2022-01-31#
- 10:44 In 1984, besides the unique meaning given by Orwell, that year also saw the birth of many excellent works: "Perfume," "The Lover."
- 21:16 Today while browsing Twitter, I saw someone say there won't be any ground rumbling on New Year's Eve. I thought Japan also celebrated the Spring Festival, which was a bit disappointing. Then in the afternoon, I saw that the comic "Dui Dui" updated its latest episode, so I watched it immediately, but there was still no ground rumbling.
2022-01-30#
- 21:00 I feel that in modern society, the practice of visiting relatives back and forth in the countryside is a custom that exhausts both sides—at least that's the impression I get from most of the people I know. The visitors are constantly on the move, tiring themselves out; the hosts are busy killing chickens and cooking, working hard for half a day, also quite exhausting. However, both sides have to maintain this status quo due to moral customs.
2022-01-29#
- 11:43 Reading "Translation is the Great Way" endlessly. Yu Guangzhong relentlessly pursued He Qifang, whipping him all the way, simply because his translations were a mix of Chinese and Western styles. In contrast, he greatly admired his contemporaries Qian Zhongshu and Zhu Guangqian. Therefore, this style is not due to the historical context but rather personal reasons.
2022-01-28#
- 00:10 Reading "Translation is the Great Way" using modern Chinese to report on modern life. Marshall McLuhan repeatedly emphasized: "The medium is the message." He also said: "The formation of society relies more on the nature of mass communication tools than on the content of communication."
2022-01-27#
- 10:58 I remembered I still have a few years of JD Reading Membership, which is just a supplement to WeChat Reading. I searched for "Yu Guangzhong on Translation," but couldn't find it, but I found "Translation is the Great Way," thinking it should be the same book, and indeed it was when I searched on Douban.
2022-01-26#
- 11:11 Using the memos plugin to search and copy content makes it very convenient to organize scattered thoughts and excerpts from daily reading. #tips
- 22:51 Reading "My Spiritual Home" about the courage to admit. Admitting that one has been foolish is a virtue.
2022-01-25#
- 21:15 Reading "My Spiritual Home" starting from the Internet. Everyone is a whole; others' misfortunes are your misfortunes. So, don't think the death knell tolls for someone else—it tolls for you.
- 21:27 Reading "My Spiritual Home" about the humor in foreign films. American elites, constrained by religion and class concepts, often fall into the trap of being hypocritical, thus becoming objects of ridicule. This kind of humor does not exist in China: here, power does not allow humor, only hypocrisy.
2022-01-24#
- 00:07 Reading "My Spiritual Home" about honesty and the floating device. Here, floating device refers to some people who are only loyal to the fact of their choices. It discusses the book "The Economics of Jiangcun," praising Fei Xiaotong's honesty—describing the lives of rural farmers in China very candidly. Additionally, he mentioned Zhu Xi, saying someone pointed out: Zhu Xi spent his whole life studying what "is" (be) and what "should be" (should be), and never really understood it; we know the former is a fact, the latter is a wish.
- 11:09 Learned a tip for saving WeChat chat records to OneNote: select multiple chat records, click the email button, and send them to OneNote. Here, you need to disable the email notification assistance feature in WeChat to call up third-party applications like OneNote. #tips
- 22:07 Reading "My Spiritual Home" about the charm of Beijing. "The history of a city can only be its architecture." "To see what the ancients saw and to feel what the ancients felt, this feeling is called historical sense." Unfortunately, domestically, there has developed a habit of demolishing first and then imitating, and so far, there is no awareness that this practice is wrong. The history on the ground will eventually be completely demolished, and in the end, China's history will only remain in books and underground, and the underground will eventually be ruined like buildings.
2022-01-23#
- 15:55 Watched "Interstellar 2015." Cooper and TARS voluntarily left the Endurance, not because of relative forces, but to enter the black hole to collect information, as that was humanity's only hope.
- 23:54 Reading "My Spiritual Home" about the not-so-new "The Fifteenth Year of Wanli." The goodness of purpose cannot compensate for the roughness of the system. Wang Xiaobo gave a straightforward example: the walls of the bathroom in my brother-in-law's house are all pitted because my mother-in-law insisted that nails could be hammered into the cement walls of the bathroom to hang mirrors. The original intention was for our good, but she did not consider that hammering nails into cement walls could easily shatter them.
