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Non-coercive marketing is about creating customers who are both happy and empowered. […] An empowered customer is someone whose choice to transact com

The hard problem is earning the right to hold people’s memory. The best way to preserve agency and fight technological fascism is by making the altern

to be truly radical is to make hope possible rather than despair convincing.

The Operating Manual for Your Nervous System

What if Anxiety Is a Habit, Not a Disorder?

PEOPLE IN SYSTEMS DO NOT DO WHAT THE SYSTEM SAYS THEY ARE DOING. University professors chase grants, not student enlightenment. VCs nurture personal b

What the humans like is responsiveness - by Sasha Chapin What the humans like is responsiveness

Every Resource I Use to Educate My Kids

When you say that the status quo draws people toward more individuated, personality-driven work, what do you think is causing that, both culturally an

to be truly radical is to make hope possible rather than despair convincing.

iUnlock doors with it.iMeet lovers through it.iOrder food with it.iSummon cars with it.iEven meditate with it.Apple designed the iPhone too well.So we

This is pretty good, and strangely consistent with my own idea of good taste Tasteful people pursue stuff with purpose, have an appreciation and curi

On paper, taste = discernment. In practice, taste = your sense of self, made visible.

For Kant, judgment is the mental faculty that connects particulars to universals—the capacity to say “this thing is an instance of that category.” But

A system optimized for noise elimination is hostile to the genuinely new. It converges on what works, on what has worked. That convergence might produ

What am I supposed to do? Keep standards high and fail them all? That’s not an option for untenured faculty who would like to keep their jobs. I’m a t

The more upset I became, the more I felt that my sensitivity towards the paintings was the same sensitivity I held when I was the subject of the photo

To spot weird signals, you need to go down rabbit holes. Follow your intuition. And remember, pursuing rabbit holes is not always an act of procrastin

Gen AI  for music has captured ~$300M in funding so far this year across several high-profile deals, the majority of which either focus on  rights man

Craft is the new "growth hack". Investing in craft, means you invest in quality of the experience, and that benefits in all of areas of the business

The freedom of information the internet brings helps us expose idiot intellectuals quickly and more accurately than ever before. But the internet also

“As a medium, the internet is defined by a built-in performance incentive. In real life, you can walk around living life and be visible to other peopl

I am tired of seeing speed as a selling point. I’ve wanted to talk about this for a long time. I think one of the main reasons many of us feel anxio

From Lily Chambers: I genuinely do not care if AI tools make me more productive. I am tired of seeing, "increased productivity" as a selling point. I

If you don’t have time to clean up, you don’t have time to cook Professionals understand that the project is the whole project, not simply the fun

Hindsight is 2020I don’t mean “hindsight is 20/20.” I’m talking about the year 2020.See, early in 2023, I wrote an article about starting and growing

A solid foundation requires a robust team structure. Hiring individuals who not only have the requisite skills but also align with the company’s cultu

In Paul Graham’s famous essay Cities and Ambition, there’s this idea that some cities are centers for some type of ambition, and when you come to one

The role of a successful place is to provide a catalytic context for missions.

after studying in basically every library / study spot in cambridge, I've found that the best study spots are still mom & pop cafes where there is a s

my social feeds seemed to finish their years-long transformation from a neighborhood populated with friends to a glossy condo development of brands.

FOR PODCASTS: CONVERSATION > INTERVIEW Many people treat podcasts like interviews, and some podcasters think of themselves as interviewers. This isn’

It starts by sending guests a series of questions that can help bubble up interesting topics. Rachitsky has never shared these publicly before, but he

How Gen Z Embraces Inconvenience as a Style and Sustainability Statement

Why do we sit in a classroom at all? Why do we remove ourselves from the extraordinarily rich experience tapestries of living to place ourselves in ar

What am I supposed to do? Keep standards high and fail them all? That’s not an option for untenured faculty who would like to keep their jobs. I’m a t

In large part this is because education, like most social systems, is slow to adapt, iterate, and evolve to be relevant for changing times. The glacia

generative AI is but the latest in a line of innovations that draws attention to the flaws of the modern education system, leaving us to question how

The humanities, rightly understood, are the things that technology cannot take away or substitute for. Of course, I don’t mean ‘humanities’ in the way

