Chad Aaron Hall

Olds still writes by hand, in cheap spiral-bound notebooks. When she’s really humming, she can fill a whole notebook in just a few days. Only a small fraction of this private writing will ever be published. Publication, for Olds, is not entirely the point. The act of writing itself, she insists, is fun —a physical discipline that sits somewhere

... See more

With path problems, the solver can usually assess how close the current state of the system is to the goal state. Most machine learning algorithms depend on this assessment. With insight problems, it is often difficult to determine whether any progress at all has been made until the problem is essentially solved. They’re often associated with the... See more

This is why despite what some silly people say on social media, confiscating rich people’s wealth wouldn’t be nearly enough to fund the government.

The reason why it’s important to mention all this is because this pattern is intricately tied into our desire for control. With control, we attempt to bridge the gap between the uncertainties of a given process, and the certainty of an end result. We want to know how exactly something will materialize, as its mere materialization isn’t enough.

Schopenhauer believed that all of human experience runs along a pendulum that swings from two poles: one of desire, and the other of satisfaction. We strive when we have desire, so the only way to alleviate this is to experience the pleasure that comes with satisfaction. But once you’re satisfied, boredom ensues, and desire inevitably arises yet... See more

Relationships are like weighing scales. You either bring your partner up, or weigh them down. The hope is that you are both evenly weighted enough of the time to balance the scales.