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This is from Adam Davidson. I spent two years working on the Jeffrey Epstein podcast, Broken. I became close with many of his victims and learned a lot of stuff that–for annoying legal reasons–we can’t publish. That experience has fundamentally reshaped how I see the world. TL;DR: I knew that rich and powerful men can get away with a lot. I didn’t realize just how much they can get away with and just how much the entire system–courts, journalism, prosecutors–works inadvertently and deliberately, to reinforce their impunity. ...

“I will stay in the fray, in the revel of ideas and risk; learning, failing, wooing, grieving, trusting, working, reposing – in this sin of language and lips.” “We have to follow not the path of self-enlightening doubt, but the path of despair. … This path is self-completing because it is more radical than mere doubt, and because it presents the ‘complete’ forms of ‘untrue consciousness in its untruth’.” “This is the counsel of despair which would keep the mind out of hell. The tradition is far kinder in its understanding that to live, to love, is to be failed, to forgive, to have failed, to be forgiven, for ever and ever. Keep your mind in hell, and despair not.” ...

Find the value of x and y for the following two equations: $$ \sqrt{x} + y = 7 $$ $$ x + \sqrt{y} = 11 $$ My solutuin is based on a guess. From the above, the instinct is that both x and y are the numbers like 1, 4, 9, 16, etc. If we rewrite the equations as follows: $$ x = (7 - y)^2 $$ $$ y = (11 -x)^2 $$ ...

“What opportunities can’t I see because they’re not prestigious enough?” “You don’t really outperform your peers with quality per se, you outperform your peers by finding underpriced quality that others don’t judge to be valuable.” Girard’s philosophy teaches us that the world is filled with under-priced opportunities that are only available to people who are comfortable with promising, but low-status projects. The modern world rejects imitation in favor of originality at all costs. You should never say what others are saying, never paint what others are painting, never think what others are thinking, and so on. Since this is absolutely impossible, there soom emerges a negative imitation that sterilizes everything … More and more often they’re obliged to turn their coats inside out and, with great fanfare, announce some new “epistemological rupture” that is supposed to revolutionize the field from top to bottom. This rage for originality has produced a few rare masterpieces and quite a few rather bizarre things … ...

Starting from 2020, the pandemic set the background for this decade and further. Then George Floyd and subsequent BLM opened the ugly side of America wide to the world. The only light note was that the new genetic vaccine was developed in a record speed and saved the world from the virus. With that, it is still tragic to see that the zero-policy in China was still effective causing unnecessary harms to people brutally. ...

每个人都有一个自己的世界。人人不同，每个人的世界也不同，这些小世界都是有局限的。我们的小世界存在于一个巨大的世界之中。生命不过是黑暗之间的一道闪电，如何改变自己，如何体验这个巨大的世界，是每个人都该问的问题。 逻辑需要训练，科学需要学习，人的认知偏差需要时时警惕。语言如迷雾一般，需要小心驾驭。而交流分享自己的小世界，是理解那个大世界的唯一办法。居里夫人说，生活不需担心，而要理解。明白越多，害怕就越少。 Nothing in life is to be feared, it is only to be understood. Now is the time to understand more, so that we may fear less. – Marie Curie

1 Yesterday 21 people were killed in an attack by a lone gunman at an elementary school in Uvalde, Texas. The 18-year-old gunman was killed by police. Why tragedies like this happen again and again in the United States? Buffalo, Laguna Woods, Sandy hook, Santa Fe High, El Paso, and so many others. March 13, 1996. 26 years ago, a gunman entered Dunblane Primary School in Scotland, killed 16 kids and a teacher. The UK government responded by enacting tight gun control legislation. Since then there has been a total of zero school shootings in the UK. ...

Kant has four big questions for philosophy. What can I know? How should I act? For what can I hope? What is the human being? This writing has something to do with Kant’s last question. In the book of “Last Chance to See”, Douglas Adams told an anecdote about the Golden Pavilion Temple in Kyoto. “I remembered once, in Japan, having been to see the Gold Pavilion Temple in Kyoto and being mildly surprised at quite how well it had weathered the passage of time sicne it was first built in the fourteenth century. I was told it hadn’t weathered well at all, and had in fact been burnt to the ground twice in this century.” ...

“Moral worth should be judged not in terms of the naturalness of a trait, but rather in terms of how that trait impacts the wellbeing of everyone affected by it. Thus, violence is natural but bad, medicine unnatural but good.” – Steve Stewart-Williams, The Ape that Understood the Universe 道德与否不应该以某一属性是否自然为依据，而是应该以该属性是否会影响所有人的福祉为据。正因为如此，暴力是自然的却是不对的，医药是非自然的却是好的。

“The battle to feed all of humanity is over.” This is the first line of Paul Ehrlich’s book ‘The Population Bomb’, published in 1968. The book sold millions of copies and was taken very seriously. The Malthus’s prediction of what is now called Malthusian trap. That is more an observation of the cyclical patterns of population boom and bust that had happened for most of human existence. The the industrial revolution changed things at some great costs. ...