In only three generations, children in the British Isles as well as the United States have lost their freedom to roam, their independently explorable

Boredom, lust, embarrassment, resentment, confusion, euphoria, anger, ambivalence… everything is amplified in the febrile, white-hot heat of adolescen

Putnam believed that the single biggest risk factor was the growing amount of time people spent alone. Even back when he wrote Bowling Alone—before sm

Making systems resilient is fundamentally at odds with optimization, because optimizing a system means taking out any slack. A truly optimized, and th

The problem (or at least one of the problems) is that the twin edicts to simultaneously optimize your team and life and to be flexible in light of an

But you can’t optimize systems in a context that’s changing, especially if it’s changing in unpredictable ways. Removing inefficiencies when circumsta

Against Optimization

Prove you can do hard things When a teenager asks why they need to learn calculus, what should you say? You know they will never use it in adulthood

You have to speak from the diaphragm. That’s the only way that your words carry, is when you give them strength. Belief begins in the body. If you st

The thing that no one ever tells you about your calling is that it’s boring. Oh, everything is interesting if you’re interested… shut up. Yes, it will

Here is my definition of imposter syndrome. Imposter syndrome is the persistent, unrealistic, fear-inducing, fucking ridiculous belief that you are su

Sometimes the prize feels closer, other times farther away. Still other times it feels like we are drowning in aimlessness and exasperation. An identi

"Failure is a data point." Amy Buechler, Founder Coach at YC

"Failure isn’t an indictment of your basic worth but rather a piece of valuable feedback." Amy Buechler, Founder Coach at YC

No one talks about the way in which the world, in all of its bewildering capability, is, at every second, offering some detail that might lead to a ne

“to hone sensory receptivity to the marvelous specificity of things.” I would argue that this is another way of talking about learning to pay a certai

hello, i'm v good at asking questions. it's one of the things i get most complimented on i think what i do is simple & easy for anyone to do: 1.

Intelligence is a form of friendship with the world. It can’t be cultivated out of fear of it.

Kind Words is arguably the best game for any person feeling lonely, as it can be enjoyed even by non-gamers. The objective is to write and receive let

What wisdom can you find that is greater than kindness? (Jean-Jacques Rousseau)

it is very Good™️ to have many many small moments of connection - a hello, a goodbye, a ‘have a good day’, a bit of chitchat - with each person we enc

i live my life this way. almost every day is full of multiple tiny interactions with no aim beyond a hello, a how are you, a smile and then i continue

across many dimensions we have been acculturated to value the aggregated over the individual, and defaulting to the average consensus has become comfo

one of the reasons school fails to help people model success is that a series of tests introduces no randomness. Success in real life involves a grea

Homuncular Flexibility: The Human Ability to Inhabit Nonhuman Avatars

Desktop Metaphor

most of success comes from doing the mundane and often distasteful stuff, like identifying and dealing with problems and pushing hard over a long time

Viktor Frankl wrote dozens of books, but only one,  Man’s Search For Meaning,  was not aimed at commercial success. Frankl wrote  Man’s Search For Mea

How to Be Successful

Winston Churchill hit the nail on the head when he said, “Success consists of going from failure to failure without loss of enthusiasm.”

There are some gifts, by the way, that you do not have to pay for. Gifts that come at no cost. Gifts that do not require wrapping paper. Gifts that

Although I appreciate the gesture, I’m not The Godfather! My help doesn’t come with strings attached. If I take the time to do something for you, it’s

Institutionalized Organizations: Formal Structure as Myth and Ceremony on JSTOR

“It’s easier to imagine the end of the world than the end of capitalism,” wrote the literary critic Fredric Jameson. One of the hardest elements to im

While serving a life sentence in jail, Kaczynski wrote a little-known sequel to his manifesto, entitled “Anti-Tech Revolution: Why and How”. In it he

As a society, we are so fully invested in capitalism, competition and algorithms that it’s almost impossible to pull ourselves out of the cycle to see

We Must Strengthen Our Democratic Institutions

Longtermtrends - Quarterly Chart Brief - October 2024 | https://eocampaign1.com/web-version?p=bb6d40de-a003-11ef-99eb-311c7e9fb2a9&pt=campaign&t=1731

Politics is a lagging indicator of consciousness. Do not despair.

