Pay attention to what you’re paying attention to
There are two modes of experience: appreciative, and evaluative.
Concrete example: let's say you're listening to a piece of music. Are you sinking into it, awash in emotions? You're in the appreciative mode.
Are you the mixing engineer, listening to the snare hits to make sure they're consistent? You're in the evaluative mode.
Much of sanity, and
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The Sublime Beauty That Airplanes Leave Behind
nytimes.comCognitive endurance refers to the capacity of independent engagement with a challenging problem, in the presence of accessible solutions. For example, a student’s cognitive endurance regulates how long they struggle with a math problem before looking up the solutions in the textbook’s appendix.
Like athletic endurance, cognitive endurance can be
... See moreBut this isn’t really about the software. It’s about what software promises us—that it will help us become who we want to be, living the lives we find most meaningful and fulfilling. The idea of research as leisure activity has stayed with me because it seems to describe a kind of intellectual inquiry that comes from idiosyncratic passion and
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