2022-01-22#
- 14:11 The investigation report on the severe rain disaster in Zhengzhou, Henan investigation report has come out. Regarding the concealment of reports, there is a saying: Those who are full of hope for the future often know nothing about history.
2022-01-21#
- 09:13 Web clipping plugin: MaoXian Web Clipper #plugin #Tool
- 09:57 The terms malicious return home and poisoning from afar are shocking; after a year of hard work, wanting to return home for a reunion during the Spring Festival, where does the malice come from?
2022-01-20#
- 10:51 We all know that mixing a bit of truth into a lie makes it easier for others to be deceived; should we also mix a bit of lies into the truth to make it acceptable? Source #quote
- 12:44 During lunch, we discussed "Bad Blood," particularly how the board members of Theranos, those political bigwigs, were easily attracted. Besides Elizabeth's exceptional persuasive ability, it must also be because the field she was involved in could have a positive revolutionary effect on people's lives—the biotechnology and medical field. The bigwigs could not only gain money but also participate in this revolution, gaining a good reputation.
- 12:47 There is a saying abroad about the "revolving door" between politics and business; domestically, besides this, there is another related to studying: those who excel in learning can enter government, and those who excel in government can engage in business. So ultimately, it still comes down to studying well, then becoming an official, and then going into business—a principle that has been true for thousands of years.
2022-01-19#
- 22:14 Reading "Bad Blood." Boasting about your product, obtaining funding, hiding your true progress until reality can finally catch up with your boasting. Theranos was undoubtedly a standout in this regard.
2022-01-18#
- 12:52 Reading "Bad Blood." Employee Ian commented on Sunny and Elizabeth: dual personality disorder—similar delusions occurring in two closely related individuals. This can be considered very appropriate.
- 21:03 Mark is an indispensable character in "Attack on Titan": empathetic, calm, and strong in command. It's a pity he was killed early by Reiner and others; otherwise, he would definitely have been a strong character later on.
- 21:37 Reading "Bad Blood." Elizabeth has a strength in being able to precisely control so-called connections. For example, by utilizing the relationship of Schultz, a member of the Hoover Institution, she gifted shares to many political figures in exchange for their positions on the board, thereby enhancing external recognition of the company through their identities.
- 22:17 Reading "Bad Blood." Schultz's grandson Tyler discovered Theranos's secret and received an angry response when he sought an explanation. He informed his grandfather about this confrontation, but Schultz, a former senior cabinet member, did not express anything—he absorbed information but rarely disclosed it proactively.
- 23:24 Reading "The Silent Majority" about the reversal of human nature. Orwell's statement means that we must first have a consciousness of seeking truth before we can think about the next step of action.
- George Orwell's words: The key is that we must acknowledge that one plus one equals two.
- Westerners believe that a person's main emotions stem from themselves, so they emphasize solving physical pain. Chinese people believe that human emotions are about familial affection and respect for elders, thus they do not emphasize such issues.
- To reverse human nature, three factors are needed: worthless labor, the threat of violence, and the fragility of human nature.
- Logicians point out that correct conclusions can be derived from correct premises, but anything can be derived from a wrong premise. Viewing worthless sacrifices as noble means accepting a wrong premise. After that, you can do anything and believe anything—this state is correctly termed "confusion."
2022-01-17#
- 22:28 Reading "A Letter from a Strange Woman" about the hazy night. A story of a boy's love for a girl and another girl's love for him. In later life, love and other women can no longer become the theme of his life because that experience of being loved and loving has already been fully manifested in him.
- 23:36 Reading "The Silent Majority" about a Braudel-style examination of Chinese culture. Wang Xiaobo believes that Chinese culture, in the face of material life's difficulties, advocates a passive endurance attitude, not promoting thinking but advocating shouldering burdens. This forms a strange competition—competing in negative abilities, competing in who can endure hardship better and who is less greedy for comfort.
- "The Horse Whisperer": A viewpoint from the Cultural Revolution period— the poorer, the more glorious.
- Culture of suffering: There is a strange culture of suffering in China, believing that to succeed, one must first endure hardship; otherwise, that success is not "honorable."
2022-01-16#
- 17:46 Reading "The Silent Majority" about debate and morality. Several passages are truly wonderful, and I couldn't help but excerpt them:
- Most debates in our society tend to shift from equal discussion to one side criticizing the other. Here, the discussion is not about who is right or wrong, but about who is good or bad.
