Tanuj

Sometimes, knowing the name is good enough. Most cognitive biases work that way. Once you find out what availability bias is, you can figure out where you’ve fallen for it. Noticing availability bias without knowing it is much harder. It’s the same for emotions, ideas, design patterns, and specific situations in life. Having a name helps you... See more

In the words of MIT sociologist Sherry Turkle: computers empowered their users, making them feel smart[er], “in control”, and “more fully participant in the future”.

Indra’s Net ‘symbolizes a cosmos in which there is an infinitely repeated interrelationship among all the members of the cosmos’. He adds that ‘the cosmos is, in short, a self-creating, self-maintaining, and self-defining organism’. Furthermore, there is no theory of a beginning time, and such a universe has no hierarchy. ‘There is no center, or,... See more

If you’re trying to do impossible things, this effect should chill you to your bones. It means you could be intellectually stuck right at this very moment, with the evidence right in front of your face and you just can’t see it.

This idea of hovering, of epistemological hovering, and messiness, and incompleteness, and not everything ties up into a neat bow, and you're really not on a journey here. You're here for some messy reason or reasons, and maybe you don't know what it is, and maybe I don't know what it is!

For an intelligent species, building a Dyson Sphere is a technological leap on a par with the discovery of fire for our ancestors. The transition from a planetary species to an interstellar species. It would usher in an age of exploration and expansion on a scale we can barely imagine.