Variance Futures Quotes

The novel, then, provides a reduction of the world different from that of the treatise. It has to lie. Words, thoughts, patterns of word and thought, are enemies of truth, if you identify that with what may be had by phenomenological reductions. Sartre was always, as he explains in his autobiography, aware of their being at variance with reality. One remembers the comic account of this antipathy in Iris Murdoch Under the Net, one of the few truly philosophical novels in English; truth would be found only in a silent poem or a silent novel. As soon as it speaks, begins to be a novel, it imposes causality and concordance, development, character, a past which matters and a future within certain broad limits determined by the project of the author rather than that of the characters. They have their choices, but the novel has its end. * ____________________ * There is a remarkable passage in Ortega y Gasset London essay ' History as a System' (in Philosophy and History, ed. Klibansky and Paton, 1936) which very clearly states the issues more notoriously formulated by Sartre. Ortega is discussing man's duty to make himself. 'I invent projects of being and doing in the light of circumstance. This alone I come upon, this alone is given me: circumstance. It is too often forgotten that man is impossible without imagination, without the capacity to invent for himself a conception of life, to "ideate" the character he is going to be. Whether he be original or a plagiarist, man is the novelist of himself... Among... possibilities I must choose. Hence, I am free. But, be it well understood, I am free by compulsion, whether I wish to be or not... To be free means to be lacking in constitutive identity, not to have subscribed to a determined being, to be able to be other than what one was...' This 'constitutive instability' is the human property lacking in the novels condemned by Sartre and Murdoch. Ortega differs from Sartre on the use of the past; but when he says that his free man is, willy-nilly, 'a second-hand God,' creating his own entity, he is very close to Sartre, who says that to be is to be like the hero in a novel. In one instance the eidetic image is of God, in the other of the Hero.

An awful lot of hokum is talked about love, you know. An importance is ascribed to it that is entirely at variance with fact. People talk as though it were self-evidently the greatest of human values. Nothing is less self-evident. Until Plato dressed his sentimental sensuality in a captivating literary form the ancient world laid no more stress on it than was sensible; the healthy realism of the Muslims has never looked upon it as anything but a physical need; it was Christianity, buttressing its emotional claims with neo-Platonism, that made it into the end an aim, the reason, the justification of life. But Christianity was the religion of slaves. It offered the weary and the heavy-laden heaven to compensate them in the future for their misery in this world and the opiate of love to enable them to bear it in the present. And like every drug it enervated and destroyed those who became subject to it. For two thousand years it's suffocated us. It's weakened our wills and lessened our courage. In this modern world we live in we know that almost everything is more important to us than love, we know that only the soft and the stupid allow it to affect their actions, and yet we pay it a foolish lip-service. In books, on the stage, in the pulpit, on the platform the same old sentimental rubbish is talked that was used to hoodwink the slaves of Alexandria.

As planners, we've become so comfortable with a system that gives local planners and boards a tremendous amount of arbitrary and subjective power that we don't consider that maybe it should not be this way. Maybe we should have to work harder to write quality codes instead of relying on variances to bail us out when things don't work out quite as we have planned. Maybe we need to acknowledge that we don't know so much after all, that we can't predict the future and should quit trying to do so.

As he talked or listened, he made grimaces like a monkey.  He said yes by dropping his eyelids and thrusting his chin forward.  He spoke with childish arrogance strangely at variance with the subservient position he occupied beneath the veranda.  He, with his many followers, was lord and master of Balesuna village.  But the white man, without followers, was lord and master of Berande—ay, and on occasion, single-handed, had made himself lord and master of Balesuna village as well.  Seelee did not like to remember that episode.  It had occurred in the course of learning the nature of white men and of learning to abominate them.  He had once been guilty of sheltering three runaways from Berande.  They had given him all they possessed in return for the shelter and for promised aid in getting away to Malaita.  This had given him a glimpse of a profitable future, in which his village would serve as the one depot on the underground railway between Berande and Malaita. Unfortunately, he was ignorant of the ways

It is a crucial moment in a soldier’s life when he is ordered to perform a deed that he finds completely at variance with his own notions of right and good. Probably for the first time, he discovers that an act someone else thinks to be necessary is for him criminal . . . Suddenly the soldier feels himself abandoned and cast off from all security. Conscience has isolated him, and its voice is a warning. If you do this, you will not be at peace with me in the future. You can do it, but you ought not. You must act as a man and not as an instrument of another’s will.54 —J. Glenn Gray (The Warriors)

