Category: Post
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In his essay “How I Read,” Rob Anderson offers advice on reading better and more deeply, which it’s important because “You can tell the difference between a smart person who reads and a smart person who doesn’t by how they express ideas, the references they make, and the chains of logic they follow.” How does…
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You should write, not because it makes you rich or brings you site traffic. You should write because it enriches you. When you write, you generate questions, you pursue interesting curiosities, and you engage with that information. This process makes you a different person: That’s the promise: you will live more curiously if you write.…
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Grognardia argues that nerd subcultures, which used to be hard to access, have been transformed into brands to be marketed and have thus lost their nerd appeal: Nerd subcultures were once genuinely weird – offputting, insular, and proudly obscure. They were difficult to access and defiantly uncool and that very inaccessibility acted as a crucible,…
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It wasn’t Erol Otis (he designed the cover). It was John Dee, who came from a comics background and thus drew lean, muscular heroes and heroines. And as this article points out, he drew halflings really well: Jeff liked to show Halflings in actions other than picking pockets or running scared. His Halflings were fighters…
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History tells us that the philosopher Arthur Schopenhauer threw a woman down the stairs in a fit of anger that his thinking was interrupted when she insisted on talking in the hallway outside his door. The story is used repeatedly to help us understand Schopenhauer’s character. The problem is, it’s not true. So how did…
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Daniel Kahneman wrote Thinking Fast and Slow, a foundational text about the various ways humans make decisions. This post summarizes a few of his strategies for improving thinking. One stood out, because I think it would apply to better hiring decisions: Delay Your Intuition: At 22, Kahneman redesigned the Israeli army’s interview system. The old…
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If you’re unaware, there’s a new conspiracy theory moving around the Internet that Roy Jay, an eccentric 1980s comedian, never existed. According to the theory, our memories have been manipulated by AI, so that we believe his existence, making it a deliberate Mandela effect. This is not true, but the longer, more interesting answer is…
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Lots of reasons, but the biggest one is that being around people and dealing with their various hang ups is part of being human, and we forget that at our own peril. But also because when you smile at the world, the world smiles back. The author chose to become kind after a lifetime of…
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The author thinks we could eventually move away from screens completely, which would be welcome relief to parents, internet addicts and office workers alike. The shift will be due to advances in computing which remove the screen entirely. Increasingly, I envision a world without phones or tablets or computers. A world defined by a more…
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What if the kids are alright? considering all the content i consume about society’s rapid decline, it’s consistently disorienting to put the phone down, step outside, and look at how little has changed since my childhood. And more: we have spent roughly equal amounts of time letting strangers on the internet tell us what the…
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“the most important lessons from history are things that are so fundamental to the behaviors of so many people that they’re likely to apply to you and situations you’ll face in your own lifetime.”
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“It is not a surprise that changes occurred – using your brain for new things helps it grow, but the specifics are interesting at least to me.”
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“what i stumbled upon wasn’t just a collection of silly memes; it was a masterclass on the language of the ultra-wealthy.”
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“In my experience, high-level enjoyment, like a sport, is composed of many interlocking micro-skills that must be trained individually, but which reinforce each other.”
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“The whole process, including detection, deployment, tracking and capturing the hostile drone is fully automated removing the need for a human pilot.”
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“This new frame could help us sidestep some potential alignment problems…”
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One writer’s wish list for the future
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“When you think, ‘Social media is terrible,’ which are you thinking of most?”
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“I don’t define myself by my hobbies, let alone feel the need to broadcast my interests in them through textiles.”
Basement Whatever 