след лемминга

— Ну хорошо, следующий вопрос. Как вы понимаете пословицу “бесплатный сыр бывает только в мышеловке?”

— Ну… бесплатный сыр обычно достается второй мыши.

— Это как?

— Когда первая попадается в мышеловку, вторая мышь может спокойно подойти и забрать сыр себе. Что? Я опять что-то не так сказал? Только не говорите, что вторая мышь должна спасать первую!

Приведу в качестве примера пять недостатков современного демократического устройства.

Во-первых, оно культивирует демагогию, и особенно раздачу пустых предвыборных обещаний, выполнять которые в реальности никто не собирается.

Во-вторых, провоцирует краткосрочное мышление. Политики редко думают дальше, чем на одни выборы вперед, а ведь для полноценного и гармоничного развития страны горизонт должен составлять 20-30 лет, и даже больше.

В-третьих, у государственных чиновников нет никаких реальных стимулов предлагать населению высококачественные услуги по низким ценам. В любом, самом демократическом обществе фактически существует монополия на оказание госуслуг — поставщик один, и у него нет конкуренции.

В-четвертых, легитимность правительства в современной демократии обеспечивается так называемым общественным договором. Эта идея восходит ко временам Жан-Жака Руссо и прочих деятелей Просвещения, но понятие это довольно эфемерное.

Наконец, в-пятых, если посмотреть на количество избирателей, которые голосовали не за правящую партию, правительство или президента, то окажется, что в большинстве демократий их почти половина. Это довольно много людей, чтобы их игнорировать.

My friend and business partner Tom Pinckney started two companies with me and one company before. He invented many non-trivial patented inventions and raised many millions of dollars in venture capital, and returned capital to those investors many times over.

He got his Bachelors and Master degrees from MIT. He’s the nicest, smartest, and most decent guy you’ll ever meet.

But my favorite thing about Tom is he never got a high school degree. High school students today optimize their grades and SATs and after school activities. They speak French and Chinese, play piano and paint abstract art. They dance around and play hockey and act like they help homeless people.

Tom grew up in rural South Carolina and mostly stayed at home writing video games on his Apple II. There was no place nearby to go to high school. He took a few community college classes but none of those places could give him a high school degree. It didn’t really matter - all he wanted to do was program computers. So when it came time to apply to college, Tom just printed out a pile of code he wrote and sent it to colleges.

Stanford, Berkeley and everyone else summarily dismissed his application on technical grounds - he didn’t have a high school diploma.

MIT looked at his code and said, “we like it” - we accept you.

For his Masters the best four CS schools - Stanford, Berkeley, Carniegie Mellon, and MIT — all recruited Tom He stayed at MIT, the school that gave him a chance without a high school degree.

MIT is a national treasure. If you believe in meritocracy and the American dream, you believe in MIT.

Gerin oil (or Geriniol to give it its scientific name) is a powerful drug which acts directly on the central nervous system to produce a range of characteristic symptoms, often of an antisocial or self- damaging nature. If administered chronically in childhood, Gerin oil can permanently modify the brain to produce adult disorders, including dangerous delusions which have proved very hard to treat.

Gerin oil addiction can drive previously sane individuals to run away from a normally fulfilled human life and retreat to closed communities from which all but confirmed addicts are excluded. These communities are nearly always limited to one sex, and they vigorously, often obsessively, forbid sexual activity. Indeed, a tendency towards agonised sexual prohibition emerges as a drably recurring theme amid all the colourful variations of Gerin oil symptomatology. Gerin oil does not seem to reduce the libido per se, but it frequently leads to a prurient desire to interfere with, and preferably reduce, the sexual pleasure of others.

Strong doses of Geriniol can also lead to “bad trips,” in which the user can suffer morbid delusions and fears, notably fears of being tortured, not in the real world but in a postmortem fantasy world.

Medium doses of Gerin oil, though not in themselves dangerous, can distort perceptions of reality. Beliefs that have no basis in fact are immunised, by the drug’s own direct effects on the nervous system, against evidence from the real world.

