Derek Sivers

Geography is four-dimensional: https://sive.rs/4d

2026-05-06T23:40:04Z

Geography is four-dimensional: sive.rs/4d

Geography is four-dimensional

2026-05-05T04:00:00Z

Forty years ago, a family moved from India to Canada, and raised their children with “Indian values”. When those children visited India last year, the locals laughed at their outdated beliefs. What their family had said were facts were just a perspective from 1980.

Twenty years ago, I lived in Los Angeles. Talking with an old friend that’s still there, I said it’s the nicest place I’ve ever lived, and why. She said, “Oh wow. You haven’t been here in a while. It’s not like that anymore.” She said my description was like looking at an old photo from 1999.

Last year I went to China and loved it. So clean, polite, efficient, and all-around nice. A German friend said I’m crazy because “China is filthy, rude, noisy, and awful - with everyone spitting and pushing.” I asked when he was there, and he said 2002. Ah! But that place is long gone. It’s not like that anymore.

When someone speaks of a place, you have to ask, “When?” Geography is four-dimensional. You can’t know a place - only a place as it was at a time. Where is bound to when. Unless you are in a place right now, you can only speak of it in past-tense.

I was born in America, but the last year I lived there, George Bush was president. So I’m not from the current place, though it has the same name.

Like Doc stepping out of a time machine. “I’m from here, but not this here!”

I used to describe myself as American, but that’s becoming less true with time. I’m from the America of the 80s, 90s and early 2000s.

But that place is long gone. It’s not like that anymore.

1993 communal internet shaped me: https://sive.rs/netizen

2026-05-04T01:42:03Z

1993 communal internet shaped me: sive.rs/netizen

Netizen

2026-05-03T04:00:00Z

I can relate to the original meaning of this old term that means to be good citizen of the internet.

Wikipedia says a “netizen” is someone who actively contributes to the development of the internet, not for personal gain or profit, but to make the internet a better place.

I’ve been online since 1993. In 1993, the only way to connect a Mac to the internet (unless you were at a university) was to buy a big paper book on TCP/IP networking, to get the floppy disk inside the back cover that had the MacTCP drivers with SLIP and PPP, so you could connect a dial-up modem to your computer.

Imagine what kind of nerds go to that trouble. That’s who was on the internet in 1993.

It was an amazingly helpful place. We used the web, Usenet, FTP, and email mailing lists to share what we knew. All of this was plain text. Images didn’t really come until a year later.

I was running a recording studio at the time, and I couldn’t get my hardware to sync, so I posted my problem in a Usenet forum, and the next day a man from Trinidad taught me how to fix it.

In return, I shared what I had learned about how to copyright your songs, trademark your band name, and get gigs at universities. The U.S. copyright and trademark office was years away from putting their forms online, so I bought a flatbed scanner and scanned their paper forms, sharing them on my website. Wired magazine and many forums pointed to my website as a helpful resource for musicians, since it was the only place online to get these forms and instructions.

There was no advertising, and no talk of money. I met someone who said he wanted to make money online, and I tried to explain to him that that’s not what the internet is about. It’s a free helpful place where everyone contributes and benefits from others’ contributions.

I wasn’t naïve. I’m not trying to sound pure-of-heart. It really was the culture and vibe at that time.

Slowly the culture around me changed, so now it seems I need to explain my strange behavior — why I don’t monetize everything like everyone else. I’m just a product of my place and time. 1993 shaped how I think of the internet, and I’m keepin’ on in that original spirit.

Like picking up trash where you walk, even if the rest of the world is full of litter. You keep doing what you can to make things better.

Now my netizen contribution is to…

answer emails from about 10,000 people per year,
run NowNowNow.com, and
keep sharing everything I can on my site.

I’m not autistic, but my heroes are.

2026-04-29T19:17:32Z

I’m not autistic, but my heroes are.

Since we moved from city to rural land, to a house where the bathroom and kitchen are outside, my boy observed: “This year there are way more full moons.”

2026-04-27T17:45:12Z

Since we moved from city to rural land, to a house where the bathroom and kitchen are outside, my boy observed: “This year there are way more full moons.”

My favorite LLM prompt: “List the top cities in {COUNTRY}, and anthropomorphize each one, listing the good-natured stereotypes and jokes that other people in {COUNTRY} say about people in this city.”

2026-04-27T00:35:53Z

My favorite LLM prompt: “List the top cities in {COUNTRY}, and anthropomorphize each one, listing the good-natured stereotypes and jokes that other people in {COUNTRY} say about people in this city.”

Good book on cultural psychology: Tribal. Great insights and examples of how change happens on the personal, cultural, and institutional level. My notes at https://sive.rs/book/Tribal

2026-04-25T20:29:39Z

Good book on cultural psychology: Tribal. Great insights and examples of how change happens on the personal, cultural, and institutional level. My notes at sive.rs/book/Tribal

Fascinating book: Nineteen Ways of Looking at Consciousness - https://sive.rs/book/Conscious19 - uses one true story, 19 times, of the laughing brain patient - https://sive.rs/u12 - in the format of Nineteen Ways of Looking at Wang Wei - https://sive.rs/book/WangWei - to explore the subject.

2026-04-23T17:29:10Z

Fascinating book: Nineteen Ways of Looking at Consciousness - sive.rs/book/Conscious19 - uses one true story, 19 times, of the laughing brain patient - sive.rs/u12 - in the format of Nineteen Ways of Looking at Wang Wei - sive.rs/book/WangWei - to explore the subject.

Great book: Elephant in the Brain: https://sive.rs/book/BrainMotives You have hidden motives and subconscious incentives. Two reasons for doing anything: a good reason and the real reason. Instititutions do this too: wasteful because they’re serving hidden purposes no one acknowledges. Great insights throughout.

2026-04-22T20:45:41Z

Great book: Elephant in the Brain: sive.rs/book/BrainMotives You have hidden motives and subconscious incentives. Two reasons for doing anything: a good reason and the real reason. Instititutions do this too: wasteful because they’re serving hidden purposes no one acknowledges. Great insights throughout.

Travelling While Black - by Nanjala Nyabola

2026-04-20T04:00:00Z

summary:

Thoughts on human rights, race, gender, travel, inequality, tribe, home, visas, poverty, Kenya, Africa, and Bessie Head.

recommend: 3/10

my notes:

First requirements before consider going somewhere: I only ask for a clean and safe hotel, an easy visa process, and a means to get there and back.

To survive, you depend on a foreign society’s hospitality.

When we move not out of choice, but out of necessity, we encounter other societies at their best or at their worst. Having an influx of people from disparate backgrounds show up at your border.

I became such an avid reader and writer to imagine all of these experiences that I couldn’t have in my real life.

Men imagine that a woman travelling solo is a declaration of sexual availability.

To give yourself over completely to another society - and its biases - challenges you to continue being fearless and turning up, or to walk away and return to your comfort zone.

The traveler depends not on power, but on motion, on a willingness to go into different worlds, use different idioms, understand a variety of disguises, masks, rhetorics. Travelers must suspend the claim of customary routine, in order to live in new rhythms and rituals.

Dislocation and exclusion gives you perspective on things that others may take for granted, and a deeper understanding of the fluidity and complexity of culture.

Language is a vector for a shared history.

It’s one thing to preach equality - it’s another thing altogether to shun privilege.

Would women accomplish if they didn’t have to spend so much energy learning how to survive men?

In Kenya, if you strip away the British Puritanism or the Islamic winds from the coast, there is a myriad of African identities jostling for dominance and survival.

People, when they learn that I am African, almost always assume that they have had a better life than I have. A black, African woman is almost always at the bottom of whatever constructed hierarchy of value a society has in place, and so I am more likely to be viewed as an object of pity.

Don’t ask, “How can I help?” Your presence clouds the conversation. It dangles an illusion of power that you don’t have.

Whatever fears you have in your normal life are only intensified by travel.

We consume information about each other and form stereotypes, not realising that they are doing the same to us.

Guidebooks are written with such certainty.

Privilege can insulate the traveller from consequences, but it can also make someone a lightning rod for unwanted attention.

The Instagram accounts of major international humanitarian organisations, where funds are raised: Black and brown subjects are photographed either struggling or in the process of receiving assistance. But for the places where these organisations work - the subjects are often photographed empowered or resolute. In the former, the photographs are a plea for help; in the latter, they offer an appearance of solidarity. They reduce a person’s entire life experience to a single moment for the purposes of raising money.

Europe has always been a violent place.

1990 Schengen Convention closed off all humane routes into Europe for citizens of these unwanted countries who could not meet the required thresholds.

When your options are certain death while standing still, versus a minute chance of success if you move, you will move.

Cities foster empathy, because they are by definition diverse and multifaceted, and understand intimately the importance of multiculturalism for enriching daily life.

People with a spiritual or intellectual disposition, constantly feeling like outsiders, are best placed to look at their societies. They can do it from a place of abstraction that makes their analysis sharper or clearer. Exiles cross borders, break barriers of thought and experience.

Some people find home in disconnection and transience. For some people, home is not a geography but a state of mind - it’s wherever they can do work that feels meaningful or useful. Writers recognise home isn’t a place, but is in the ever-changing community or fellowship of people who see the world the way you do, and find the words to describe it.

Editor at Random House tried to champion the African writer, but there was a sense that there could only be one.

The voice of men is often portrayed as neutral, while women’s voices are considered “special interest”.

Career writers are outsiders, comfortable with solitude and being misunderstood. Yet that compulsion to be seen and understood makes a person learn how to use language well. To lock yourself up in a room for 12-18 hours a day, weeks on end, speaking to nobody and committing words in the hopes that someone will resonate.

CBD in Johannesburg, Nairobi and elsewhere - abandoned after independence, when there was a mass exodus to nearby, newly built suburbs. Like Detroit and Cleveland, where formerly prosperous city centres have crumbled because that prosperity could not survive desegregation. They flourished because restricting non-white residents meant that economic resources could be focused on the white population. Once white people, who formerly represented the main tax base in an urban centre, leave for racially homogenous suburbs, cities shift their planning focus to those suburbs and deprive the formerly prosperous CBD of key resources.

South Africa economic system sees black foreigners as a threat, while white foreigners are seen as “investors”.

Kenya: as a British colony, colonialism was not uniform: Resistance from the coastal city-states that were never officially colonised.

If you are neutral in the face of oppression, then you have chosen the side of the oppressor.

A foreigner is a person who lacks some fundamental right to make claims on the territory in which they are foreign.

A 2019 study of Canadian immigration data found that three of every four African students had had their student visa applications rejected, and that students from African countries were far more likely to experience this than those from any other region. The global average for rejection of Canadian student visas is only 39 per cent. Somalia and Mozambique had the highest level of rejections - 100 per cent of all Canadian student visa applications. Considering that each student visa application costs $160 in application fees and another $100 to provide biometrics, the Canadian government is raking in millions worldwide from African student visa applications that it knows it is going to reject

“Africa for beginners”: The implication is that Africa is hard, and you need to start off somewhere easy that won’t overwhelm you from the outset. When people call Nairobi “Africa for Beginners”, they mean all the upmarket places that have been deliberately packaged to be easy for outsiders, often to the exclusion of locals.

Something alien or “wrong” is more interesting than what we think is “normal” or “right”.

People who live in slums are not defined by their housing situation.

Only societies that have been through the violence of colonisation are put into the taxonomies of tribes. In themselves the colonisers saw “high societies” and organised politics. In the Other they saw chaotic brutes organised according to indiscernible, inferior clusters that they called the tribe. The term is riddled with the idea that this is something that lesser people do.

Swahili word for tribe is lugha or kabila. Lugha is the word for language. Kabila only came into popular use because ukabila for tribalism: “Wewe ni kabila gain?” - What tribe are you? - is something that a lot of Kenyans used to ask each other. But that changed after the 2007 election, because the question was followed by violence. Today, the question is loaded with the weight of this tragedy. Having the wrong surname at the wrong place during Kenya’s 2007–8 post-election violence left many people dead. In politically tense moments, a person’s name and the implications of ethnicity that come with it become critical.

Ethnicity is more important to the analyst than it is to the analysed. It’s a lens through which they can categorise. But doesn’t actually have as much explanatory power as the analysis claims.

As a woman, I got my tribe in Kenya. I inherit it from my father and I lose it as soon as I marry. I can’t pass it on to any children, unless they are intentional about carrying it forward.

Parklands, Nairobi: the heart of Nairobi’s Indian community. For a middle-class Kenyan, Parklands is the dream.

Asians in Kenya amount to about 1 per cent of the national population, but they are an economically powerful and highly visible minority.

Democratic Republic of Congo is in effect four countries - the Lingala, Kikongo, Kiswahili and Tshiluba regions. 600 languages within them, bound together by the absurdities of colonisation. It takes five hours to fly across the country at its widest point. Even its second and third largest cities are bigger than the capitals of most other African states.

Tribal - by Michael Morris

2026-04-16T04:00:00Z

summary:

I love cultural psychology. Great insights here, and examples of how change happens, on the personal level, cultural level, and even institutional level. American, but lived in Hong Kong for years and I appreciated his example of Singapore.

recommend: 8/10

my notes:

Older generation of scholars presumed that cultural landscapes were permanent fixtures. Psychology compared individual traits. These approaches reduced cultures to stable patterns - age-old institutions or fixed character traits. However cultural patterns - of societies and of individuals - are in flux. Generations develop new lifestyles through selective retention of their parents’ ways and heightened borrowing from other traditions. Individuals migrate more than ever but not always assimilating - instead, maintaining multiple cultural worldviews that they switched between situationally.

It was not simply collective institutions or individual psychologies that determined culture, but the interplay between them. Cultural institutions shape the individual’s mind, and the individual’s mind shapes cultural institutions. Culture and psyche are inexorably intertwined. This fusion of anthropology and psychology has produced a new science called “cultural psychology.”

Scholars study cultural groups - from clans to corporations to nations - investigating cognitive structures, social structures, biases, and behaviors. Cultural patterns are mutable and malleable. With the right tools, we can harness them. Like soccer coach Hiddink’s method of unlocking talent through selectively evoking and adjusting cultural patterns.

