Tom Elwood -best of the internet.

Saturday, May 31, 2025

Friday, May 30, 2025

Faith

"Faith is the courageous trust that good is yet to come." - The very reverent Steven L. Thomason

It Is Not the Critic Who Counts | Theodore Roosevelt Conservation Partnership

"It is not the critic who counts: not the man who points out how the strong man stumbles or where the doer of deeds could have done better. The credit belongs to the man who is actually in the arena, whose face is marred by dust and sweat and blood, who strives valiantly, who errs and comes up short again and again, because there is no effort without error or shortcoming, but who knows the great enthusiasms, the great devotions, who spends himself in a worthy cause; who, at the best, knows, in the end, the triumph of high achievement, and who, at the worst, if he fails, at least he fails while daring greatly, so that his place shall never be with those cold and timid souls who knew neither victory nor defeat."

—Theodore Roosevelt

Speech at the Sorbonne, Paris, April 23, 1910

https://www.trcp.org/2011/01/18/it-is-not-the-critic-who-counts/

Thursday, May 29, 2025

NYTimes: Beware: We Are Entering a New Phase of the Trump Era

"We humans are stability-seeking creatures. Getting accustomed to what used to seem unthinkable can feel like an accomplishment. And when the unthinkable recedes at least a bit — when someone gets released from detention (as the Columbia University student Mohsen Mahdawi was a few weeks ago) or some particularly egregious proposal is withdrawn or blocked by the courts (as the ban on international students at Harvard has been, at least temporarily) — it's easy to mistake it for proof that the dark times are ending."

https://www.nytimes.com/2025/05/28/opinion/trump-danger-normalization-shock.html?smid=nytcore-android-share

Monday, May 26, 2025

Who has strong opinions on the internet?

"We found the people who have the strongest counter-consensus views have the highest levels of subjective understanding (feel like they understand the issues the best)...but actually have the lowest level of objective knowledge."

@39:40 in https://hiddenbrain.org/podcast/how-much-do-we-really-know/

Much like the Dunning-Kruger effect.