To see what is in front of one’s nose needs a constant struggle. One thing that helps toward it is to keep a diary, or, at any rate, to keep some kind of record of one’s opinions about important events. Otherwise, when some particularly absurd belief is exploded by events, one may simply forget that one ever held it.


- George Orwell, In Front of Your Nose (1946)

Previously.

Why is it that I am a liberal rationalist, but like a) propaganda songs and b) sacred music so much?

Item (+MP3) (thanks, Gregor!):

Sie hat uns alles gegeben,

Sonne und Wind und sie geizte nie.

Wo sie war, war das Leben,

Was wir sind, sind wir durch sie.

Sie hat uns niemals verlassen,

Fror auch die Welt, uns war warm.

Uns schützt die Mutter der Massen,

Uns trägt ihr mächtiger Arm.

[...]

Item (MP3 sample):

Den Satan unter unsre Füße treten.

Erhör uns, lieber Herre Gott!

[...]

Und uns für des Türken und des Papsts

grausamen Mord und Lästerungen,

Wüten und Toben väterlich behüten.

Erhör uns, lieber Herre Gott!

Item (MP3 sample):

Mine eyes have seen the glory of the coming of the Lord:

He is trampling out the vintage where the grapes of wrath are stored;

He hath loosed the fateful lightning of His terrible swift sword:

His truth is marching on.



Glory, glory, hallelujah!

Glory, glory, hallelujah!

Glory, glory, hallelujah!

His truth is marching on.

I’d guess it is the longing for simple world where truth is clear cut. Of course, when parading through my living room singing the praise of the party or joining the choir to fend of the temptations of Satan, I know I’d feel deeply uncomfortable in the real-life environment where such songs “live”… It’s a bit of a conundrum, really.

PS: The Bach cantata is great music, of course. Still, I’d classify it more a case of the ideological fervor getting to me. For the music that Douglas Adams probably meant when he described Bach as ‘the music of life itself’ (or, more precisely, ‘the music copied by the guy who was played the music of life itself by a time-travelling guy’, but that’s in the book), I’d vote for BWV 1042.

Update:
Fixed the final link. Really, it’s amazing.

I just read the new Paul Graham essay, “Is It Worth Being Wise?”.

[...]And while wisdom yields calmness, intelligence much of the time leads to discontentment.

That’s particularly worth remembering. A physicist friend recently told me half his department was on Prozac. Perhaps if we acknowledge that some amount of frustration is inevitable in certain kinds of work, we can mitigate its effects. Perhaps we can box it up and put it away some of the time, instead of letting it flow together with everyday sadness to produce what seems an alarmingly large pool. At the very least, we can avoid being discontented about being discontented.

Good, I always feared that antidepressants would mess with mathematical ability too much. Maybe I should take up amphetamines?

The wisdom vs intelligence distinction overall is plausible, and I definitely agree with many of his observations (discipline hinders intelligence while furthering wisdom, for example). Still, the definition of wisdom as average outcomes over situation space and intelligence as the height of the peaks feels wrong to me. In this metric, I’d speculate that there’s a somewhat fixed area in the graph for each person and that the distributions that Paul calls “intelligent” and “wise” would then form through either specialization in a narrow domain of knowledge or a more general education.

Personally, I think of intelligence as the ability to form new knowledge. The choice for a person seeking optimal outcomes then becomes how to distribute effort between increasing intelligence and applying it to form and utilize knowledge (another distinction). That sounds like a pretty basic optimization problem, actually (given a known life time and a straightforward relation between effort spent building intelligence and intelligence gained). After this, the model starts to become convoluted as you start to consider knowledge retention rates and costs, contradictory information and various biology-related constraints. It’s an interesting question, but I fear it’s much to complicated to expect good popular literature on it anytime soon.