Phil Nguyen
@philintheblank
Phil Nguyen
What gives multinational corporations the right to pollute the air we breathe, drain our groundwater and exhaust our planet’s dwindling resources – and deprives us of the right to stop them? One powerful idea: private property. Because the rich own things, and the poor do not, it is legal for the rich to destroy Earth and illegal for the poor to st... See more
Sally Rooney • Sally Rooney: When are we going to have the courage to stop the climate crisis?
Applied literature helps not to decide, but to think, to see, to name, to know, to understand. If we want to know the world we must see it for what it is, not for what we want it to be, believe it ought to be, and not through the lens of our own dispositions and beliefs.
Henry Oliver • Notes Towards an Applied Literature
Anywhere from 90 percent to 97 percent of vanilla-flavored products are made with vanillin , a substance found in small quantities in natural vanilla but made synthetically for processed commercial foods. Real vanilla contains hundreds of different components that contribute to its nuanced taste and aroma. It is as different from vanillin as sugar ... See more
Amanda Fortini • How Vanilla Became Shorthand for Bland
On the richness and complexity of real vanilla. Vanilla is not vanilla.
A worldview is not—by itself—a path. It is not a path because it does not show you where to put your foot next. It might provide some overall sense of direction (“the purpose of life is the positive evolution of consciousness”). It does not answer the question “what can I do for the next fifteen minutes that takes me that way?”
Approaches to religion | Vividness
Since the ideal strategy for many singles is to date around enough to find someone worthy of marrying, the “game” is of a finite length. At some point, singles will necessarily have to double down on a date, i.e. , switch to exploitation. If you don’t date around (explore) at all, you may very well get stuck dating (or even marrying or having child... See more
Shreeda Segan • Dangerous Dating Protocols Web
Life emerges from the realm of the non-living as a new kind of organization of matter . Life is not distinguished by what it is made of, but by how it is put together, and how it behaves.
Understanding Living Systems
Shades of blue
The idea that psychopathology involves entrenchment is not by itself that innovative, but once we conceptualize that entrenchment as canalization, we can now link it to evolutionary phenotypic variation, dynamical systems, the free energy principle, Bayesian frameworks, Hebbian neuroplasticity, etc. and apply ideas from these areas to the study of ... See more
Awais Aftab • Reflections on Canalization and Psychopathology
How the concept of canalization enables us to think more scientifically about mental health by linking it to other fields such as dynamical systems and bayesianism.
The different yanas contradict each other profoundly. They are not superficially and arbitrarily different. Their fundamental principles are different. They have different concepts of truth, and especially of ultimate truth. For Mahayana, emptiness is the ultimate truth and ultimate goal. It is a shock to be told that in Vajrayana, emptiness is mer... See more