Quotes
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Norbert Wiener on Feedback vs Learning
Feedback is a method of controlling a system by reinserting into it the results of its past performance. If these results are merely used as numerical data for the criticism of the system and its regulation, we have the simple feedback of control engineers. If, however, the information which proceeds backward from the performance is…
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Norbert Wiener on Structure and Performance
Cybernetics takes the view that the structure of the machine or organism is an index of the performance that may be expected from it. Norbert Wiener, The Human Use of Human Beings, Cybernetics and Society
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Norbert Wiener on the Environment, Progress
What many of us fail to realize is that the last four hundred years are a highly special period in the history of the world. The pace at which changes during these years have taken place is unexampled in earlier history, as is the very nature of these changes. This is partly the result of…
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N.T. Wright on the Lord’s Prayer
If we are truly praying this prayer to God’s honour, we can never simply pray for food for ourselves. We must pray for the needs of the whole world, where millions go hungry and many starve. And already we may sense, bubbling up out of the prayer, the realization that if we truly pray it…
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Bryan Jarrell on Self Care
The whole concept of self-care puts the onus of stress management on the individual when the problem is living in a stressful world … Self-care can be a sort of social gaslighting, where we blame humans for struggling in the midst of inhumane conditions. Sometimes, the problem isn’t our inability to measure up to life’s…
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Don Hertzfeldt on Hunting vs Being Fed
Not to sound like a curmudgeon, but when I was a teenager, I took the train to go to the record store to find rare stuff. Spotify is way more convenient, but that wasn’t the point. The point was to get out and feel like you’re hunting, to feel like you’re living your life. I’m…
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Hildegard of Bingen, The Enlightened Heart
Holy Spirit,Giving life to all life,Moving all creatures,Root of all things,Washing them clean,Wiping out their mistakes,Healing their wounds,You are our true life,Luminous, wonderful,Awakening the heart from its ancient sleep. Hildegard of Bingen, The Enlightened Heart
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Elizabeth Oldfield, Soul Work for the End of the World
The reconcilably bittersweet nature of adulthood was suddenly too much. I am purportedly a grown-up, but I don’t know the answers. I feel bone-weary from carrying around heavy things. I hate that monsters exist, and that they often win, and that some of them live in me. Elizabeth Oldfield, Soul Work for the End of…
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Norbert Wiener on Entropy’s End Game
In a very real sense we are shipwrecked passengers on a doomed planet. Yet even in a shipwreck, human decencies and values do not necessarily vanish, and we must make the most of them. We shall go down, but let it be in a manner which we may look forward to as worthy of our…