Collections
So much value and love for the process of writing and what it does for the coherence between heart, brain, imagination, lived reality, unseen, and see
You can’t write a viral essay that says “it’s complicated and I’m not sure.” But this is the only path to truly novel insight.
Writing is a task that takes both objective and subjective intelligence. LLMs ace the objective parts the same way they ace every test; you can’t faul
the moralists ask us how we can justify our love of reading, we can make use of some such excuse as this. But if we are honest, we know that no such e
The hot new theory online is that reading is kaput, and therefore civilization is too. The rise of hyper-addictive digital technologies has shattered
TED’S 24 RULES FOR READINGReading shouldn’t be a goal—instead it ought to be cultivated as a habit.It should be a relaxing and enjoyable habit, someth
Surviving…whatever all this is… doesn’t have to mean being left a shell of a human. In culture today, there’s an attempt to make something out of it.
The latest season touches on a similar note — in which Robinson’s neighbor sneaks a pig in a Richard Nixon mask into his home. It ends with an all-too
Extra-Existentialism
Longtermtrends - Quarterly Chart Brief - October 2024 | https://eocampaign1.com/web-version?p=bb6d40de-a003-11ef-99eb-311c7e9fb2a9&pt=campaign&t=1731
Politics is a lagging indicator of consciousness. Do not despair.
When we mistake spreading ideas for taking real action, we overlook a crucial asymmetry: ideas and actions distribute their consequences wildly differ
pretty clear that collecting cultural ephemera is a new consumer behavior that’s going to become a core part of life on the internet
Books you read are sending you input. Your friends modeling behaviors for you. Newspapers. Tools. People you follow on Twitter. The architecture of a
The dream isn’t just to show all of ourselves unfiltered to the world. It’s to find a character that we feel comfortable being, that we deeply resonat
This is pretty good, and strangely consistent with my own idea of good taste Tasteful people pursue stuff with purpose, have an appreciation and curi
On paper, taste = discernment. In practice, taste = your sense of self, made visible.
For Kant, judgment is the mental faculty that connects particulars to universals—the capacity to say “this thing is an instance of that category.” But
A system optimized for noise elimination is hostile to the genuinely new. It converges on what works, on what has worked. That convergence might produ
Even if, for a while, I feigned hatred of rock and roll, that only made sense on the presumption of its continued reign. Much the same could be said a
To be honest, my appetite for this sort of online blowup diminishes hourly. Though I’m as prone to schadenfreude as any other media professional tryin
We can always opt out of this arrangement, of course, and live happily in meatspace, but that is precisely the point: Offline we exist by default; onl
“So thinking is prior to language. What language contributes is to firm up certain particular ways of seeing the world and give fixity to them. This h
“His own opinion, which he does not air, is that the origin of speech lie in song, and the origins of song in the need to fill out with sound the over
Collecting and archiving are ways to reclaim and own our attention—they are acts of meaning-making. These practices are rituals: habits and skills tha
Parnell shows that authors of color and queer authors are much more likely to have their work flagged as “adult content,” largely due to problems with
The whole thing about the Kardashians — the resistance they’ve kind of induced in people — is that it doesn’t feel consensual. You absorb information
Curation leads to expertise. Through curation, you better understand yourself, history, and unlikely connections across fields. Increasingly, we will
we’ve always been influenced in what we find beautiful or valuable or important, of course, but what’s new is the speed at which one is inundated with
You can use algorithms to surface new things. But algorithms are not nearly as good as human curators yet. Whatever pattern matching is going on insid
The freedom of information the internet brings helps us expose idiot intellectuals quickly and more accurately than ever before. But the internet also
“As a medium, the internet is defined by a built-in performance incentive. In real life, you can walk around living life and be visible to other peopl
I am tired of seeing speed as a selling point. I’ve wanted to talk about this for a long time. I think one of the main reasons many of us feel anxio
From Lily Chambers: I genuinely do not care if AI tools make me more productive. I am tired of seeing, "increased productivity" as a selling point. I
The problem (or at least one of the problems) is that the twin edicts to simultaneously optimize your team and life and to be flexible in light of an
But you can’t optimize systems in a context that’s changing, especially if it’s changing in unpredictable ways. Removing inefficiencies when circumsta
Against Optimization
Feedback is ineffective if it does NOT result in the other person taking action in a way they or you feel good about. As the remixed Dostoevsky quote
The most important ingredient for giving effective feedback is care for the other person. Your intent must to be genuinely help the other person. You
When delivering tough feedback, use this framework: Start directly: “I want to chat with you about [specific issue]” Share observations: “What I’m hea
Tech communities, like any community, are messy. If you’re fortunate to land on one that’s inclusive and welcoming then there are exciting things comi
The club model teaches us something: organizations that endure don’t try to include everyone. They’re clear about their identity, even as that identit
We believe that a healthy ecosystem competes on innovative features, not critical mass. The social web should be centered around people, not platforms
It was only because I showed up and I paid attention," he said. "I looked for places to go. I looked for communities to join. I looked for ways to bec
The five principles of prompting I developed work equally well as management techniques for humans: Give direction. Describe the desired style in de
People who are good at solving poorly defined problems don't get the same kind of kudos. They don’t get any special titles or clubs. There is no test
2) Clear Roles & Decision Rights Without clear swim lanes and decision rights, individuals on teams feel disempowered and projects tend to stall out.