People tend to construe cultural patterns as unchangeable: “gun culture in Texas,” or “drug culture in Hollywood” or art “runs in the blood” of Italians. But people’s cultural conditioning and convictions change over time. We internalize new cultural identities and codes with every new community we join. Someone who joined the army or an ashram acquire a fresh identity and outlook.

People switch between their multiple cultural mindsets situationally. Cultural selves take turns.

If someone in your foraging band figured out how to dislodge coconuts from a tree, you would learn by watching, and soon the whole group would share the skill. In this way, groups living in different ecologies developed different pools of knowledge: different cultures. Surviving through sharing knowledge in these groups is tribal living.

We are tribal. Latin term tribus: the cultural and regional groups that made up ancient Rome. Only during the era of colonialist expansion did “tribe” take on pejorative connotations of primitivism. As anthropology developed, the tribe concept came to be used very broadly.

A culture evolves as some elements are learned and others are overlooked as the rising generation re-creates the society. Customs associated with success and status are more likely to be learned and passed on.

Three characters inside every person: Conformist seeks belonging and understanding. Contributor dreams of esteem and tribute. Traditionalist cherishes continuity. Once all three tribal instincts were in place, in the last hundred thousand years, our forebears began to thrive and to live in recognizably human ways.

Big brains evolved for mastery of the social environment, not mastery of the physical environment.

Social judgments are handled by different parts of the brain than judgments about the physical world.

Everyone in the group knows it. It’s what “we” do. It contributes to similarity within the in-group and distinctiveness from out-groups, heightening feelings of connection and loyalty. Because I know that they know it, I can anticipate their moves, and understand their intentions.

We are less alone than other primates because we carry around our peers in our heads. Continually reminded of what others in our group tend to do or think. We are kept company - and sometimes feel suffocated - by the steady stream of suggestions from our unconscious about what’s normal to think, normal to do, or normal to say in a situation.

The psychological processes of the peer instinct - attention to peers, mind reading, learning from observation, conformist motivations - are the underappreciated foundation of human culture. We internalize a cluster of peer codes for each cultural community we belong to. Those codes guide us toward socially safe actions. It’s why your mannerisms at church are different than at the gym. It’s why crypto investments go suddenly from boom to bust.

Lee Kuan Yew was impressed that British citizens abided the law because they believed that everyone else did too (the faith in “rule of law”). Lee believed that his fellow Singaporeans remembered the British rule-based approach. With the right cues, these memories could be reawakened. White cotton uniforms became the dress of all government officials. Lee also reinstated English as the language of government business. The changed sights and sounds cued the free port norms, backed by anti-corruption laws and role models of rectitude. Over time the change became contagious. There was less reason for merchants to offer bribes when they saw that their peers were no longer doing it. Within a decade, Singapore had become the “cleanest” business environment in the world.

People’s perceptions that “almost everybody does it” precipitate their own corrupt behaviors.

Peer instinct: the cue is presence of tribemates, or ambient signs of the tribe. Minor details in a setting that are diagnostic of a culture can trigger us, but it’s hard to recognize because it happens unconsciously. Signs of a tribe are powerfully evocative, but only for insiders to the culture.

I usually traced a person’s success or failure to character traits and credited or blamed the person accordingly. My Chinese friends tended to refer to more contextual pressures on the actor - whether from family, friends, or coworkers - and shared credit or blame with these groups surrounding the central figure.

In the early 1990s, psychology experiment evidence from outside of Western settings scarcely existed. Culture wasn’t considered to be relevant to basic processes like cognitive biases.

We interpret the same activity through different cultural lenses. Attributions of causality and the narratives that followed. This perception-warping power of cultures comes primarily from peer codes. The biggest difference was their perception of their peers’ beliefs. Differing views of peers accounted for their differing biases in explanations for behavior.

Code-switching among bilinguals: People told slightly different narratives and answered questions differently when interviewed in English as opposed to when interviewed in Japanese. Bicultural individuals switch automatically rather than deliberately. They would explain behavior in the Western way when that culture was cued and would explain behavior in the Eastern way when that culture was cued. Switching cultural frames reflexively without any awareness of the cues triggering them.

People can be fully at home in two or more cultures. Those who feel their two identities to be compatible tend to mesh with the cues of a setting (like chameleons). Those who feel identity conflict tend to resist the peer cues (like contrarians).

Preverbal infants are oblivious to race, but they prefer strangers who speak their mother’s language (and accent).

In Western societies, racial characteristics align with major cultural fault lines, but this is not true in much of the world. Skin color and facial features don’t reliably distinguish Russians from Ukrainians, Palestinians from Jews, or Hutus from Tutsis. Language and attire are the primary cues for tribes other than ethnic groups. For bankers, surfers, or hipsters, it’s how a person talks and dresses that marks them as one of the tribe and triggers in-group codes when interacting with them.

Lee Kuan Yew declared English the language of government in Singapore. He felt a language of the ethnic groups - Chinese, Malay, and Indian - would lend itself to favoritism, so better to use an external lingua franca.

Dress triggers peer codes: Army fatigues triggers military habits like discipline and obedience. Nurses who wear uniforms adhere to protocols more than non-uniformed nurses. EMTs uniforms cue shared frameworks and protocols that enable coordinated work. Undercover agents adopt the attire of the networks they infiltrate, and sometimes start to identify with the criminals they have been sent to spy upon.

Imagine that you are driving to a countryside inn. Your car’s navigation system suggests a path to your destination - a well-traveled route that most drivers take. But you prefer scenic back roads, or might try a shortcut. Now imagine you’re leading a convoy of wedding guests to the inn: You prefer a route that is certain and clearly understandable, so no one gets lost. Peer instinct prompts you toward paths that are normal or typical for your group. When we want to be original, we ignore its advice. But when we crave certainty and understandability, we tend to follow the peer-code path. Pressure heightens conformity.

Immigrants: if settled in a group from their heritage country, adhered more to the heritage-country customs.

Peer instinct: what most people do. Hero instinct: what the most respected people do. Contributing to a community requires noticing what behaviors its members approve and admire.

Altruism pays off because friends reciprocate in your hour of need. If members of a community evaluate each other’s behaviors, share these judgments with others, and treat people according to their reputations, then prosociality helps reproductive prospects and would be selected for.

We volunteer for service positions in our community to gain approval and respect. We work hard to make a name for ourselves in our fields as it “opens doors” for us professionally. We engage with others or avoid them based on their reputations.

To discern what the community admires and desires, it’s hard to learn by observing or asking each person. A handy shortcut is focusing on the behavior of those members with most status. Individuals with high status exemplify qualities that the community appreciates. They are beacons that show us paths to public approval.

Emulating heroes is why there’s clickbait about what CEOs eat for breakfast, wears boxers or briefs.

Instead of just motivation to act normally, we look for exemplary ways to contribute to the good of the group. Motivating our aspirations to gain skills, uphold ideals, and distinguish ourselves.

People hold noble ideals but don’t always live up to them. Ideals become buried in our minds under the clutter of everyday tasks and selfish concerns. Part of a minister’s role is to rouse people’s higher selves and lift their ideals to the fore of their minds.

Rituals reduce anxiety by asserting control over dangers. Funeral rites that assert control over death by ushering the deceased’s soul to the afterlife.

Tradition serves our need for continuity. Threats to tribal mortality: Changes can threaten the continuity of their tradition. Majority groups, who think of a country as “their land,” feel threatened by rising populations of minority cultures and immigrants. They respond defensively with rash efforts to lock in and defend their traditions.

“Undecided”s tend to gravitate toward the majority stance on an issue - they go with what the average believes.

Victorian photographs: grim expressions were a practical necessity. Portrait sitters used to say the word “prunes” to achieve the standard pressed-lip look. Photography was regarded as an ordeal best left to professionals. Kodak realized it needed to change the cultural assumptions around photography. It introduced a cheap, user-friendly camera as a loss-leader product. Kodak donated cameras to schools, Scout troops, and YMCAs to hook the youth. Taught tricks for evoking smiles: asking adults to say “cheese”. Americans began to see others smiling for the camera. Smiling became an acceptable practice, which gave more people license to try it, and this put more smiling photographs into circulation. Through this cycle of changed perceptions and changed behavior, smiling became the standard thing to do and then even the obvious thing to do. Nowadays we do it as a reflex, on autopilot.

A minority faction consistent in its views (e.g., several participants calling a shade of blue “green”) influences their peers. Their behavior prompts a third of participants to see the stimulus that way at least once. People “try out” alternative beliefs and practices suggested by peers, even if they are not sure that they will embrace them permanently.

In the book Private Truths, Public Lies: Considered peer perceptions in the fall of the Soviet Union - an event that caught most of its citizens by surprise. Why didn’t they see it coming? For decades, the Kremlin had repressed dissent. Citizens tended to praise the system in public even if they harbored doubts in private. Discontent known only through vague rumors, not covered in the news.

Street protests are called “demonstrations” because they reveal the prevalence of a belief otherwise unseen.

Society’s understanding of itself often lags behind progressive change in its members’ private attitudes, as attitudes are not directly observable. Many citizens are loath to express their liberalized attitudes in public, for fear of offending more traditional neighbors. But this reticence perpetuates the community’s inaccurate self-understanding and its exclusionary behavior.

For definitive social change, it’s not enough to change many individuals’ private attitudes about an issue. There also must be change in their perception of the societal consensus. Getting the public to recognize a consensus that they have long overlooked requires overcoming skepticism with multiple types of evidence.

Counterproductive support group: Month-long retreat for women with disordered eating at a spa-like setting in Europe. Did people’s eating habits change? Yes, she said, some of the bulimics became anorexic. ☺

To encourage a behavior, don’t emphasize how many people currently aren’t doing it. Political campaigns used to try to shame voters about low turnout: “Only one in three Americans voted in the last election.” But this message informs you that your peers are not bothering to vote - so why should you?

Hippocrates oath was not part of medical training for most centuries since. It was adopted in modern times once physicians sought to separate themselves from bloodletters and barbers and needed a distinguished ancestor. Medical societies appropriated the white lab coat of scientists around this time too.

Connections to the ancient past infuse an activity with meaning and legitimacy. Any history that we tell is very selective in its focus and thus never definitive. Official histories are strategic in what they include and what they elide. By emphasizing parts of the past that are analogous to their favored plan, leaders rationalize it as obligated by a binding precedent. Christianity spread through Europe by scheduling its holy days around prior pagan rituals (e.g., Christmas came at the time of Yule, and Easter incorporated the eggs of spring fertility rites). The US kept the red, white, and blue of the Union Jack. “My Country, ’Tis of Thee” followed the tune of “God Save the Queen”. “Star-Spangled Banner” followed a familiar drinking song.

Complaints of “cultural appropriation”: People guard their traditions vigilantly because, as we’ve seen, traditions are quite malleable and hence vulnerable. Cultural groups with less power over global media and discourse are particularly vulnerable to distortion of their tradition.

UNESCO was founded to recognize and preserve the world’s cultural heritage sites. But the problem is that UNESCO’s stamp puts a site on every tourist’s “bucket list.” Foot traffic is “ruining the ruins”. It saved decaying buildings but displaced their inhabitants, centuries-old homes becoming postcard shops. Residents don’t want to live in a theme park. Wealthy regimes succeed in lobbying for certification more often than poor nations, leading to a highly Eurocentric representation of the world’s cultural heritage.

Pace of life is encoded at many different cultural levels: in shared habits like a brisk walking speed, in collective ideals like administrative efficiency, in traditions like relying on public clocks. In other words, it involves peer codes, hero codes, and ancestor codes.

Bottom-up progression of change - from ordinary people’s daily habits to collective ideals shared in the media and finally to public traditions and institutions - is called a “grassroots” movement.

Abrupt institutional changes (independence and stiff anti-corruption laws) set the stage for the signaling of ideals. Lee Kuan Yew’s modeling of austerity and incorruptibility and then the triggering of “free port” habits (through English and white uniforms). These are top-down progressions from institutions to ideals to habits. This strategy is often called “shock therapy” because institutional change disrupts a group’s equilibrium, allowing for the coalescence of new ideals and habits.

If most nurses are women, we jump to the value judgment that most nurses should be women.

Nineteen Ways of Looking at Consciousness - by Patrick House

2026-04-08T04:00:00Z

summary:

Using the story of Anna - the patient who laughed when the surgeon stimulated parts of her brain - the author looks at the subject of consciousness from 19 different angles, writing in slightly different styles. He used the format of another book I have notes on here, titled “Nineteen Ways of Looking at Wang Wei”. Some beautiful poetic writing here.

recommend: 7/10

my notes:

Dolphins or whales, which crawled back into water after a brief stint as hippos, saddened by how murky it was, used all the vocal tricks learned on land to re-create through echolocation and sonar, as much as possible, the range of visual distance the eyes granted.

Like life, the game of pinball is never won but, instead, can be lost less badly at some times than at others.

Zugunruhe, a German term, and translated it roughly, perhaps poetically, as “the anxiety felt by migratory birds prevented from migrating.”

Music heard so deeply that it is not heard at all, but you are the music.

We took the motion required to predict the effects of our motions and internalized them in order to achieve thinking.

What about a caterpillar when it turns into a butterfly? When it is liquid goo during its metamorphosis, is it butterfly or caterpillar or what? The brain is never in exactly the same state. A child’s mind metamorphoses into an adult’s mind. It does not simply grow. From a purely biochemical point of view, the human brain thus is always comparable to metamorphic goo.

Your brain is spending gobs of stored metabolism keeping track of the walls and ceilings and their spatial arrangement specifically with respect to you, all so that you perceive a virtual reality with you at its center. What we see is not the object itself, but an evolved decoding of the parts of that object relevant to survival, not to the truth. A red pill is not red. A blue pill is not blue. They are the same color, which is to say that they are no color at all, to all but our eyes. What you experience are the brain’s deductions about the relevance of objects or a room’s layout to you, to your survival, and to your goals.

A cat one hundred feet away is not actually smaller than a cat nearby at your feet. Your brain simply chooses to depict it as smaller because things farther away are less likely to harm you.

