lung-gom-pa
You must be curious about what lung-gom-pa is. It is an ecstatic state: running in a trance, just like lungs-on-legs.
Albert Camus: In the depth of winter I learned that there lay within me an invincible summer.
Albert Camus: what if Sisyphus is happy? La lutte elle-même vers les sommets suffit à remplir un cœur d’homme; il faut imaginer Sisyphe heureux. The struggle itself towards the summit is enough to fill a man’s heart; you have to imagine Sisyphus happy.
Then I realize that Camus has many quotes worthy of noting as below:
Camus: You will never be happy if you continue to search for what happiness consists of. You will never live if you are looking for the meaning of life.
Camus: Man is the only creature who refuses to be what he is.
Camus: Live to the point of tears.
Camus: Autumn is a second spring when every leaf is a flower.
why don’t more people use Linux?
If Linux is so good, why aren’t more people using it? If exercising is so healthy, why don’t more people do it? If reading is so educational, why don’t more people do it? If junk food is so bad for you, why do so many people eat it?
Programmers are different. Not because it (Linux, for example) is easy, but because it is worth it.
story as a way to abstract the world
Below are just some excerpts from the above link.
“Humans think in stories rather than in facts, numbers, or equations, and the simpler the story, the better,” writes Yuval Noah Harari. “To survive, you must tell stories,” says Umberto Eco. “If the storytelling mind cannot find meaningful patterns in the world, it will try to impose them,” opines Jonathan Gottschall. Such thoughts are widely disseminated and, presumably, widely believed.
stories have little to do with truth and everything to do with helping us impose order and certainty on a chaotic and unpredictable world, the storytelling theory purports to explain many things: why we believe in gods, myths and the supernatural; why we make art; why we put so little effort into distinguishing truth from lies; and why our decision-making is often so irrational.
no one can truly know anything for certain
human consciousness does not concern itself very much with truth. Lewis Wolpert wrote, “The primary aim of human judgment is not accuracy but the avoidance of paralyzing uncertainty. We have a fundamental need to tell ourselves stories that make sense of our lives.”
Science is always at a disadvantage against religion because faith is unassailable while theory, by its very nature, is subject to constant revision. We see this play out constantly, as the faithful point to new scientific discoveries that upend previously held concepts in order to “prove” that science can’t be trusted. After all, religion is founded on an immutable story, a solid rock upon which we can lash ourselves in any storm, while science is merely the shifting sand under our feet. From a purely epistemological view, scientific theories can of course be proven while religious ones cannot; but from a psychological view, this is both irrelevant and delusional. People follow religions because their precepts can be neither proven nor disproven; the more impermeable to reason, the better.
The matter at hand is not about the value of science as a human endeavor, which has yielded benefits of incalculable value even for those who reject it (e.g., electricity, vaccines, global navigation, central heating, etc.). It is about telling stories that make us feel better about ourselves and the world around us, regardless of their objective validity.
the question here is whether, in the practice of just living our lives, a true story is any better for us than an untrue one. And if not, perhaps the story is not the basic building block of human thought that we currently think it is.
cook vs write
Alain de Botton: Cooks: make the food others too busy to prepare. Writers: articulate thoughts others too preoccupied to formulate.
we are copycats
Donald Miller quote: “Sometimes you have to watch somebody love something before you can love it yourself. It is as if they are showing you the way.”
To learn swimming, we imitate other swimmers’ movement. We practise every movement until it clicks, we are swimming. To learn writing is little different. We can speak every word and every sentence, but how to organize them togetehr to communicate the idea and its reason and emotion to another person is not that obvious. Similarly, how to write a program has the initial difficulty too. The code is an abstraction of the instruction to the computer. The computer is an abstraction of electronic hardware and a bunch of code like bootloader and operating system too. From one abstraction to another, you have to show the ways to do it.