You might think that such a potentially dangerous and addictive drug would top the list of proscribed substances, with exemplary sentences handed out for trafficking in it. But no, it is readily obtainable anywhere in the world and you don’t even need a prescription. Professional pushers are numerous, and organised in hierarchical cartels, openly trading on street corners and even in purpose-made buildings. Some of these cartels are adept at parting clients from their money.

Я очень люблю собственные внутренние диалоги. То есть я предпочитаю их огромное воображаемое содержание полному отсутствию того, что есть на самом деле. Обычно это происходит как-нибудь так. – Это… Ну… И чо? – говорит во мне кто-нибудь романтичный и непоследовательный. – Ну ты вообще сам-то как думаешь? – отвечает ему некто рассудительный и здравый. – Ребят, дайте поспать, а! – кричит совсем уже непонятно кто такой, возможно посторонний. – Сережа, ты где?! (ой, извините, это кажется, звонит моя мама).

Чем хороши такие внутренние диалоги в психическом и практическом плане? Они отвлекают вашу истинную сущность, занимают ее огромным количеством дел и создают так называемое богатство впечатлений. И именно в это время вы можете спокойно вздохнуть, расслабиться, отупеть и принять действительность такой, как есть, без прикрас: ведь она – всего лишь фотография, на которой синий пингвин разговаривает с резиновой уткой.

Let’s begin by looking at how reading happens in the brain. Stanislas Dehaene, a neuroscientist at the Collège de France in Paris, has helped to demonstrate that the literate brain contains two distinct pathways for making sense of words, each activated in different contexts. One pathway, known as the ventral route, is direct and efficient: We see a group of letters, convert those letters into a word and then directly grasp the word’s meaning. When you’re reading a straightforward sentence in a clear format, you’re almost certainly relying on this neural highway. As a result, the act of reading seems effortless. We don’t have to think about the words on the page.

But the ventral route is not the only way to read. The brain’s second reading pathway, the dorsal stream, is turned on when we have to pay conscious attention to a sentence. Perhaps we’ve encountered an obscure word or a patch of smudged ink. (In his experiments, Mr. Dehaene activates this pathway in a variety of ways, such as rotating the letters or filling the prose with errant punctuation.) Although scientists had previously assumed that the dorsal route ceased to be active once we became literate, Mr. Dehaene’s research demonstrates that even adults are still forced to occasionally decipher a text.

The lesson of his research is that the act of reading observes a gradient of awareness. Familiar sentences rendered on lucid e-ink screens are read quickly and effortlessly. Unusual sentences with complex clauses and odd punctuation tend to require more conscious effort, which leads to more activation in the dorsal pathway. All the extra cognitive work wakes us up; we read more slowly, but we notice more. Psychologists call this the “levels-of-processing” effect, since sentences that require extra levels of analysis are more likely to get remembered.

E-readers have yet to dramatically alter the reading experience; e-ink still feels a lot like old-fashioned ink. But it seems inevitable that the same trends that have transformed our televisions will also affect our reading gadgets. And this is where the problems begin. Do we really want reading to be as effortless as possible? The neuroscience of literacy suggests that, sometimes, the best way to make sense of a difficult text is to read it in a difficult format, to force our brain to slow down and process each word. After all, reading isn’t about ease—it’s about understanding. If we’re going to read Kant on the Kindle, or Proust on the iPad, then we should at least experiment with an ugly font.

Then there is the infamous “Yale Goal Study.” According to some writers, in 1953 a team of researchers interviewed Yale’s graduating seniors, asking them whether they had written down the specific goals that they wanted to achieve in life. Twenty years later the researchers tracked down the same cohort and found that the 3 percent of people who had specific goals all those years before had accumulated more personal wealth than the other 97 percent of their classmates combined.

It is a great story, frequently cited in self-help books and seminars to illustrate the power of goal setting. There is just one small problem—as far as anyone can tell, the experiment never actually took place.

In 2007 writer Lawrence Tabak, from the magazine Fast Company, attempted to track down the study, contacting several writers who had cited it, the secretary of the Yale Class of 1953, and other researchers who had tried to discover whether the study had actually happened.1 No one could produce any evidence that it had ever been conducted, causing Tabak to conclude that it was almost certainly nothing more than an urban myth. For years, self-help gurus had been happy to describe a study without checking their facts.