A bit of electricity can cause a brain to experience movements, emotions, sensations, memories, urges: laughter with or without mirth, the feeling that the body is levitating or floating, vertigo, dissociation, the sensation of “falling flat”, blurred vision, nausea, sounds seeming “distant”, blurred or distorted faces, déjà vu, an inability to count, speak, read, name things, or breathe, a fleeting, transient depression.

If you look at castles built during the Crusades, you will find holes in the walls and may, at first, believe that these were made as places to shoot arrows from. They were not. When the castle was built, there was no free-standing scaffolding, so wood logs were driven between the stones until the next layer and another platform could be added. Then the wooden scaffolding was removed. Any explanation that the holes were constructed in order to shoot arrows from - despite how well suited they appear for the task, after the fact - is incorrect, and the lesson applies wholesale to castles as well as to all of biology. Many erroneous assumptions are likewise made when one looks at any modern mammalian brain and infers, hundreds of millions of years after its creation, purpose from function. Brains are not the product of a single evolutionary line with any kind of plan or reason but a Frankensteinian patchwork of error, theft, malformation, crookedness, accident, and chance.

Baghdad airport highway intuition: We’re driving along, and my driver, this enlisted man, this kid, slams on the brakes, cuts across the median, and heads back to Camp Victory. And I said “What happened?” And he said “I don’t know, something felt wrong.” He was very upset. We-were-going-to-die upset. I let him go for a while, and later I said, “What do you think it was?” He says, “There were no kids. We drive that same route every day at the same time and there are kids kicking around an old soccer ball, in that field, and today there were none. And that felt really dangerous to me. And thinking about it, it’s because the moms know when the bad guys have planted a roadside bomb, and they keep their kids away.”

Anytime one learns a new skill, that awareness fades into the background of the littler brain with practice. Intuition is the reasoned product of a lifetime of careful, metabolically expensive observation. Intuition works so well because the brain is predicting everything all the time. The ringing red bell of alarm was a mismatch in their observed statistics of how things should be.

Most of the brain’s neurons are devoted to prediction and feedback so that the brain can learn and update the validity of previous predictions.

“Elegance is refusal.” - Coco Chanel

Those interested in animal conservation have a bias toward “charismatic megafauna”.

The difference between biology and physics is the difference between dropping a pigeon and a bowling ball from high atop a tower.

If the goal of the brain is to predict, and prediction means silencing, do bodies disappear when their goal is done - when they’ve predicted everything? That can’t be right.

The way out of a whirlpool is not to swim against it but rather to give in and let it take you around a full loop to the top, upriver, but where escape is easiest.

“But no one knows for certain And so it’s all the same to me I think I’ll just let the mystery be” - Iris DeMent

Theories of how the brain works latch on to whatever complicated technology or idea exists at the time. Hence, we got steam-based theories of the brain in the eighteenth century, computational theories in the twentieth. It implies that no matter how complicated a discovery we make, nature has already both known and taken advantage of the phenomenon.

Why is it the case that there is not one kind of “what it is like” to be human?

Brain’s only output is the motor neuron, so consciousness must do only one thing well: Reduce the cost of movement by making the world appear simple and actable. Make movements more efficient through prediction of what movements will do based on everything that has been tried before.

Within every raw block of marble of considerable size and quality is a statue of the David just waiting for someone to come along and chip away the unnecessary bits. So, too, does a brain create a story of self. From this totality of incoming input we expertly carve out the relevance of light and sound and call it “seeing” and “hearing”.

She imagines how the men, who have never themselves met, might interact. She “endlessly considered in her mind, first each of them separately, then the two together.” Such conscious simulations help the human brain generalize similar features of objects, locations, or people without having to experience them in every possible situation. They act as a kind of educated practice and, as data from the results of the simulations accumulate in the mind, the results can be used for ever further simulations.

Stoics engaged in premeditation: prestudying bad future. We spend almost half of our waking thoughts reliving memories or planning for the future.

The act of reporting a thought also changes it.

Consciousness evolved because it is an incomparable playground for learning. Mind wandering is not random. It is purposeful, careful, and efficient.

A mouse, seconds after it is plucked from a maze, shows signs of neural activity as if it is replaying, at a rapid speed, and sometimes backward, pieces of the maze it just left.

A one-terabyte hard drive full of data weighs more than an empty one, but a monkey brain full of memories weighs no more than an empty one, and a conscious monkey brain no more than an unconscious one.

It is harder to create a robotic soccer fan than a robotic soccer player. It is harder to create a sex-enjoying robot than a sex robot.

Principles of simplicity, elegance, and beauty drive physicists.

People thought the sun revolved around the earth because it looked like it did. What would the sun’s arc in the sky be if the opposite of what it merely looked like were true? It would appear identical. Intuition alone could not distinguish which of the competing ideas was correct. Nothing about any theory of how the brain works tells us definitively how the feeling of subjectivity unfolds from its workings.

Most people cannot tickle themselves, but those with a tendency toward schizophrenia sometimes can.

Elephant in the Brain - by Kevin Simler and Robin Hanson

2026-03-30T04:00:00Z

summary:

You have hidden motives and subconscious incentives. Two reasons for doing anything: a good reason and the real reason. Instititutions do this too: wasteful because they’re serving hidden purposes no one acknowledges. Great insights throughout.

recommend: 8/10

my notes:

We are unaware of our deepest biological incentives. We are strangers to ourselves.

We act in our self-interest on hidden motives. While not to appear selfish - to look good while behaving badly.

Man always has two reasons for doing anything: a good reason and the real reason.

It’s easy for us to rationalize our own motives. When we make up stories about things outside our minds, we open ourselves up to fact-checking. People can argue with us: “Actually, that’s not what happened.” But when we make up stories about our own motives, it’s much harder for others to question us.

Social institutions behave as though they were designed to achieve other, unacknowledged goals. They say school teaches valuable skills and knowledge. Yet students don’t remember most of what they’re taught, and most of what they do remember isn’t very useful. Schools are structured in ways that actively interfere with the learning process. * The art scene isn’t just about appreciating beauty. It’s an excuse to affiliate with impressive people. * Education is about getting graded, ranked, and credentialed: stamped for the approval of employers. * Religion is about conspicuous public professions of belief that help bind groups together. … Many institutions waste wealth, resources, and human effort - largely for the purpose of showing off. They’re inefficient because they’re simultaneously serving purposes no one is eager to acknowledge.

Conscious thought is a rehearsal of what we’re ready to say to others.

Difference between cynicism and misanthropy: between thinking ill of human motives and thinking ill of humans.

Prestige is your “price” on the market for friendship and association. (just as sexual attractiveness is your “price” on the mating market) Price is driven by supply and demand. We all have a similar (and highly limited) supply of friendship to offer to others, but the demand for our friendship varies greatly Highly prestigious people have many many would-be friends.

Norms suppress competition and promote cooperation. We hold ourselves back, collectively, for our own good. The desire to skirt and subvert norms is one of the key reasons we deceive ourselves about our own intentions.

Egalitarianism is concerned with early warning signs of people who position themselves above others: dominating, bragging, ganging up, and otherwise attempting to control others’ behavior. Collective enforcement, then, is the essence of norms. Groups need to create an incentive for good citizens to punish cheaters. Punish anyone who doesn’t punish others. For example, it’s unlawful to witness a crime without reporting it.

Anything that hampers enforcement will improve the odds of getting away with a crime.

Norm against selfish motives: Consider how awkward it is to answer certain questions by appealing to selfish motives. Why did you break up with your girlfriend? “I’m hoping to find someone better.” Why do you want to be a doctor? “It’s a prestigious job with great pay.” Why do you draw cartoons for the school paper? “I want people to like me.” There’s truth in all these answers, but we systematically avoid giving them, preferring instead to accentuate our higher, purer motives.

Discretion creates ready-made excuses or alibis. Skirting a norm instead of violating it outright. Prevents a norm violation from becoming full common knowledge, which makes it more difficult to prosecute. The pretext doesn’t need to fool everyone - just plausible enough to make people worry that other people might believe it. Smoke shops sell drug paraphernalia - pipes, bongs, vaporizers - as devices for “smoking tobacco”. Innuendo: drugs (“Do you like to party?”), euphemism: (“Want to come up and see my etchings?”)

We don’t just deceive others; we also deceive ourselves. Patients with the worst test results - who were judged the most at-risk of cholesterol-related health problems - were most likely to misremember their test results, and they remembered their results as better (i.e., healthier) than they actually were.

There’s no value in sabotaging yourself per se. The value lies in convincing other players that you’ve sabotaged yourself. It’s never useful to have secret gaps in your knowledge, or to adopt false beliefs that you keep entirely to yourself. The entire value of strategic ignorance and related phenomena lies in the way others act when they believe that you’re ignorant. Ignorance is at its most useful when it is most public. When you’re playing against an opponent who can take your mental state into account.

We deceive ourselves the better to deceive others. The best way to convince others that we believe something is to actually believe it. Wear a mask long enough and it becomes your face. Play a role long enough and it becomes who you are. Spend enough time pretending something is true and you might as well believe it.

“I’m doing this no matter what,” says the Madman, “so stay outta my way!” When we commit ourselves to a particular course of action, it often changes the incentives for other players.

We measure loyalty in our relationships by the degree to which a belief is irrational or unwarranted by the evidence. When someone remains committed despite a strong temptation to defect. It only demonstrates loyalty to believe something that we wouldn’t have reason to believe unless we were loyal.

Self-discretion is our mental habit of giving less psychological prominence to potentially damaging information. Discretion among different brain parts: When part of the brain has to process a sensitive piece of information - wanting to get the upper hand in a particular interaction, for example - it doesn’t necessarily make a big conscious fuss about it. Instead, we might just feel vaguely uneasy until we’ve gained the upper hand, whereupon we’ll feel comfortable ending the conversation. It can threaten our self-image and therefore our social image.

We don’t have privileged access to the information and decision-making that goes on inside our minds. We think we’re good at introspection, but that’s an illusion. We’re like outsiders within our own minds.

One of the most effective ways to rationalize is telling half-truths. We cherry-pick our most acceptable, prosocial reasons while concealing the uglier ones.

Listeners prefer speakers who can impress them wherever a conversation happens to lead, rather than speakers who steer conversations to specific topics where they already know what to say.

Prestige is synonymous with “one’s value as an ally.”

Academics are motivated to produce research for prestige, rather than the underlying value of the research. When articles previously published in a journal were resubmitted soon afterward with new obscure names and institutions, only 10 percent of them were noticed as having been published before, and of the remaining 90 percent, only 10 percent were accepted under the new names.

People often claim not to be influenced by a particular piece of media, yet believe that other people will be influenced.

Art is anything “made special”: not functional or practical, but for human attention and enjoyment. In the fitness-display theory, art is largely a statement about the artist, a proof of his or her virtuosity. If a work of art was made too easily (like if a painting was copied from a photograph), we’re likely to judge it as much less valuable than a work that required greater skill to produce. Consumers appreciate the same artwork less when they’re told it was made by multiple artists instead of a single artist - because they’re assessing the work by how much effort went into it.

Contemplate the idea of a hypothetical “replica museum” - a gallery stocked entirely with copies of the world’s masterpieces - indistinguishable from the originals.

A sculpture looks like a seashell. It might actually be a seashell. Did she just pick it up off the beach, or did she somehow make it herself? This question is now absolutely central to your appreciation of this “sculpture.” If she found it on the beach: meh. If she made it by manually chiseling it out of marble: whoa!

We prize originality and spurn works that are too derivative, however pleasing they might otherwise be to our senses or intellect. It makes a world of difference in gauging the artist’s skill, effort, and creativity.

The fundamental challenge facing artists is to demonstrate their fitness by making somethingthat lower-fitness competitors could not make. Hence the appeal of constraints in a given art form. Poets who adhere to strict meter and rhyme schemes prevent themselves from using words that don’t fit. Sculptors who work with marble don’t allow themselves to patch up their mistakes with putty or glue. Those constraints allow their talents to shine.

Artists advertise their survival surplus by doing something that serves no concrete survival function.

The bunker reflects a kind of desperation of an animal worried about its survival, rather than the easy assurance of an animal with more resources than it knows what to do with.

We need to consume a lot of art to calibrate our judgments, to learn which things are high status. An unrefined palate won’t appreciate a Michelin-starred restaurant. An untrained ear can’t appreciate the genius of Bach. Discernment becomes important not only for differentiating high quality from low quality (and good artists from mediocre ones), but also as a fitness display unto itself.

Factors that influence our charitable behavior: We give more when we’re being watched. We prefer to help people locally rather than globally. We give more when the people we help are identifiable (via faces and/or stories).

Charities bracket donations into tiers and advertise only which tier a given donor falls into. Someone who gives between $500 and $999 might be called a “friend” or “silver sponsor,” while someone who gives between $1,000 and $1,999 might be called a “patron” or “gold sponsor.” If you donate $900, then, you’ll earn the same label as someone who donates only $500. Not surprisingly, the vast majority of donations to such campaigns fall exactly at the lower end of each tier. Put another way: few people give more than they’ll be recognized for.

Charity solicitation works: People donate when they’re asked for money, especially by friends, neighbors, and loved ones. People seldom initiate donations on their own. Up to 95 percent of all donations are given in response to a solicitation.

In charity, we privilege our fellow citizens over people in foreign countries. For most people, the “warm fuzzies” just aren’t enough. We also want to be seen as charitable. Conspicuous compassion: motivated to appear generous, not simply to be generous. Spontaneous, almost involuntary concern for the welfare of others.

Charity subconscious motivation: “See how easily I’m moved to help others? When people near me are suffering, I can’t help wanting to make their situation better; it’s just who I am.” This is a profoundly useful trait to advertise. It means you’ll make a great ally.

People donate opportunistically. Most donors don’t sketch out a giving strategy and follow through as though it were a business plan. Instead we tend to donate spontaneously.

Empathy focuses our attention on single individuals, leading us to become both parochial and insensitive to scale. The mark of a civilized man is the capacity to read a column of numbers and weep. If only we could be moved more by our heads than our hearts, we could do a lot more good.

Which kind of people are likely to make better friends, coworkers, and spouses? “Calculators” who manage their generosity with a spreadsheet? “Emoters” who simply can’t help being moved to help people right in front of them?

