values

It’s paradox all the way down (or, “nested opponent processes”).

• Consider the basic Yin/Yang duality.

• Now imagine 2 overlapping axes in a plus sign:

  • SEEING: literal<>abstract vision; up-down.

  • DOING: literal<>abstract action; right-left.

• It doesn’t stop here. Consider the pairings. There’s:

  • BEING (literal vision & literal action), and;

  • KNOW

We craft virtual machines to interact with our hyper landscape. Through meditating on what our story is and what we care about, we become fluent in it. We can get out of our head and act from our values. It’s a feedback loop. By changing your actions, you encounter new things that refine your virtual engine.

And most importantly: your virtues are co

Maybe virtues shouldn’t come from an abstract ideal of yourself. Maybe they come from a fine-tuned perception of your own mind, and the structural ability to model your character. There’s a diligence required to observe your inner working, an analysis required to cluster patterns, and a creativity required to coin memorable frames that shape the gr

Udio (the AI song generator) can seriously penetrate the subconscious. It’s an earworm generator at scale. I find myself quietly yelling, “it’s time to write!” from that meme song I made for the editor team. What if you actually distilled your values and virtues into ear worms?

Vervaeke clip on Tim Ferris: The church, the temple, and the mosque used to be places where an “ecology of practices” had a home. It was less about socializing, or communicating, but communing. People would mutually conform to set of rituals and words that would transform themselves, enhancing religio, sacredness, and an awareness of the depths of

Adaptive preference bias — the tendency to want to justify your own decisions. With time, all of your decisions become the right ones. You learn to love where you end up, instead going through the struggle of molting and moving your life in accordance with your values. It’s the danger of over-relying on your own emotions. While values are often emo

My goal for Greek Orthodox Holy Week is to rapidly record my perceptions, make sense of them, build awareness of my negative virtues, and then shape postive virtues to live through over the next year.

I’ve always thought of a virtue as compressed earned wisdom baked into a word that I repeat. I was thinking in large aspirational terms before (kairos, synthesis, patience, etc.) but now I’m thinking about it through “negative” virtues. Trying to take note of all the tiny moments throughout the day where I don’t live up to my fullest self (little s