Michael Brooks
@mike
Michael Brooks
The reason we’re so increasingly intolerant of long articles and why we skim them, why we skip forward even in a short video that reduces a 300-page book into a three-minute animation — even in that we skip forward — is that we’ve been infected with this kind of pathological impatience that makes us want to have the knowledge but not do the work of... See more
Maria Popova • Maria Popova — Cartographer of Meaning in a Digital Age
The more present we are, the more we relax into ourselves, the stronger a magnet we become for what aligns with us. That’s the paradox of the self: it is most potent when we are least focused on it.
Isabel Hazan • distillation
“Yego’s rise was enabled by YouTube. Yet since its founding, popular consensus has been that the video service is making people dumber. Indeed, modern video media may shorten attention spans and distract from longer-form means of communication, such as written articles or books. But critically overlooked is its unlocking a form of mass-scale tacit... See more
YouTube: The Learning Machine
A work of fiction is, in a sense, always “wrong.” It is a complicated organism. It is not, ever, an accurate or correct or true or 100 percent “defensible” representation of reality. It’s always somebody’s take on reality, full of inadvertent falseness (full of, that is, inadequate attempts to be truthful.)
"It’s so strange how we’re able to carry forward this mystery of personal identity even when our present selves are so different from our future selves and from our past selves most of all. I think a lot about this question of, what is a person? Am I the same person as my childhood self? Sure, we share the same body, but even that body is so... See more
Maria Popova • Maria Popova — Cartographer of Meaning in a Digital Age
Why should the universe have a purpose? The question of the purpose of the universe is an invention of human minds, and has no significance, except for the way that it illuminates the psychology of scholarly pursuit and of the pursuing scholars themselves. We should not impose human-inspired attitudes and questions on material things. There is a
... See moreA good note on why maybe being observers is a worthy pursuit, and why assigning purpose might not track.
Get good at asking the right questions. Elon said, the answer is usually the easy part. The hard part is asking the right questions. Questions are the only tool we have to inquire about this reality. It is our pickaxe to inspect the world we live in. It also happens to be the backbone of our cognition, we literally think in questions. Getting good... See more
Notion – The all-in-one workspace for your notes, tasks, wikis, and databases.
Remember The New Yorker . You subscribed because you liked it. Then it taunted you with its endless words, pages and pages demanding to be read. It reminded you of all the time you didn’t have to spend reading The New Yorker . Whenever you glimpsed the growing pile, you felt mild panic. Every time you recycled an unread issue, you felt like a... See more