When we mistake spreading ideas for taking real action, we overlook a crucial asymmetry: ideas and actions distribute their consequences wildly differ

We should be skeptical of both utopian and dystopian technology predictions. New tools will amplify both our virtues and our vices, just like every pr

We see something that works, and then we understand it “We see something that works, and then we understand it.” (Thomas Dullien) It is a deeper

Why So Many of the World’s Oldest Companies Are in Japan

The short-term crowd is always too distracted to notice the long-term crowd slowly compounding. An investor obsessing over daily economic data misses

All you have to do is just be 5% better than everyone else who’s really bad at it. You don’t have to get everything perfect… you just have to be a lit

Yatú: Head of Fiction is Norm. Head of Reality is me.  (USB club job titles the co-founders gave themselves)

Decentralized investor communities gain traction in biotech

The Only Crypto Story You Need, by Matt Levine

By yielding a generational wealth creation opportunity that was a strange hybrid of a lottery jackpot and self-made fortune, crypto created an ideolog

For example, it was 30 years after the invention of film that someone first tried telling stories with it — before that, film was mainly used as a dem

Just a moment...

How do you explain the web to people who have never used it? You make it as simple and as accessible as possible.

Stephen Malina

The destiny of our species is shaped by the imperatives of survival on six distinct time scales. To survive means to compete successfully on all six

We need the right kind of climate optimism

We Need the Right Kind of Climate Optimism

One cannot understand the Iran War without understanding the Kahanists. But I rarely see analysts mention them. Maybe they did, and it was behind a pa

Trump seemed unmoved by his divine destiny: the messiah, after all, is an unpaid position. More mysterious is why Parnas — a transnational criminal un

What do they say? Nothing at all. Life goes on. In the morning, adults hurry to work; children go to school; grandmothers go stand in lines. More and

But the question remains: Why was the Palace of the Soviets to be erected precisely where the Temple of Christ the Saviour had stood? (Let us add that

Rob and I had to face the truth: Matter is a great product—3x App of the Day, with many thousands of passionate users—but it isn’t the next Duolingo.

When the institutions are optimized to fund the legible thing and the individuals are optimized to build the legible thing, the identity of the founde

Glance Back

anyone who prioritizes the wellbeing of the “future of humanity” in the abstract over the dignity and care of individuals in the present cannot claim

Consider one more possibility: that the people who seem to slow us down and hold us back are actually preventing things from happening too fast. Imagi

Our metrics of progress have continuously abstracted: from the tangible bushels of wheat in agricultural economies (with natural physical limits), to

Collecting and archiving are ways to reclaim and own our attention—they are acts of meaning-making. These practices are rituals: habits and skills tha

Parnell shows that authors of color and queer authors are much more likely to have their work flagged as “adult content,” largely due to problems with

The whole thing about the Kardashians — the resistance they’ve kind of induced in people — is that it doesn’t feel consensual. You absorb information

..it is possible that every bit of complex technology will in its turn reveal to us something about ourselves we did not know. Part of inventing and t

Now on to the good news. Your no thanks doesn’t need to be an absolute, total, eternal no. We can use typewriters to write letters and write a poem on

The Technology That Actually Runs Our World

my favorite feeling in the world is “I’ve done everything I could, and whatever happens from now on is not my fault so I can just relax”

I must admit, idling accounts for some of the most relaxing moments of my day. They’re not joyful, nor are they ultimately restful (I’m reading Twitte

That is, be systematically ascetic or heroic in little unnecessary points, do every day or two something for no other reason than that you would rathe

Traumatisation is most usually presented as anunassailable, concrete fact, and this is where I need to be respectful. If someone brings a firmconvicti

when the trauma label has been appliedby outside mores – when an event like an explosion, an assault or a sexual event has taken place andour culture

The hyperreal doesn’t mimic or imitate reality. It replaces reality altogether, making it nearly impossible for us to determine what is real, what isn

I say please and thank you, not because I believe it matters to him, but because it matters to me. If I am going to use natural English to communicate

