Agalia Tan

In his own fine post on baseball and optimization a couple of years back, Rob Horning cited Melissa Gregg who observed that “personal productivity is an epistemology without an ontology, a framework for knowing what to do in the absence of a guiding principle for doing it.”

Related, are our searches and consumption driven by preferences or inquisitiveness?

As someone who came of age online and on social media, learning how to comport myself into legibility is a familiar act.

Adaptive literacy is knowing when to let go of what worked before.

Unlearning is harder than learning. Because it means admitting that the thing you spent years mastering is now obsolete. That the knowledge you built your career on doesn’t apply anymore. That the mental models you rely on are actively getting in your way.

Most of advertising is... See more

The playful wildness that made them successful gets replaced by increasingly hollow repetition as they struggle to maintain the career they worked so hard to achieve.

The Beckham saga illustrates this shift vividly. Brooklyn Beckham’s public denunciations of his parents use the now-familiar language of control, emotional safety, boundaries, and self-preservation. His claims may or may not be justified – that is not the point. What matters is the cultural script available to him. The script says: if a... See more