Debbie Foster

If you’re skeptical of any prescriptive advice to begin with, if “less certainty, more inquiry” is your guiding light, not only will you listen; you will adjust. You will grow. And if that’s not self-awareness and self-discipline, I don’t know what is.

And when something deceives us by purporting to be genuinely "real"—based on true events that happened to actual people, or could have happened to actual people, we tend to give them more weight: we think of them as truth in a fiction jacket. This problem bleeds over into related half-fictions like true crime and government conspiracy theories,

"God veil our faults,' as the old folks say. A simple, much overused prayer. But what little wisdom it contains. A philosophy of sorts. I love how modest it is. I mean, they could have said, 'God erase our faults.' Now that would've been ambitious. But ‘veiľ is better. It presupposes that to live a life is to have faults, that no one is perfect and

in the fascist imagination, there must be a victim to be protected and an invasive enemy on the attack: if young people are adopting beliefs in multiculturalism, gender fluidity, and socialism, then someone must be forcing these ideas on their innocence.

In essence, Friston's principle explains how living systems defy (at least temporarily) the second law of thermodynamics and achieve homeostatic stability. Broadly speaking, the free energy principle is consistent with Freud's principle of constancy, which asserts that the nervous system conserves energy and tends towards stability.

Goodhart's law, coined by the British economist Charles Goodhart: when a measure becomes a target it ceases to be a good measure.

There's no better feeling than when I'm after something, and I can sense it nearby, but I don't quite know what it is yet. The poem or essay hasn't materialized, but I trust that it will.

Despite having more options than ever, we may see true individuality flattened in favor of what a select group of others like, because that's what algorithms do. They don't recommend content for you ; they recommend content based on others similar to you.

This tends to happen to ex-believers who find themselves back in church: it's not until you're back in the room, with the faith atomized in the air, the energy rising off the people still inside the system, that you really remember. Call it late-breaking phantom limb syndrome of the soul.