism.

...the message being sent out by a broken window-the perception it invites-is that the owener of this building and the people of the community around it don't care if this window is broken: They have given up, and anarchy reigns here. Do as you will, because nobody cares.

Certainly, the perception of the average consumer is a vital part of every business, and if a retailer, service provider, or corporation is sending out signals that its approach is lackadaisical, its methods halfhearted, and its execution indifferent, the business in question could suffer severe-and in some cases, irreparable-losses.

So I had to go to the Marriott,” I finished. “You what?” He jumped to his feet as though he’d been hit with a cattle prod. “How could you do this, after everything that happened?

Matt Levine’s excellent forty-thousand-word article in Bloomberg Businessweek, “The Crypto Story.

While the females of a few species behave in ways typical of the males of most other species, there are no highly evolved species whose males and females behave identically. Nor is the innateness of a wide range of sex differences in humans particu­larly controversial within the scientific community.

Instead of devising rigorous, testable environmental hypotheses to explain in detail a wide range of sex-typed behaviors, feminist scientific method amounts to little more than readiness to criticize the design of experiments already done and scrutinize any data for possible environmentalist reinterpretation.

The male advantage in dominance-aggression makes patriarchy inevitable because men will always strive harder than women to reach the top of hierarchies they encounter, and create hierarchies to reach the top of if none exist.

Using culture as the all-purpose explanation of human behavior ignores the fact that culture itself is just one more natural phenomenon, a product of what is innate in man responding to the environ­ments in which man has found himself. If culture always encourages people to raise boys and girls differently, then people are innately disposed to develop cultures which so encourage them.

While part of the reason for the scientific sterility of feminism is its failure to ask why, a further cause of this sterility is the widespread impres­sion that it is up to the nativist to prove the existence of innate sex differences, and that, if he cannot, sex differences may be presumed to be learned.

Judged historically, the free market is the most successful economic arrangement. Permitting people to trade and associate freely for productive purposes has created unparalleled prosperity, along with support for the democratic institutions on which other forms of individual liberty have been found to depend. It is inevitable that feminists reject the free market, however, because they must interpret the expressions of sex differences facili­tated by the freedom of the market as products of adverse socialization and discrimination.

Even if nothing were known of fetal hormonalization, cerebral lateraliza­tion, natural selection, or the behavior of infants, the failure of environmen­tal explanations of patriarchy would force the conclusion that male dominance is biologically based.

To say that men want more intensely than women to be in a position to perform highly remunerated tasks is not to say that men deserve to do these tasks or that men do them better. There is no cosmic cashier dispensing wages for having a virilized brain. Nobody gets paid without performing. But because men try harder more often, they will, if not forcibly prevented, succeed more often than women in attaining highly-paid positions.

Feminism is an antidemocratic, if not totalitarian, ideology.

In any case, the sex segregation of the workforce is essentially the result of innate sex differences and unmanipulated expectations.

If sex roles are to be regarded as the outcome of bargaining in which men received dominance in exchange for the risk of violent death, it is hardly clear that they got the better deal.

It is sometimes argued that the biologically determined differential success rates of men and women are unjust since, had women been treated fairly over the milennia, the market would have evolved to reward female talents as much as it now rewards male talents. Trying to substantiate a conditional this counterfactual is like trying to determine whether Julius Caesar would have used atomic weapons had they been available 2,000 years ago.

The nature and ramifications of gender differences are empirical questions of biology, psychology, anthro­pology, sociology, political science, and history. Their dispassionate study will differ greatly from the drawing of foregone conclusions of the sort expounded in women’s studies courses.

Because the maintenance of order requires physical strength and aggressiveness, it has been a male task in every society that has ever existed.

Feminist pedagogy refuses to allow children to form their own ideas because it sees the ideas of children as manipulated in just this way by sexist ideology. The only hope for restoring autonomy to children then becomes countermanipulation, and if all education is at bottom brainwashing, the only serious question concerns ownership of the laundry.

