Sriya Sridhar
@sris
Academic studying privacy and attention, seeking things that make sense and perpetual calm. Lit and poetry are my first loves
Sriya Sridhar
If you want to create the common sense that comes from twenty years of being in the world, you need to devote twenty years to the task. You can't assemble an equivalent collection of heuristics in less time; experience is algorithmically incompressible.
Ted Chiang, The Lifecycle of Software Objects
Practical things you can do to make your text clearer.
Open two copies of the same document and put them side-by-side. Edit in one, while referring to the other.
Rewrite your first draft using this rule: no significant words from the first draft are allowed in the second draft.
If your sentence has more than two commas in it, it’s probably too long.
I... See more
Open two copies of the same document and put them side-by-side. Edit in one, while referring to the other.
Rewrite your first draft using this rule: no significant words from the first draft are allowed in the second draft.
If your sentence has more than two commas in it, it’s probably too long.
I... See more
gilest.org: Clarity hacks
big secret to happiness is just liking stuff. finding more stuff to like. finding ways to like stuff you didn’t before. recognizing what it feels like to like something and doubling down on that. what feels frivolous is actually the whole ballgame
But busyness has a way of stealing creativity from you. Generative work, like art and writing, requires long periods of nothingness: it’s only in that wide empty space that ideas emerge. Long runs, hot showers, commutes that don’t involve harried Slack messages and listening to podcasts at 2x speed. Sitting at the edge of a dock, listening to the o... See more
Jasmine Sun • the scenic route
quote from American Childhood (Annie Dillard):
There was joy in concentration, and the world afforded an inexhaustible wealth of projects to concentrate on. There was joy in effort, and the world resisted effort to just the right degree, and yielded to it at last. People cut Mount Rushmore into faces; they chipped here and there for years. People sl
... See moreIt seems to me that, through the way Reddit and YouTube and social media work, there’s such an emphasis on creating distinctions and communities, and it’s just created an explosion of interest in ideological sub-groupings that had been completely forgotten. I started in politics in the early ‘00s, and it just didn’t have this flavor. If you were a ... See more
Aaron Z. Lewis • The garden of forking memes: how digital media distorts our sense of time
Something else happens in a world of superabundance, and an attention economy. Because you can’t find what you want, you start to dig yourself into very specific niches, and join sub-groups. Everyone atomizes into millions of groups connected by very specific interests. In more benign ways, it can be great – you find your fellow travelers, and I ca... See more