Ben White

Montaigne

08.17.26 // Reading

From Stefan Zweig’s short book on the famous sixteenth-century Frenchman, a passage where Montaigne rales against schooling as the mere transmission of knowledge:

“They never cease whining into our ears,” he gripes, “as if it were being poured into a funnel, and our task is merely to parrot back everything we have been told.” Instead of allowing his own thoughts to ripen in his mind, the masters fill it with a petrified knowledge and leave it “bereft of insight and consciousness”. And he angrily contests: “What use is it to have a bellyful of meat, if one cannot digest it, if it cannot transform us, if it cannot improve us and fortify us?”

…

“As when plants suffocate for too much moisture, and lamps from too much oil, so the action of the spirit is suffocated by an overload of study and matter.” Such knowledge is a burden on the mind, not an action of the soul: “To know by heart is not to know, it is to keep what they have given you and store it in your memory.”

…

Therefore, later, the mature man will hand out a bad mark and a good lesson to those masters who only seek to inculcate rules mechanically: “our masters”, he says in his last years, should judge the aptitude of a child not by his memory but by the testimony of his life… Let the young man read and sift and verify, not just accept the authority in good faith. A rich variety of opinions must be presented to him. He will make his choice, and if he cannot, then he will remain in doubt. He who sheep-like follows another follows nothing. He discovers nothing, because he seeks nothing.

As Montaigne may have hoped, modern pedagogy has moved more toward flipped classrooms and discussion sections. After all, there is a difference between information and education. Interesting, though, is how the cheapening of readily accessible knowledge seems to have stunted educational growth. Perhaps a driven, precocious polymath may not have needed those strict guardrails of a rigid system, but inadequate groundwork and the lack of constraint also don’t seem to, well, work.

Undeniably:

Books are, I find, the best provisions a man can take with him on life’s journey.

Zweig happily points out that Montaigne, like Marcus Aurelius, was learning in public, not issuing decrees from a self-help pulpit:

It is true: Montaigne achieved little else in his life aside from posing the question: “How should I live?” But what is so magnificent, so philanthropic in his case, is that when he posed this question: “How should I live?” he did not insist on following it up with: “This is how you should live!”

…

He had never sought to counsel others on anything he did not know intimately himself. “This is not my doctrine; it is my study, and no one else’s lesson but my own.”

Possible false humility aside, admirable restraint.

The Purpose of Perception

08.03.26 // Reading

From Douglas Hoffman’s “Interface Theory of Perception” as described in 2019’s The Case Against Reality:

The purpose of a desktop interface is not to show you the ‘truth’ of the computer — where ‘truth,’ in this metaphor, refers to circuits, voltages, and layers of software. Rather, the purpose of an interface is to hide the ‘truth’ and to show simple graphics that help you perform useful tasks such as crafting emails and editing photos. If you had to toggle voltages to craft an email, your friends would never hear from you. That is what evolution has done. It has endowed us with senses that hide the truth and display the simple icons we need to survive long enough to raise offspring. Space, as you perceive it when you look around, is just your desktop — a 3D desktop. Apples, snakes, and other physical objects are simply icons in your 3D desktop.

Interesting.

Steven Pinker essentially summed up the argument well back in 1997:

We are organisms, not angels, and our minds are organs, not pipelines to the truth. Our minds evolved by natural selection to solve problems that were life-and-death matters to our ancestors, not to commune with correctness.

As British statistician George E.P. Box once famously said, “All models are wrong, but some are useful.”

Three quotes about science from the delightful Reality Is Not What it Seems by theoretical physicist Carlo Rovelli:

Science is born from this act of humility: not trusting blindly in our past knowledge and our intuition. Not believing what everyone says. Not having faith in the accumulated knowledge of our fathers and grandfathers.

Science is not reliable because it provides certainty. It is reliable because it provides us with the best answers we have at present.

It is precisely its openness, the fact that it constantly calls current knowledge into question, which guarantees that the answers it offers are the best so far available: if you find better answers, these new answers become science.

Rovelli’s book on “The Journey to Quantum Gravity” includes a thoroughly enjoyable tour of physics from Democritus (pre-Socratic originator of the atomic theory of the universe) through today. As one might imagine, the implications of quantum loop gravity aren’t easy to grok. Nonetheless, he tackles the challenge admirably: eminently readable, highly recommended.

