Fire & Motion 14
Fleeting quotes
A good marriage is one in which each spouse secretly thinks he or she got the better deal, and this is true also of our friendships. / 選擇是自由的實踐；選擇貨幣，是財務自由的實踐。 / Continuous thinking and learning, done with joy, can somewhat help delay what is inevitable.
Reading
梁錦松說過，「你賺的錢不是你的，你花的錢才是你的」。不管你是否喜歡這個知恥而引疚辭職香港前財政司，這句話講得非常對，你能花的話，錢就是你的。無大台的區塊鏈紀錄了誰有多少錢，透過密碼貨幣錢包管理的私鑰，你能動用這些錢，就是如此簡單。問「我的錢到底在哪裡」，跟問飛行里數在哪差不多，你能動用里數兌換機票就可，沒必要有一張一張的飛行里數券放在口袋。跟錢的分別只是，飛行里數券從來沒有存在過，所以你不覺得不自然而已。
📄“Reality” is constructed by your brain.
Our brains work hard to bend reality to meet our prior experiences, our emotions, and our discomfort with uncertainty. This happens with vision. But it also happens with more complicated processes
📄Psychology of Human Misjudgement
One very practical consequence of Liking/ Loving Tendency is that it acts as a conditioning device that makes the liker or lover tend (1) to ignore faults of, and comply with wishes of, the object of his affection, (2) to favor people, products, and actions merely associated with the object of his affection and (3) to distort other facts to facilitate love.
The proper antidote to creating Persian Messenger Syndrome and its bad effects, like those at CBS, is to develop, through exercise of will, a habit of welcoming bad news. At Berkshire, there is a common injunction: “Always tell us the bad news promptly. It is only the good news that can wait.” It also helps to be so wise and informed that people fear not telling you bad news because you are so likely to get it elsewhere.
Deprival-Superreaction Tendency is also a huge contributor to ruin from compulsion to gamble. First, it causes the gambler to have a passion to get even once he has suffered loss, and the passion grows with the loss. Second, the most addictive forms of gambling provide a lot of near misses and each one triggers Deprival-Superreaction Tendency. Some slot machine creators are vicious in exploiting this weakness of man. Electronic machines enable these creators to produce a lot of meaningless bar- bar-lemon results that greatly increase play by fools who think they have very nearly won large rewards.
In social proof, it is not only action by others that misleads but also their inaction. In the presence of doubt, inaction by others becomes social proof that inaction is the right course.
the special strength of extra-vivid images in influencing the mind can be constructively used (1) in persuading someone else to reach a correct conclusion or (2) as a device for improving one’s own memory by attaching vivid images, one after the other, to many items one doesn’t want to forget. Indeed, such use of vivid images as memory boosters is what enabled the great orators of classical Greece and Rome to give such long, organized speeches without using notes.
While traveling, instead of using cell phone to capture the moment, use our own visual to do the journaling.
📄How to know what you really want
When I think about the lifestyle that I would most like to have, who do I feel most embodies it?
(Luke Burgis also talks about mimetic desire on TKP) When it comes to mimetic desire, it would be better to ask Who, instead of What or Why, that generates and shapes our desire. Also pay attention to "negative model of desire" that we constantly measure ourselves against.
By mapping out the system of desire that you’re enmeshed in (and probably have been your whole life), you can begin to take some critical distance from it. This will allow you to stop accepting your currently dominant desires at face value and save you from defaulting into important life choices instead of choosing them with intentionality.
When you ask people to imagine how things could be different, they imagine how things could be better. This doesn’t depend on how we word the question, and it happens in people’s everyday thoughts.
People get used to good things because they’re always imagining how things could be better. So even if things get better, you might not feel better. When you live in a cramped apartment, you dream of getting a house. When you get a house, you dream of a second house. Or you dream of lower property taxes. Or a hot tub. Or two hot tubs. And so on, forever.
By only imagining things being better, it risks losing the other half of possibilities. What I mean by "the other half" may not always be worse, but it certainly provides some redundancy or fraction that make smooth of the system.
Watching
My third time watching this movie. Absolutely stuck by the fact that "we appear, and we disappear, we are important to some, but we are just passing through". And same as the sunset.
Also rewind it for the second time just because I miss the Wes Anderson vibe.
Outside Interest!
🎥Everything is Connected -- Here's How: | Tom Chi | TEDxTaipei