Handbook of Epictetus

The Handbook is short and sweet. 53 short segments, essentially paragraphs, on Stoic philosophy. The Handbook is a classic that is simple to read, bares rereading and random dipping into, and is thought inspiring.

37. If you undertake some role beyond your capacity, you both disgrace yourself by taking it and also thereby neglect the role that you were unable to take.

That's right, in ~100 A.D. Stoics got opportunity cost...

44. These statements are not valid inferences: "I am richer than you; therefore I am superior to you", or "I am more eloquent than you; therefore I am superior to you." But rather these are valid: "I am richer than you; therefore my property is superior to yours", or "I am more eloquent than you; therefore my speaking is superior to yours." But you are identical neither with your property nor with your speaking.

...and logic. People don't change much - the rich and the intelligent still often mistake their good fortune as reflections of their personal character [1].

The Handbook is elegant and compelling. As human character and traits have not changed since the time of the writing the Handbook is also timeless. The Stoics focused on character and on proper human focus, and therefore their work stands up today some 2000 years later.

Lowdown:
- at about $5 this clear, compact, compelling read is a steal

Notes:
[1] Academics are often simply people who can argue well - and not always because they are logical and well informed. As they often then make the invalid inference that they are thus superior they tend to get all moral on thou. Note that the immature argue in order to feel morally superior to their opponents (quite possibly due to evolutionary pressure - we are social animals, so pecking order is key, so building in a feeling of righteousness to help push forward in arguments in order to place the resources in it to win and get the dino-meat and cave-babe would be advantageous), without self reflection many/most do not move past this and likely do not even realize the danger. The deep feeling of not wanting to back down even when presented with arguments that make it clear one is clearly wrong is automatic (how many times have you found yourself continuing to argue well past the point that you should have given up?). Until one really confronts this feeling and persists in wanting to follow truth one cannot overcome this - with practice one can actually enjoy being proven wrong as you have just learned something new (the overcoming does not seem to be simply an artifact of aging, as many older people retain this undeveloped state). And by enjoy I don't mean a grudging post argument coming to accept the truth, but a "wow this is cool!" in the moment of the argument.

Taoism

What is Taosim? The core is 81 little sections (1 pp. or less, most often less) that makes up the Tao Te Ching by Lao-Tzu. Get the version translated by Stephen Addiss & Stanley Lombardo, as they do not hold your hand and try to explain but instead translate [1]. A very nice feature is that in each section one line is transliterated, and a small dictionary is included in the back - this allows the reader some direct contact with the original text and look over the translators shoulders [2].

Like everything Taoism consists of some high quality core, and then a lot of layers and interpretations and additions on top of varying quality and impact. For me, and most others, the rest is basically garbage - but unlike many things the core of Taoism is pretty easy to identify and go through: get the Tao Te Ching and then read the Wikipedia article to learn about the magic realism style and other cultural artifacts layered on top and you are an instant "expert".

The rest of Taoism is like English and Philosophy departments versus the core texts they study: sure there is some gain, but the ratio of garbage generated (words, papers, books, etc.) that simply critiques and discusses versus original and interesting content is large. Some quality material is generated, and some solid learning can happen. But it seems often that the role and function of these departments is often misconceived - sure, "everything is text", but not all text is of the same quality. English/Philosophy/some other departments are basically academic blog factories which discuss and otherwise point to other material or general thoughts and teach you to "blog" also, if you luck out with a faculty position. Unlike academic blogs real blogs do not have such heavy constrains: high fees, often needing to parrot back a profs position/opinions to get a decent mark, PC and other limiting constraints on thought and expression [3] (tenure does not really work to fill its claimed function), needing to get people in a physical space at the same time, forcing everyone to listen to student X's insipid "thoughts" [4] etc etc etc. Ug, flashbacks to sitting in [5] on African Studies class.

Taoism itself is pretty enigmatic versus, say, Stoicism and much closer to the pure mystical view of the world versus the Stoics pure rational view. But it is interesting to reflect on, especially since where someone sits on the rational/mystical scale seems to be a set point that is built into many people so reflecting on both views will help you understand people. Taoism is the counterpoint to Stoicism, at least in feel and approach, but comes to basically the same conclusions.