One such unsung activity is giving to people in the far future. Instead of donating money now, we might put it in a trust and let the magic of compound interest work for 50 or 500 years, stipulating how it should be put to use after it’s grown to a much larger size. Helping people in the far future doesn’t showcase our empathy or prosocial orientation. We’re rewarded (by our peers) for giving in the here and now, to people who are part of our local communities. There’s something suspect about wanting to help people who are too remote in space or time.

While we profess many noble reasons for our behavior, other less-noble motives usually lurk in the background. We need ideals to let ourselves be judged. Promising to behave well (and in staking our reputation on that promise) incentivizes us to behave better than if we refused to be held to any standard.

Design institutions to account for hidden motives. Institution designers must identify both the surface goals to which people give lip service and the hidden goals that people are also trying to achieve.

People of India! My OCI + Airtel + HDFC has culminated in a massive achievement and rite of initiation. I have made my first UPI payment. I’m now unstoppable.

2026-03-25T07:53:39Z

People of India! My OCI + Airtel + HDFC has culminated in a massive achievement and rite of initiation. I have made my first UPI payment. I’m now unstoppable.

China in Ten Words - by Yu Hua 余华

2026-03-14T04:00:00Z

summary:

Famous fiction author. I loved the movie from his book “To Live”. Memoir of growing up in China filtered through ten topics. Sometimes it’s cultural insights, but sometimes just his personal stories. Deep insights on “copycat” and “bamboozle”. Note those words are rough English translations of the real Chinese words he’s discussing.

recommend: 5/10

my notes:

Nothing is so likely to forge a connection between people as pain. When in this book I write of China’s pain, I am registering my pain too, because China’s pain is mine.

We survive in adversity and perish in ease and comfort. Adversity enhances our endurance, while ease and comfort tend to hasten our demise.

In the short space of thirty years, a China ruled by politics has transformed itself into a China where money is king. Political passions that had accumulated since the Cultural Revolution finally expended themselves completely in one fell swoop, to be replaced by a passion for getting rich. When everyone united in the urge to make money, the economic surge of the 1990s was the natural outcome.

During the Cultural Revolution, the definition of “the people” was workers, peasants, soldiers, scholars, shop clerks. Now the expression “the people” has been denuded of meaning.

What other political figure would make a point of waving to his people in a swimsuit? Only Mao.

The word that has lost the most value the fastest during the past thirty years is “leader.” In today’s China we no longer have a leader - all we have is a leadership.

During the Dragon Boat Festival of 2009 the following text message began to circulate: « New China News Agency, May 28: The Chinese Academy of Sciences has successfully cloned Mao Zedong. The clone’s physical indicators match those of Mao in his prime. This announcement has elicited a powerful reaction internationally. President Obama has declared that within three days the United States will repeal the Taiwan Relations Act and withdraw all military forces stationed in Asia. The prime minister of Japan has ordered the demolition of the Yasukuni Shrine, acknowledged that the Senkaku Islands are Chinese territory, and approved reparations for the 1937 invasion of China to the tune of 13 trillion dollars. The European Union has lifted its ban on arms sales to China. Russia’s President Medvedev has conceded China’s claim to a million square miles in eastern Siberia. Mongolia has signaled to the United Nations that it has always been part of China. Taiwan’s President Ma Ying-jeou has promised to abide by all arrangements proposed by the mainland regarding reunification and has applied to be a scholar at the National Archives. North Korean leader Kim Jong-il has sent instructions to his representative at the Six Party Talks to handle things according to Chairman Mao’s directives. There has been a rapid turnaround in domestic affairs: In just twenty-four hours officials from the county level and up have returned their ill-gotten gains, to the tune of 980 trillion yuan. Privately run businesses have converted to public ownership. 25 million sex hostesses have become honest women overnight. The stock market has soared. House prices have declined by 60 percent. The Chinese people once more are singing the anthem of the age: “The east is red, the sun is rising, / China has brought forth another Mao Zedong.” »

Although life in the Mao era was impoverished and restrictive, there was no widespread, cruel competition to survive. People then were on an equal level, all alike in their frugal lifestyles. Today survival is like war. The strong prey on the weak, people enrich themselves through brute force and deception, and the meek and humble suffer while the bold and unscrupulous flourish.

Mao Zedong Thought has not perished. His ideas retain their vitality like seeds planted in receptive soil.

During the Cultural Revolution, Mao’s poems were put to music. His quotations were sung by adults and children. Mao’s poems and quotations were everywhere. In our daily encounters with Mao’s pronouncements, the most ordinary things would take on weighty meaning. As we got ready for bed, on our pillowcases we would read “Never forget class struggle” and, on our sheets, “Advance bravely through wind and waves.”

“Chairman Mao is at our side,” people used to say, and I believed that, too. I was certain he’d be happy if I did something good and disappointed if I did something bad.

If it had been just a few people weeping, I would certainly have felt sad, but a thousand people all weeping at the same time simply struck me as funny.

One day when I noticed a poster with a cartoon. My reading had finally discovered another new continent.

You may start off with an advantage, only to box yourself in over time, or sometimes you may start with a handicap, only to find it carries you a long way.

Writing enables me to claim ownership of two lives, one imaginary and one real, and the relationship between them is like that between sickness and health: when one is strong, the other is bound to fall into decline. So, as my real life becomes more routine, my imaginary life is all the more brimming with incident.

My experience of growing up consisted largely of revolution.

When society undergoes a drastic shift, an extremely repressed era soon becomes a very lax one.

China’s high-speed economic growth seems to have changed everything in the blink of an eye, rather like a long jump that let us leap from an era of material shortages into an era of extravagance and waste, from an era when instincts are repressed into an era of impulsive self-indulgence.

One of Mao Zedong’s remarks sums up a basic characteristic of the Cultural Revolution: “We should support whatever the enemy opposes, and oppose whatever the enemy supports.” The Cultural Revolution was an era when everything was painted in black and white, when the enemy was always wrong and we were always right. Nobody had the courage to suggest that the enemy might sometimes be right and we might sometimes be wrong. Deng Xiaoping, in turn, said something that captures the zeitgeist of our current age: “A cat that catches the mouse is a good cat, no matter whether it’s black or white.” In so saying, he overturned Mao’s system of values and pointed out a fact long evident in Chinese society: right and wrong often coexist. So China moved from Mao Zedong’s monochrome era of politics-in-command to Deng Xiaoping’s polychrome era of economics above all.

She said, “Money is not the sole criterion for judging happiness.” I said, “If you are someone with an annual income of only 800 yuan, you will earn a lot of respect for saying what you did, but you’re not.”

The Rich List is popularly known as the Pigs-for-Slaughter List. In China there’s a saying: “People fear getting famous just as pigs fear getting fat.” Reflecting the observation that fame invites a fall just as a fattened pig invites the butcher.

“Copycat” (in Chinese) originally denoted a mountain hamlet protected by a stockade or other fortifications. It was also a name once given to the lairs of outlaws and bandits, and the word has continued to have connotations of freedom from official control. “Copycat” has more of an anarchist spirit than any other word in the contemporary Chinese language.

As the copycat concept has gained acceptance, plagiarism, piracy, burlesque, parody, slander, and other actions originally seen as vulgar or illegal have been given a reason to exist. And in social psychology and public opinion they have gradually acquired respectability.

In China today, in some spheres there is still a lack of freedom, while in others there is so much freedom it’s hard to believe. More than twenty years ago I could say whatever came into my head when I was interviewed by a journalist, but the interview would undergo strict review and be drastically edited before publication. Ten years ago I began to be more circumspect in interviews, because I discovered that newspapers would report everything I said, even my swear words. Now I am often amazed to read interviews I have never given - remarks that the reporter has simply concocted, a gushing stream of drivel attributed to me.

“That was a copycat.” That is our reality today: you may have done something illegal or unconscionable, but as long as you justify yourself with some kind of copycat explanation, your action becomes legitimate and aboveboard in the courtroom of public opinion.

When in 1966 Mao Zedong proclaimed, “To rebel is justified,” it triggered a release of revolutionary instincts among the weaker segments of society, and they rebelled with a passion. Everywhere they rose up against those in positions of authority. Traditional Communist Party committees and state organizations totally collapsed, and copycat leadership bodies sprouted up all over the place. All you needed to do was to get some people to back you, and overnight you could establish a rebel headquarters and proclaim yourself its commander-in-chief.

Notice the parallel between the sudden appearance of myriad rebel headquarters at the beginning of the Cultural Revolution and the rapid emergence of the private economy. In the 1980s, Chinese people replaced their passion for revolution with a passion for making money, and all at once there was an abundance of private businesses. Just as the copycat challenges the standard, so too the private sector assailed the monopoly status of the state-owned economy. Innumerable businesses soon went belly-up, only for countless others to take their places. China’s economic miracle was launched in just this way. Through its continual cycles of ruin and rebirth the private sector demonstrated its enormous capacity for survival, at the same time forcing ossified, conservative state enterprises to adapt to the cutthroat competition of the marketplace.

“Copycat” took on a rich new range of meanings, it has suddenly brought into view all manner of things that have been churning below the surface during these years of hectic development. Copycat: that is the name they have all adopted.

Barefoot doctors were an invention of the Mao era: peasants with a smattering of education were shown how to perform routine medical procedures and then sent back home with a medical kit on their backs. Why were they called barefoot doctors? Because for them practicing medicine was just a sideline activity; their basic work remained going out to the fields and laboring in their bare feet. When peasants around them came down with some minor injury or illness, they would be in a position to provide basic treatment on the spot.

I used to be a copycat dentist.

Bamboozle: to mislead. Hyping things up and laying it on thick. Playing a con trick and ripping somebody off. A social propensity toward chicanery, pranks, and other shenanigans. Once these words with negative connotations took shelter under bamboozlement’s wing, they suddenly acquired a neutral status. “Bamboozle” throws a cloak of respectability over deception.

Copycat phenomenon emerged in collectivist fashion, like bamboo shoots springing up after spring rain. “Bamboozle” immediately took the nation by storm. Like a rock stirring up a tidal wave it triggered a tsunami-style reaction as phenomena long existent in Chinese society - boasting and exaggerating, puffery and bluster, mendacity and casuistry, flippancy and mischief - acquired greater energy and rose to new heights.

Chinese homily: “The timid die of hunger, the bold of overeating.”

“Purpose” and “passion” are words we use when we’re not working.

2026-03-13T03:22:34Z

“Purpose” and “passion” are words we use when we’re not working.

I was inconsiderate but now I’m everywhere

2026-03-12T04:00:00Z

When I was in the music business, there was a record producer who lived in New Jersey, but refused to come into New York City. Anyone that wanted to meet with him had to drive all the way down to his little town. I thought, “What’s his problem? Is he lazy or scared?”

When musicians or authors ask my advice on distribution, I recommend using all forms of media, because…

Some people only listen to audio.
Some people only watch video.
Some people only read paper books.
Some people only swipe feeds on their phone.
etc.

If you have something worth spreading, it’s considerate to spread it widely, to reach people through their favorite medium.

But me? I was acting like the record producer in New Jersey, making everyone come to my website. It was inconsiderate. So I’m taking my own advice, and distributing through the top channels.

My own site is the master source of everything I make. But now it’s also shared everywhere, so we can meet in your city instead of my little town.

I was inconsiderate but now I’m everywhere: https://sive.rs/socials

2026-03-11T20:57:49Z

I was inconsiderate but now I’m everywhere: sive.rs/socials

I love people. I love when they’re not around.

2026-03-10T19:41:26Z

I love people. I love when they’re not around.

Great book: “You’re Not Listening” by Kate Murphy. My notes: https://sive.rs/book/NotListening

2026-03-08T19:51:51Z

Great book: “You’re Not Listening” by Kate Murphy. My notes: sive.rs/book/NotListening

About my book notes

2026-03-06T05:00:00Z

At sive.rs/book I have a collection of my notes from the 420+ books I’ve read since 2007.

This page answers questions about it.

My notes are not a summary of the book!

When I’m reading and come across a surprising or inspiring idea, I save it.

That’s all my notes are. I’m not summarizing the book. I’m just saving ideas for myself, for later reflection. It helps me remember what I learned from it.

If I’m reading a book about a subject I already know well, I’ll have very few notes, because not much surprised me.

I kept these notes private for years, but decided to share them on my site.

Notes don’t replace the book

It’s sad when people say my notes saved them time from reading the book.

My notes are just some tiny tidbits with no context. It’s like reading a punchline without the joke. If you hear a joke, then the punchline is all you need to remember the full joke. But if you just hear the punchline, without the joke, it makes no sense. I just save the punchlines to remind myself what I’ve read.

Again: these notes are really just for me but I’m sharing them on my site.

If you look through a book’s notes and like the ideas, please go read the whole book. It gives so much more context and meaning.

“Which one should I read?”

Whichever one seems to apply to your current situation. Books are most useful when they solve a problem (or curiosity) you’re having now.

By default I have the list sorted with my top recommendations up top. But really the best one for you is the one that speaks to your current situation.

“How do you choose the rating?”

I give every book a 0-10 ranking on the website, for your sake, so the list is sorted with my top recommendations up top.

That 0-10 rating is how strongly I would recommend this book to anyone. (Out of any random 10 people, how many of them should read this book?) It’s not always how much I liked it, or a judgement of how good it is. For example, I would give a little lower rating to a book I liked about an obscure subject that most people aren’t as into.

Also, if the ideas in a book really linger, and I find myself thinking of it often years later, I’ll go back and raise its rating.

“How do you use these notes?”

I go back to subjects that have a new need in my life. Like if I’m about to attend a conference or meet lots of people, I’ll re-read my book notes on people skills.

I search across books for certain ideas. For example, discipline: I’ll go search all notes for any mention of discipline, and re-read the thoughts on that subject. I like that it finds ideas about discipline as applied to investing, or fitness, or meditation, or whatever.

“Why don’t I see (some book)_?”

I only read books that apply to my life or current interests right now. I say no to all requests, and publishers asking me to do reviews.

I do read fiction, but I don’t take notes on it. For fiction, I prefer films or audiobook.

I also read hundreds of books before 2007, but didn’t start taking notes until I realized I was forgetting what I had read.

