provocations
provocative ideas, musings, and statements to mull on
sari and
provocations
I know that the people who will make you feel warm and fuzzy when you’re sad, and the people who will give you brutally honest feedback, are usually different people. Ideally you want to have relationships with both kinds, and reward them for their strengths, rather than getting mad at them for failing to do what they’re bad at.
via Sasha Chapin
And that’s for comparatively structured questions, like “What is the optimal way to convert input X into output Y?” It’s even harder for uncertain jobs, like “What should input Y be?” Was the team that designed the “like” button more productive than the team that produced Slack’s “emoji react” feature? We can argue indefinitely. Maybe the “like”... See more
Byrne Hobart • The Startling Convexity of Expertise
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.
People around you, constantly under the pull of their emotions, change their ideas by the day or by the hour, depending on their mood. You must never assume that what people say or do in a particular moment is a statement of their permanent desires.
Robert Greene • Mastery
a glorious rewrite of the giving tree. much rather model society on this.
Once men turned their thinking over to machines in the hope that this would set them free. But that only permitted other men with machines to enslave them.
A quote from Dune
“It's so hard to forget pain, but it's even harder to remember sweetness. We have no scar to show for happiness. We learn so little from peace.”
— Chuck Palahniuk, Diary