44 (snippet). Extreme love exacts a heavy price.
Many possessions entail heavy loss.

Monks used to copy texts by hand, and the Tao is the only book that I personally have done this for. I learned two things doing this (1) I am happy I am not a 1st Century monk, (2) coping a text like the Tao is conducive to deep reflection and makes you a better person [6]. I copied the text for a friend, including the pictograms and dictionary, and this gift gave both to me and to him I think. I probably got much more than him actually (hmm... a crappy hand written book? Gee - "thanks").

Lowdown:
- Tao Te Ching is a short & powerful (but not fast) read.
- The Tao Te Ching embodies the core of a whole philosophy/religion - so it has huge return on investment.
- The view is close to a pure mystical view: since it seems a high portion of people "think" this way it is good to understand this style.

Notes:
[1] This book really demonstrates the power of a good translation - real empirical evidence that you can have widely varying differences in quality and tone that can change a book qualitatively from "ug" to "wow". In the preface they have a small comparison between several translations of the first line, here are 3 of 10 different available translations

The Way that can be told of is not an Unvarying Way (Waley)
The ways that can be walked are not the eternal Way (Mair)
The tao that can be said is not the everlasting tao (Gibbs)

Here how it is done in this book:

Tao called Tao is not Tao.

To my ear this much less verbose style of translation is clear, compact, elegant . The translators aim to retain the "simplicity, rhythm, and power of the Chinese" in order to achieve the impact of the original.
[2] This "interactive" feature is wonderful, very enlightening and fun. In addition to the roman transliteration the pictograms are painted alongside which adds a beauty. Pictograms and stylistic paintings are interspersed in the text which adds some minimalistic visual candy on the journey through the book.
[3] Would a prof say the rest of Taoism is garbage? Or is that "too risky"? What if a student self identifies as a Taoist? Will that offend him/her? Such questions are likely asked around every statement made, trimming down what can be said into the most pablum like residue left. Okay, I admit the rest is not literally garbage - but in terms of diminishing returns for the majority of people it might as well be.
[4] When reading one can simply scan over boring/trite/or otherwise lame material, and one already reads ~ 3X faster than people can speak (maybe ~2X if you read slow like myself, or ~4X if you read very fast), plus people trim out the lamest material when writing (uh, ah, er... this one time... ), and double-takes are easy - simply go back and reread, if someone says something you sorta missed you have to ask them to repeat.
[5] That's right - sitting in: you can crash University classes, since most are huge. I likely should have asked the prof, as I starting doing later, since the class was "small" (~40 people?).
[6] i.e. painful, but constructive pain.

Stoicism Lite

William B. Irvine, A Guide to the Good Life: The Ancient Art of Stoic Joy

This book attempts to sell the reader on a pop version of Stoicism as a way of life, and as one would expect with such a purpose is easy to read. The author is a professor of philosophy who was interested in obtaining a philosophy of life, and since academic philosophy does not provide this looked into Stoicism. Zen Buddhism was discounted, apparently because it seems too difficult for the modern man, and few other competing strategies are discussed. This is somewhat surprising, as the author is a prof and since he is attempting to sell the reader on pop Stoicism - Stoicism Lite. A few related (at least to causal thought) approaches such as Humanism, philosophical Taoism, and Confucianism jump to mind [1]. This lack of comparison is made even more glaring since the author spends time (our time) rambling about "what if I made the wrong choice? what if Stoicism is not the true path?". Gee, what if? How about you look around instead of arguing/whining in a vacuum?

Never-the-less even without a comparison of other approaches Stoicism as presented looks good. The text could easily be dropped 20-25% in length and retain the good parts. Stripping out empty rhetorical questions, the well intended but weak modern justification of Stoicism based on evolutionary psychology [2], the continuous chatter and mild talking down to the reader [3], and generally taking a more aggressive editing approach would have tightened up the presentation, but since the intent is to soft sell the reader on pop Stoicism this doesn't matter too much - the book remains an easy read. And perhaps the flaws I see are a selling point which make the book "approachable"?

