Selfishness and Self-love

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If it is a virtue to love my neighbor as a human being, it must be a virtue and not a vice-to love myself since I am a human being too. There is no concept of man in which I myself am not included. A doctrine which proclaims such an exclusion proves itself to be intrinsically contradictory. The idea expressed in the Biblical “Love thy neighbor as thyself!” implies that respect for one’s own integrity and uniqueness, love for and understanding of one’s own self, can not be separated from respect for and love and understanding of another individual. The love for my own self is inseparably connected with the love for any other self.

The affirmation of one’s own life, happiness, growth, freedom, is rooted in one’s capacity to love, i.e., in care, respect, responsibility, and knowledge. If an individual is able to love productively, he loves himself too; if he can love only others, he can not love at all.

The selfish person.. can see nothing but himself; he judges everyone and everything from its usefulness to him; he is basically unable to love. Does not this prove that concern for others and concern for oneself are unavoidable alternatives? This would be so if selfishness and self-love were identical. But.. selfishness and self-love, far from being identical, are actually opposites.

Eric Fromm, Man for Himself

The Process of Transitions

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Change is a situational shift.

Getting a new boss is a change, and so is receiving a promotion or losing your job.

Moving to a different house is a change, and so it remodeling your house or losing it in a fire.

Having a new change is a change for everyone in the family—including the new baby, who was pretty well situated before all the change too place.

And, of course, losing a loved one is a change—a huge one.

Transition, on the other hand, is the process of letting go of the way things used to be and then taking hold of the way they subsequently become. In between the letting go and the taking hold again, there is a chaotic but potentially creative “neutral zone” when things aren’t the old way, but aren’t really a new way yet either. This three-phase process—ending, neutral zone, beginning again—is transition.

William Bridges, The Way of Transition

Loose, Messy and Chaotic

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Tight ways of thinking and working, while being superficially attractive and comforting, don't work. They have been built on the illusion of control. This illusion – propagated by legions of consultants, economists, market researchers and other purveyors of empirical snake oil – has actually made businesses less capable of embracing the complex realities of the modern world.

Agility, flexibility, a willingness to exercise judgement and an ability to improvise will become the defining characteristics of successful institutions in the next decades. This means fighting the instinct to solve every problem through rules and regulations and recognising the limitations of long-term planning and the painfully slow nature of most internal decision-making processes.

It means accepting the need to operate in real time and making the organisational and cultural changes necessary to achieve it. And most importantly, it means building a strong, self-sustaining, trusting organisational culture rather than in investing in yet more process and bureaucracy.

The future is loose, messy and chaotic: now is the time to embrace it.

Martin Thomas, Loose: The Future of Business is Letting Go

The clarity of the next hour and the fuzziness of the next year

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Studies show that the parts of the brain that are primarily responsible for generating feelings of pleasurable excitement become active when people imagine receiving a reward such as money in the near future but not when they imagine receiving the same reward in the far future.

If you’ve ever bought too many boxes of Thin Mints from the Girl Scout who hawks her wares in front of the local library but too few boxes from the Girl Scout who rings your doorbell and takes your order for future delivery, then you’ve experienced this anomaly yourself. When we spy the future through our prospectiscopes, the clarity of the next hour and the fuzziness of the next year can lead us to make a variety of mistakes.

Daniel Gilbert, Stumbling on Happiness

Critical Ignoring compliments Critical Thinking

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On the web, where a witches’ brew of advertisers, lobbyists, conspiracy theorists and foreign governments conspire to hijack attention, the same strategy spells doom. Online, critical ignoring is just as important as critical thinking. 

That’s because, like a pinball bouncing from bumper to bumper, our attention careens from notification to text message to the next vibrating thing we must check. A flood of information depletes attention and fractures the ability to concentrate.

Sam Wineburg writing in The Conversation

25 Data Science Articles from Dec 2022

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A Pandas DataFrame cheatsheet for exploratory analysis & data manipulation 

Five ways that data roles will change in 2023 related to Chief Data Officers

AI & machine learning are “top of mind for the Army, especially as it pertains to protecting its assets in space”

10 weird things about SpaceX's more than 3,000 Starlink satellites (and that number keeps growing)

Initial specific steps toward launching a machine learning project 

Adobe has just released a remarkable and free AI-powered enhanced speech tool

The four biggest trends they expect to shape the AI landscape in 2023

Synthetic data applications, limitations & vulnerabilities

A guide to the roles and responsibilities on a data migration team

A tech journalist goes back to high school to find out what OpenAI’s Chatbot can pass AP Lit

The current limitations of AI’s military impact & where tech could one day spark “revolutionary changes” 

How Bayesian network structure learning can incorporate missing data 

The NGA has plans to develop an overarching cloud-based enterprise management system capable of automating its data collection and dissemination and ultimately replacing the overall Foundation GEOINT storage and management process 

A new paper on “Localization and classification of space objects using EfficientDet detector for space situational awareness”

Potential uses of ChatGPT for data scientists

McKinsey on the state of AI since the research firm began tracking it five years ago

A new collaborative effort is designed to “support interoperable open map data as a shared asset that can strengthen mapping services worldwide”

Different kinds of geospatial specialists are needed in different situations

China outpaces efforts by U.S. intelligence agencies to harness power of publicly available data 

The Space Dev Agency’s first major satellite launch has been delayed again

A look under the hood: How does ChatGPT work internally? 

