Pay attention to what you’re paying attention to
Cognitive 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 moreThere 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
... See more
Something strange and wondrous begins to happen when one spends stretches of time in solitude, in the company of trees, far from the bustle of the human world with its echo chamber of judgments and opinions — a kind of rerooting in one’s deepest self-knowledge, a relearning of how to simply be oneself, one’s most authentic self. Wendell Berry knew... See more
Maria Popova • Kahlil Gibran on Silence, Solitude, and the Courage to Know Yourself
Who gets to write shapes what gets to be written, which shapes what is remembered — that is the making of the collective selective memory we call history, and it is made of words. We invented words to name the world and invented power to apportion the named. It is our inventions that tell the fullest story of our nature. The range of them — the... See more
Maria Popova • The Marginalian
people building tech products so often miss the point
the point is to help people live a good life, not an efficient life
the point is resonance, not scale
the point is to deliver comfort, not just convenience
the goal is not technology - the goal is human flourishing
the point is to help people live a good life, not an efficient life
the point is resonance, not scale
the point is to deliver comfort, not just convenience
the goal is not technology - the goal is human flourishing
sari azout • Tweet
varda reveals the importance of three things in this journey: inspiration (the motivations, ideas, circumstances and happenstance that ignite the desire to create), creation (the means, structure, details, and the work), and sharing (perhaps the purpose of creation).
People are made of stories. Our memories are not the impartial accumulation of every second we’ve lived; they’re the narrative that we assembled out of selected moments. Which is why, even when we’ve experienced the same events as other individuals, we never constructed identical narratives: the criteria used for selecting moments were different
... See moreTed Chiang • Exhalation: Stories
The hostile telepaths problem — LessWrong
lesswrong.com