- When malice reaches a certain level, it will resort to action: if you have power, organize to deal with the other party; if you have force, make the other party bleed; even those who have nothing will threaten to report.
- If you watch a good movie and don't think it's good, you're not good enough; if you watch a bad movie and don't think it's bad, you've become a bad person.
- I believe there are many people like me: we love art, we love science, believing they are noble pursuits, but we do not want the matters in these fields to relate to our attitudes towards life, our responsibilities to others, or our feelings of love, nor do we want to violate social taboos because of this.
- 19:16 Learned about an English audiobook: Libby. It is essentially a mobile library where you can apply for library cards from various places, borrow books, and even push them to Kindle. This is a Douban introduction article.
2022-01-15#
- 23:12 Watched a sci-fi film "A Wrinkle in Time," which was quite interesting. Although its core is about dreams, it is set in the future and also explores the theme of genetic modification—will genetically modified humans become better or worse? Additionally, this translated title is quite clever.
2022-01-14#
- 19:13 Read blog, a new insight is: Zhuge Liang's five northern expeditions, did no one notice where such a huge expense came from? Of course, it was exploiting the common people; it's just that everyone went to praise his wisdom and loyalty. A general's success comes at the cost of countless bones, and not many people care about what happens behind the scenes.
2022-01-13#
- 00:04 Reading "The Silent Majority" about the messenger problem in the ancient Central Asian country of Khwarezm. There is a strange custom where messengers bringing good news to the king are rewarded, while those bringing bad news are fed to tigers. This leads to several issues: the truth is not necessarily the most important, as it depends on whether there are such kings around and the messenger's transmission preferences, which in turn encourages messengers to become slippery; when messengers become slippery, good things will move away from us. Wang Xiaobo also mentioned three types of popular news: first, extracting and filtering from reality; second, transforming existing information; third, fabricating from thin air. I find this very reasonable and still relevant today.
2022-01-12#
- 23:00 Reading "The Silent Majority" about the silent majority. The so-called vulnerable group refers to those who have not expressed certain words.
2022-01-11#
- 00:20 Reading "A Unique Pig" about "Their World" preface. The large group of homosexuals is overlooked in our country; to use vision as a metaphor, this society is almost completely blind in certain aspects of people's lives, although in other areas, vision is very good. This causes our panic: if its vision has such a significant defect, who can guarantee it hasn't overlooked other more important matters?
- 09:41 Listening to the podcast "Those Software Matters," one episode discussed the "Bad Blood" incident; politics is indeed an amplifier of fraud.
2022-01-10#
- 21:09 Reading "A Unique Pig" about Li Yinhe's "Reproduction and Chinese Village Culture." The characteristic of Chinese villages is that there is a large group of people watching you; they don't care how you make money, but they will comment on how you live your life. In such circumstances, life is certainly difficult to lead in a new way—the precious financial resources are all spent on weddings and funerals, and the meaning of life becomes to gain the jealousy and applause of the villagers, lacking the motivation to improve life.
2022-01-09#
- 17:07 Reading "38 Letters Rockefeller Wrote to His Son" about sincerely believing that one has a way. This letter mentioned Rockefeller's criteria for hiring: looking for people who seek better ways to get things done. It included an example where he asked Rogers how the government could abolish all prisons in thirty years. The response was not how to do it but a denial, followed by not being able to propose any solutions. In Rockefeller's view, this positioned him as "someone too lazy to think."
- Related to 2021-08-19: First think from necessity, not ease;
- Related to 2021-09-27: The founder of Dyson mentioned in a podcast that his way of thinking is always about where improvements can be made and how to do better.
2022-01-08#
Reading "Attack on Titan: No Regrets," Erwin said a very philosophical statement: A decision is meaningful when it becomes the basis for the next decision.
2022-01-07#
- 18:11 Reading Platform Thinking: "Value creation comes from the clever combination and utilization of resources, thereby reducing the complexity and uncertainty of human needs." This description aligns with the viewpoint mentioned in "Decision Thinking": decision-making is resource allocation. As the world is full of uncertainty and complexity, decision-makers need rational decision-making methods to improve decision quality (refer to "Rational Choice in an Uncertain World"), thereby creating greater value. #quote
- 18:20 Reading Platform Thinking: It discusses a term—self-confrontation. Running and climbing are forms of self-confrontation; if you run far, you have to run back, and if you climb high, you have to come down. Meditation is also a form of self-confrontation. This self-confrontation is far more powerful than any opponent. The body is the physical limit of a person, and confronting the body continuously raises this limit, allowing other things to have a higher ceiling. This aligns with my long-standing belief of not using coffee to combat fatigue, but I haven't summarized it as well.
