David Pennington

Basic dynamic in life: there is nothing meaningful enough to make you happy that could not make you sad if you lost it. This is the paradox of feeling, and it’s inherent and existential. If things inspire real positive emotion in you then they are necessarily things in which you are sufficiently invested that you would feel negative emotions when... See more

A user journey that changes who you are

But that’s not why you should write.

You should write because when you know that you’re going to write, it changes the way you live.

My friend, digging for penis straws, says maybe it’s good to see. We have to confront this stuff. This is the cost of our collective Amazon addiction.

Even if you don’t plan a whole trip around them, libraries are excellent spots for weary travelers: free, quiet, cool, full of locals, and staffed by people whose job is to help any visitors who walk in the door.

I concluded that what we call “intelligence” is as much about virtues such as honesty, integrity, and bravery, as it is about “raw intellect.”

Algorithmic systems reduce this randomness significantly. They optimize our information environment for relevance and engagement, which means showing us more of what we’ve already engaged with. The system can’t show us what it doesn’t predict we want, and it can’t predict interest in something that falls outside our behavioral patterns.

This means... See more

We don’t need to fix the problems of the world with technology, we need to fix technology with our human spirit.”