nico λ

If we insist on argument as the essence of education, we will defend democracy not as the most efficient but as the most educational form of government, one that extends the circle of debate as widely as possible and thus forces all citizens to articulate their views, to put their views at risk, and to cultivate the virtues of eloquence, clarity of

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People who are miserable are ugly and unapproachable and have a “victim mindset” because they can’t accept that it is all their own fault, and therefore they are bad. People who are happy must be strong and living virtuous lives full of beauty and tradition. People who are not must therefore be weak and moral failures. This framework of logic makes... See more

nowhere.” It is the conviction that in order to describe the world accurately and empirically, we must put aside res cogitans—the subjective, immediate way in which we experience the world in our minds—and limit ourselves to res extensa, the objective, mathematical language of physical facts. Without these distinctions, it’s difficult to imagine

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on a deeper level, writing is more than just the process by which you obtain a piece of text, right? it’s also about finding out what you wanted to say in the first place, and how you wanted to say it. this post existed in my head first as a thought, then it started to gel into words, and then i tried pulling those words out to arrange them in a

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One of the fundamental choices that you face on Earth is the degree to which you’ll pursue deeper but riskier fulfillment or practice avoidance that exempts you from bad feelings but leaves you bereft of good ones.

When working on a team, you should usually ask the question

There’s a spectrum of “trying to figure out everything for yourself” to “bugging your coworkers with every little question”, and I think most people starting their careers are too far on the former side. There’s always someone around that has been in the codebase longer, or knows... See more

It is perhaps on the political Right that such ideas are most forcefully expressed today. Lasch emphasised that his new typology superseded the political binary, but fantasies of simple agrarian living, unprocessed food, and escape from modern technology now strike many as “conservative”. But whether its politics are coded as “Left” or “Right”,... See more

But the informational value of the web has been nearly destroyed. Fake News isn’t even the biggest problem. It’s the digital ecosystem’s insistence on stifling curiosity by prioritizing ANSWERS over questions.

Most impactfully, the web has been systematically re-engineered to hinder discovery in order to drive people as quickly as possible to... See more