Remember in the before times how on hard days you could grab your work bestie and go have lunch blocks away from whatever was bothering you?
Like many people I thought Covid, with its stopped clock and blunt force, would bring a major reckoning. A reckoning with small things, like what we w
And I realised that if you ever hear someone explaining things in terms of a long list of caveats, the odds are good that you’re looking at tacit know
Tacit knowledge is knowledge that cannot be captured through words alone.Think about riding a bicycle. Riding a bicycle is impossible to teach through
A democratic cultural politics would be developmentalist — oriented to learning, growth and discovery — rather than presentist. All kinds of resources
Some assume that a fundamental property of the internet is that it is globally connected, but countries, such as Iran and China, who have built their
Supportivelistening differs from other types of listening (e.g., listening during chit-chat or aconflict, informational listening) because it requires
Contemplative dyads, in particular, represent a deep interpersonal meditative practice carried out in pairs with a witness who engages in active liste
So when people opt to devote their energy to tracking the latest TikTok star or scrolling content instead of nurturing interpersonal relationships, th
Social media stopped being primarily about connecting socially a long time ago. People still use a range of technologies to connect to friends and bui
Taste for Privacy: How Context, Identity, and Lived-Experience Shape Information Sharing Preferences
The social-platform layer offers the feeling of encounter with the friction surgically removed. As one analysis of Gen Z’s parasocial turn put it, onl
We all know we’re overstimulated and want to stop, but we can’t. We use app blockers, throw our phones away, and build rigid routines. But none of it
humans don’t have fixed identities. we’re constantly testing. trying different versions of ourselves. seeing what gets rewarded. adjusting based on fe
I feel like there’s something so soulless about our culture—something deeply, deeply missing in people’s experience of life, a kind of superficiality.
We can always opt out of this arrangement, of course, and live happily in meatspace, but that is precisely the point: Offline we exist by default; onl
We are currently living in a time when the lines between fantasy and reality are blurring and virtual worlds are creating room for new rules of self-e
What am I supposed to do? Keep standards high and fail them all? That’s not an option for untenured faculty who would like to keep their jobs. I’m a t
The more upset I became, the more I felt that my sensitivity towards the paintings was the same sensitivity I held when I was the subject of the photo
To spot weird signals, you need to go down rabbit holes. Follow your intuition. And remember, pursuing rabbit holes is not always an act of procrastin
Gen AI for music has captured ~$300M in funding so far this year across several high-profile deals, the majority of which either focus on rights man
One cannot understand the Iran War without understanding the Kahanists. But I rarely see analysts mention them. Maybe they did, and it was behind a pa
Trump seemed unmoved by his divine destiny: the messiah, after all, is an unpaid position. More mysterious is why Parnas — a transnational criminal un
What do they say? Nothing at all. Life goes on. In the morning, adults hurry to work; children go to school; grandmothers go stand in lines. More and
But the question remains: Why was the Palace of the Soviets to be erected precisely where the Temple of Christ the Saviour had stood? (Let us add that
Fulfillment... is a function of time. The search for pleasure is circular, repetitive, atemporal... It has an end. It comes to the end and has to star
it’s so easy to derail our own joy by looking around at someone else’s life or worse — the imaginary life we think we should have by now
Put another way, will humans will always want to do things like scroll Instagram, but perhaps won't ever want to open TurboTax/Docusign/Concur/Foursqu
A futuristic and unrealistic concept interface: the computer waits on the human instead of the human waiting on the computer.
