The Attention Span. “Racehorses and Psychopaths.”

The value of information is determined by what’s discarded in the process of creating it.

Consciousness exists on a spectrum from pure abstraction (map) to pure engagement (territory).

confirmation bias is often the difference between sounding smart and being right. And sometimes something much, much worse.

The really, really dark side here is that the stronger an abstraction, often an outright lie, the more motivating it can be for tribal behavior. The soldier metaphor is doubly-appropriate. Taken to its most horrifying extreme, war and genocide is facilitated by abstraction.

Perhaps the simplest and best definition of wisdom I’ve heard is “knowing what information is important.” This kind of knowing is not solely done in the intellect. Data is constantly being fed into your unconscious, then cross referenced against your experience.

This is the difference between dissonance and resonance. When head and body are aligned or conflicted. As in the famous example of George Soros and his back pain, bodily sensation is a key indicator of unconscious dissonance; of when your intellect is missing something important from the outside world. His back hurt when his portfolio was positione... See more

Once you know exactly where you are on the map, you still need to orient yourself and move in the territory. And this is the key insight I learned from writing this piece. If you rebuild your new model based on abstractions it’s no more likely to be correct than the old one. So, you need to rebuild it in harmony with the world around you. The Taois... See more

The synthesis of these ideas may merely prove to be confirmation bias, but they are deeply resonant with me. And that’s the crux of the filtering process. That resonance hints at an internal alignment around values. You can intuitively detect it when you read it, when you hear it, and when you speak it. Shepherd wonders if what we hear as “eloquenc... See more

As the author of Sapiens, Yuval Noah Harari, puts it: “you could never convince a monkey to give you a banana by promising him limitless bananas after death in monkey heaven.”