David Pennington
@dtpennington
I write stuff. I’d like to write more stuff. Currently: reclaiming my brain.
David Pennington
dtpennington.com
Which brings us back to the question of traditionalism and dynamism, and their potential interaction: if you have had a cultural revolution that cleared too much ground, razed too many bastions and led to a kind of cultural debasement and forgetting, you probably need to go backward, or least turn that way for recollection, before you can hope to... See more
Ross Douthat • The fall of the intellectual
Alas, we’re too dumb for the big ideas. Pop psychology, it is! Pass me my copy of Atomic Habits.
The randomness of physical space and human recommendation created collisions between existing preferences and unfamiliar possibilities.
Our Horizon of Possibilities: How Algorithms Contract Our World
Something is deeply wrong when we sext the same way we order a sandwich.
Catherine Shannon • Your Phone Is Why You Don't Feel Sexy
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.
You should write because when you know that you’re going to write, it changes the way you live.
James Somers • More People Should Write
The average American has fewer than three friends, fewer than three people they would consider friends. And the average person has demand for meaningfully more. I think it's something like 15 friends or something.
The implication is that Meta will close that friendship gap with AI companions. Zuckerberg clarified they won't replace relationships... See more
kyla scanlon • The Most Valuable Commodity in the World Is Friction
It’s not just that he wants us to have more friends, he wants our new friends to be his AI creations. Gross.
“A lot of writing consists of waiting around for the aquarium to settle so you can see the fish. Walking around muttering seems to hasten the process. Taking public transportation nowhere helps. Looking out the bus window lets the back of your mind move forward. Don’t listen to anything but natural sound. Don’t look at anything you have to turn on.... See more
Austin Kleon • The North Shore
We should all want to cultivate a thirty second mind that can absorb the essence of a problem and come up with insights based on deep fluency with how the world works. However, a different type of “thirty second mind” is far more common today. Nearly thirty years after the internet became mainstream, the majority of people in our society have... See more
The Rational Walk • The Thirty Second Mind
Thinking About Thinking and Mental Models
The detriment of going from a multi-disciplinary mindset to an attention vacuum.
We have become archivists of the self, I thought, curators of a life half-lived. Each countless photograph of a wonder, of dinner, of a view, of our children, of the utter banality of our everyday lives, was not a memento, a way of remembering the things we did, but instead evidence of the poverty of our engagement with the present moment.