“Ignoring” is not the same as “noticing”; the difference is right there in the words!
You are right that it is undesirable to be a slave to one's emotions, to keep having emotional outbursts or “expressing” all emotions impulsively. But at the other extreme if you try to address this by building a habit of dissociation and “ignoring” your feelings (as you propose), that is also not good, and not how Stoicism or meditation address it. (To use an analogy: it would be bad for a parent to be a slave to their children, or for a charioteer to be led by their horses instead of controlling them. But ignoring them isn't great either!)
Stoicism addresses this preemptively, building a practice of having a proportionate response to things outside our control. Meditation also addresses this by, as you said, noticing emotions when they arise, recognizing them for what they are (creating some distance), and letting them pass instead of indulging them. Ignoring your emotions or letting them burst out are both different from letting them pass/seeing them through.
- The first part says: if you shrug off someone else's cup being broken as just an accident, you should also do the same when yours gets broken.
- Then he clearly says “Apply now the same principle to the matters of greater importance.”
- The last part says that if you respond to someone else's bereavement with platitudes like “Such is the lot of man” or “This is an accident of mortality” (this does not preclude some amount of sympathy and compassion preceding those statements!), then you should respond the same to yours, rather than thinking of yourself as uniquely wretched and unfortunate.
The main point is about being consistent in how you view others' fate and yours: not that you should care equally about someone's wife and yours (or that you should be indifferent to either), just that the story you tell about life and fortune should be the same.
[He's also obviously distinguishing the cup situation (a simple everyday thing where the principle is easy to see and follow, given as an establishing example) from the wife situation (a situation where the principle is harder to apply), by saying “greater things” / “higher matters” / “matters of greater importance”.]
There's logic to prevent you from viewing more than five translations at one time, but I'm happy to see you got right past that by url-hacking. It breaks the layout a little bit and makes the site even worse on mobile.
I see you included all the translations except Stephen Walton's. Yes he took some liberties, but I like it anyway :)
Thanks for making this site; I love it and have returned to it many times. (I don't mind the layout with all translations even on mobile; I just rotate my phone or decrease font size.) I read through the whole thing recently. (https://twitter.com/svat/status/2004591889010643102)
Stephen Walton's translation is actually my favourite! I omitted it here because this is HN and likely someone would complain the translation is clearly incorrect because it talks about “Your neighbor’s car gets hit in a parking lot”. But to include it too just for completeness :) https://enchiridion.tasuki.org/display:Code:e,ec,twh,twr,gl,...
I'm very glad to hear all that! My goal was to make it easy to use, so the following part of your blog post (2019!) absolutely made my day:
> The software too pleasantly just worked, with no setup or install required: just clone the sample app, change the filenames and <base href="..."> in index.html as it mentions. It’s a joy when that happens.
Suffice to say, many people haven't had as much success as you: they fumbled around for 10-20 commits and ended up with something broken. I think requiring people to edit json is just too much :)
The article describes a bad programmer as one whose programs “die young”. I would guess that Knuth is saying is that the longest one of his programs lived (was used?) for 12 years?
If that is what he meant, I presume this remark was written well in the past, as TeX has lasted way more than 12 years.
∀ᶠ ε : ℝ in [>] 0, ∀ C > (0 : ℝ), ∀ C' > C,
∃ a b n : ℕ,
0 < n ∧
ε * n < a ∧
ε * n < b ∧
a ! * b ! ∣ n ! * (a + b - n)! ∧
a + b > n + C * log n ∧
a + b < n + C' * log n
Yes on the one hand, one needs to know enough about Lean to be sure that this formulation matches what we intend, and isn't stating something trivial. But on the other hand, this is not as hard as finding an error on some obscure line of a long proof.
Live out of a suitcase, travel the world, hang out with a wide selection of excellent mathematicians, write joint papers with many of them, when you get bored or stuck, pack the suitcase and keep moving - for your whole life.
- Minor nit: The documentation mentions "uvx aristotlelib@latest aristotle" but that doesn't work; it should be "uvx --from aristotlelib@latest aristotle"
- It took me a minute or two of clicking around to figure out that the (only?) way to use it is to create an API key, then start aristotle in the terminal and interact with it there. It could be more obvious I think.
The book Concrete Mathematics started as course notes for a class whose textbook initially was the (dense) "Mathematical Preliminaries" chapter of The Art of Computer Programming (Chapter 1 and roughly the first half of Volume 1), so it can be seen as an expanded and leisurely (and even more delightful, because of all the student jokes and other marginalia) version of that chapter. This is mathematics that Knuth needed for the rest of TAOCP.
So it's more "mathematics for the analysis of algorithms" (incidentally the title of another book by Greene and co-authored by Knuth), and so probably most applicable to the field of "AofA" rather than physics or computer science in general.
Lovely book, very few math books fill one with as much joy as this one.
FWIW the XKCD talk at Google is here (wow, 18 years ago! I remember watching this video when it was posted): https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=zJOS0sV2a24 (Knuth comes up to ask a question at 21:30) (Can't tell from the video where he was sitting otherwise, though there are definitely at least some people sitting on the floor.)
• Bank accounts and cash. If you're tracking a single number, do you track a cash withdrawal (and then ignore purchases with cash), or do you ignore cash withdrawals (and track cash purchases)? With double-entry accounting, you just track withdrawals as money flowing (Bank account) -> (Cash), and purchases as (Cash) -> (Stuff) or whatever you want to call it; both are equally cleanly represented.
• Bank accounts and credit-card (or other loan) repayments. Similar thing: if you were to use a single number, do you change it when you make a purchase with a credit card (and ignore tracking paying your credit card bill) or do you change it when you pay your credit card bill (and ignore purchases with your card)? With double-entry accounting you just treat them as money flowing (Bank account) -> (Credit card) and (Credit card) -> (Expenses). And your bank account statements and credit card statements will both make sense in isolation, if you have this complete picture.
You are right that it is undesirable to be a slave to one's emotions, to keep having emotional outbursts or “expressing” all emotions impulsively. But at the other extreme if you try to address this by building a habit of dissociation and “ignoring” your feelings (as you propose), that is also not good, and not how Stoicism or meditation address it. (To use an analogy: it would be bad for a parent to be a slave to their children, or for a charioteer to be led by their horses instead of controlling them. But ignoring them isn't great either!)
Stoicism addresses this preemptively, building a practice of having a proportionate response to things outside our control. Meditation also addresses this by, as you said, noticing emotions when they arise, recognizing them for what they are (creating some distance), and letting them pass instead of indulging them. Ignoring your emotions or letting them burst out are both different from letting them pass/seeing them through.
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