An AI method from MIT and IBM research “improves the training and inference performance of deep learning models on large graphs”

Some basics about the new AI called ChatGPT 

Why Neural Network explainability is important, how to do it, & the tools for it

“The FCC approved part of SpaceX’s application for the second generation of the Starlink constellation, which will allow SpaceX to deploy up to 7,500 satellites”

The abundance-oriented approach

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When you don't need to compare yourself to other people, you gravitate towards things that you instinctively enjoy doing, and you're good at, and if you just focus on that for a long enough time, then chances are very, very high that you're going to progress towards mastery anyway, and the fame and the power and the money and everything will come as a byproduct, rather than something that you chase directly in trying to be superior to other people.

If you were to go back to the three things that people need—mastery, belonging, and autonomy—I'd add a fourth, after basic necessities have been met. It’s the attitude or the worldview that you bring to life. And that worldview can be characterized, just for simplicity, in one of two fashions: One extreme is a kind of scarcity-minded approach, that my win is going to come at somebody else's loss, which makes you engage in social comparisons. And the other view is what I would call a more abundance-oriented approach, that there's room for everybody to grow.

Raj Raghunathan quoted in the Atlantic

The Gift of Belonging

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We all need a place we can call home – not just brick and mortar and four walls, but an atmosphere that is secure, where we feel completely comfortable with each other in the sureness that we belong, and that our happiness and well-being are of utmost importance to our partner. John Powell has captured the essence of this love in one sentence: “We need the heart of another as a home for our hearts.”

You are accustomed to spending time together without quarrels and recriminations, so that you feel safe with each other. At the same time, familiarity should never bred discourtesy. The courteous kindness we show our partners should be even greater than courtesy shown to anyone else.

Although warm affection seems as simple and uncomplicated as the comfort of an old shoe, it takes a measure of time and consistent behavior to build this love in your (relationship) – time spent in proving to each other that you can be depended on to be loyal, supportive and kind. In short, that you can be depended on.

It is possible to begin developing this love now, even if you have failed in the past. It will require forgiving and forgetting past mistakes. It will necessitate a practical decision to be one against the world. It must include consistent kindness in your daily behavior, for this is fundamental to the continuance of love.

Ed Wheat, Love-Life for Every Married Couple

The Truth about Teams

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There’s this erroneous notion that we’re team players, meaning we’ll work even harder for the team than we would for ourselves. But in real life we belong to five or six different teams, none of which provide this deep sense of belonging. You’re on the marketing team and I’m on the product team and we’re also on the quality team. We’re not solely devoted to a single team. Plus, coordinating teamwork—organizing meetings and such—causes about a 40 percent loss in productivity. And there’s another problem. There’s this concept that teams need to have good relationships between members in order to be high-performing. But a team that’s all chummy, with no discord, is often like a couple that’s burying something and not talking about it. Teams are going to be challenged, and they have to perform—and that sometimes requires yelling at teammates or doing something that pisses people off. Discord can be more associated with performance than harmony is.

Po Bronson quoted in Wired magazine

Missing the Miracle

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He looked like anything but a king. His face is prudish and red. His cry, though strong and healthy, is still the helpless and piercing cry of a baby. And he is absolutely dependent upon Mary for his well-being.

Majesty in the midst of the mundane. Holiness in the filth of sheep manure and sweat. Divinity entering the world on the floor of a stable, through the womb of a teenager and in the presence of a carpenter. This baby had overlooked the universe. The rags keep him warm were the robes of eternity. His golden throne room had been abandoned n favor of a dirty sheep pen. And worshiping angels had been replaced with kind but bewildered shepherds.

Meanwhile, the city hums. The merchants were unaware that God has visited their planet. The innkeeper would never believe that he had just sent God in to the cold. And the people would scoff at anyone who told them the Messiah lay int he arms of a teenager on the outskirts of their village. There were all too busy to consider the possibility.

Those who missed His Majesty's arrival that night missed it not because of evil acts or malice; no, they missed it because they simply weren't looking. Little has changed in the last two thousand years, has it?

From God Came Near by Max Lucado