weekly Go Flip Yourself

• about culture cycles

• about the danger of caring more about the past rather than the future [are you holding rights? or are you creating what’s next?]

• the battle between macro-culture and micro-culture — and while the former is declining, the latter might thrive

• “you can’t reduce things to formula”

• the difference between art and entertainment

• we need mind-expanding experiences

• there is a real danger in going full-passive consumption; which is bad for the culture

• “i spend more time reading than i do writing” => “any process you have in the world, your output depends on your input”

• fluid intelligence versus crystallized intelligence

• now being similar to 1800’s: back then, power went from the industrialists to the creative people

• you get luckier if you force yourself out of your comfort zone

• what Internet allowed is: direct contact with your audience, your people

relationships are stories.

When the corporate executive and the college student struck up a conversation in the 1980s, they weren’t just sharing space. They were engaging in a moment engineered by circumstance. The stakes were low; the expected return on breaking social norms was just high enough. With nowhere else to be, curiosity got its chance.

Not only do we have useful research that breaks the rules; we also have useless research that follows the rules. You can develop theories, run experiments, gather data, analyze your results, and reject your null hypotheses, all by the book, without a lick of fraud or fakery, and still not produce any useful knowledge. In psychology, we do this all the time.

In the 1860s, Charles Baudelaire bemoaned what we might now call doomscrolling:

Every newspaper, from the first line to the last, is nothing but a tissue of horrors. Wars, crimes, thefts, licentiousness, torture, crimes of princes, crimes of nations, individual crimes, an intoxicating spree of universal atrocity.

And it’s this disgusting aperitif that the civilised man consumes at breakfast each morning … I do not understand how a pure hand can touch a newspaper without a convulsion of disgust.

i call this ‘the pendulum of history in action’ and can’t wait for the ‘certified 100% human made and thought’ rationale.