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
You might have independence, and you might be an ambitious person—but if you can’t even begin to fathom creating and playing by your own rules, do you really have agency?
sundus • agency: it's only human
How to spot high agency people:
1. Weird teenage hobbies - Teenage years are the hardest time to go against social pressures. If they can go against the crowd as a teenager, they can go against the crowd as an adult.
2. Energy distortion field - If you meet with them when… Show more
Don’t underestimate the power of vision and direction. These are irresistible forces, able to transform what might appear to be unconquerable obstacles into traversable pathways and expanding opportunities. Strengthen the individual. Start with yourself. Take care with yourself. Define who you are. Refine your personality. Choose your destination a... See more
Jordan Peterson • 12 Rules for Life: An Antidote to Chaos
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
PhilPapers
excellent work by C. Thi Nguyen
What idea changed how you view the world?
Here's mine: High Agency.
The high agency library: (19 best examples I've found in 4 years) https://t.co/IOttWTOC5u
“the high agency library” - great examples of agency
In ordinary language, we frequently speak of machinery or ideas ‘doing’ things in our lives. But they do nothing. People – human persons – produce, operate and apply their creations. The problem with assigning agency, even informally, to the nonhuman is that this disguises the strength of human control, limited though it is in other respects. It le... See more
Bennett Gilbert • On hope, philosophical personalism and Martin Luther King Jr | Aeon Essays
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.
Dr. Julie Gurnertwitter.comA 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