1/ In the mid-2010s my metaphysics nearly broke. A Bay Area VC friend introduced me & other nerds to an “energy healer.” Reaction: yeah, ok. “Energy” did not have a place in our scientific ontologies.
The “practice problem” is the tendency people have to practice something they sense is not wise to practice (a “bad habit”), not practicing something they sense is wise to practice, and/or not having a good sense of what is wise to practice. This leads to a practice soup (sister concept: “thought soup”), an incoherent EOP, adopted in an unexamined... See more
Someone on Twitter suggested affixing services with the equivalent of the newly-mandated restaurant calorie count: this is the lived employment reality of the person serving you, this is what this particular service does to the environment. That feels blunt but appropriate, given how effective capitalism is at cloaking the means, conditions, and... See more
I have been enamored with Samo Burja’s notion of a live player for a while, which he contrasts to a dead player. From his Great Founder Theory:
A live player is a person or well-coordinated group of people that is able to do things they have not done before. A dead player is a person or group of people that is working off a script, incapable of... See more
Rahul asked us to characterize authentic spiritual experience, which I said might be marked by humility, self-emptying, and a displacement of ideological certainties. It can feel disorienting rather than confirming of a final sense of identity or an ultimate solution. That does not prevent someone, after being shattered, from picking up the pieces... See more