Thought provoking

To be human is to be an animal that needs witnesses. Someone has to see you eating cereal. Someone has to be there when you tell a bad joke. Otherwise you start twitching in public, you start growling in the supermarket. You start developing hobbies. This is the horror we call solitude.

When we are faced with something that genuinely challenges our worldview, we choose ignorance.

Caring only about the things which immediately affect us. Consuming only that which our senses can easily perceive.

We fall back on what we know, we revert to our biases. We make our known ignorance a source of truth.

And at its heart, this ignorance is... See more

There’s a quote often misattributed to Dostoevsky that fits perfectly. It goes: “Talking nonsense is the sole privilege mankind possesses over other organisms. It’s by talking nonsense that one gets to the truth. I talk nonsense, therefore I’m human.”

You almost wish he had said it.

When I want to be transformed, I chase my reading, to use Robin Hanson’s phrase. “Hunting has two main modes: searching and chasing,” Hanson writes. “With searching you look for something to chase. With chasing, in contrast, you have a focus of attention that drives your actions.” Searching is when I’m reading without a clear aim and continue to... See more

The reason we’re so increasingly intolerant of long articles and why we skim them, why we skip forward even in a short video that reduces a 300-page book into a three-minute animation — even in that we skip forward — is that we’ve been infected with this kind of pathological impatience that makes us want to have the knowledge but not do the work of... See more

I once had a conversation with filmmaker Neeraj Ghaywan during a tough time when I was struggling to make sense of life and work. He said something that stayed with me: “Whatever you're trying to do, do it fast because passion doesn’t last long. It deteriorates with age.”