HEY Email
A good life doesn’t ask you to be good at everything. It asks you to find the small circle where you have unusual leverage, and to be peacefully avera
My father was a Sarkari Babu (government officer with basic salary) his entire life, he was at one job throughout his life. He drove a Bajaj scooter
accurate https://t.co/kDKo3ZXiVX
The most underrated note taking app is still the photo album. I can instantly recall what I was doing weeks or years ago. A single picture evokes a do
wispr (dictation tool) is amazing and i'm now using it 60%+ of the time when i would've typed before. i'm going to put my referral link below - if you
That is, be systematically ascetic or heroic in little unnecessary points, do every day or two something for no other reason than that you would rathe
Traumatisation is most usually presented as anunassailable, concrete fact, and this is where I need to be respectful. If someone brings a firmconvicti
when the trauma label has been appliedby outside mores – when an event like an explosion, an assault or a sexual event has taken place andour culture
Unplugging Is Not the Solution You Want
Society is increasingly cutting the nourishing ties that attach us, and calling it innovation. I worry about how encouraged we are to do things effici
I couldn’t help but come to the conviction, right there on the bus, that one of the most important questions modern man must ask himself is how much t
Ugh, I can’t believe I had to live/work through the deaths of both print media AND online media and now possibly television and film too?? Can I just
The problem in media isn’t the business model. The problem is that most of the content sucks.
the answer for publishers in the age of AI is no different than it was in the age of Aggregators: build a direct connection with readers. This, by ext
The subscription model means content providers are paid regularly no matter the quality and quantity of the product. Makes sense – being paid on a reg
What tradition or practice from another culture or era do you think we should widely adopt?I wish patronage were widely adopted as an explicit social
Media and Machines.
What education does is provide a curated experience to help you learn. Done well, it sifts through the myriad resources, possible paths, and common e
I have many friends who feel like they need a degree to do something they can already do without a degree MFA vs just write PsyD vs just coach PhD vs
warm minimalism
Functionality still matters, of course. But competition has pushed quality so high and prices so low that many manufacturers can no longer distinguish
When evaluating a company, one of my favorite questions to ask is whether it has an aesthetic. We don’t talk about aesthetics as the highest form of
And there’s a lot of positive evidence. It’s not that there’s some metaphysical concept of beauty that rules the world — beauty is a human experience.
It is that the attribute we call beauty is of two kinds. One is a parochial kind of attractiveness, local to a species, to a culture or to an individu
Aesthetics are your problem and mine. Nobody else’s. The fact of the matter is I want everything we do, that I do personally, that our office does, to
A garden is made up of the following parts: Seeds: the content contributed by gardeners, such as text, photos, video, audio, or other digital media. G
ore often than not, the digital gardens of today are botanic—privately owned online spaces made for visitors to fawn over while a “do not touch” sign
If there's any kind of lesson in all this, it's mostly some advice I want to give myself. The lesson is simply: speak up. It's OK to slip into advocac
look at how the word “community” itself has been warped in recent years into a cynical marketing cliché to rival “storyteller” — annexed as the torche
to be truly radical is to make hope possible rather than despair convincing.
“People think that intimacy is about sex. Intimacy is about truth. When you realize you can tell someone your truth, when you can show yourself to the
This project is inspired by the transformative power of intimate gatherings. Most of my transformation has happened in intimate group settings where m
When I think about editing images, a vast array of options come to mind: contrast, saturation, sharpen, blur, airbrush, clone stamp, etc. Even basic i
Reading is alluring. It has a nameless quality beyond satisfying desires for information and pleasure. Despite more colorful and interactive media, re
all serious intellectual work happens on the page, and we shouldn’t pretend otherwise. If you want to contribute to the world of ideas, if you want to
Among the troubadours, there was a different class of people, called knowms. Thecouncil was told that the knowms had some special skills that may help
information becomes knowledge only through processes of verification and critical analysis.
This is what knowledge decay looks like. Not burning libraries, but a slow, structural dissolution of the connections between claims and their sources
LLMs have three new capabilities that change the nature of search: Intuitive leaps: LLMs can answer poorly written questions with spooky-accurate ans
Unlike vertical search aggregators, boutique search engines feel less like the Yellow Pages and more like texting your friends to ask for a recommenda
