Thought provoking
The objection to conforming to usages that have become dead to you is that it scatters your force. It loses your time and blurs the impression of your character. If you maintain a dead church, contribute to a dead Bible-society, vote with a great party either for the government or against it, spread your table like base housekeepers,—under all
... See moreRalph Waldo Emerson • Self Reliance (Illustrated)
Yowza
The universe rather resembles a soup of experience-causing material, which your mind then separates into distinct, unified objects. And even this is inappropriately projecting our own conceptions of substance onto reality.
From Narrow To General AI • A brief digression into Kant’s Transcendental Idealism
Subjectivity at its finest.
The philosopher Hannah Arendt wrote presciently about the danger of a society of lonely individuals. She defined loneliness not as solitude—since solitude is where one can reflect on their connection to themselves and others and really prepare themselves for encountering others. She described loneliness as isolation and even alienation from others... See more
Sure, Mr. Hoover. • Hope beyond individualism
In the meantime, humanity has been deprived of comprehensive understanding. Specialization has bred feelings of isolation, futility, and confusion in individuals. It has also resulted in the individual’s leaving responsibility for thinking and social action to others.
Maria Popova • Buckminster Fuller’s Manifesto for the Genius of Generalists
State of AI and path to AGI
the loss of these small groups, in favor of nation-level organization of atomized individuals, has had serious consequences for human welfare and human agency. We are missing a layer of organization essential for our happiness.
Sarah Perry • Gardens Need Walls: On Boundaries, Ritual, and Beauty
How we spend our days is, of course, how we spend our lives. What we do with this hour, and that one, is what we are doing. A schedule defends from chaos and whim. It is a net for catching days. It is a scaffolding on which a worker can stand and labor with both hands at sections of time.
— Annie Dillard, ’The Writing Life’, 1989
Bullshit, unlike lying, works by making you unconcerned with whether speech is true or false. The bullshitter, like the sophists of antiquity, does not appeal to any measure of truth outside of the needs of the moment. Instead, he tries to capture your attention with the catchiness of his claim and how much it provokes something inside of you: some
... See moreJohn Vervaeke, Christopher Mastropietro, • Awakening From the Meaning Crisis
the goal is not to separate the strands, it's to document the tangle.
(Ann Friedman)