The intensity of feminist rage at femininity should not be allowed to obscure the universality of feminist anger. It is difficult to call to mind another social movement in which feelings of displeasure and belligerence play so prominent a role. Now, the only thing so ubiquitous in the feminist’s field of vision that she finds it everywhere she looks is herself. It is not femininity in the abstract that feminists hate, but their own feminin­ity.

Nothing could have produced this degree of anger at men and hatred of self but a childhood in which femaleness went unconfirmed by an ineffectual father, together perhaps with a dominant mother. Neglect and uncertainty produced profound feelings of disappointment that festered into resentment and a desire for revenge against the man who failed the feminist-to-be. Committed feminists have indeed been cheated—of a father’s love.

Feminism shared with the Left a readiness to see oppression where others see liberty and injustice where others see free bargaining.

Feminists in search of culprits might begin by looking in the mirror.

Success in extrafamilial pursuits goes against deep-seated female impulses. Women are hypergamous. They seek men of higher status than themselves, for substan­tially the same reason that females have always sought to mate with the alpha male; he has proven his ability to protect her and her offspring. The higher a woman climbs in hierarchies, the fewer men she will find appealing—and, since males prefer to dominate sexual bonding pairs, the fewer men she will appeal to.

So long as feminism remains institutionalized it will purvey coercion. Feminists may be beyond rational persuasion, and will continue to proclaim their errors with complete assurance. But they are, in the end, asking women to make themselves unattractive to men and to forego love and children. Feminism will be forgotten, commanding only the loyalty of barren women whose genetic lines are running to extinction.

Men are penalized less severely for infidelity than women because of the male’s needs to know that the children he is raising are his, but also because the male’s promiscuous impulses are very powerful; society cannot in practice heavily penalize behavior that most of its male members are prone to.

Subse­quent events have verified that an entire society whose males are raised without male authority figures would, for its short existence, more closely resemble a Hobbesian state of nature than an egalitarian paradise.

One thing I think this is showing us is that focusing on the brain as the source of inspiration for machine learning is derived from a very specialized architecture. I’ve been suggesting that a true general purpose intelligence is much more likely to arise not from mimicking the structure of the core of the human cortex, or anything like that, but from actually taking seriously the computational principles that life has been applying since the very beginning. CHRISTINA: Paramecia? MICHAEL: Even before that. Bacteria biofilms. All that stuff has been solving problems in ways that we have yet to figure out. They’re able to generalize, they’re able to learn from experience with a small number of examples. They make self-models. It’s amazing what they can do. That should be the inspiration. I think the future of machine learning and AI technologies will not be based on brains, but on this much more ancient, general ability of life to solve problems in novel domains.

The stand-up comic London Lee, née Alan Levine, once said he had a German shepherd as a pet until it found out he was Jewish and bit him.

Svet nudi pregršt prilika. Prilike na poslu, u ljubavi, za duhovni razvoj i emocionalnu ispunjenost. Vaša misija je da ostanete stalno budni kako vas prilike ne bi mimoišle.

He’s like the kid they use down in Louisiana as alligator bait. They tie him to the end of a rope and he walks out into the swamp. All the kid can do is hope they jerk the rope back in time.

The claim made in popular debate that the race difference intelligence is genetic should be taken to mean that black and white children would not develop the same mean intelligence if raised in the same environment, and, perhaps, the stronger thesis that blacks would develop lower intelligence than identically raised whites in all practically possible environments. “Hereditarianism” is a convenient label for the latter view, and its denial, the claim that identically raised blacks and whites would develop identical mean intelligence, may be called “environmentalism.

A natural starting point for discussing variations in intelligence and temperament is the psychometric literature. This literature does indeed reveal large group differences, [...] Black children do not perfo in school as if they are as able and motivated as white or Asian children. Black adults do not succeed in science, art, commerce, or the professions as if they were as able and motivated as white or Asian adults. On the whole, blacks encountered in everyday life, in the press, and on television news broadcasts do not behave like whites or Asians. Moreover, evidence of the equal intelligence of the races would presumably exist were the races in fact equal, and be prominently cited by the many social scientists who passionately believe they are. Yet this does not happen. [...] Everyday observation, together with the failure of egalitarians to produce evidence that the races are equal, disconfirms racial parity.