“Don’t the authors get mad?”

No, but this was my biggest surprise!

The main reason I didn’t post these for years is because I assumed it was against copyright law. But I quietly tried it, without announcing it.

Then as the site got more popular, I was scared I’d get in trouble, but instead I got emails of thanks from the authors of those books. Maybe especially since I really am trying to get people to go buy the books whose notes they like.

“Exactly how do you take these notes?”

When reading a paper book, I just underline or circle the bits I find surprising or useful. Then when I’m done reading the book, I type those bits into a text file.

On an ebook, I just highlight the bits I find surprising or useful. Then when I’m done reading the book, I connect the ebook device by USB, copy the text file of notes, and edit from there.

Either way, I edit a lot, and re-shape the sentences into something that works for me.

“Hey you might like this other book summary site!”

No. I don’t want to read summaries of books. I like reading the whole book!

I aim to read even harder books, like “How to Read a Book” describes well.

“Why are there not more women authors?”

It’s a good question, and it bothers me too.

I’m kind of a feminist. Most of my friends are women. Most of my favorite musicians are women. When hiring, I try to hire only women. But yet the authors of the books I read are mostly men. Why?

It seems the publishing industry is biased that way. A female author sent her manuscrupt to twenty publishers, and all twenty rejected it. She sent it again to all twenty publishers using a male pen name, and half of them accepted it. I suspect that many men will only read books by men, whereas women will read books by men and women. So publishers are just meeting the market, expecting male authors to sell better, which then feeds the problem.

When I seek a book to solve a current problem or curiosity, I look for a book that seems to be the most highly recommended by the most people, or people I already admire. So whether it’s their bias or the publishing industry, these books are too-often by men.

But please also read my short article, “The mirror: It’s about you, not them.”, because ultimately I don’t care who the author is. When I read a book, it’s about me.

Go to sive.rs/book to browse the notes.

I highly recommend the book "Factfulness" by Hans Roling. My notes: https://sive.rs/book/Factfulness

2026-03-05T16:37:41Z

I highly recommend the book "Factfulness" by Hans Roling. My notes: sive.rs/book/Factfulness

Maintenance of Everything, part one - by Stewart Brand

2026-03-03T05:00:00Z

summary:

Because I loved his book “How Buildings Learn”, I expected a more philosophical look at maintenance, but it’s mostly a deep dive into a few specific examples of boats, guns, and cars.

recommend: 3/10

my notes:

“Maintenance” means the whole grand process of keeping a thing going.

Maintenance is what keeps everything going. Every living thing spends time maintaining its own life and the life of the systems it depends on: bodies, vehicles, homes, cities. Everything is nested in something larger, even more worth maintaining.

The necessity of maintenance accumulates invisibly and gradually.

When you take responsibility for something, you enter into a contract to take care of it.

My boat is (like) new every day.

A large part of maintenance is routine inspection. Fix something when you first see it beginning to fail.

Prepare for the worst.

Read “Shop Class as Soulcraft” and “Zen and the Art of Motorcycle Maintenance”.

Work back from the visible part of the problem to the issues hidden behind it.

Ensure the problem goes away and stays away.

A noteworthy fix is a detective story.

Maintenance is frustrating. That’s what makes it interesting. Inspect the aggravation itself. When you’re baffled, your current theories aren’t working, so empty your mind of them.

Conquer the gumption trap of value rigidity. (“an inability to revalue what one sees because of the commitment to previous values”)

If you can't think that way, just fake it. Pretending to be open-minded can work well enough to reward you into gradually developing the real thing.

Allow what seems like an excess of time for your tasks, because things almost always take longer than expected.

Tidiness, like cleanliness, is a social signal - as much to yourself as to others. It's visible evidence that something is respected.

Write down every step of the disassmbly process with reassembly in mind.

Understand how it works, and how it's made.

Anything he looked at, he’d mentally dismantle then reassemble before trusting it.

To take proper ownership of something, study its manual. There are usually two manuals: the one from the manufacturer, and the 3rd party one that goes deeper and wider.

Swiss Environmental Action Foundation has a great book “Dry Stone Walls” that teaches the principles of the craft. It applies metaphorically to anything that has to hold itself together: a poem, a theory, a software program. Gravity plus friction.

Never paint rust.

The most active frontiers of maintenance are manufacturing, aerospace, software, and the military.

Design process: 1. Question every requirement. 2. Delete any part or process you can. If you don't have to add back 10% of them later, you didn't delete enough. 3. Simplify and optimize, only after step 2. 4. Accelerate cycle time, only after step 2 and 3. 5. Automate only after all other steps.

Offline 23 hours a day

2026-03-03T05:00:00Z

Last month, I moved into my new home in the woods. There’s no internet and no phone service here. It’s so productive.

At first I thought I couldn’t move in without internet. But now I prefer it this way.

Media silence creates a vacuum, which your own thoughts expand to fill.

I notice it most at the start of the day. No news. No texts. I have no idea what’s going on out there, so I develop what’s going on in here. My writing, coding, and learning fills the time and space.

My thoughts feel more independent. I explore my own ideas deeper before looking for other perspectives.

Problems I used to punt, I now solve on my own. It’s voluntary, like weightlifting. My brain feels stronger because I work through the problem instead of prompting it away.

Remember the movie “WALL·E”, where people depended on assistance so much that they couldn’t even walk on their own? I want to be able to solve problems without help, and lift heavy thoughts without needing others’ opinions.

When I’m yearning to search, I ask myself why.

What answer am I hoping to hear?
What answer would be a surprise?
What would I do in each case?

This process feels more useful than a search result.

Every day or two, I bring my laptop into town to get online for an hour. The time limit keeps me super-focused. I know why I’m there. I know what I need. I download emails and upload code. I post my questions to a bunch of AIs, and save the answers to read later.

Limiting online time helps me ignore the hype. Media still screams about what I urgently need to see now, but I don’t. A minute later, I’m offline. I text and call friends, then go home to work.

Not so long ago, this was the norm. You’d go online to get what you need, then disconnect.

Some day soon they’ll connect the fast fiber here to my home in the woods. So I’m posting this for my future self, to remember how peaceful and productive it is to block the inputs, and make a vacuum to expand my output.

I’ve been offline 23 hours a day: https://sive.rs/off23

2026-03-03T00:38:44Z

I’ve been offline 23 hours a day: sive.rs/off23

Got my own ActivityPub server running at https://sive.rs/d though still super basic and testing

2026-02-26T23:45:17Z

Got my own ActivityPub server running at sive.rs/d though still super basic and testing

You’re Not Listening - by Kate Murphy

2026-02-25T05:00:00Z

summary:

Being a great listener when people speak. Deep insights about understanding, connection, helping people express themselves, overcoming assumptions, the ethics of gossip, and more. Specific techniques for the support response, encouraging elaboration, and keeping it balanced. You can’t be ethical without being a good listener. When people say, “I can’t talk right now,” what they really mean is “I can’t listen right now.”

recommend: 9/10

my notes:

Toastmasters can perfect your public speaking, but there’s no comparable training of listening.

Listening goes beyond just hearing what people say. It’s also paying attention to how they say it and what they do while they are saying it.

Listening has to do with how you respond - the degree to which you elicit clear expression of another person’s thoughts.

Lonely people have no one with whom to share their thoughts and feelings. They have no one who shares thoughts and feelings with them.

Listening plugs you into life. Our desire to have our brains sync, or to connect, with another person is basic and starts at birth. We are all “waiting for it.” It’s how we find friends, create partnerships, advance ideas, and fall in love.

Our ability to listen and connect with people as adults is shaped by how well our parents listened and connected with us as children. Insecure anxious attachment style people are concerned about losing people’s attention and affection. Can lead them to be overly dramatic, boastful, or clingy.

To listen well is to figure out what’s on someone’s mind and demonstrate that you care enough to want to know.

If you have someone in your life who listens to you and who you feel connected to, then the safer you feel. Stepping out in the world and interacting with others: You know you will be okay if you hear something or find out things that upset you because you have someone, somewhere, you can confide in and who will relieve your distress. It’s called having a secure base, and it’s a bulwark against loneliness.

Everybody is interesting if you ask the right questions. If someone is dull or uninteresting, it’s on you.

Uncertainty makes us feel most alive. Events that shake you out of your rote existence: you feel more fully engaged. Your senses are sharper. You notice more. You get a greater surge of pleasure from chance encounters with people than planned meetings.

Listening for things you have in common and gradually building rapport is the way to engage with anyone.

Interrogation doesn’t work. Peppering people with appraising and personal questions like “What do you do for a living?” or “What part of town do you live in?” or “What school did you go to?” or “Are you married?” is interrogating. It makes people reflexively defensive and will likely shift the conversation into the superficial. Prying is the quickest way to lose someone’s confidence.

Assumptions are earplugs. People in long-term relationships tend to lose their curiosity for each other. Convinced they know each other better than they do. They don’t listen because they think they already know what the other person will say. Close friends also overestimated how well they grasped each other’s meaning. The understanding, ‘What I know is different from what you know,’ is essential for effective communication to occur. Opinions, attitudes, and beliefs change. If you stop listening, you will eventually lose your grasp of who they are and how to relate to them. Relying on the past to understand someone in the present is doomed to failure. How long would you want to stay with someone who insisted on treating you as if you were the same person you were the day you two met?

A happy marriage is a long conversation that always seems too short.

People confided their most pressing and worrisome concerns to people with whom they had weaker ties, even people they encountered by chance, rather than to those they had previously said were closest to them. They avoid telling the people in their innermost circle because they fear unkindness, judgment, blowback, or drama.

We can never really know another person’s mind.

We unconsciously create file folders in our heads into which we drop people, usually before they even start talking. That makes us jump to conclusions about people before we know who they really are. Our unconscious drive to categorize and the inherent difficulty of imagining realities we have not experienced ourselves. Everyone has a singular experience that separates them from everyone else who shares that label. What you know is a persona and not a person, and there’s a big difference. There’s more than you can imagine below the surface.

When people feel insecure or isolated, they tend to overdramatize and espouse more extreme views to get attention.

In dating situations, people may be reluctant to give their surnames upon meeting someone new, fearing that person will do the digital equivalent of going through their dresser drawers instead of getting to know them more organically. Divulging your last name is now seen as a significant turning point in the relationship. The delay reflects a yearning to be known more deeply and individually first; to not be judged by posts, tweets, and other signals.

People want the sense you get why they are telling you the story, what it means to them, not so much that you know the details of the story. You are the detective, always asking, “Why is this person telling me this?” understanding that speakers sometimes may not know the answer themselves. Good listeners help speakers figure that out by asking questions and encouraging elaboration. People rarely tell you something unless it means something to them. It comes to mind and out of their mouths because it begging for a reaction. A man always has two reasons for what he does - a good one, and the real one.

When someone else talks, we take mental side trips. We get too absorbed in our musings, diverting our attention just a little too long, only to return to the conversation somewhat behind. Smart people are often worse listeners because they come up with more alternative things to think about and are more likely to assume that they already know what the person is going to say. The use, or misuse, of this spare thinking time holds the answer to how well a person can concentrate on the spoken word. To be a good listener means using your available bandwidth to double down on your efforts to understand and intuit what someone is saying. Continually ask yourself what their motivations are for telling you whatever they are telling you. You don’t need to worry what to say next.

Getting to know another person well enough to laugh. To have an inside joke, to be able to make someone smile even when that person is mad at you, to have license to let down your guard and be silly, requires the investment of listening. You have to listen to them long enough to be able to repeat back something they said and put a funny twist on it and also to know what the lines are that you’d better not cross. Think who can make you burst out laughing, it’s usually your closest confidants. That’s because you feel free enough to let loose with them but also because the things that are the funniest to us are often the most personal.

We listen like a game of catch with a lump of clay. Each person catches it and molds it with their perceptions before tossing it back.

Remember more of what people say: Precursor to empathy, which requires you to summon emotions felt and learned in previous interactions and apply them to subsequent situations.

Conversational sensitivity: picking up hidden meanings and nuances in tone. You can’t be good at detecting intricate cues in conversation if you haven’t listened to a lot of people. Intuition is nothing more than recognition. The more people you listen to, the more aspects of humanity you will recognize, and the better your gut instinct will be. It’s a practiced skill that depends on exposure to a wide range of opinions, attitudes, beliefs, and emotions.

When people feel known and appreciated, they are more willing to share.

We often miss lies, as well as truths, because when someone says something that doesn’t make sense, we don’t stop the conversation and say, “Wait. Back up. I don’t understand.” People shrug and move on because it doesn’t seem worth the trouble or they think they can guess what the other person meant. Assume everything is relevant. If something doesn’t quite make sense to you, pay attention. “I’m not a better listener, but if I hear something I don’t understand, I ask about it.”

Misunderstandings, like differences of opinion, are valuable reminders that others are not like us. We incorrectly assume other people’s logic and motivations resemble our own. Misunderstandings are an opportunity. They are an inspiration, and invitation to listen more closely and inquire more deeply.

Miles Davis: “If you understood everything I said, you’d be me.”

The self generates conversations with itself by taking the perspective of another. An example is an athlete who might internalize the voice of a coach. Listening to others determines the tone and quality of our inner dialogues. The more people you listen to in the course of your life, the more sides to an issue you can argue in your head and the more solutions you can imagine.

Ray Bradbury responded that his morning ritual was to lie in bed and listen to the voices in his head. “I call it my morning theater. My characters talk to one another, and when it reaches a certain pitch of excitement, I jump out of bed and run and trap them before they are gone.”

Our inner voices are influenced by the voices we regularly hear in the media. This is important because your inner voice influences how you ponder things, interpret situations, make moral judgments, and solve problems. Whether you see the best or worst in people or yourself. Your inner voice: if it can’t get your attention during the day, it will roust you at 4:00 a.m.

Cognitive behavioral therapy is all about learning how to talk to yourself differently. An unhelpful inner voice is replaced by kinder or more open one.

By recording and transcribing more than a hundred informal dinner conversations, he identified two kinds of responses. More common was the shift response, which directs attention away from the speaker and toward the respondent. Less common was the support response, which encourages elaboration from the speaker. Shift responses are symptomatic of conversational narcissism. Shift responses are usually self-referential.

