Quote of the Fortnight:
@nestguy – “Writing for Medium is like joining a hip gym where all the benefits of your workouts are transferred to the gym owner’s body.”
« La séparation des sciences et des lettres est un artefact universitaire, créé de toute pièce par l’enseignement. – Michel Serres » – via @zecool [The separation of the sciences and the arts is a created fiction by the higher education system.]
Today in 1986, Charles Bukowski wrote a great letter to the man who rescued him from his ‘9 to 5’ job – via @raesmaa
And what hurts is the steadily diminishing humanity of those fighting to hold jobs they don’t want but fear the alternative worse. People simply empty out. They are bodies with fearful and obedient minds. The color leaves the eye. The voice becomes ugly. And the body. The hair. The fingernails. The shoes. Everything does.
The intelligent, the bandits, the helpless and the stupid – by A Man with a PhD
One hallmark of the bandits when they run a company is that they are mostly concerned with how Wall Street sees them, focused on quarterly earnings instead of long term growth, looking at market share rather than profitability. All in order to maximize the money they get. Short term manipulation is better than long term growth.
Selfishness doomed while cooperation evolves, study says – via @dinoboy89
In their study, released Thursday in Nature Communications, they created theoretical populations of organisms in which some were selfish and some were “suckers,” as Adami put it. If the two personality types were unable to tell each other apart, the selfish individuals would attack one another and the suckers and eventually go extinct, and the suckers would win. However, if the selfish ones could recognize the suckers but not vice versa, then the selfish ones would win, playing nice with one another while killing off the suckers.
Co-operation beats competition in natural selection. “Maybe we should teach ourselves how co-operate better?” – @paulgslatter
“We found evolution will punish you if you’re selfish and mean. For a short time and against a specific set of opponents, some selfish organisms may come out ahead. But selfishness isn’t evolutionarily sustainable.”
