provocations
provocative ideas, musings, and statements to mull on
sari and
provocations
consumption choices force you to develop the habit of self-examination. And when you think about more complex life choices — what kind of personality to present to the world, how to behave in your romantic relationships, how to express yourself through art or music — that habit will come in handy. In fact, economists would say that social... See more
Noah Smith • You are what you consume
Why should what you produce , rather than what you consume , be the most important thing about you? Why shouldn’t the fact that you race boats or watch anime or drink matcha lattes be what defines your identity? Why should I call myself a “writer” rather than a “science fiction fan” or a “rabbit dad”? Just imagining introducing myself as the latter... See more
You are what you consume
In ‘How Movies Were Edited 60 Years Ago,’ an editor manually cut film splicing, taping, and rewinding at a near biblical pace. Each move carried significance since fixing mistakes was time consuming.
Watching that, I envied the slow process. It’s the opposite of my current approach > revisions layered endlessly, endless undos, nothing ever... See more
Watching that, I envied the slow process. It’s the opposite of my current approach > revisions layered endlessly, endless undos, nothing ever... See more
Media I’ve Consumed: Week 001 > The World Is Too Smooth
If prestige thinking is less essential than we claimed, and if machines can now produce a lot of its outputs cheaply, then what’s coming is not necessarily a tragedy for humanity. It may be a correction.
A correction of our class’s inflated self-regard.
A correction of an educational system that quietly treated one kind of cognition as the apex of... See more
A correction of our class’s inflated self-regard.
A correction of an educational system that quietly treated one kind of cognition as the apex of... See more
The Thinking Class
The hotnewtheory online is that reading is kaput, and therefore civilization is too. The rise of hyper-addictive digital technologies has shattered our attention spans and extinguished our taste for text. Books are disappearing from our culture, and so are our capacities for complex and rational thought. We are careening toward a post-literate... See more
Text is king
- The Era of Summarized Living will remove bias from work and life . One striking lesson I learned while serving on a jury almost twenty years ago was just how bad and biased our memories are, even when our only job is to remember something. In my jury experience, the group routinely recalled a situation or something a witness said one way, only to
The Era of Summarized Living, What Great Products Flex, & Mainstream Signs of AR
In some important ways, a user’s LLM chat history is an extended interview. The social media algorithms learn what you like, but chats can learn how you think.
You should be able to provide an LLM as a job reference, just like you would a coworker, manager, or professor. It can form an opinion and represent you without... See more
John Carmackx.comOne of the things that raises my hackles is the claim that the only reason not to be in awe of these technologies is that you haven’t used them enough. It’s certainly true that people who use ChatGPT a lot come to think it’s great, but I’m not sure whether that’s because they’re discovering its extraordinary depths or because they’re sort of... See more