Thought provoking
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
Whenever I see people defend the 40-hour workweek, I think back to this quote by David Cain:
'But the 8-hour workday is too profitable for big business, not because of the amount of work people get done in eight hours (..) but because it makes for such a purchase-happy public. Keeping free time scarce means people pay a lot more for convenience,
... See moreIn 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
Rareness of Love "When you're young, you believe that there will be many people with whom you'll connect with deeply. Later in
life, you come to realize that it only happens a few times. A few moments, frozen in genuine beauty, where you look at someone and you know, from a place deep within yourself, that they are going to mean something to you, that they are rare. When it comes to this kind of connection, it's important to understand that energy cannot be created or destroyed - that is a scientific fact. If the depth is there, it cannot be denied, cannot slip through your fingers, cannot be something you successfully run away from due to fear of exposure or battle wounds. You can try to dismiss it, can try to stay protected and hidden from the warmth, but your hiding spot is never watertight — it always catches up to you. And if it's not meant to fit within the soul of you, if it's simply not your love to hold, no amount of bargaining with your heart will anchor it. That is the beauty of discovering the things that stay, the things that fall into place. In a world of billions, in a world where we are all seeking connection but avoiding eye contact, there are remarkable points of impact where you manage to crash yourself into someone who ends up breaking through the exterior. Someone who makes contact with your heart, who grows roots within it. Together, you beat the odds. If you have found human beings like this, I hope you protect them. I hope you risk your heart for what you feel. I hope you believe that you are worthy of something full, and pointed and real. I hope you never settle for less, because certain people are truly just rare, beautiful drops of borrowed light that find their way to you. You don't feel alien with them. The otherness never arrives. There isn't a version of yourself you have to shed in order to feel connected to them. They see you clearly. You are held there. You are chosen there. Love becomes a safe place to rest your head. A place without artifice, or armour. There are no hiding spots. Everything is unguarded, and unvarnished, and there is freedom in that kind of openness, in that kind of vulnerability.
the weirder, the better
instagram.comThe 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 goal is not to separate the strands, it's to document the tangle.
(Ann Friedman)
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