jason calacanis is a smart guy. his human search company, mahalo, now returns a selection of pages, using tabs, when making a search. no specific page on mahalo? then check out google, yahoo, youtube or flickr all neatly just one click away. i checked it out with the first thing that came to mind: habit.
the mahalo tab returned the same items as the google page, which is to say nothing interesting. mahalo does not, then, have a human scripted page for habits. flickr produces some nice pics, delicious some handy linux hacking guides, and wikipedia a barely begun nothingness. I’m disappointed all round. I thought that i’d search my own machine using google desktop. much more interesting.
here’s charles sanders peirce:
And what, then, is belief? It is the demi-cadence which closes a musical phrase in the symphony of our intellectual life. We have seen that it has just three properties: First, it is something that we are aware of; second, it appeases the irritation of doubt; and, third, it involves the establishment in our nature of a rule of action, or, say for short, a habit.
and
From all these sophisms we shall be perfectly safe so long as we reflect that the whole function of thought is to produce habits of action; and that whatever there is connected with a thought, but irrelevant to its purpose, is an accretion to it, but no part of it.
and william james:
Extending the work of Bain and the British associationists on ideo-motor activity, he articulated a biologically grounded theory of instincts and linked these with the psychological development of emotion and habit. Going beyond the psychophysics of Helmholtz and Wundt, he linked the physiological understanding of perception to realms of symbolic meaning when he claimed from an evolutionary standpoint that when we are confronted with the blooming, buzzing mass of confusion before us, attention to outward stimuli is largely a function of personal interest.
cornelius agrippa:
It happens also sometimes, that not only they that are asleep, but also they that are watchfull do with a kind of instigation of minde, Divine, which Divination Aristotle cals ravishment, or a kind of madness, and teacheth that it proceeds from a melancholy humor, saying in his Treatise of divination: Melancholy men, by reason of their earnestness, do far better conjecture, and quickly conceive a habit, and most easily receive an impression of the Celestials.
of course this is all about habits. calacanis wants to change yours. someone, somewhere is going to create the page you go to by default. who’s it going to be? terry said mahalo was really angling for wikipedia. i think this shows that there’s more to this. why not tilt at the windmills of wikipedia and google, and whoever else.
but you won’t see my habits there. i think you should, if you wish, and i were to let you. one day, maybe.
Habit is a compromise effected between the individual and his environment, or between the individual and his own organic eccentricities, the guarantee of a dull inviolability, the lightning-conductor of his existence. Habit is the ballast that chains the dog to his vomit.
From Beckett’s “Proust”.
Comment by Terry Jones — November 22, 2007 @ 2:55 am