sari

“Because I want to know! Sometimes, you can use what you know, but that's not what counts most. I want to know everything there is to know. Not because it's any use, but for the pleasure of knowing, and now I demand that you teach me everything you know, even if I will never be able to use it.”

― Jacqueline Harpman, I Who Have Never Known Men

If prestige thinking is less essential than we claimed, and if machines can now produce a lot of its outputs cheaply, then what’s coming is not necessarily a tragedy for humanity. It may be a correction.

A correction of our class’s inflated self-regard.

A correction of an educational system that quietly treated one kind of cognition as the apex of... See more

all serious intellectual work happens on the page, and we shouldn’t pretend otherwise. If you want to contribute to the world of ideas, if you want to entertain and manipulate complex thoughts, you have to read and write.

Who wants a birthday cake made with aspartame? Who would rather have a tanning bed than a sunny day? Who prefers to watch bots play chess? You can view high-res images of the Mona Lisa anytime you want, and yet people will still pay to fly to Paris and shove through crowds just to get a glimpse of the real thing.

I think there is a deep truth here:... See more

The hotnewtheory online is that reading is kaput, and therefore civilization is too. The rise of hyper-addictive digital technologies has shattered our attention spans and extinguished our taste for text. Books are disappearing from our culture, and so are our capacities for complex and rational thought. We are careening toward a post-literate... See more

I see three distinct drivers of taste: Inputs, Filters, and Discernment.

• INPUTS are the experiences, knowledge and data you seek. Your brain is a system that absorbs whatever is around it, and then mashes it together alongside a lot of emotionally-driven randomness that results in all sorts of ideas, mistakes of the eye, and a lens on the world

... See more