Language and Thought

Looking at the connections between the language we use and the thoughts we have

I like the term economism . It describes how economic thinking and practice have become ingrained into all sorts of aspects of our lives, even non-economic ones. In today’s world governed by economism , everything seems to need to be measured by economic logic: am I using my time efficiently?

Rabbit Holes 🕳️ #78

Haven’t heard this term before, but I think it follows from the collapse of things into measurements. We started with measuring money as a collapse of information, and that led to collapses of other aspects of the world as a proxy for money where money isn’t available to measure value.

If you have an apple and I have an apple, and we exchange apples, then you and I will still each have one apple. But if you have an idea and I have an idea, and we exchange ideas, then each of us will have two ideas.

George Bernard Shaw

Ideas are most valuable when shared (AND ACCEPTED) - Twitter bad example, because of the second part

Mentors and friends have always warned me that employers will never care about you.

But what if that’s a story we decided was true, one that doesn’t have to be?

Alicia Bonner • Why do you work?

Most anxieties about the future are really about the present.

Jonah Peretti • The Anti-SNARF Manifesto

This is at the core of my beliefs regarding the fear of AGI. It’s a reflected fear of current economic trends

A scrub is a player who is handicapped by self-imposed rules that the game knows nothing about.

visakan veerasamy • a matryoshka of possibilities

Most rules aren’t actually rules, they are illusions we create for ourselves.

H]uman beings need all the relatives they can get–as possible donors or receivers not necessarily of love, but of common decency.

. . .

When we were children in Indianapolis, Indiana, it appeared that we would always have an extended family of genuine relatives there. Our parents and grandparents, after all, had grown up there with shoals of siblings

Austin Kleon • KURT VONNEGUT ON THE NEED FOR BUILDING EXTENDED FAMILIES

Extended Family is important. Why not choose the extended family we bring in?

Socrates said that manual laborers make bad friends and bad citizens because they have no time to fulfill the responsibilities of friendship and citizenship.

Bob Black • The Abolition of Work

Believing in magic can be an irresponsible thing to do if it leads you to disengage from your material responsibilities– but if you’re a responsible person trying to get meaningful work done, and there’s a real possibility that something wonderful could happen and make everything tremendously better, it’s worth making a little space for, isn’t it?

if i'm honest with myself

Be magical

Questions are places in your mind where answers fit . If you haven’t asked the question, the answer has nowhere to go. It hits your mind and bounces right off. You have to ask the question — you have to want to know — in order to open up the space for the answer to fit. 1

Long Questions/Short Answers

It’s all about asking the right questions