I asked him, “What made you decide to become a sociologist?” Becker’s face contorted as if he’d just smelled something dreadful. “You’re assuming it was a decision. Better to ask, ‘How did it happen that you became a sociologist?’”

He now divides his time between homes in San Francisco and Paris. The shuffle between cultures and languages keeps him from getting complacent about what he knows.

Negative emotions are louder. We’re five times more upset by negative interactions than made happy by positive interactions.

Squelch the impulses to: * suggest you know how someone feels * identify the cause of the problem * tell someone what to do about the problem People usually aren’t looking for solutions from you anyway; they just want a sounding board. You shut people down when you start telling them what they should do or how they should feel. No matter how good your intentions. When people tell you how you feel or what you should do, it makes you defensive. We start defending the indefensible.

Open and honest questions don’t have a hidden agenda of fixing, saving, advising, or correcting. Open questions allow people to tell their stories, express their realities, and find the resources within themselves to figure out how they feel about a problem and decide on next steps.

Good listeners are good questioners, because you have to listen to ask an appropriate and relevant question.

Many journalists prefer telephone to in-person interviews so they don’t get biased or distracted by the other person’s appearance or nonverbal tics. It’s the same idea behind the confessional booth in the Roman Catholic Church. It makes people less self-conscious and encourage a more open and honest exchange.

Japan saying: “The silent man is the best to listen to.”

Gossip is defined as at least two people talking about someone who is absent. Gossip allows us to judge who is trustworthy, who we want to emulate, how much we can get away with, and who are likely allies or adversaries. Listening to gossip contributes to our development as ethical, moral members of society. We are socialized by the gossip we hear from our families, friends, colleagues, teachers, and religious leaders. The Jesus parables and Buddha stories are recorded gossip. The more shocked or upset you are by gossip, the more likely it is that you’ll learn a lesson from it. Of course, you are also likely to reform if you are the subject of gossip. Organizations that allow their members to gossip will be more cooperative and deter selfishness better than those that don’t.

Social dynamics change rapidly and are incredibly complicated. Trying to understand this complexity is extremely challenging. That’s why we’re so interested in listening to and examining lots and lots of examples to try to understand how the game is played.

Listening it is in itself a virtue that makes us worthy of the most valuable information. Integrity and character develop by choices. This includes to whom and how well you choose to listen.

Ethical behavior requires that you take into account how your words and actions affect others. You can’t get a sense of that without listening.

Individualism: when no sense of social obligation, the individual loses all assurance of a place, an order. He gained freedom, but he has lost security, belonging and connection.

People tend to regret not listening more than listening and tend to regret things they said more than things they didn’t say.

You need to listen enough to know when the other person is ready to hear what you have to say.

Not everything needs to be said as you are feeling it. In fact, sometimes it’s better to wait until you aren’t feeling it quite so strongly.

Relationships most often fail due to neglect - not being attentive.

Communication is fundamentally a cooperative endeavor, so if we perceive our partners aren’t keeping up their ends of the bargain, we are going to feel cheated.

Conversational expectations: * truth * get information we don’t already know * … but not so much that we feel overwhelmed * relevance and logical flow * Manners - we expect the speaker to be reasonably brief, orderly, and unambiguous * politeness and fairness in turn taking

Careful listening is draining. Air traffic controllers are limited to two-hour shifts.

Few people are effortlessly eloquent. They often need time to build up enough trust in you, and maybe also in themselves, to talk freely. A good listener takes the time and makes the effort to help people find their voice. Intimacy and understanding are earned.

The best friendships are those where you are able to immediately pick up the conversation where you left off because the person’s words have remained with you. One of the most gratifying things you can say to another person is: “I’ve been thinking about what you said.”

Friends can connect what you are saying in the moment to things you’ve said in the past to help you work through problems, clarify your thinking or just make you laugh at the association.

People sometimes say things that they are embarrassed by what they said. They may apologize for saying too much or might later act distant or coolly toward you, resentful that you know what you know. When you start drawing from other people’s accounts, they are going to get upset, even if you believed the information was not embarrassing or sensitive. Better to be a reliable confidant. Otherwise, people will think twice about telling you anything of significance.

Think about the people in your life who you have a hard time listening to and ask yourself why.

When people say, “I can’t talk right now,” what they really mean is “I can’t listen right now.” Many never get around to it.

You Will Not Stampede Me - by Bryan Caplan

2026-02-17T05:00:00Z

summary:

Tiny blog posts about non-conformity. I love his writing in general, but these were topics that I’d already read his writing on before, or too out of my realm (like academic life) to be interesting to me.

recommend: 3/10

my notes:

Society is consistently wrong. The public gets hysterical: massive overreaction to a statistically tiny evil. What drives perceptions is availability bias: well-publicized emotionally gripping anecdotes.

Any very large, unselective group includes some villains. If you identify with any large, unselective group, you will be regularly tempted to commit the villainous act of standing up for your groups’ villains. When they do wrong – as they inevitably will – your impulse will be to ignore, minimize, or justify their misdeeds. Never identify with large, unselective groups!

Suppose you identify with a large, unselective group – a nationality, religion, ethnicity, political party, etc. Historian shows that this group once committed a monstrous atrocity – say mass murder. This leaves you with four options: 1. To keep your identity and share the blame: “We were terrible.” 2. To renounce your identity and avoid the blame: “They were terrible.” 3. To redefine the perpetrators’ identity and avoid the blame: “We weren’t involved.” 4. To keep your identity and deny the facts: “Never happened – and they had it coming.”

Restrict your identity to groups that are small, selective, or both. The classic small, unselective group: nuclear family, and circles of friends.

A conformist says what others say, but does what others do. People dislike expressing views or taking actions unless other people do. Normal people lack integrity. They feel little need to bring their actions in harmony with their words – or their words in harmony with their actions.

Civilization is not the product of knowledge alone, but a partnership of knowledge and effort. Great thinkers bring most of the knowledge, but the common man provides most of the effort. Neither is worth much without the other.

Trolling diverts intellectual resources from the construction of compelling arguments to the elicitation of negative emotions.

Revenge: Suppose X is the most severe morally acceptable punishment for act Y committed by person Z. Suppose that the government fails to do anything about Y. What’s wrong if a person personally affected by act Y does X to Z? (If the victim punishes the attacker if the government doesn’t.)

“Why do we kill people who kill people to show that killing is wrong?” You could just as easily have a bumper sticker saying: “Why do we imprison people who imprison people to show that imprisoning is wrong?”

When faced with demands for conformity, silently ask, “What will happen to me if I refuse?”

Societies are huge, anonymous, and forgetful.

Spend the first year of any job convincing your employer he was right to hire you, and he’ll spend your remaining years on the job convincing you not to leave.

If I created my own school, what would it be like? Two goals: 1. prepare students for independent adult life 2. give them a fun childhood 90 minutes of math every day. Most high-status jobs require good math skills, and that’s unlikely to change. Ample time reading and writing, but what they read and write is up to them.

I know that I’m going to hedonically adapt to most good and bad life events, so I place little stock in life events.

Libertarians may be perfectly happy living in a society bound together by nothing stronger than “I’ll leave you alone, you leave me alone.” But psychologically normal humans crave a sense of deep belonging – a sense only big government satisfies.

If people really crave a sense of deep belonging, how come almost no one voluntarily lives in intentional communities? People want to sound like communitarians, but live like individualists. Governments deliver what people pretend to want. Free markets deliver what they actually want.

Hollywood makes a lot of socially conservative movies. When you strip away the glamorous actors and cool music, the message is clear: Live a responsible bourgeois life or you will soon be severely punished. The Godfather saga, Goodfellas, Pulp Fiction, Fargo. The message of all this cinema: Follow the path of bourgeois virtue. Work hard, keep the peace, abstain from alcohol, have very few sexual partners, and keep your whole family far away from anyone who lives otherwise. The writers try to create engrossing stories – and end up weaving morality tales.

I wish to clone myself and raise the baby as my son. Seriously. I want to experience the sublime bond I’m sure we’d share. I’m confident that he’d be delighted, too, because I would love to be raised by me.

Supply-and-demand solves countless mysteries of the world – everything from rent control to road congestion.

Resolve debates about “what’s obvious” by betting, not talking.

Productive moral arguments begin with clear-cut simple cases, not one-sentence moral theories or trolley problems.

Violence and theft are presumptively wrong, and calling yourself “the government” does nothing to rebut these presumptions.

The best three pages in philosophy remain Epicurus’ “Letter to Menoeceus.”

What next?

2026-02-09T05:00:00Z

I have so much more to say on this subject, but this book is done now because I believe short books are useful. So the conversation continues on the website:

sive.rs/u

There you will find more thoughts and stories around “Useful Not True”. Please email me any questions or thoughts. I reply to every one. Go to:

sive.rs/contact

To share my books with others, get them directly from me with quantity discounts, at:

sivers.com

I hope you found this book useful, not true.

—— Derek Sivers
New Zealand
June 2024 (Saturday, winter)

Reframing death

2026-02-08T05:00:00Z

For the last three years, my boy and I have had a pet mouse. We got her from a pet store, and he’s carried her in his hand through so many adventures in forests, beaches, and playgrounds. She sat on many little handmade boats down the creeks of New Zealand. Sand castles and Lego houses built just for her. Drawings and stories for and about her. You’ve never seen a mouse so loved.

The past six months, she’s been next to me on my desk, twelve hours a day, as I wrote this book. Moving slower and wobbling, looking like she’s in pain. This week, she kept falling over when trying to eat. Thirty minutes ago, she died. I’m surprised how much I’ve been crying.

As soon as she died, she looked at peace for the first time in months. It led to a thought that seems like a nice end to this book, and gives it extra meaning for me. Heaven is such a useful reframing. Maybe it’s the original reframing. Death can be terrifying or devastating, so no wonder every culture found a way to reframe it.

Some people avoid loving pets or even people, because they’re scared of the eventual heartbreak and loss. But avoiding sadness is like listening to music with only major chords. The minor chords are so beautiful. I’m crying, but isn’t that wonderful? It’s a part of a rich life.

And even that is reframing. It’s a useful belief that has helped me love people and pets, again and again.

You are what you pretend to be

2026-02-07T05:00:00Z

Your outside doesn’t need to match your inside.

You can feel terrified inside, but just pretend to be brave for one minute. By doing that, you were actually brave.

You might be a total introvert, but need to attend an event, so you act social for one hour. By pretending to be social, you were.

You can imitate your role model. Many top performers have an alter ego — a Jekyll to their Hyde or vice-versa — a side of themselves they personify and bring out when needed. It’s not Maria who negotiates. It’s El Tigre.

I wasn’t usually in the mood to be a good dad. But knowing how important it is, I’d collect my strength and do the right thing for a few minutes or hours — a short burst of being who my boy needed me to be. After years of that, we have an amazing relationship, and he tells everyone he has the best dad ever.

You are your actions. Your actions are you. Your self-image doesn’t matter as much.

When you realize what you need to do, it doesn’t mean that’s who you need to be. You can just pretend.

Keep tuning and adjusting

2026-02-06T05:00:00Z

When I got my first guitar, the nice man at the shop put on new strings and tuned it. A week later, I brought it back to the shop because it sounded terrible. He told me it was just out of tune. I said, “But you tuned it already!” He explained that I constantly have to re-tune it every time I play.

Same with adopting a new mindset. Every week, back in the journal, reflecting, talking with friends, and making adjustments.

Sometimes you need to stick to the plan exactly, and only adjust your thoughts. Sometimes you need to update the plan. Use your wisdom to decide.

Don’t be discouraged when you get off course. A big benefit of keeping a journal is that you can go back and review it, to remind yourself what you’re doing and why.

Take the first step immediately

2026-02-05T05:00:00Z

I spent basically my whole life in America, and had no desire to travel or be anywhere else. But one day I was thinking about growing older, and how people get stuck in their ways as they age. I thought what a learning experience it would be to move somewhere far away — somewhere that surprises me every day. Doing that often would be great for my brain.

The more I wrote about it in my journal, the more I felt it matched my values. So, out of curiosity, I looked up the price of a flight to London. I picked a random departure date four months away, and a return date six months after that. It was only $400 round trip — a crazy sale price too good to miss. So without hesitation, I typed in my credit card and booked it.

It took a few seconds to realize what I’d done. I just committed to moving to London for six months. Whoa.

Four years later, I was living in Singapore, had a baby with a woman from India, and moved to New Zealand to raise him. I’m a citizen of three countries now, and deeply happy with my life. I think of the impact of impulsively booking that flight.

On the other hand, there were many times where I thought I wanted something — in theory — then took the first step, and realized I was wrong. Taking action tests your thought in reality.

Here’s a good rule from experience: If you’re considering something destructive — that would hurt someone or yourself — be very reluctant, keeping all other options in mind for some time. But for anything else, take the first step immediately, without hesitation. Start momentum.

Why your choice is wrong

2026-02-04T05:00:00Z

No matter what choice you make, someone will tell you it’s wrong.

It’s wrong because it’s not what they would have chosen.

It’s not what they need.

It’s not the choice of other people they know.

It’s not what an expert recommends.

The prosecution rests their case.

You might feel a need to defend it, or argue why you’re right. Don’t bother.

It’s not for them, or anyone else. It’s not even for your future or past. It’s only for you, and only for now.

Your choice helps you do what you need to do, be who you want to be, or feel at peace.

It improves your current actions.

That’s enough.

No need to argue that it’s true.

Talk with friends to solidify it

2026-02-03T05:00:00Z

After you privately internalize a belief, talk about it with friends. Explaining it to different people helps you refine it. They might see an angle or consequence you hadn’t considered.

You hear it for the first time outside your own mind. You’ll hear it sound wrong or right when telling someone else.

It feels like an announcement. It helps solidify the decision. You can ask them for help to support your choice, and to hold you to it.

We know ourselves through others. If people say you have nice eyes, then you must have nice eyes. When your friends acknowledge your belief and echo it back to you, it really feels like reality.

Private journal to internalize it

2026-02-02T05:00:00Z

Once you find a viewpoint you want to adopt, a great tool to internalize it is a private journal. Whether you write, type, or just talk, the point is to fill your mind with this new perspective.

