Claudia

Humans have evolved the capacity to create and believe in stories. Narratives can also transcend the “here and now” by introducing individuals to situations beyond their everyday experience, which may increase empathy and perspective-taking towards others, including strangers.

Not only does Cassandra predict the Trojan war, but she also warns everyone about the Trojan Horse. Once again, nobody listens. They start calling her names. She tries to smash the horse open with an axe and gets dragged away screaming.

Our brains are hardwired to seek, understand, and resonate with narratives

The constant re-reading entices the consciousness into operating in an unusual manner; it creates patterns of operation or categories which are available when external events dictate them. This practice may allow a person to perceive aspects of reality which are so uncommon and unusual that he would not otherwise possess the needed constructs, or r... See more

The Man Who Walked on Water

A conventionally minded dervish, from an austerely pious school, was walking one day along a river bank. He was absorbed in concentration on moralistic and scholastic problems, for this was the form which Sufi teaching had taken in the community to which he belonged. He equated emotional religion with the search for ulti... See more

Even dickheads love their dogs. Find a way to connect to those you disagree with. “The obvious mistakes of those who find themselves in opposition are to break off relations with those who disagree with you,” texts Vera Krichevskaya, the co-founder of TV Rain, Russia’s last independent TV station. “You cannot allow anger and narrow your circle.”

the wisest of storytellers, through imagery and the richness of their languages and through the multileveled structure of their stories, provide a beacon for those open to a new understanding of humanity’s evolutionary process and who might hope to see themselves as part of that transformation.

The more we rely on artificial intelligence for our knowledge base, the more we should be focused on what the training data includes and excludes. The answer may shape our future understanding of our shared history and the world around us.

Knowledge always needs someone to recognize. It is an active act, not something given by the world some territo

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We know from endless studies of social psychology that diverse groups—with different forms of expertise, different pools of knowledge, different cultural backgrounds—tend to make better decisions than homogeneous groups. In a small-context world, you can get some of that diversity from a language model, in that its training data draws from a vast a... See more

Your success here will depend entirely on how successfully you can tell stories, and how successfully other people can repeat those stories, both to themselves and others.Your North Star here has to be: are other people retelling this story successfully?Port cities around the world are more similar to each other than they are to their inland counte... See more