Thomas

I wrote about the kind of cognitive dissonance between the argument that we need people to have more babies and the argument that we need fewer immigrants. Do you think that having more babies causes people to lose jobs because the babies take the job? No. You want more people because then you have a country that flourishes more.

“The problem with social media platforms is not just that they seek to hook us on their products, it’s also that they offer themselves as the answer to profound human desires, which they are ultimately unable to satisfy.”

L. M. Sacasas

Desire, Dopamine, and the Internet

Intelligence is not central to the success of most life on Earth. Consider the grasses: they’ve flourished across incredibly diverse global environments, without planning or debating a single step. Planarian worms regrow any part of their body and are functionally immortal, a trick we can manage only in science fiction. And a microscopic virus... See more

Leisure, it must be clearly understood, is a mental and spiritual attitude—it is not simply the result of external factors, it is not the inevitable result of spare time, a holiday, a weekend or a vacation. It is, in the first place, an attitude of mind, a condition of the soul, and as such utterly contrary to the ideal of “worker” in each and... See more

This means it’s really easy to get stuck. Stuck in your current way of seeing and thinking about things. Frames are made out of the details that seem important to you. The important details you haven’t noticed are invisible to you, and the details you have noticed seem completely obvious and you see right through them. This all makes makes it... See more

Technology removes the soul from human performance in order to make it more compatible with industry.