MSY 82 ONS

“CIRCULAR REASONING

Not everybody appreciates this conclusion. When I explained the argument to an English literature professor at a party once, she practically shouted, “Are you suggesting that Shakespeare might just be a fluke of history?” Well, as a matter of fact, that’s exactly what I was suggesting. Don’t get me wrong: I enjoy Shakespeare as much as any normal person. But I also know that I didn’t acquire my appreciation in a vacuum. Like just about everyone else in the Western world, I spent years of high school laboring over his plays and sonnets. And presumably, like many others, it wasn’t immediately obvious to me what all the fuss was about. Try reading Midsummer Night’s Dream and forget for a moment that you know it’s a work of genius. Right about the point where Titania is fawning over a man with the head of a donkey, you might just start to wonder what on earth Shakespeare was thinking. But I digress. The point is that no matter what my schoolboy brain thought of what it was reading, I was determined to appreciate the genius that my teachers assured us was there. And if I hadn’t, it would have[…]”

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“Increasingly, however, the questions that scientists find most interesting—from the genomics revolution to the preservation of ecosystems to cascading failures in power grids—are forcing them to consider more than one scale at a time, and so to confront the problem of emergence head-on. Individual genes interact with each other in complex chains of activation and suppression to express phenotypic traits that are not reducible to the properties of any one gene. Individual plants and animals interact with each other in complex ways, via prey-predator relations, symbiosis, competition, and cooperation, to produce ecosystem-level properties that cannot be understood in terms of any individual species. And individual power generators and substations interact with each other via high-voltage transmission cables to produce system-level dynamics that cannot be understood in terms of any individual component.”

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• The importance of having a partner and true friendships 
• The “satisfaction” component of happiness and the importance of “wants management”
• The tyranny of social comparison 
• The four main idols that drive us: money, fame, power, and pleasure 
• Success addiction, workaholism, and their detriment to happiness 

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