Charlie Gedeon
@charliegedeon
Reflecting on how learning and creativity are shaped by technology and our interactions with it. Co-founder of Pragmatics Studio, a small digital design studio in Montreal.
charliegedeon.comCharlie Gedeon
If you’ve ever felt that you can’t focus on a task when you’re hungry — or that all you can think about is food — the neural evidence backs you up. Work from a few years ago confirmed that short-term hunger can change neural processing and bias our attention in ways that may help us find food faster.
quantamagazine.org • The Brain Has a ‘Low-Power Mode’ That Blunts Our Senses | Quanta Magazine
What The Prisoner's Dilemma Reveals About Life, The Universe, and Everything
youtube.com“In the short term, it is environment that shapes the player, but in the long run, it’s the player that shapes the environment.”
Learning means being able to use new information. The basic process of learning consists of reflection and feedback. We learn facts and concepts through reflecting on experience—our own or others’. If you read something and you don’t make time to think about what you’ve read, you won’t be able to use any of the wisdom you’ve been exposed to.
Rosie • How to Remember What You Read
Template for helping onboard new team members. Helps discussing working conditions and culture.
Brings to mind how lots of generative AI will usher in a whole new level of convenience for even more tasks. Powerful quote:
Today’s cult of convenience fails to acknowledge that difficulty is a constitutive feature of human experience. Convenience is all destination and no journey. But climbing a mountain is different from taking the tram to the top, even if you end up at the same place. We are becoming people who care mainly or only about outcomes. We are at risk of making most of our life experiences a series of trolley rides.
Provocative Teaching Advice and Raising Thoughtful & Curious Kids
Incredible article about the state of the digital world and the necessity for kids to know who they are in the world.
What would a healthy culture and caring parents do for those kids? They would be pulled aside and told: you are you, and you will always be you; we live here, on this planet, in this culture, as this species; you live in the times you live in, and you will never live anywhere else. There’s no escape, for any of us. The world gets better and it gets worse. Your life gets easier and it gets harder. Progress happens. Happiness is possible. But the world is an irredeemably broken place, tragedy is the endowment of our bodies and our gods and our world, and you will always, always, always be you. You can hide in your room, but you’ll still be you. And you’ll still be you when you head off to college and make brand new friends, and you’ll still be you after you come out to your parents, and you’ll still be you after you get that job or that promotion or that raise, and you’ll still be you after you lose those last 10 pounds, and you’ll still be you after you fall in love, and you’ll still be you after the AI revolution or the socialist revolution or the love revolution or any other revolution. The only sensible path forward is to learn to accept the brokenness of human life, to develop resilience in the face of its petty cruelties, and to learn to live with yourself.
“All the technique in the world doesn't compensate for the inability to notice.” — Elliott Erwitt
If you're small, you're in a position where it's to your advantage to be weird—you can have a point of view that the big tech companies never could. In the world of chairs—you're not going to build a cheaper chair than Ikea. Why not build something they couldn't—like a more interesting one?
(Not Boring) Software Inc. • No More Boring Apps | (Not Boring) Software
Yet death still forces its way into our personal space. Its sudden and unwelcome appearance makes it only more spectral. As our urban lives increasingly involve interactions with strangers, with people or beings whose comings and goings are complete mysteries, more and more ghosts haunt our cities. As urban neighbourhoods are razed and rebuilt... See more