Agency
Ideas around agency, aka the sense of control that you feel in your life + your capacity to influence your own thoughts and behavior
unoptimal and
Agency
@HunterGlenn @visakanv @goblinodds That is literally the first question you need to answer for yourself if you want to train agency. What do I want?
Stuart Evans added 2mo
amidst interesting comment thread
Even if you work inside the system, you don’t need to let the system work inside of you. And if you summon up the boldness to go in a different direction, others might even surprise you by following along.
"Multitasking Isn't Progress—It's What Wild Animals Do for Survival"
alex added 6mo
Sometimes you will exhibit reflexive agency - agency as an automatic response to the situation you’re in. You have a preference, you have the ability to satisfy it, so you do that. What could be more natural?
David R. MacIver • Learning to exercise agency
Stuart Evans added 1y
5 Reasons People Keep Taking Advantage Of You
taylorpearson.me
Stuart Evans added 2y
A big secret is that you can bend the world to your will a surprising percentage of the time—most people don’t even try, and just accept that things are the way that they are.
People have an enormous capacity to make things happen. A combination of self-doubt, giving up too early, and not pushing hard enough prevents most people from ever reaching a... See more
People have an enormous capacity to make things happen. A combination of self-doubt, giving up too early, and not pushing hard enough prevents most people from ever reaching a... See more
blog.samaltman.com • How to Be Successful
sari added 1y
FOMO is good. Being plugged in is good. There is valuable info at all levels from twitter gossip to philosophy books. You should stay plugged in. You can manage anxiety and beat the House without resorting to shaming social platforms into managing attention for you. That's a terrible yielding of agency.
Venkatesh Rao • Against Waldenponding
sari added 1y
spent the weekend with a bunch of highly agentic people and now i've got a bunch of thoughts about agency
Stuart Evans added 4mo
I think often what’s going on with prompted agency is that it gives you permission to act, and many people aren’t good at acting without permission.
David R. MacIver • Learning to exercise agency
Stuart Evans added 1y
sari added 1y
Learned helplessness, the failure to escape shock induced by uncontrollable aversive events, was discovered half a century ago. Seligman and Maier (1967) theorized that animals learned that outcomes were independent of their responses—that nothing they did mattered – and that this learning undermined trying to escape. The mechanism of learned helpl... See more
Learned Helplessness at Fifty: Insights from Neuroscience
Mary Martin added 1y