// 07.20.26

From Mattering, by Jennifer Breheny Wallace:

We lose our footing and our sense of where we fit. The world feels colder, unwelcoming. The human brain wasn’t built for this kind of world. We often describe what’s happening around us as a mental health crisis, but this language only provides a partial picture. In truth, we are living through a social health crisis, a profound breakdown of the relationships that once protected us. We’ve lost track of our most basic human needs for connection and contribution. Now we often feel tempted to fill that void with counterfeit forms of mattering—chasing attention over connection, prestige over purpose, and money over meaning. The rise in loneliness, burnout, and anxiety is the predictable consequence of a society that has forgotten how to make people feel valued.

And later:

There’s a growing tendency in our culture to treat responsibility to others as an inconvenience, an obligation to dodge or delegate. In trying to guard against burnout or preserve autonomy, we can begin to see every task as a threat, like one more thing to manage rather than a sign that we matter.

It’s hard to feel weightless but simultaneously anchored.

// 07.14.26

From Pilgrim at Tinker Creek, by Annie Dillard:

Thomas Merton wrote, “There is always a temptation to diddle around in the contemplative life, making itsy-bitsy statues.” There is always an enormous temptation in all of life to diddle around making itsy-bitsy friends and meals and journeys for itsy-bitsy years on end. It is so self-conscious, so apparently moral, simply to step aside from the gaps where the creeks and winds pour down, saying, I never merited this grace, quite rightly, and then to sulk along the rest of your days on the edge of rage. I won’t have it. The world is wilder than that in all directions, more dangerous and bitter, more extravagant and bright. We are making hay when we should be making whoopee; we are raising tomatoes when we should be raising Cain, or Lazarus.

Ezekiel excoriates false prophets as those who have “not gone up into the gaps.” The gaps are the thing. The gaps are the spirit’s one home, the altitudes and latitudes so dazzlingly spare and clean that the spirit can discover itself for the first time like a once-blind man unbound. The gaps are the cliffs in the rock where you cower to see the back parts of God; they are the fissures between mountains and cells the wind lances through, the icy narrowing fiords splitting the cliffs of mystery. Go up into the gaps. If you can find them; they shift and vanish too. Stalk the gaps. Squeak into a gap in the soil, turn, and unlock-more than a maple—a universe. This is how you spend this afternoon, and tomorrow morning, and tomorrow afternoon. Spend the afternoon. You can’t take it with you.

Lush prose, serious advice for living. Dillard won the Pulitzer Prize for this in 1975. It feels and reads very human.

// 06.19.26

From the ending of Leonard Mlodinow’s Subliminal: How Your Unconscious Mind Rules Your Behavior:

We choose the facts that we want to believe. We also choose our friends, lovers, and spouses not just because of the way we perceive them but because of the way they perceive us. Unlike phenomena in physics, in life, events can often obey one theory or another, and what actually happens can depend largely upon which theory we choose to believe. It is a gift of the human mind to be extraordinarily open to the theory of ourselves that pushes us in the direction of survival and even happiness.

// 06.12.26

Feynman’s Rainbow

05.18.26 // Miscellany, Reading

From Leonard Mlodinow’s Feynman’s Rainbow: A Search for Beauty in Physics and in Life, a memoir about his early career as a physicist and working in the same department as titans Richard Feynman and Murray Gell-Mann:

People sometimes scoffed at academia because of the relatively low pay. But I had seen too many “adults” work too many hours at jobs they did not like in order to amass things they only thought they needed, and then, decades later, regret their “wasted” years. And I had seen my father work long, arduous hours just to make ends meet. I had vowed to have a better life than that. The most valuable asset I figured I could earn was the ability to spend my time doing something I liked.

When you select your medical school, your residency, your next job, or how you’re working in your current role—what are you optimizing for?

There is a flip side to the comforting knowledge that everyone is just stumbling through the fog, and that is that it is a pretty good bet that many of them are not stumbling in the right direction. Who is going down the blind alley and who is on the road to success? Whose work will be remembered and whose forgotten? What is worth doing, and how do you know? I didn’t have the answers, but I thought back on the pep talk the division chair had given me. Explore, he said. Check out what other people are doing. I decided to open myself to others.