That’s it for crypto explanations for the moment, as that’s about all that Sam Bankman-Fried knew about crypto, or for that matter needed to know, to trade billions of dollars’ worth of it. Plus, so many writers have taken a crack at explaining to a lay audience what a bitcoin is that it’s hard to see the point of doing it all over again. See, for example, Matt Levine’s excellent forty-thousand-word article in Bloomberg Businessweek, “The Crypto Story.” What is curious is how elusive Bitcoin is, as a thing to understand. Bitcoin often gets explained but somehow never stays explained. You nod along and think you are getting it but then wake up the next morning needing to hear the explanation all over again.

his bed at Lenox Hill Hospital, where he was recovering from chest pains. The song was rerecorded in a Manhattan studio, released on October 6, 1982, and sprinted up the dance charts. This set the stage for two pivotal events in the young life of Madonna: the first was an appearance shortly thereafter at No Entiendes, Haoui Montaug’s popular cabaret; the second was the filming of her debut music video. The label had allocated $1,500 for the production—an amount that was, even then, a pittance. The shoot was at Paradise Garage, a sprawling West Village discotheque, where Madonna had recently performed. After the show, Jordan Levin, a Mudd Club and Pyramid celebutante who’d been invited

by Madonna, found herself in a limousine with the singer, Martin Burgoyne, and, by chance, Michael Stewart. As Levin wrote in 2019: A limo—she had a limo! She dropped us off at the Pyramid around 3am—we were too hyped to go home. We danced to Dollar Bill Y’all, the bass throbbing through the roll in our hips and our smoky, giddy brains, swimming in the dark—the Pyramid was so black, an inky pool whose blackness made it seem bigger than it was. The song thrummed in our veins “dollar bill y’all, dollar bill y’all, dollar dollar dollar dollar dollar bill y’all.” Which we didn’t have but so what? We had the song. We’d been to the show, ridden

The shoot for the “Everybody” video was a few days later. Given the minuscule budget, it was left to Madonna’s friend Debi Mazar to do makeup, while East Village club kids, including Levin and Michael, were brought in to populate the floor in front of the stage. The twentysomethings received little direction, as the focus was predominantly trained on Madonna and her dancers. Just once, the camera operator descended to the dance floor, giving the club kids visions of stardom. Michael was filmed for just a moment, his arms waving slowly, face set in deep concentration. Fleeting, but impossible to miss.

Tolstoy, a greater novelist, is a greater sinner. In Anna Karenina, he makes almost everyone who reads the book fall in love with Anna—thus preserving the mystery—despite the fact that she is narcissistic, self-indulgent, materialistic, irresponsible, inconsiderate, with bad taste in the men she marries or loves. Nevertheless, she is charming and gorgeous, and it is impossible for men not to fall in love with her, including Levin, who is surely Tolstoy himself and knows better. Ultimately the mystery of love leads to her suicide, and the probable death of her lover, and the destruction of her husband’s career and moral character.

Congratulations Terry! Pitfall by Terry Kirk named a 'Top Book to Read this Spring' by CBC Reads.- Michael Levine, Westwood Creative Artists Inc.

In his book Healing Trauma, Peter Levine states, Trauma is about loss of connection—to ourselves, to our bodies, to our families, to others, and to the world around us. This loss of connection is often hard to recognize, because it doesn’t happen all at once. It can happen slowly, over time, and we adapt to these subtle changes sometimes without even noticing them. These are the hidden effects of trauma, the ones most of us keep to ourselves. We may simply sense that we do not feel quite right, without ever becoming fully aware of what is taking place; that is, the gradual undermining of our self-esteem, self-confidence, feelings of well-being, and connection to life. Our choices become limited as we avoid certain feelings, people, situations, and places. The result of this gradual constriction of freedom is the loss of vitality and potential for the fulfillment of our dreams. (2008, 9)