good questions

How can I find worth and dignity in something deeper and more enduring than intelligence?

How can I thrive while operating contrary to dominant social and cultural trends?

The experts all agree: the trend, they say, is your friend.

All you need to do is identify it, and then you ride it out. And, true enough, I’ve watched thousands of people make a buck doing just that. If you are active in the arts, that may be the single most obvious... See more

Their gospel of optimisation ignores the fundamental question: what’s the point of being 10x more productive if we’re not 10x more fulfilled?

Reid Hoffman and Tyler Cownen recently talked about how AI is good at answering questions but not at asking them—as The Diff noted on Saturday, that makes perfect sense given how the models are constructed: they're trying to predict the highest-probability next token, i.e. they're relentlessly searching for a local maximum. But good questions are a... See more

Whether or not we live fulfilling lives often depends on our ability to honestly ask ourselves, How did I get here? Am I happy where I am? If not, how do I go to go somewhere different?

It's a question most of us could do with asking ourselves. I think virtually everyone, except perhaps the very Zen or very old, goes through life haunted to some degree by the feeling that this isn't quite the real thing, not just yet – that soon enough, we'll get everything in working order, get organised, get our personal issues resolved, but

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