In considering the explore-exploit tradeoff, we are often jealous of those who seem to have it all figured it out. It is a mistake, however, to assume they’ve always figured it out correctly or that their solutions can be taken on wholesale.

The creative mind has a vast attic. That homework problem you did in college, that intriguing but seemingly pointless paper you spent a week deciphering as a postdoc, that offhand remark of a colleague, all are stored in hope chests somewhere up in a creative person’s brain, often to be picked through and applied by the subconscious at the most unexpected moments. It is a part of the creative process that transcends physics. For instance, Tchaikovsky wrote, “The germ of a future composition comes suddenly and unexpectedly. If the soil is ready…” And Mary Shelley: “Invention does not consist in creating out of void, but out of chaos.” And Stephen Spender: “There is nothing we imagine which we do not alread know. And our ability to imagine is our ability to remember what we have already once experienced and to apply it to some different situation.”

I love this description of creativity, derived from a full, vibrant life, broadly sourced and even full of randomness.

Hanging around a grown kid like Feynman made you question things. Like all the things we do in life because we have to do them—or at least we think we do. Sitting through boring meetings with colleagues or customers or clients when we’d rather be outside staring at a rainbow, or managing our careers along some path for which we have no passion merely because it is supposed to be the road to success. Like my young boys today, Feynman was startlingly honest with people, including himself, and you couldn’t make him do anything he didn’t want to do, at least not without grumbling. In contrast, there I was, still free to choose my own path, and I was compromising almost before I began. What, for me, was worth doing? What would give meaning to my life?

[…]

WHAT IS IMPORTANT IN LIFE? It is a question we should all give thought to. The answer is not taught in school, and it is not as easy as it may seem, for a superficial answer is not acceptable. To discover the real truth you have to know yourself. Then you have to be honest with yourself. Then you have to respect and accept yourself. For me, these were all tough tasks.

I had gone through college and into academia in a hurry, wanting to rush ahead with my work, to prove to the world that I had been alive, and that it had mattered. That was an external focus to life. That was Murray’s way. To accomplish and impress. To be an important person, and a leader. It was the classical path. The traditional one. It seemed to be an obvious and worthy goal. I had accepted it without second thought. But for me, it was like chasing a rainbow. Even worse, it was like chasing other people’s rainbows. Rainbows whose beauty I didn’t really see.

Feynman’s example caused me to rethink mine. He didn’t seek the leadership role. He didn’t gravitate to the sexy “unified” theories. For him satisfaction in discovery was there even if what you discover was already known by others. It was there even if all you are doing is re-deriving someone else’s result your own way. And it was there even if your creativity is in playing with your child. It was self-satisfaction. Feynman’s focus was internal, and his internal focus gave him freedom.

Different approaches to life—external validation vs internal motivation—as exemplified by two of the greatest physicists of the twentieth century.

There’s an exchange in the book I loved:

“Do you know who first explained the true origin of the rainbow?” I asked.
“It was Descartes,” he said. After a moment he looked me in the eye.
“And what do you think was the salient feature of the rainbow that inspired Descartes’ mathematical analysis?” he asked.
“Well, the rainbow is actually a section of a cone that appears as an arc of the colors of the spectrum when drops of water are illuminated by sunlight behind the observer.”
“And?”
“I suppose his inspiration was the realization that the problem could be analyzed by considering a single drop, and the geometry of the situation.”
“You’re overlooking a key feature of the phenomenon,” he said.
“Okay, I give up. What would you say inspired his theory?”
“I would say his inspiration was that he thought rainbows were beautiful.”
I looked at him sheepishly. He looked at me.
“How’s your work coming?” he asked.
I shrugged. “It’s not really coming.” I wished I was like Constantine. It all came so easily to him.
“Let me ask you something. Think back to when you were a kid. For you, that isn’t going too far back.
When you were a kid, did you love science? Was it your passion?”
I nodded. “As long as I can remember”
“Me, too,” he said. “Remember, it’s supposed to be fun.” And he walked on.

Remember, it’s supposed to be fun.

