language vs reality

Be tentative with words, value them well, take safe words, words without catches, do not spin them with one another so that no webs arise, for you are the first who is ensnared in them.197 For words have meanings. With words you pull up the underworld. Word, the paltriest and the mightiest. In words the emptiness and the fullness flow together. Hen

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Sometimes, knowing the name is good enough. Most cognitive biases work that way. Once you find out what availability bias is, you can figure out where you’ve fallen for it. Noticing availability bias without knowing it is much harder. It’s the same for emotions, ideas, design patterns, and specific situations in life. Having a name helps you notice... See more

The roots of the word “compete” are the Latin con petire, which meant “to seek together.” What each person seeks is to actualize her potential, and this task is made easier when others force us to do our best. Of course, competition improves experience only as long as attention is focused primarily on the activity itself. If extrinsic goals—such as

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Peter Berger and Thomas Luckmann, the influential phenomenological sociologists, have written that our sense of the universe in which we live is held together by conversation. When I say to an acquaintance whom I meet in the morning, “Nice day,” I do not convey primarily meteorological information—which would be redundant anyway, since he has the s

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These are the terms amateur and dilettante. Nowadays these labels are slightly derogatory. An amateur or a dilettante is someone not quite up to par, a person not to be taken very seriously, one whose performance falls short of professional standards. But originally, “amateur,” from the Latin verb amare, “to love,” referred to a person who loved wh

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turns out if you let yourself want what you want*, everything is amazing (* instead of supposed-tos, shoulds, “if I were a good person, I’d…”s, rules, everybody else’s opinion, what’s ‘sane’, what’s ‘reasonable’, what you have worked out intellectually, etc.)

"should is one of the most violent words in the english language" https://t.co/1WZPwU2pqt

well-arranged words rearrange reality.