Ajinkya Wadhwa

You can also take more explicit measures to prevent yourself from automatically adopting conventional opinions. The most general is to cultivate an attitude of skepticism.

Some people are born with a reasonably tame mammoth or raised with parenting that helps keep the mammoth in check. Others die without ever reining their mammoth in at all, spending their whole lives at its whim. Most of us are somewhere in the middle—we’ve got control of our mammoth in certain areas of our lives while it wreaks havoc in others. Bei... See more

This powerful symbolism of the wedding is what makes it so important well after the day has passed. It marks a moment in time when the net of support has been cast, with each of your loved ones acting as a node in this net. It’s something you can reference as you move forward with your partner, especially as you start making some big life changes (... See more

In the human world, we think of “Me vs. You” selfishness and “Us vs. Them” tribalism as different concepts, but they’re actually just the same phenomenon happening on different parts of Emergence Tower.

One good trick is to ask yourself whether in your previous job you ever found yourself saying "Why doesn't someone make x? If someone made x we'd buy it in a second." If you can think of any x people said that about, you probably have an idea. You know there's demand, and people don't say that about things that are impossible to build.

Humans learn via direct experience, but their advanced language and imagination capabilities offer them a second learning pathway.

Spirituality has often been neglected by both the non-religious—because they group it, unfairly, into the “not for me” pile as part of their rejection of religion—and by the religious—because they rely on their religion for spiritual growth, and religions aren’t typically focused on the types of spirituality we’ve been discussing.

We can opt out of the stories of religion or politics, but we cannot opt out of the story of money. It is so interwoven into the fabric of society that even our physical health depends upon how abstract numbers on a screen can be converted into tangible meals.

For the rest of this series, we’re going to apply one particular second dimension to everything we discuss: the Psych Spectrum.

One last thing. When I took this topic on, I decided to do my best to force humility and open-mindedness on myself, even in places we’re all terrible at being humble, like politics. It’s amazing how much intellectual progress you can make when that’s your starting point, and working on this post has felt like an awakening in more than one area. So ... See more