The Meaning of Your Work Life

05.11.26 // Miscellany, Reading

From Arthur C. Brooks’ The Meaning of Your Life:

My psychologist friend said something else that proved revolutionary for my thinking—and, in fact, my whole life: to give a great deal to one person is even more empowering than to give a little to a lot of people. In other words, making a big, tangible difference to one person’s life has a much greater meaning-creating self-transcendent effect than writing checks to a bunch of charities (as worthwhile as that is). This is an ancient idea; it is written in the Mishnah Sanhedrin section of the Jewish Talmud, for example, that “he who saves a single soul saves a whole world.”

Randomly writing on the internet aside, finding ways to be involved with individuals (family, community, education, and mentorship) are real paths to fulfilling variety.

The lowest level of work motivation is “necessary evil.” Finding meaning in work that you hate is difficult. In fact, if you hate your job, it can inhibit a sense of your life’s meaning. Above this is work as a duty, such as that which you do to be a productive citizen and to support those you love. Fulfilling a duty is, of course, meaningful. My family is meaningful to me, and thus, so is supporting them. However, ideally you can do better than just that, by seeing your work as a means to practice excellence and virtue—that is, honing your craft. Even higher in meaning is service to others, beyond just economic support.

Even when the job isn’t perfect or is just a temporary step on a longer journey, approaching it with the Craftsman’s Mentality makes it better. Striving and excellence have positive echoes.

Psychologists have studied this mysterious sense of calling in depth and often say that it requires having a “subjective career,” as opposed to an “objective career.” The difference between the two is how success is defined. Objective careers focus on money, power, and prestige. Subjective careers are more focused on earned success and service to others. Earned success is the opposite of an old idea in psychology called “learned helplessness,” which is what occurs when people feel like no matter what they do, their rewards or punishments aren’t affected. For example, you are paid and promoted the same as everyone else, regardless of how you perform. Alternatively, you are not rewarded or are treated poorly even when you excel in your work. This leads to feelings of resignation, futility and, often, depression about life in general.

I appreciate the conception of a “subjective career” and “earned success” over “learned helplessness.” When we think of bad places to work and bad cultures, it is where democracy or fairness have been subverted in favor of sameness, where A players and C players are equivalent (or, even worse, when the willing are coopted to do do do because their yes-nature is exploited until burnout and the sloths and dishonest are tolerated).

Earned success means being recognized and rewarded for merit and personal responsibility. I work a lot with companies seeking to bring more meaning and happiness to the workplace, and one of the things I stress the most is this idea of earned success through honest, clear, merit-based systems. This is hard for weak leaders, who don’t like holding people accountable or acknowledging that aptitude and work effort differ between people and some are more excellent than others. To avoid conflict, these leaders prefer tenure- or loyalty-based systems, which strip work of meaning and drive away good people.

Holding people accountable is actually extremely hard, which is why it’s so often just not done except for either egregious cases or petty reasons. Dr. Death practiced medicine for years.  Fairness does not equal sameness. The apathetic management style—low expectations and low support—may often be an understandable reaction to the real world, but it also further hollows out organizations and leads to a disengaged and unresilient workforce.

The point is that you can look for your calling without being a lifesaving paramedic or feeding the hungry. Simply being a great team member, a kind coworker, a considerate and caring manager, all count. Serving others doesn’t have to be heroic to achieve self-transcendence and the sense of meaning you crave. Even if your job is not extrinsically rewarding, you can start generating your own intrinsic rewards.

I still don’t like the idea of a calling. I think what Brooks refers to as a calling is really mostly a good attitude. But, a good attitude is also the greatest gift you can give yourself. It’s also one you can easily take away, and one that—for most of us—requires practice giving again and again.

From the excellent and illuminating Everything is Tuberculosis, written by YA author (e.g. The Fault in Our Stars) John Green:

I want to pause here to note a defining feature of humans, which is that we like to know why things happen, especially when really bad things happen. And if a reason is not immediately apparent, we will find one.

and

We all engage in the punitive act of giving a disease a meaning.

The ability to tell a convincing story is very different from the ability to be right. The narratives about TB that Green describes are both historically fascinating and unfortunately still very relevant today.

// 04.08.26