So what makes up Stoicism and makes it a compelling way of life? Here - where it matters - the book excels, giving an easily digestible and simple sketch of Stoic tools.

Goal: Tranquility.
Base Approach: Reason & Observation.
Psychological Techniques: 5 main ones, in order of returns
(1) Negative Visualization (gratitude),
(2) Dichotomy of Control (focus on what you can affect),
(3) Fatalism (of past/present - look for the positive here, focus on changing future not "if onlys" about the past),
(4) Self-Denial (reset your adaptation point, so your base life feels great),
(5) Meditation (reflection).

It seems that modern evidence has confirmed all these approaches are useful. There is a famous gratitude study that showed that people who kept a gratitude journal had surprising improvement in mental health versus a regular (reflective) journal control, people who "fight the tide" drown in life while those who compete against themselves and what they can control tend to do well, cognitive psychology - which includes a positive past/present fatalism view - demonstrates better results in treating depression then medication [4], hedonic adaptation ("keeping up with the Jones' ") is a well known problem that self-denial can help by resetting, and reflection has long been proscribed to improve ones life ("an unexamined life is not worth living") as this allows problems to be caught early ("an once of prevention...") and choices and paths seen and trimmed [5].

The book has a boiler plate intro/background, then (the meat) discussion on these 5 tools in the Stoic tool set, discusses some Stoic advice, and wraps up with the authors reflections on living the Stoic life and an appendix on further reading. The advice part is pretty weak - rewarmed advice is never as good as reading the original - but important for keeping the text self-contained. I'd like a little less hand-holding and interpretation here, but it goes with the chatty style of the book.

All in all - this is a fast and easy read, well worth going through. The core is the section on Stoic Psychology (about 60 pages of the total roughly 300 pages - which includes a bibliography and an index) and I would recommend reading this first [6]. If you get interested, I'd then skip right to the primary texts. If you are not hooked on the Stoic Life Plan, then read the rest of the book through to get the pop version and some take away tid-bits and advice.

Stoicism is a basic framework that you likely partially use and have found on your own. The consistent framework, strong literature, and pedigree makes Stoicism compelling and worth considering. Essentially an exercise plan for life logistics with some good teachers. If I had to put Stoicism in a nutshell, I'd say it is all about the Dichotomy of Control - focus on what you can control (i.e. your character and actions) using reason and honesty as your tools.


Notes:
[1] As Humanism likely has a strong influence on many scientists and artists and other intellectuals the lack of discussion seems strange, are not most University like people at least implicitly affected by this? And as Confucianism is getting some play currently due to China looking for a replacement for Marxist thought it is also strange that an author writing a pop book would overlook the opportunity to discuss this.
[2] The evolutionary psychology section is much too hand wavy - if you want to add this sugar coating put more effort into this, and the "Zeus" claim made by the the original Stoics - which this whole evolutionary psychology spiel attempts to address - can be interpreted in a metaphorical manner as writings suggest that Zeus/logos/nature were used somewhat interchangeably). i.e. this whole section seems un-necessary to begin with, and poorly done.
[3] A danger of repeatably teaching introductory philosophy? From my memories of the handful of second year philosophy classes I took the level of discourse is scraping the bottom of the barrel.
[4] Studies show a roughly equal success rate in treating an "episode", but cognitive psychology appears to prevents relapse better than medication.
[5] Instead of the evolutionary psychology section I would have much preferred to see a results based justification, using examples of studies and other evidence such as briefly sketched here. The author discusses hedonic adaptation, but could sketch out more of "positive psychology", and other, findings that support the Stoic tool set.
[6] If you are looking for discussion regarding the Stoic frame, such as briefly touched in my "filter" post, this book is not were you want to go. You will not find terms such as "kataleptic" or a deep look at the subtle and deep Stoic frame in "Good Life" - this is a pop view after all. The Stoic frame may be where real changes in your views come from. To use a hackneyed analogy - taking on "Stoic Lite" is like "learning" a new and more powerful programming language, without actually learning the key new mode of expression that makes the language different and powerful. You can use Python like you use Basic, or you can dig deep and learn something new and learn Python instead of using Python notation to write Basic code. Sure, you will likely get some gain and pleasure moving to Python and writing you Basic code in it but this approach misses out on the deepest and most significant gains. The Stoicism Lite as promoted by "Good Life" is basically standard pop psychology (i.e. self help genre), that may be pleasant, easy, and give some important gains, but possibly misses out on the most radical and important aspects of Stoicism. I say "possibly" as I have only barely scratched the surface of Stoic thought and thus cannot provide a useful claim either way. It does seem that the Stoics thought deeply about human action and have created a subtle approach that can give us some insights, as I suspect this framework is fairly different than the standard approach we pick up in our society.