Every phase of life can be shopped for at Costco. Where else can you purchase a wedding ring, a baby carrier, and a casket? It follows your own life s

when i'm tied up in consumption, creation is lost to me; i am no longer the writer, the creative, the poet, the artist, but the eater, the viewer, the

To ask, every day, "What matters, in the end?" is to create the possibility of differentiated choice, the potential to overthrow the tyranny of our hi

The amount of people who seem to live as if cowardice were heavily rewarded really make me think that simply being brave has a greater effect on life

I notice this pattern constantly with my hypertrophied left hemisphere coaching clients: they're paralyzed needing to understand before they trust. Bu

Fulfillment... is a function of time. The search for pleasure is circular, repetitive, atemporal... It has an end. It comes to the end and has to star

it’s so easy to derail our own joy by looking around at someone else’s life or worse — the imaginary life we think we should have by now

A leading indicator of personal growth is how curious you are able to be with all your emotions - especially the ones you weren't allowed to feel as a

a big theme from opening sessions at @bowmansschool is the importance of paying attention to your feelings a few people have said they don't have acc

How to be more emotionally intelligent (without trying so hard) 🧵 for @threadapalooza

The most competent people I know are pretty good at basically anything they put their minds to, because they just design a process and run it. I think

The Science Finally Catches Up: New Research Confirms ADHD as an Evolutionary Advantage, Not a Disease

the best relationships consist of a series of unbreachable private understandings

convinced that adults have totally forgotten how to have fun in conversation. every conversation is either "checklist catch up on life events" or "gr

What is love? Ask 19 geniuses. Get 19 answers. • Plato: It's remembering a soul. • Freud: It's desire in disguise. • Buddha: It's letting go. • Nietz

my sense is that people who take a long time to respond to messages, or tend to go into shame spirals about them, often put a lot of pressure on thems

The witch has turned from being a figure of alienation and marginalization to one of aspiration. No longer does the witch manage the divide between th

When scientific progress destabilized religious authority and the lack of meaning found in a pure rational worldview revealed science’s limitations, m

Of course this is what museum culture does: it, depending on your point of view, loots historical artifacts from a context in which they are useful an

The repetition of the word “immersed” is interesting, as it suggests this is not something these women studied, that instead it was a liquid medium th

insight from Gurwinder Bhogal: People want to belong to a tribe, and one way that people belong to a tribe is by having the same beliefs as the member

We still instinctively long for this kind of belonging, as our sacrifices to sports teams, fraternities, or churches demonstrate.

Contribute your skills to an existing effort – make it possible. Build the website, raise the funds, recruit the talent, plan the events. As Bill McKi

They're blind to a simple truth: complex minds can't develop on their own. If they could, feral children would be like any other. And minds don't grow

Our society’s individualism, largely driven by technological advances and the illusion of endless progress, will no longer be sustainable – will not b

On Being Lost

At its core, sensemaking is the art of regulating attention. This is a fancier way of saying that you must know what to ignore. And then you must have

Spirituality is experiencing who you are beyond small mental definitions, rituals, relationships. For this reason it renders traditional religion impo

“The function of prayer is not to influence God, but rather to change the nature of the one who prays.” — Søren Kierkegaard

Even if, for a while, I feigned hatred of rock and roll, that only made sense on the presumption of its continued reign. Much the same could be said a

To be honest, my appetite for this sort of online blowup diminishes hourly. Though I’m as prone to schadenfreude as any other media professional tryin

We can always opt out of this arrangement, of course, and live happily in meatspace, but that is precisely the point: Offline we exist by default; onl

The man we call an adventurer...is one who remains indifferent to the content, that is, to the human meaning of his action, who thinks he can assert h

The shock we’re experiencing now can’t be summarized as present shock, which happens when we become blindly obsessed with the present moment. Nor is i

You could call all of these events surprising, but I’m not sure any of them could be convincingly labeled unexpected. Such is the paradox of our times

“What shocks me the most when i travel to the West is that even the new generations dread the future and display many of the symptoms associated with

"We'll know our disinformation program is complete when everything the American public believes is false." - William J. Casey, CIA Director (1981)

Part of what I feel is important right now is to be in the system and to be creating these pockets and spaces and kind of stretching the constraints o

