Context matters...........................

 

When you’re younger, you are swept up in the drama of your own life: leaving home, making a career, creating a family. As you age, unless you are either a world-historical genius or self-deluded, you begin to realize that whatever you accomplished doesn’t actually amount to all that much. The meaning of your life has more to do with your place in a direct chain—proceeding, obviously, from you down to your children and grandchildren, but also, less obviously, from you upward through generations of people you may not have known or even have heard of. They’re your context. You need to know about them in order to understand your own life fully.

-Nicholas Lemann, as culled from this story

hardwired................

 

Our elders tell us, "Don't judge a book by its cover."  Though well-intentioned advice, it doesn't entirely reflect the primitive parts of our brains that have had to make snap judgments for thousands of years to survive and thrive in our habitats.  We're hardwired to judge things by their covers because, in previous eras of lions, wolves, and marauding tribes, that's how our ancestors stayed alive.

     As evolved as we might seem today, this split-second context scanning and decision-making process never left us.  It's still a core part of our environmental awareness and innate survival system.  While we're not conscious of it, we prefer the world around us to be stable and predictable because it gives us a sense of control over our environment.  But deep down, we know stability isn't always possible.  So no matter where we are, we're constantly on the lookout for contextual clues and the slightest changes in our environment.

-Kevin Ervin Kelly, Irreplaceable:  How to Create Extraordinary Places That Bring People Together

aspects................................

 

Humans, like all other animals, are selective creatures; that is, our survival and flourishing depend on our ongoing, mostly unconscious, selection of aspects of our environment for attention, interaction, and transformation.  So, objects are events with meanings that 'stand out' within the context of a situation.

-Mark Johnson, The Aesthetics of Meaning and Thought

In theory, anyway...............

 

     Nothing in science—nothing in life, for that matter—makes sense without theory.  It is our nature to put all knowledge into context in order to tell a story, and to re-create the world by this means.

-Edward O. Wilson, Consilience: The Unity of Knowledge

Fun with statistics.................

That vertical line at the end of the chart represents the money supply - a 450% increase.  Scary? Inflationary?  Maybe, but not so fast.  Morgan Housel weighs in with some context:

Money supply has increased from $4 trillion a year ago to $18 trillion today.

A 450% increase!

That’s something you might see in a third-world country with hyperinflation.

But before you dump life savings into gold and build a bunker, here’s the punchline: The huge majority of the increase you’re seeing in this chart is not money printing or new money creation.

It’s an accounting rule change. . . .

Of the $14 trillion increase in M1, $11.2 trillion (80%) came from an accounting rule change that shifted money from savings accounts to checking accounts.

Forecasting is difficult *........................................

      Nor does talent exist in a vacuum.  Outstanding performers in part of a company may, when transferred, suddenly fail. . . . Hypotheses abounded but what everyone learned is that ability and environment are inextricably linked.  As anyone who's suffered a terrible boss will recognize: given the right circumstances, everybody can be made to fail.  Because achievement derives in part from context, forecasting individual talent omits half the picture.

-Margaret Heffernan, Uncharted:  How To Navigate The Future

* although the weather people seem to have gotten the latest snow forecast right

Models, again.............................

 You cannot derive a probability or a forecast or a policy recommendation from a model; the probability is meaningful, the forecast accurate or the policy recommendation well-founded only within the context of the model. . . . And our own experience in economics is that the most common explanation of a surprising result is the someone has made an error.  If finance, economics and business, models will never describe 'the world as it really is'.  Informed judgment will always be required in understanding and interpreting the output of a model and in using it in any large-world situation.

-John Kay and Mervyn King, Radical Uncertainty:  Decision=Making Beyond The Numbers

In defense....................................

..............of textbooks.   No word on why they're so expensive.

On point in time data.................

One of the reasons the fire-hose of information can actually make it harder to analyze the state of the world is because many people simply use point in time data instead of taking time to look at the overall trend.

