Agency

you are a self-modifying machine, a particle with partial control over its own future, and it pays to know what all the buttons do. I’ve heard many people describe to me what sound like levers in their own souls, but I know very few people who realize that they can pull on them deliberately, if they want to.

Value capture occurs when an agent’s values are rich and subtle; they enter a social environment that presents simplified — typically quantified — versions of those val-ues; and those simplified articulations come to dominate their practical reasoning. Examples include becoming motivated by FitBit’s step counts, Twitter Likes and Re-tweets, citatio... See more

Things you can say to people in ten seconds that sometimes produce insanely outsized effects: 1. Yeah, someone *should* do that. Why not you? 2. Is there something you could do about that problem in the next five minutes?

A popular narrative now casts all living entities as ‘machines’ built by genes, as Richard Dawkins called them. For Mayr, biology was unique among the sciences precisely because its objects of study possessed a program that encoded apparent purpose, design and agency into what they do. On this view, agency doesn’t actually manifest in the moment of... See more

You are the machine that fuels everything else in your life. Paying attention to the mindset that drives that machine, is simply one of the most important things you can do. Every move, every decision, every action will rest on that. Be sure it is as optimal as it can be.

“Between stimulus and response there is a space. In that space is our power to choose our response. In our response lies our growth and our freedom.” – Not Viktor Frankl