The Soviets were not 50% right, they were entirely wrong. They weren’t quantitatively wrong about the amount of variance due to the environment, they were qualitatively wrong about what environmental manipulations could do in the face of built-in universal human machinery. Having said this, though, I now feel no particular impulse to vote Republican. Also, it’s quite possible that someday you could create perfectly unselfish people… if you used sufficiently advanced neurosurgery, drugs, and/or brain-computer interfaces to engineer their brains into a new state that no current human brain occupies. Whether or not this is in fact possible isn’t something that ideology gets to decide. The reasoning errors of past communists can’t prohibit any particular future technological advance from being possible or practical. Having said that, I feel no particular impulse to turn “liberal.

According to Bartholomew, an important goal of St. Louis zoning was to prevent movement into 'finer residential districts . . . by colored people.' He noted that without a previous zoning law, such neighborhoods have become run-down, 'where values have depreciated, homes are either vacant or occupied by color people.' The survey Bartholomew supervised before drafting the zoning ordinance listed the race of each building's occupants. Bartholomew attempted to estimate where African Americans might encroach so the commission could respond with restrictions to control their spread. The St. Louis zoning ordinance was eventually adopted in 1919, two years after the Supreme Court's Buchanan ruling banned racial assignments; with no reference to race, the ordinance pretended to be in compliance. Guided by Bartholomew's survey, it designated land for future industrial development if it was in or adjacent to neighborhoods with substantial African American populations. Once such rules were in force, plan commission meetings were consumed with requests for variances. Race was frequently a factor. For example, on meeting in 1919 debated a proposal to reclassify a single-family property from first-residential to commercial because the area to the south had been 'invaded by negroes.' Bartholomew persuaded the commission members to deny the variance because, he said, keeping the first-residential designation would preserve homes in the area as unaffordable to African Americans and thus stop the encroachment. On other occasions, the commission changed an area's zoning from residential to industrial if African American families had begun to move into it. In 1927, violating its normal policy, the commission authorized a park and playground in an industrial, not residential, area in hopes that this would draw African American families to seek housing nearby. Similar decision making continued through the middle of the twentieth century. In a 1942 meeting, commissioners explained they were zoning an area in a commercial strip as multifamily because it could then 'develop into a favorable dwelling district for Colored people. In 1948, commissioners explained they were designating a U-shaped industrial zone to create a buffer between African Americans inside the U and whites outside. In addition to promoting segregation, zoning decisions contributed to degrading St. Louis's African American neighborhoods into slums. Not only were these neighborhoods zoned to permit industry, even polluting industry, but the plan commission permitted taverns, liquor stores, nightclubs, and houses of prostitution to open in African American neighborhoods but prohibited these as zoning violations in neighborhoods where whites lived. Residences in single-family districts could not legally be subdivided, but those in industrial districts could be, and with African Americans restricted from all but a few neighborhoods, rooming houses sprang up to accommodate the overcrowded population. Later in the twentieth century, when the Federal Housing Administration (FHA) developed the insure amortized mortgage as a way to promote homeownership nationwide, these zoning practices rendered African Americans ineligible for such mortgages because banks and the FHA considered the existence of nearby rooming houses, commercial development, or industry to create risk to the property value of single-family areas. Without such mortgages, the effective cost of African American housing was greater than that of similar housing in white neighborhoods, leaving owners with fewer resources for upkeep. African American homes were then more likely to deteriorate, reinforcing their neighborhoods' slum conditions.

The study demonstrated that the IQ scores or academic achievement of students while enrolled in school had between zero and 5 percent predictive power in explaining the variation in their long-term outcomes. At the same time, emotional and attitudinal success attributes (the authors named six: self-awareness, perseverance, proactivity, emotional stability, goal setting, and social support systems) explained 49 to 75 percent of the variance in the students’ long-term outcomes. Put another way, academic achievement and IQ score predicted next to nothing about the future of these dyslexic students. What mattered most was their ability to bounce back, get help from others, and take action.