It’s also important to acknowledge that the systems change or innovation scene is not the only place where change and innovation is happening. Real ch

If you have a theory that’s been working pretty well for a while — it made good predictions, it solved real problems, it explained a lot of mysteries

Real explanations will sometimes sound weird, crazy, or too complicated because reality itself is often weird, crazy, or too complicated. It’s unfortu

Things change as contradictory evidence piles up, but even then, it doesn’t mean you should scrap the theory you started out with. Everyone back in th

Hey, Why Aren't We Doing More Research About Spiritual Awakening

Quick thread on coincidences, synchronicity and magic. I think it was Gordon White who defined magical practice as working to maximize the number of m

The fundamental issue is that these are subtle and esoteric arts. These ways of experiencing and interrogating reality depend (almost) wholly upon our

People with an optimistic mindset are associated with various positive health indicators, particularly cardiovascular, but also pulmonary, metabolic,

Umwelt, as I learned from Ed Yong’s book, An Immense World, is the world as it is experienced by a particular organism. How does the organism that is

What you allow your milieu to feed into your mind is what you will be processing. It is what will carve the pathways of your brain. This is perhaps we

“Gnosis should be an experience of your own life, a plant grown on your own tree. Foreign gods are a sweet poison, but vegetable gods you have raised

Market forces incentivise us to get on the property ladder, and then to set fire to the rungs beneath us so that nobody else can climb up. Moloch need

“True teachers are those who use themselves as bridges over which they invite their students to cross; then, having facilitated their crossing, joyful

Ever tried uncollapsing a wavefunction?

Could We Ever Really Build a Dyson Sphere? This megastructure for gathering solar energy would fill any conceivable future energy desires. But can it

Lots of theories have been tried, and lots of them have been given up because of something that looks like contradictory evidence. But the evidence mi

If you have a theory that’s been working pretty well for a while — it made good predictions, it solved real problems, it explained a lot of mysteries

Real explanations will sometimes sound weird, crazy, or too complicated because reality itself is often weird, crazy, or too complicated. It’s unfortu

Things change as contradictory evidence piles up, but even then, it doesn’t mean you should scrap the theory you started out with. Everyone back in th

“Worry can become like a bad habit of the mind. The rule of neuroplasticity—that our brain keeps changing based on our repeated activity—says that wha

many of the quant-ities related to suffering are based on perceptions and similar uncertain infer-ences. The uncertainty will necessarily increase fru

Scientists have demonstrated that, as the years go by, much of what we think we remember is false. It seems our brains can't store every detail we exp

There is no ideal pitch deck. The narrative depends on what you’re building—but I really like this one: 1. Vision for the world in 5 years 2. The nove

Gen Z and the End of Predictable Progress - by kyla scanlon

What we’re seeing isn’t just a media trend. It’s a shift in the architecture of power. Attention → Speculation → Allocation. This is the new supply ch

Many people were outraged by what they regarded as his non-parliamentary use of medieval laws to raise money. The most notorious was ship money. This

When startups start taking off, the founders usually can't tell what's changed. It's some combination of all the random things they did to make it ta

Startups and Macro Risk

Attention Required! | Cloudflare

The Dumb Idea Paradox: Why great ideas often start out by sounding dumb. at andrewchen

Startups and Macro Risk

If you find yourself in a culture of Tension, the best way to move that culture forward is to create a sense of clarity and opportunity. Show people w

in times of intense stress or adversity, future-oriented thinking such as hope may be more effective than mindfulness in sustaining positive mindsets

So many people say "I don't want to have kids because I don't want them to experience all the issues in the world today". What are they smoking? We l

Sometimes, earning less and bringing back time is just as precious as making more money.

Art critic Jonathan Crary’s book 24/7 explores how we entered a culture that battles against rest and time itself. A nonstop 24/7 culture that never t

At the Institute for the Future we believe that the value of futures thinking is not in predicting the future (something no one can do), but in imagin

Cayce Pollard as the positive archetype for how to navigate volatility. So by intensely tuning oneself in to subjective responses to things, you can c

The purpose is to scout the path and shift the discourse.

honestly i'm so good at consuming content LMAO. like how do I make it my job to literally just read, watch, and listen to stuff??