{"id":1193,"date":"2017-08-20T15:23:43","date_gmt":"2017-08-20T15:23:43","guid":{"rendered":"https:\/\/dailystoic.com\/?p=1193"},"modified":"2017-08-20T15:23:43","modified_gmt":"2017-08-20T15:23:43","slug":"claude-shannon-moderation","status":"publish","type":"post","link":"https:\/\/dailystoic.com\/claude-shannon-moderation\/","title":{"rendered":"Moderation in the Midst of Acclaim"},"content":{"rendered":"

There\u2019s value in learning not just from Stoic philosophers, but from \u201cnatural Stoics\u201d\u2014people who have lived with the kind of wisdom we want to cultivate in ourselves, even if they never called themselves Stoics. That kind of model doesn\u2019t have to be\u00a0a Cato<\/a>,\u00a0a Seneca<\/a>,\u00a0a Marcus Aurelius<\/a>, or some distant historical figure. We can find natural Stoics in any walk of life, in ordinary people and great minds.<\/p>\n

One of those people is Claude Shannon, and he is\u00a0the founder of the information age.<\/a>\u00a0He isn\u2019t a household name, but in 1948, decades before anything resembling a \u201cdigital\u201d world would come into existence, Shannon wrote a seminal paper called\u00a0\u201cA Mathematical Theory of Communication.\u201d<\/a><\/p>\n

Few pathbreaking scientists lived out Stoic values as consistently as Shannon. He made a lifelong principle of the kind of indifference that the Stoics try to achieve. It was central to a career in which he chased his curiosity, often at the expense of more prestigious or lucrative options. As he put it, \u201cI don\u2019t think I was ever motivated by the notion of winning prizes, although I have a couple of dozen of them in the other room. I was more motivated by curiosity. Never by the desire for financial gain. I just wondered how things were put together. Or what laws or rules govern a situation, or if there are theorems about what one can\u2019t or can do. Mainly because I wanted to know myself.\u201d<\/p>\n

For Shannon, those weren\u2019t just words. At the height of his brief fame, when his information theory had become the buzz-phrase to explain everything from geology to politics to music, Shannon published a four-paragraph article kindly urging the rest of the world to vacate his \u201cbandwagon.\u201d Being a scientific celebrity didn\u2019t matter to him. What mattered was the truth, and the curious, serious research that uncovered it.<\/p>\n

Only\u00a0Seneca<\/a>\u2014who knew what it was like to be famous and controversial\u2014could have put it better: \u201cThe heart is great which shows moderation in the midst of prosperity.\u201d<\/p>\n

PS: Jimmy Soni and Rob Goodman, authors of the wonderful biography of Cato, the towering Stoic,\u00a0Rome\u2019s Last Citizen<\/a>\u00a0<\/i>have recently published\u00a0A Mind At Play<\/a><\/i>, an acclaimed biography of Claude Shannon. You should check it out.<\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"

There\u2019s value in learning not just from Stoic philosophers, but from \u201cnatural Stoics\u201d\u2014people who have lived with the kind of wisdom we want to cultivate in ourselves, even if they never called themselves Stoics. That kind of model doesn\u2019t have to be\u00a0a Cato,\u00a0a Seneca,\u00a0a Marcus Aurelius, or some distant historical figure. We can find natural […]<\/p>\n","protected":false},"author":1,"featured_media":879,"comment_status":"closed","ping_status":"closed","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"inline_featured_image":false,"footnotes":""},"categories":[8],"tags":[],"yoast_head":"\nModeration in the Midst of Acclaim<\/title>\n<meta name=\"robots\" content=\"index, follow, max-snippet:-1, max-image-preview:large, max-video-preview:-1\" \/>\n<link rel=\"canonical\" href=\"https:\/\/dailystoic.com\/claude-shannon-moderation\/\" \/>\n<meta property=\"og:locale\" content=\"en_US\" \/>\n<meta property=\"og:type\" content=\"article\" \/>\n<meta property=\"og:title\" content=\"Moderation in the Midst of Acclaim\" \/>\n<meta property=\"og:description\" content=\"There\u2019s value in learning not just from Stoic philosophers, but from \u201cnatural Stoics\u201d\u2014people who have lived with the kind of wisdom we want to cultivate in ourselves, even if they never called themselves Stoics. 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