Einstein further explained that the pull of gravity actually slows time down. So if you were an astronaut on a long interstellar trip and your spacecraft passed close to a black hole (where the gravitational force is massive), time would slow down significantly. When you got back to Earth you might have aged several years, but your spouse and your friends would have already lived into old age. We can observe this effect in a much smaller way right here on Earth. If you lived in Dubai on the top floor of Burj Khalifa, the world’s highest tower, time would pass slightly faster for you than it would for someone living on the ground floor, just because gravity affects each of you differently. While a variance like this is too small for the human body to detect, it’s measurable with today’s technology. It gets even more bizarre. The math indicates that in space-time, past, present, and future are all part of an integrated four-dimensional structure in which all of space and all of time exist perpetually.

Real endlessness, absolute multitude, and variance imply an accident or the impossibility of an accident, which boils down to the same. Absolute multitude and endlessness can exist only in emptiness. The Home of endlessness and the multitude is Zero. We have to reach the bottom of a second, the bottom of time, to pass through the whole multitude and “infinity” to catch the present. Nevertheless, it is impossible to catch the present because it is Zero. Over time, the future becomes the past at the edge of Zero. The present is the annihilation of life; the present does not exist, but Everything is the presence of an organism that remembers and breathes according to its program—the present is the eternity it tries to avoid. All the rest implies some motion or illusion; it resembles eternity because it has eternal life.

Too much information is key to a more diverse, non-deterministic future. Once we have information overload we have choice, we never know which instructions a computer or a person is going to load into their thinking. We look at our newborn babies in a hospital maternity ward, and newborn computers stacked on a pallet, and we never know what rhetoric they may encounter, which instructions or question/answer sets they will leave more permanently loaded in their mental processing. Even the variance of permanence is a dimension no one knows, and will shape them or the world they shape.

The economist Harry Markowitz won the 1990 Nobel Prize in Economics for developing modern portfolio theory: his groundbreaking “mean-variance portfolio optimization” showed how an investor could make an optimal allocation among various funds and assets to maximize returns at a given level of risk. So when it came time to invest his own retirement savings, it seems like Markowitz should have been the one person perfectly equipped for the job. What did he decide to do? I should have computed the historical covariances of the asset classes and drawn an efficient frontier. Instead, I visualized my grief if the stock market went way up and I wasn’t in it—or if it went way down and I was completely in it. My intention was to minimize my future regret. So I split my contributions fifty-fifty between bonds and equities. Why

The Upside of Heuristics The economist Harry Markowitz won the 1990 Nobel Prize in Economics for developing modern portfolio theory: his groundbreaking “mean-variance portfolio optimization” showed how an investor could make an optimal allocation among various funds and assets to maximize returns at a given level of risk. So when it came time to invest his own retirement savings, it seems like Markowitz should have been the one person perfectly equipped for the job. What did he decide to do? I should have computed the historical covariances of the asset classes and drawn an efficient frontier. Instead, I visualized my grief if the stock market went way up and I wasn’t in it—or if it went way down and I was completely in it. My intention was to minimize my future regret. So I split my contributions fifty-fifty between bonds and equities. Why in the world would he do that?

How can we humans claim ourselves to be superior to other animals? Is it because of the technological development we’ve made? Destroying one resource to create another one! Egotism is what we humans are fraught with… We boast of our intellectual superiority, but why do we have to depend upon a dog to sniff out a thief, one from our own race? Why do we need a dog for that? Why don't we just train ourselves and do the job on our own? The defence we produce here is that we don't have as many olfactory receptors in our nose as there are in a dog, and a part of a dog’s brain is devoted to analyzing smells. But then why is our developed logical and intellectual ability considered superior to their developed instinctive abilities? Isn't it ironical that a race that considers itself superior to others needs another race that it looks down upon, to sniff out someone of its own race? Doesn't it seem at variance with our own asset, logic that is, that we, who haven't yet developed a reliable device to predict an earthquake, consider ourselves better than a race that has an uncanny ability to predict future catastrophe? Being at the top of the food chain isn’t everything; even the dinosaurs disappeared, and the ones which were at the bottom still exist… I truly believe in nature's impartiality.

Mistakes should be a learning experience for all. If people become afraid of pointing out their own mistakes because they will feel humiliated in front of their peers, it’s human nature for them to do whatever they can to hide those mistakes in future meetings. Variances that get glossed over are lost learning opportunities for everybody. To prevent this, mistakes should be acknowledged as a chance to take ownership, understand the root cause, and learn from the experience. Some tension is unavoidable and appropriate, but we think it’s better to establish a culture where it’s not just okay, it’s actually encouraged to openly discuss mistakes.