reading, watching & listening to
sharing a selection of things I'm reading and find thought provoking
reading, watching & listening to
fascinating historical perspective.
our ancestors experienced day-to-day unpredictability (you could die from childbirth, starvation was a constant threat, etc…) but global stability (if your parents were peasants, you’d prob be a peasant).
modern humans inverted that - routine defines us but there is global instability (the world is constantly changing - technology, climate, politics)
other weird things about modern life:
children teach their parents how to use tools that are critical to thriving in modern society, a complete inversion of the transmission of knowledge through generations.
non-local social comparison - we compare ourselves to billions of people, not a few hundred in close proximity to us.
we are distanced from nature, whereas for generations before survival was tied to understanding the natural world.
nuanced piece by Anthropic CEO
measuring something’s value by how much money it makes is like measuring he value of sex by the amount spent on prostitution
Value capture occurs when an agent’s values are rich and subtle; they enter a social environment that presents simplified — typically quantified — versions of those val-ues; and those simplified articulations come to dominate their practical reasoning. Examples include becoming motivated by FitBit’s step counts, Twitter Likes and Re-tweets,... See more
PhilPapers
excellent work by C. Thi Nguyen
Most people don’t want a blank canvas, they want a dance, a format, a prompt.