"People with powers like ours, why should we hide? The life I had is gone. There's no getting it back. I'd rather make a new one. A better one. One where I don't have to pretend to be weak to survive."
Sayfa 274 - marcellaKitabı okuyor
When a man goes to clear jungle he has relatively few types of tools: To cut, perhaps a machete; to knock down, a bulldozer; to burn, fire. Science is like that. When we explore the vast realm of natural and human behavior, we find our most useful tools of measurement and calculation are based on surprisingly few basic ideas. When a man has a hammer, all he sees around him are nails to hit. So it should be no great surprise that, wtih our small number of effective mathematical tools, we can find anologies between a wind tunnel and a Reuters screen.
Sayfa 116
This is precisely the question Fehr and Gächter asked. They set up an experiment putting together several groups of four participants, each equipped with a certain amount of money (in this case, twenty Swiss francs or ‘monetary units’). For several rounds, the participants were able to decide how much should be contributed to the public pot. The payment options were regulated so that it was most worthwhile for the individual to make no contribution at all, or only a very small one. For the whole group, however, it was better if everyone always put in the maximum. Six rounds were played, with the following results: the participants’ willingness to cooperate – represented as the average contribution thrown into the public pot per round – started weak and soon fell sharply. By the end of the sixth round, the players kept most for themselves. Only when they played the game a second time were the participants given the opportunity to ‘punish’ the meanest players. For every monetary unit spent by one player on punishing another uncooperative player, three monetary units were deducted from the player who was punished. The effect on the overall willingness to cooperate was spectacular: by the end of these six rounds, the level of cooperation had reached almost the maximum possible (the maximum being the result if everybody behaved cooperatively all of the time). Punishing individuals who refuse to cooperate therefore solves the problem of freeloading, at least in an experimental setting.
Nay, if you read this line, remember not
The hand that writ it; for I love you so
That I in your sweet thoughts would be forgot,
If thinking on me then should make you woe.
"‘But the father of eight children has no choice …’ Muttering half aloud, so he broke off, turned, sighed, raised his eyes, sought the figure of his wife reading stories to the little boy; filled his pipe. He turned from the sight of human ignorance and human fate and the sea eating the ground we stand on, which, had he been able to contemplate it fixedly might have led to something; and found consolation in trifles so slight compared with the august theme just now before him that he was disposed to slur that comfort over, to deprecate it, as if to be caught happy in a world of misery was for an honest man the most despicable of crimes. It was true; he was for the most part happy; he had his wife; he had his children; he had promised in six weeks’ time to talk ‘some nonsense’ to the young men of Cardiff about Locke, Hume, Berkeley, and the causes of the French Revolution.* But this and his pleasure in it, in the phrases he made, in the ardour of youth, in his wife’s beauty, in the tributes that reached him from Swansea, Cardiff, Exeter, Southampton, Kidderminster,* Oxford, Cambridge—all had to be deprecated and concealed under the phrase ‘talking nonsense’, because, in effect, he had not done the thing he might have done. It was a disguise; it was the refuge of a man afraid to own his own feelings, who could not say, This is what I like—this is what I am; and rather pitiable and distasteful to William Bankes and Lily Briscoe, who wondered why such concealments should be necessary; why he needed always praise; why so brave a man in thought should be so timid in life; how strangely he was venerable and laughable at one and the same time."
