This AI boom has set off an existential crisis in me.
Some background: I’ve been teaching writing for the past six years. In that time, I developed frameworks for how to write well and a reputation as a good teacher to learn from. Partially because of the AI wave, I decided to stop teaching. It has only been four months... See more
A central thesis is that all products are asking things of their customers : to do things in a certain way, to think of themselves in a certain way — and usually that means changing what one does or how one does it; it often means changing how one thinks of oneself.
Quality over quantity. I often worry that I write too much on this blog. After all, the world has a lot of text. Does it need more? Shouldn’t I pick some small number of essays and really perfect them?
Arguably, no. You’ve perhaps heard of the pottery class where students graded on quantity produced more quality than those graded on quality. (It
The book Extraordinary Tennis for the Ordinary Tennis Player by Simon Ramo offers a helpful mental model: a distinction between “loser’s games” and “winner’s games.”
Loser’s games = focusing on minimizing mistakes.
Winner’s games = focusing on maximizing success.
When learning tennis, amateurs play a loser’s game, meaning the majority of points come... See more
Through all of this, Republicans still insist that they’re the party of normalcy. This is why they can’t quite deal with the charge that they’re weird. There’s a reason for this. For years, in the American political imagination, Republicans were the normal party and Democrats were the party of weirdness.
Authenticity brings us to avatars. This might seem a strange connection: aren’t avatars, by nature, inauthentic? After all, avatars entail being someone other than yourself. But for many people, avatars are a vessel for more authentic self-expression.
Things that work: Dogs, vegetables, index funds, jogging, sleep, lists, learning to cook, drinking less alcohol, surrounding yourself with people you trust and admire.
It’s a rather simple question that quickly gets to the core of someone’s sense of well-being and legitimacy: did your childhood leave you feeling that you were – on balance – OK as you were? Or did you somewhere along the way derive an impression that you needed to be extraordinary in order to deserve a place on the earth? And, to raise an... See more