🦋 eunoia

In New York, people speak fast. In the American South, they speak slowly. Both of them are a form of politeness, understood in a different way. In New York, you speak quickly because you respect the value of the other person’s time and you don’t want to take up too much of it. In the South, you speak slowly because you want to respect the person by... See more

“Practice” made its way into our language by way of the Greek word praktikē , meaning “active,” and the Old French pratique , which actually means “experience.”

Process, on the other hand, originates in Latin as procedere and in French as proces , which mean something more akin to “a methodical series of steps.” Those steps lead toward something, as... See more

Flirting is intelligence at its peak because it’s the ultimate spontaneous social situation where you have to delicately balance humor, sincerity, & formality in order to explore unknown territories of conversations using cheeky cryptic language all while performing a vibe check

Some might call this concatenation of elements a “vibe”: something that’s difficult to pin down precisely in words but that’s evoked by a loose collection of ideas, concepts, things that can be identified by intuition rather than by a prescribed logic.

What the neural network “learns” is emergent rather than deduced. For example, it may notice a pattern that if it’s cloudy, then people are more likely to carry an umbrella. But it would not be able to explain that this is because cloudy implies rain and rain implies umbrella. Instead it effectively identifies a “rainy” vibe through correlations of... See more

Metaphors are slippery, like memory. But then, putting things to words is always a translation, an approximation of the thing. There’s perhaps no better reminder of that than our inability to describe the sensation of scent, its transportability, what it feels like and means to us. As Epstein suggests, the mind and memory are equally inarticulable ... See more