Current data tells you very little unless you’re able to provide context about where it’s been and where it’s potentially going next.

-Ben Carlson, as lifted from here

This explains a lot..................

our species tends to think in terms of narrowly defined problems, and usually pays little attention to the most important feature of these problems: the wider context in which they are embedded. When we think we are solving the problem, we are in fact disrupting the context. Most consequences will then be unintended.

-Martin Gurri, from this upcoming book

via

History.............................

xkcd takes us back in time to the fall of 1881, a sad time in American history.  While many faithful readers will recognize the events involved, I'm guessing many a recent college graduate won't have a clue.  Perhaps we ignore history because there is so much of it, or maybe it's because we feel our own time (and by default, us) is special and unique.   The study of history offers an important context for understanding the human experience.   We avoid it at our own peril.

For those interested in the events of 1881, this book is highly recommended.

Context.............................

Jerry Seinfeld kept photos from the Hubble Space Telescope up on the wall in the Seinfeld writing room. “It would calm me when I would start to think that what I was doing was important,” he told Judd Apatow, in Sick in the Head. “You look at some pictures from the Hubble Telescope and you snap out of it.” When Apatow said that sounded depressing, Seinfeld replied, “People always say it makes them feel insignificant, but I don’t find being insignificant depressing. I find it uplifting.”


-as copy and pasted from Austin Kleon

On conceptual divisions.........

"... perhaps the great disaster of human history is one that happened to or within religion:  that is, the conceptual division between the holy and the world, the excerpting of the Creator from the creation."

-Wendell Berry

Context, not content....................

     Detachment from positionalities - and especially the positionalities occasioned by labeling - leads to serenity, freedom, and security.  Greater serenity arises from relating to the context of life rather than to the content, which is primarily a game board of interacting egos.  This broader style of relating to life leads to greater compassion and emancipation from being at the effect of the world.

     Like any limiting ego position, it is not position itself that requires relinquishment, but the emotional payoff or energy that holding on to that position provides to the ego.

-David R. Hawkins

Unfortunately...........................

“Now times had changed, and the inherited wisdom of the past had become folly.” 

-Arthur C. Clark, as culled from 2001:  A Space Odyssey

Love the quote, but removing it from its context might change its meaning.  Here it is in its full context:

      Those instincts had served his ancestors well, in the days of warm rains and lush fertility, when food was to be had everywhere for the plucking.  Now times had changed, and the inherited wisdom of the past had become folly.  The man-apes must adapt, or they must die - like the greater beasts who had gone before them, and whose bones now lay sealed within the limestone hills.

It's been longer than that........

"The last year or so has been really hard on the notion that is a linear progression from darkness to enlightenment"
-Matt Levine, as taken out of context here

Will ponder this for a while.....

"Everything, except God, has a context."

-David Warren

Sherlock Holmes...................................

...............................may have been offering investment advice.


"'Data! Data! Data!' he cried impatiently. 'I can't make bricks without clay.'"


Full story here


via

Speaking of Paradoxes.............

12.  Make small, big.  And big, small.

These endless small things.  What's the context?
Where do they really fit in?  What are you actually trying to do?  Make the small, big.

Those big things.  The 'man on the moon stuff.'  How can you make it brain friendly?  And time friendly?  Break it down, break it down, break it down.  Make the big, small.

-Nicholas Bate,  Paradoxical Productivity 35

Hmmm.....................................

All definitions of words, like everything else, are relative.  Definition is to a major degree dependent upon your partisan position.  Your leader is always flexible, he has pride in the dignity of his cause, he is unflinching, sincere, an ingenious tactician fighting the good fight.  To the opposition he is unprincipled and will go whichever way the wind blows, his arrogance is masked by a fake humility, he is dogmatically stubborn, a hypocrite, unscrupulous and unethical, and he will do anything to win; he is leading the forces of evil.  To one side he is a demigod, to the other a demagogue.

-Saul Alinsky,  Rules For Radicals:  A Pragmatic Primer for Realistic Radicals