Filters

"The map is not the territory." - Alfred Korzybski

We perceive the world via our senses: the external makes an impression on us. This impression is not neutral and fresh, but heavily filtered and distorted via our biases. We - or more precisely, processes within our minds - silently attach propositions immediately on the impression, and we typically assent to these propositions. Critical thinking is the routinized mechanism of teasing out this filtered and categorized and assented to framework, a bag of tricks used habitually to improve our filters, to question them, to suspend our assent and an attempt to make informed assent. Rhetoric and propaganda is the attempt to use the filters and implications to get an audience to assent to the entire bundle, both the impression and a parasitic framework which is a Trojan horse.

Our minds make up a map of the world, one that is reduced in content but, hopefully, reflective of the significant features of the world. Filtering suggests it is hard to make a good map.

To see the effect of a filter pay attention the next time you learn something new, X, it becomes a new pattern, a new filter and you will start to see item X in the world around you, whereas previously you had filtered it out. Learning new ideas and patterns enables you to make sense of the impressions of the world using your new filter. Everyone is familiar with this, many call this "coincidences" - to the careful they see this as illuminating how our minds work, and a warning, to the less careful they see conspiracy theories and evidence of the supernatural, profound evidence. We can also consider illusions - these are well known examples where our minds profoundly layer something onto an impression which we know is not true, and yet we still perceive incorrectly; to a great extent everything is an illusion, a combination of a true impression and an additional assumed and added framework. By understanding an illusion we can remove assent - facts we can demonstrate to be true will change our assent - although we cannot stop slathering the added framework as it is automatic and uncontrolled. In fact, the existance of illusions is the most clear means of teaching the neccessity for critical thinking.

We can see people as givers of assent - if you are careful you will critically give, or suspend, assent to the impressions and their associated implied (by our minds) propositions, baggage, and implications. If you are not careful you will not examine what the underlying impression is, and take the whole package as true. You will not take the effort to attempt to discriminate what is true, and what is an assumption that we slathered on top.

The agnostic is one who only provides his assent to implications that at strong - what Stoics would call kataleptic impressions - something where the implications are basically not falsifiable. Your feelings of pain, consciousness, existance of external reality - kataleptic. A Bayesian would assign very little uncertainty to kataleptic impressions. Both a Stoic and a Bayesian treat the world differently than most - they work to give assent only to what is concrete and knowable, and treat most of what we "know" as more ephemeral and work to suspend assent.

Lowdown:
- what we see is: illusion = filter(impression), the illusion suggests implications, critical thinking is trying to determine if we should assent to the implications.
- Work to be an agnostic. Focus on the "hard core" and don't cling to the ephemeral. Belief is an uncritical opinion, a freely given assent to an impression, and is irrational and often false.
- Agnostic ~ Stoic ~ Bayesian ~ Critical thinker != the "natural" man.
- Stoic psychology of mind: input - filter(impression), output - assent, or suspension of assent, to the implications we bundle to impressions. To compare peoples minds, compare their assent to impressions; to compare their character, compare how they assent.
- There is nothing new under the sun: NLP seems to be Stoic personality theory, rediscovered and with some more medical information behind it and focusing on the tactics and tricks versus the overarching strategy