Strengthen it by stacking up the reasons why you chose it.
“Here’s how this will help me: ____”
“Here’s how this will help others: ____”

Clarify it by defining it so simply that it’s easy to remember.
“Here’s how I’d explain it to a stranger in ten seconds: ____”

Plan it with a specific list of actions.

Picture the changes vividly. Describe your new self-identity and its implications.

Prepare for setbacks. Outsmart your future self that will try to revert to your old mindset. Trick the trickster in advance.

Come back and review your journal often, so you can remind yourself of your decision, reasons, vision, and plan.

No new instructions for the computer

2026-02-01T05:00:00Z

You load the program into the computer, and it begins its calculations. It’s computing. It’s working hard, and it’s going to take some time.

If you interrupt it with new instructions, it has to begin all over again, because the parameters have changed. If you keep giving it new information, it will never finish its job.

People who tell me they are lost and running in circles have one thing in common: They say they keep listening to podcasts, reading books, watching videos, doing courses — taking in more and more information — and still don’t know what to do.

Consider the computer metaphor for yourself. You’ve taken in so much information, and heard so many instructions. That’s enough input. It’s time for output. Run the program. Stop interrupting yourself with new information. Let yourself execute one plan of action, and see it through to fruition.

From explorer to self-leader

2026-01-31T05:00:00Z

Picture the stereotype of an explorer, hundreds of years ago, on an expedition to uncharted lands. The explorer tries everything. Up that river. Down that valley. Into every inlet. The explorer finds a nice harbor that would make a great port, and notifies the queen.

The queen appoints a captain to lead people to this new place. The leader is focused entirely on this destination. “Here’s where we’re going. Here’s why. Here’s how. Let’s go.” The leader describes the plan clearly and simply so it’s easy to understand and repeat.

The leader goes in a straight line, obstinate and undistracted. If a storm sends the ship off course, it gets back on course. If you tried to suggest, halfway there, “What if we tried somewhere else, instead?”, the leader would ignore you.

This is a metaphor for two sides of yourself.

When making a change in your life or your mind, you start by exploring. You take in tons of information, and keep searching for different perspectives.

Eventually, you don’t need more information or time. You’ve found some good options. You need to decide. You need to switch from explorer to leader — to leading yourself.

Stop considering other viewpoints. Stop changing the course. Pick a destination and cut off other options. “Here’s where I’m going. Here’s why. Here’s how. Let’s go.” Describe the plan clearly and simply so it’s easy to remember. Go in a straight line, obstinate and undistractable. Ignore that explorer inside of you that says, “What if I tried something else, instead?”

You can go back to exploring after you arrive at your destination.

How to decide and make the best choice

2026-01-30T05:00:00Z

You can do anything. But you can’t do everything. You have to decide. If you don’t decide, you get nothing.

You can think of a hundred paths to follow. But you can’t follow them all. Use time. One path now. Other paths maybe later. Otherwise you’ll never get anywhere.

How do you know what’s the best choice? Trick question! No choice is the best in itself. A choice becomes the best when you choose it. That’s when you make your decision congruent. You find plenty of proof to support it. Evidence against it is useless. You align yourself with your choice.

Best of all, you take action. By letting go of other options, you concentrate your energy and time. You make it part of your identity, and act accordingly. You become effective. You do the work that makes it a great choice.

An awesome collection of great questions

2026-01-29T05:00:00Z

This is where I would share powerful questions that you can answer for big insights and change. But here’s why I’m not:

I’ve read books that have long lists of questions. But when I’m reading, I want to keep reading, not stop for hours or days at that spot, pondering every question.

I’ve read books that act like a workbook, giving many blank pages with lines, expecting you to write your answers in that space. Does anyone actually do this? It doesn’t work on the ebook or audiobook. I’d rather use my own journal.

If I put questions here, I’d think of better ones after the book is published.

So here’s what we’ll do: Go to sive.rs/u

That’s the permanent website for this book, where I’ll keep an ever-improving collection of helpful questions, free for you to take and use whenever you want. I hope you agree that it’s better than this page of this book could ever be.

Five tiny tales of reframing

2026-01-28T05:00:00Z

On the Olympic podium stood the winners of the gold, silver, and bronze medal. The silver medalist was so angry at herself for not being just a little bit faster — just milliseconds away from winning the gold. The bronze medalist was so happy with herself, just milliseconds away from winning nothing.

The former student was disheartened that she was failing at everything, so she went back to visit her old teacher. When she told him her troubles, the old man said, “Guess my secret number from 1 to 100.”
“50?”
“Higher.”
“75?”
“Lower.”
With each try she smiled more, until she correctly guessed the number. Then she thanked him for the reminder that every wrong guess is not a failure, but just one step closer to success.

Two Japanese businessmen visiting Brazil had scheduled lunch to be delivered at 1pm. When the food finally arrived at 3pm, one of the men was furious. The other man was amused to witness this example of how differently their cultures treat time, and laughed at his own expectations.

A couple had been married for many years, but just divorced. The man’s friends approached him with sad sensitivity, “Oooh. You must be devastated.” But one friend greeted him with joy saying, “Congratulations! Nobody leaves a great relationship. I’m proud you both put an end to the struggle.” This made him feel better for the first time.

How long should we mourn a loved one’s death? For some people it’s years or the rest of their life. But in a traditional New Orleans funeral, musicians accompany the coffin down the street, and after a few minutes of a solemn slow dirge, the music turns festive in a happy celebration. The funeral is a parade to honor that person’s life, and the focus turns from grief to appreciation. Switching from sad to happy is always an option, even at the worst times in life.

Kingdom of Characters - by Jing Tsu

2026-01-27T05:00:00Z

summary:

Since I’m learning to read and write Chinese, I thought this was going to go more into the history of the characters themselves, but it was about the technological innovations that enabled their adoption and distribution.

recommend: 2/10

my notes:

Drawn by pamphlets and flyers that mythologized the rich bounties of the golden hills of California, Chinese immigrants poured into San Francisco to work in the gold mines during the 1849 gold rush. Hundreds of thousands of Chinese coolies worked on the transcontinental railway from 1865 to 1869. By the 1870s, Chinese laborers accounted for one-fourth of the workers in California. They made up 90 percent of the labor force that built the transcontinental railway.

Traits of useful perspectives

2026-01-27T05:00:00Z

To list all the beliefs I’ve found useful would fill a whole book. (Actually, four books so far, since that’s what my previous books were about.) So instead, for your own ideation, it might help if I list the traits that my most useful perspectives have shared:

Direct: Go directly for what I really want, instead of using other means to get there. This requires soul-searching of my real motivations. What do I really want? And what’s the point of that? Am I keeping a job just to feel secure? Getting a university degree for the status? Starting a business for the freedom? Instead, find a more efficient path to the real end result.

Energizing: I’ll think of many smart but uninspiring perspectives, then one makes me bolt straight up in my seat, full of excitement. It inspires me to take immediate action. Note that fear is a form of excitement.

Self-reliant: It doesn’t depend on anything out of my control. It doesn’t need anyone’s approval or involvement. It doesn’t need anything to change. It works no matter what happens. It’s about the process, not the outcome.

Balancing: Lately I’ve had too much of something, and not enough of something else. Comfort versus challenge. Social-time versus me-time. Exploring versus focusing. Prioritize what’s been neglected.

Selfless: I see myself from the outside, and know that I basically don’t matter. My needs are nothing compared to other people’s, so how can I help? “Useful” means for them and the greater good.

Selfish: Generosity can go too far. Protect the goose that lays the golden eggs. Practice healthy self-respect and self-care that comes from self-worth.

Lucid and lasting: Coming from a good state of mind, not angry, hurt, envious, or upset — not even ecstatically happy. It’s smart, and still seems like a good perspective a day or week later when I’m in a different state.

Test first: No matter how certain I feel, test an idea in reality. Before deciding, try it. Before buying something big, rent it, more than once. Before quitting, take a break.

Healthy: Do the right thing — do what’s wise and good — even if I don’t feel like it. Ask my idealized highest self how to think of this.

Long-term: In the big picture of my whole life, this is just a phase. Keep my eyes on the horizon. Short-term discomfort or pain can bring a deeply fulfilling reward. Serve the future.

Compensating for bias and prejudice: Correcting a bias, like my example of bowling and frisbee, earlier in this book. Do the opposite of my instincts. If I tend to walk away, I choose to stay. When I notice I’m prejudiced against something, I choose to get to know it and appreciate it. These have been the best beliefs for personal growth.

Expand your repertoire

2026-01-26T05:00:00Z

To change, reach past what comes naturally. Avoid your defaults. Get guidance outside of yourself. Use a different tool.

“Oblique Strategies” is the name of a deck of cards where each card has one creative suggestion. When making music or anything, if you get stuck, you shuffle the cards, randomly pick one, and apply what it says. Some examples:

Not building a wall; making a brick.
Use an unacceptable color.
Honour thy error as a hidden intention.

I had a poster on my wall of twenty different circles painted by twenty different artists. Each circle had a very different style, color, filling, and texture. When I didn’t know what to do, I’d think how each artistic approach could be metaphorically applied to my life.

Now I learn about foreign cultures, and try to really understand the different worldviews. Instead of judging, I try to see the benefits of their perspective. I travel to inhabit philosophies.

In the spirit of all this, I wrote a book called “How to Live” that presents twenty-seven vastly different approaches to life, each taken to an extreme. It’s meant to be used like the oblique strategies or the paintings of circles. I consider this book (“Useful Not True”) to be like a prequel for that, so consider reading it next, in the mindset of reframing and finding other perspectives.

Diamond in the trash

2026-01-25T05:00:00Z

When things aren’t going well, you’re in a bad state of mind. If you ask yourself a healthy question, like “What’s great about this?”, your answer will probably be “Nothing! This is just bad!”

Don’t be so sure. Push past that first thought. Keep asking. You can always find something useful.

Use what you learned about brainstorming. Don’t stop at the second or third answer. Come up with crazy ideas.

Use what you learned from jigsaw puzzles. Start with the edges. Come up with extreme and ridiculous ideas that you’d never actually do, but are good for inspiration and finding the middle.

We resist good ideas that require us to change. You think you’re not that kind of person? Not yet, but you can be. Keep all ideas around.

You seem to be locked in a jail cell. But if you know there’s actually a secret exit, you’ll look harder, pushing and pulling everything until you find it.

You seem to be holding a bag of trash. But if you know there’s actually a diamond inside, you’ll sift through the junk until you find it.

Your mind has a lot of trash, and often tells you there’s no way out of your situation — there’s nothing great about this. But if you decide that there is, you’ll keep looking until you find it.

Answer great questions

2026-01-24T05:00:00Z

Pick something that’s holding you back from what you want to do, be, or feel.

It might feel like physical fact. “I’m too old.” “I can’t afford it.” Even if you are old and have no money, that has not stopped others, so that’s not the real problem.

Beliefs are often self-fulfilling. Whether you think you can or can’t, you’re right. Think nobody will love you? Think there are no opportunities? You can make bad dreams come true.

Doubt limitations. What’s another way to see it? What perspective would help? Ask better questions.

“I’m too old” becomes “How can I use my age to my advantage?”

“I can’t afford it” becomes “How can I afford it?”

Every problem becomes “What’s great about this?”

Go back to your favorite books, movies, thinkers, or heroes. They’re your favorites for good reason. They have lessons or wisdom you can use. What did they teach you? What would they say?

Ask any AI to list empowering questions. There’s no shortage of great questions. But don’t just ingest them. You have to really answer them.

Who chooses your (next) thoughts?

2026-01-23T05:00:00Z

You might say, “I can’t help the way I feel”, as if it’s completely out of your control — as if you have no choice and are unable to feel any other way. But you do have a choice. Think a different way and you’ll feel a different way. You choose your reaction. Not the first one, but the next.

There’s a crucial moment in between when something happens and when you actually respond. It’s an important life skill. It’s as simple as this:

Something happens.
Get past your first emotional reaction.
Consider other ways of looking at it.
Pick one that feels empowering or useful.
It shapes how you feel and what you’ll do.

Simple, but not easy. The hardest part was getting past your first reaction.

You choose how you think and feel. You choose your meanings. Other people’s judgements, values, and meanings are also inside of you, but you can replace these with your own.

If you don’t choose your perspectives then you leave them up to mood, manipulation, or your worst impulses. Control your thoughts or be controlled.

The most useful part of this book

2026-01-22T05:00:00Z

Imagine you’re reframing a painting. First, you remove the old frame. Then you try different frames.

The first three parts of this book were helping you remove the old frame. That was just preparing for this. Now it’s time to try different frames.

Explore many different ways of looking at your situation — finding perspectives you’d never considered before. Where you felt stuck, you’ll see a great way out. You’ll find an angle that excites you. What was cloudy will be clear plan of action. You’ll see a smarter strategy. Where you felt haunted, you’ll feel at peace.

These are the powers of reframing.

Philosophies are instruments

2026-01-21T05:00:00Z

Los Angeles, 1952. Igor Stravinsky, the composer, was 70 years old, and rehearsing the orchestra.

A young girl who lived next to the orchestra hall snuck in through the back door to listen to the rehearsals. She watched the violins, cellos, flute, trumpet, clarinet, harp, percussion, and piano. She wondered which one should be her favorite. There were too many options. She needed to pick one. During a break, she got up the courage to ask the maestro.

Stravinsky’s friend and writer Robert Craft was there, so that’s why this moment is captured.

The young girl went up to Stravinsky and said, “Excuse me. Which of these instruments is the best one?” He was surprised and amused, and took the challenge.

He said, “You hear sounds, but I hear life. Every instrument is a philosophy. Every philosophy is an instrument.” She just looked at him, confused, so he continued.

“You could pick just one instrument, one philosophy. But wouldn’t it be more interesting to play them all?”

The girl said, “What?!? Nobody can play them all! How could I?”

Stravinsky said, “Let’s say, as a young woman, you go out into the world to meet new people, full of multiculturalism and humanism. You do something daring, filled with optimism. Then you start a family and have time for nothing but pragmatism. You lose a loved one and comfort yourself with stoicism. But it makes no sense, so you’re drawn to existentialism. See? So many instruments!”