- 21:33 Reading "A Unique Pig" about the misfortune of intellectuals. The greatest fear and misfortune of intellectuals is living in an irrational era. Hamlet said: To be, or not to be, that is the question. If intellectuals live in an irrational era, perhaps this is not a question; the biggest question is when will this era end. If they can catch up with the past, they will live; if they can't, there's no need to drag it out. It is evident that this refers to the Cultural Revolution; in that irrational era, Lao She could not see the end, so he naturally committed suicide by jumping into a lake.
2022-01-06#
Is Kindle going to become great again just because it can browse Douyin? No, Kindle is great precisely because it can only read books. #quote
Reading "38 Letters Rockefeller Wrote to His Son" about not having the power to be poor. Every time you have an extra penny, you increase your power to determine your own destiny.
2022-01-05#
Reading "38 Letters Rockefeller Wrote to His Son" about loyalty to oneself. This letter was likely written after Little John lost a million in investments; in it, Old John repeatedly mentions the treacherous nature of the business world, needing to be constantly wary of being deceived; he also reminds that dealing with bastards can make us smarter. This segment is very similar to the teachings in "The Godfather": "I will only show my feelings when I can be sure it is beneficial and harmless to myself; I can let my opponents teach me, but I will never teach my opponents, no matter how well I understand that matter. When doing things, do not heed others' urgings; learn to think twice before acting; if you haven't considered thoroughly, never take action; I have my own truth and am only responsible to myself; be cautious in dealing with those who demand we treat them sincerely; they want to gain benefits from me."
2022-01-04#
Reading "A Unique Pig" about "Getting Rid of Childishness," this piece is very well written and worth reading multiple times.
The article approaches from the perspective of sex, as sex is often linked to maturity. Before World War II, the United States had strict controls over sexual works, indicating that our current state in China is not without precedent; it then refutes the so-called notion that sex leads to juvenile crime by stating "Reliable causal models are hard to establish," and further illustrates: Denmark relaxed its restrictions on pornographic literature and photographs in the 1970s, which not only did not trigger more crimes but even significantly reduced offenses like indecency, exhibitionism, and violent insults.
It further states: Literature may write about sex, but sex is often not the purpose. Sex is ordinary, normal, and important in our lives; since this is the case, serious literature should not avoid it but should study, discuss, and showcase it.
In our censorship environment, authors are required to imagine the reader as a well-behaved child; since they are facing a well-behaved child, they cannot depict too "mature" sex. In response, Wang Xiaobo humorously remarked: I am a high-level reader, but the publication review treats me as a sixteen-year-old child—implying that the publishing industry must lower its standards rather than raise them.
The period our country is currently in may well be akin to the pre-World War II era in the United States. As for when it can be turned over, Wang Xiaobo mentioned: Of course, it won't be as simple as flipping a calendar, but it won't be that it can never be flipped to that day.
Reading "A Unique Pig" about the issue of homosexuality. A catchy phrase describing unethical behavior: beating the deaf, scolding the mute, robbing the graves of the childless, and now adding extorting homosexuals—because they correspond to being unheard, unable to scold, having no one to take revenge, and being afraid to report.
2022-01-03#
Reading "The Submarine at Night." The plot is surreal, even lacking a plot, paired with plain text, leaving a hollow feeling after reading. The chapter about the winemaker reminded me of "The Pianist on the Ocean," but it was not handled as well as "The Pianist on the Ocean," of course, due to differences in length and medium. After reading a few chapters, I gave up; it seems I am not the target reader for this book.
2022-01-02#
Reading "Decision Thinking." Discusses how to handle the unknown: 1. Turn the unknown into the known, using minimal resources to explore, such as MVP products; 2. Transform the unknown into potential risks, then reduce, control, and manage those risks; 3. If the risks are unknown, make reversible decisions whenever possible, for example, stipulating under what circumstances a contract can be canceled.
I don't understand why "The Submarine at Night" receives so much praise; after reading a few chapters, it feels like browsing a blog, not like serious literature that can be published.
2022-01-01#
Reading "Decision Thinking." Decisions are resource allocations, and decision-makers are resource allocators. This is my first time reading such a pocket-sized book, about the size of a Kindle, not thick, and the content is concise and clear, quite good.