provocations
provocative ideas, musings, and statements to mull on
sari and
provocations
The fork on your plate isn’t inevitable—it’s propaganda. Its design has been polished by centuries of iteration, yes, but also by centuries of forgetting. We stopped asking why a fork looks the way it does because it became too familiar to question. It’s not a tool anymore; it’s a dogma.
But supernormal isn’t about inevitability. It’s about normalization. When something becomes so ubiquitous, so embedded in daily life, it disappears from view. That’s not just true for objects—it’s true for the systems we live by. Markets, money, time.
Fearing that AI will replace you or surpass you or become you is like being afraid that your offspring will surpass you or become you or replace you. It will, because that's what they're designed to do, and that's why you created them. And also, they depend on you, and they are of you, and they will improve you. Without you, they cannot exist.
h/t
... See more
Frank by Seth Brown
The Misalignment Museum
If you want to create the common sense that comes from twenty years of being in the world, you need to devote twenty years to the task. You can't assemble an equivalent collection of heuristics in less time; experience is algorithmically incompressible.
Ted Chiang • Exhalation: Stories
“If you can see a thing whole,” he said, “it seems that it’s always beautiful. Planets, lives … But close up, a world’s all dirt and rocks. And day to day, life’s a hard job, you get tired, you lose the pattern. You need distance, interval. The way to see how beautiful earth is, is to see it from the moon. The way to see how beautiful life is, is... See more
andrea and
Most people’s mental models of energy are flawed: they think there’s a ‘tank’ of energy that gets depleted as you spend it. This may be roughly true for physical energy, but mental energy is different: spending mental energy on things that you consider productive or important gives you more mental energy for other things: a positive feedback loop.
... See morenabeelqu.co • Advice That Actually Worked for Me
"On closer scrutiny, it turns out that many of today's problems are a result of yesterday's solutions".
Thomas Sowell