Jay Matthews

Historically, however, psychoanalysis emerged in a specifically Western tradition of intellectual and social values. It is based on a philosophy of liberal individualism and thus has proved to be a therapeutic technique exhibiting constraints that have limited its applicability across cultures and classes.

10 lessons from the past year

1. There has to be value: product market fit, there must be fundamental value for users


2. Web3 and crypto are not consumer friendly: people want problems addressed regardless of labels or terminology — " Crypto will scale when the technology becomes the invisible enabler of what consumer actually care about "


3. Incentive

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One of the biggest challenges people have when embarking on an unconventional path is disconnecting from extrinsic markers of success and listening to internal motivational cues. On the default path, you can spend an entire career playing other people’s games. At first, people on a pathless path try to fill the lack of extrinsic goals with new ones... See more

That is the predicate of the slender, poetic 1993 novel  Einstein's Dreams by physicist Alan Lightman — a book about time and the tricks we play on ourselves to bear our transience, a book that does for time what Alain de Botton’s  The Course of Love does for love: punctuating a fictional world with philosophical quickenings, thought experiments,... See more

On the workshop: The low teacher-student ratio (4:16), the deliberate cultivation of community, the concentration on fun, the valuing of personal experience, the adaptability of staff and the open acceptance of differences among and between students contributed to an inclusive and diverse learning environment — an ideal teaching environment, one... See more

"So it's taken some 4.6 billion years for a cosmic swirl of gas and dust to evolve into a planet fit for butterflies and children...This intricate web of life exists because Earth operates as a system in which everything is connected and interdependent. The word 'complex' does not begin to describe the workings of this system ."

Maybe working a little harder to understand what makes work count would be a good turn.

When we think about the future self, the activity falls somewhere in between. The closer that activity is to the current self, the more willing individuals are to wait for future rewards (or to show less “temporal discounting” of future rewards)