The girl said, “What if I want to pick just one?”

He said, “Most people do pick just one. They think their instrument is the best! Go ask anyone in this orchestra, and they’ll give you indisputable proof why their instrument is better than all others. You’ll never convince that cellist that the clarinet is better, so why try? Just like religions, cultures, and philosophies, right?”

There was a long pause. The girl said, “So, which do you think is the best?”

Stravinsky smiled and said, “Time.”

“Time?”

“Time! I can separate the instruments with time. Or I can combine them at the same time. Different instruments for different times in the music. Different philosophies for different times in your life. You can play every instrument, and every philosophy, if you use time, and combine. Time itself is my favorite instrument.”

The girl seemed satisfied, and walked back to the balcony to listen again.

Existentialism: A Beginner’s Guide - by Thomas Wartenberg

2026-01-05T05:00:00Z

summary:

Light introduction to Existentialism. Points to some more important works, and gives some context. Good information and insights but written in a style that was hard for me to parse. Happy to now have my notes here after much editing.

recommend: 5/10

my notes:

One fundamental thesis of Existentialism: human beings value their freedom more than anything else.

Social and political freedom: social conventions and political institutions must not illegitimately constrain the human beings who are governed by them.

Metaphysicalconcept of freedom: the capacity to initiate a series of events.

Jean-Paul Sartre’s Nausea (1938) was perhaps the greatest philosophical novel ever written. Sartre was honored with the Nobel Prize for Literature but he refused it lest it seem that he endorsed its bourgeois values.

Everything that is not a consciousness has a nature that it must embody to be the thing that it is.

A person does not, as a consciousness, simply perceive the world. He simultaneously is aware of himself perceiving the world. Consciousness is the only entity in the world that does not just exist, but also presents itself to itself as existing.

Seeing chocolate cake on a menu does not force me to eat it, though I love chocolate and could eat the cake if I decided to. Existentialists will not accept addiction to chocolate as an excuse. You could have refrained from eating that cake. There was nothing in your nature as a consciousness that required you to be a ‘cake-eater.’ You were free to eat the cake but didn’t have to.

I can nihilate the desire to eat the pie. I can control it. This is what it is to be a free being. We have the ability to nihilate every desire.

I am a being who exists through my own nihilation of my circumstances.

Only the human being is what it is not and is not what it is.

Being free forces you to take complete responsibility for what you do. It’s totally up to you. This responsibility can seem overwhelming. You remake the world according to your own design.

Human beings, because they are free, exhibit transcendence - an ability to move beyond their given circumstances. Our freely chosen projects are evidence of our transcendence. We take it upon ourselves to create something through our own actions.

Engaging in our ‘projects’ – a term used to refer to any of the undertakings we choose. We are able to undertake our projects, in which we seek to go beyond the given conditions in which we find ourselves, only in those very conditions themselves.

Our projects often involve creating ourselves to be, in the future, something that we are not now. Although we do create ourselves in the course of our lives, we are never what we have made of ourselves, for that created self becomes simply another factor in our factical situation. And, as transcendent beings, we are once again free to become what we are not.

People do not want their freedom; it only scares and troubles them.

People perpetrate social evil because they think they are better than other people and know what is best for them. Because they believe they have unique access to ‘the truth.’ They think people who do not comprehend their ‘truth’ need to be guided by themselves and others who are ‘in the know.’ Thus, a small group of knowledgeable insiders can embrace all sorts of ill-treatment of outsiders.

We fear our own freedom because it brings responsibility in its wake and it’s that that daunts us. A free person has to accept complete responsibility for the choices he or she makes. No gods determine how we shall act.

Protestantism saw the interior lives of people as more significant than their external behavior. The standard views of people in the twenty-first century remain significantly influenced by this revolution. Existentialists believe that an emphasis on intentions rather than actions encourages the tendency human beings have to deceive themselves about why they do what they do.

Our knowledge of the existence of other minds is based on what we each see - that other bodies behave much like our own body.

Once you become aware that you are in a certain state, you no longer fully inhabit that state.

Existentialists value individuality. First-person singular, rather than plural. ‘Why am I here?’ rather than ‘Why are we here?’ Existentialists sought to counter the tendency to live guided by standards valid for all. People have to work out fundamental questions as individuals. Hence, distrust of the general and their admiration for the particular.

Why Sartre thinks that ‘hell is other people’: Their look pulls us out of our own world and turns us into an object in theirs. Our self-consciousness makes us doubt their validity, but are also unable to be fully present within them.

The key to humans discovering their own nature, according to the Existentialists, is anxiety. Anxiety allows humans to correctly understand the nature of the being that they are, but only if they have a full and complete experience of this emotion. Anxiety is crucial because of the significance of what it signals. Worry is characterized by something about which I am worried, some ‘object’ which is the focus of my concern. the target of my worry is some future event. Anxiety, on the other hand, has no obvious object toward which anxiety is directed. Yet it is at least as upsetting an emotion as worry and maybe even more so, particularly since it’s so hard to figure out what is making one anxious. From a psychoanalytic perspective, anxiety is really a form of worry, only the object of one’s worry is unconscious.

Existentialists’ say anxiety’s object is the fact that we have to make decisions that ‘make all the difference,’ but have nothing to rely on in making them. We lack adequate grounds for deciding the fundamental issues of our lives. You have to take a leap and stake your entire existence on your faith. (Kierkegaard’s idea that one had to stake one’s existence on what one had faith in is one origin of the term ‘Existence-ialism.’) We experience anxiety because we lack rational justifications for all the crucial decisions in our lives. We are, as Sartre puts it, condemned to be free.

Existentialists differ from other schools of philosophy that only put forward their own theories without attempting to confirm them experientially.

People find this form of philosophizing so compelling, for it starts with our ordinary experience as human beings and shows it to have deep, philosophical significance.

Absurd is to say that it contradicts reason. Life is absurd. Contrast it with its opposite, namely the contention that life possesses a meaning. By claiming that life is absurd, Camus intends to deny the possibility that there is a meaning just waiting to be discovered.

We are free to create outselves in accordance with our own desires. Our freedom means that we do not have any essence, any nature, that is given to us from outside ourselves.

The act of rebellion or revolt is a crucial means of self-realization in an absurd world.

Every development contains within itself a ‘negative moment,’ that is, the seeds to its own destruction. Every negation contains within itself the seeds of the next positive development.

Although Zeus has the power to condemn him to an eternally unachievable task, he does not have control of Sisyphus’s mind. So, instead of seeing himself as a victim of a cruel fate as Zeus would like, Sisyphus is able to choose a different way of interpreting his situation, to free himself from a sense of defeat.

He is becoming an individual. Achieving individuality. Being an individual requires one to separate oneself from the conformity that dominates sociality.

Camus’s novel, The Stranger, continues to introduce young people to some of the basic ideas of Existentialism.

One impetus to conformity is the denial of death. On his death-bed, he finds himself alone, separate from the others. His scarcely perceptible attempts to struggle against what was considered good by the most highly placed people, those scarcely noticeable impulses which he had immediately suppressed, might have been the real thing, and all the rest were false. And his professional duties and the whole arrangement of his life and of his family, and all his social and official interests, might all have been false.

Conformist behavior’s problem it is legitimated by something external to an individual human being, either the general consensus of a ‘They’ or the authority of a Grand Inquisitor. An individual has not had to reflect on and acknowledge the validity of the action itself.

Your freedom requires you to respect and support the freedom of others. We inhabit a world that contains other beings. If we do not act so as to foster their freedom, we jeopardize our own freedom as well.

The tyrant who thinks he is free is not. When he oppresses others, he contradicts his own nature as a free being.

Society enforces conformity and keeps people from becoming free individuals.

The anti-Semite conforms to a set of norms in order to be part of a social group. The benefits felt as part of a group to fend off the anguish that comes from acknowledging one’s freedom and responsibility. Not comfortable with acknowledging their own acceptance of such leveling norms and so need to find a way to see themselves as superior. It is a mistake to treat anti-Semitism as simply the result of ignorance on the part of the anti-Semite.

All must be mediocre in order to ensure the social uniformity.

Things that initially appear to be structured in one way turn out, upon deeper analysis, to be the exact opposite, as when the supposedly independent being turns out to really be the dependent one.

‘Woman’ as the negation of ‘man,’ which is the primary or ‘valorized’ term. To be human is, implicitly, to be a man. To be a woman is, inherently, to be relative to him - defined and differentiated with reference to man. Men, especially those who feel inferior to other men, benefit from gender oppression by allowing them to feel superior to women.

Jews or Blacks can seek to liberate themselves from their oppressors, since they don’t need them. But women need men in order continue the propagation of the human race. Women are different from that of other oppressed groups, for they cannot simply live in isolation from their oppressor.

Nothing is more essential to us than our freedom. Freedom is so important to humans that we would prefer to go insane rather than accept the idea that our actions are completely determined. I’ll do something stupid, unexpected, just to show you that I am different - that my actions are not determined.

The general human tendency to forgo freedom and aspire to a more thing-like status that allows people to evade many of the difficulties that freedom.

Their oppression has provided women with the metaphysical solace of avoiding the burden of freedom. Freed’ from the burden of their own freedom, saved from having to face all the difficult and painful questions about life.

Objects from tables to trees have a nature which observation can reveal. Human beings, though, are different. We do not have a predetermined nature that can be read off our appearance. Objectification: legible nature by reading it off his appearance. His black skin means that his accomplishments are never seen as those of a human being, but always of a Black man.

Children in the colonies are taught to read the literature of the colonizer. As a result, the young internalize the colonists’ values, which emphasize the inferiority of the colonized.

The fundamental message that the Existentialists hoped to deliver to us is that we have many more options for living our lives than we typically acknowledge.

Martin Heidegger’s magnum opus: Being and Time.

You are free to make your nature. You are not determined by your past, but always have the option of changing how you act. You can decide to climb mountains because you do not want to be a person whose life is determined by fears.

To be in contact with nothingness, (refusing everything), to determine how things might have been otherwise.

Only the human being is what it is not and is not what it is. You can change and make of yourself something different from what you appear to be at any time.

You are also creating yourself to be, in the future, something that you, now, are not.

People perpetrate social evil not because they have evil aims, but because they think they are better than other people and know what is best for them. They believe they have unique access to ‘the truth.’ As a result, they believe that people who do not comprehend their ‘truth’ need to be guided.

Freedom is actually a source of much of our trouble and pain. Most people would prefer to live a life without the pain resulting from possessing freedom. Better to be a satisfied fool than Socrates, troubled but free.

We have abandoned the gods by no longer giving them control over our actions.

There is a great deal of security to be had from seeing oneself as simply following someone else’s orders.

The Catholic Church stressed the importance of rituals. Protestantism focus on interior lives of people as more significant than their external behavior

“It’s not whether you win or lose but how you play the game.” This is often seen as laughable in these days of seemingly unbridled competition. Claiming that what matters are not external factors which are not completely within one’s control, but the internal attitudes one takes to one’s actions.

Emphasis on intentions rather than actions encourages you to deceive yourself about why you do what you do.

Freedom is difficult for humans to bear. Because we are free, we have to accept responsibility for our actions. There is no one else to blame. Our freedom to transform the circumstances of our existence and remake the world and ourselves in accordance with our own ideas.

Once you become aware that you are in a certain state, you no longer fully inhabit that state. When you become aware of what you are feeling, you feel alienated from that feeling. It was sort of act you were putting on.

Human beings have developed a range of different ways to slough off responsibility for their actions. God is a prime example. There are way more commandments than just those ten. The Old Testament actually lists 613 commandments that determine virtually every aspect of a person’s life.

The religious observant do not have to decide which norms of conduct adhere to. Moral rules are determined for them. No freedom to decide whether or not to obey the rules.

Understand how people benefit existentially from giving up control over their own lives.

Purely dyadic (twotermed) relationships are impossible, for we are always aware of the possibility of being observed by a third person, the ‘other’ who takes us out of our primary ways of being. This explains why Sartre thinks that ‘hell is other people’: Their look pulls us out of our own world and turns us into an object in theirs.

Unable to be fully present doing our projects, incapable of embracing them as meaningful. We acquire a self-consciousness that makes us doubt their validity.

Existentialism can be thought of as a form of radical empiricism.

To call something an absolute evil is to say that it is so horrible it cannot be redeemed or justified in relation to something else.

Kant was so worried that he would not finish explicating the Critical Philosophy that he adhered to a rigid schedule.

The basic feature of religion was its positing of things that were absurd, that is, contrary to reason. Calling a religious belief ‘absurd’ is not a way of denigrating it, but a matter of describing a specific feature of it: its violation of the norms of human reason. Existentialists’ use the concept of the absurd as, partially at least, a technical term with a very specific meaning. To say that something is absurd is to say that it contradicts reason.

It’s a mistake to say that nature is indifferent, for this suggests that nature has that very minimal attitude toward what happens, one situated midway between cruelty and compassion, as if it just didn’t really care what its effects on human beings were. Nature is simply incapable of having any attitude about what it brings about. It simply is what it is. What’s absurd is that we are creatures who demand reasonableness of a universe that cannot provide it.

Man is a useless passion.

There is no fate that cannot be surmounted by scorn. Sisyphus is happy. His scorn for Zeus and the fate to which he has been consigned allows him to take control of his own situation. Sisyphus is able to choose a different way of interpreting his situation.

One impetus to conformity is the denial of death.

An authentic action is one you do in full awareness of your freedom. When you act authentically, you have to accept complete responsibility for what you do, and not attribute the action to any form of influence or compulsion.

Your freedom requires you to respect and support the freedom of others.

While the anti-Semite may be ignorant about many features of Jewish culture, this cannot explain why she favors the oppression of Jews. I know very little about the Inuit, for example, but think they deserve the same respect due any human being. Without the presence of the Jew there would be no one whom the anti-Semite could use to secure her sense of her own superiority. Without the Jew, she would be forced to either invent a replacement or face her own life without this strategy of denial.

At the Existentialist Café - by Sarah Bakewell

2026-01-05T05:00:00Z

summary:

More like a memoir of her re-discovery of existentialist writers. Interesting but because of it, less educational than I wanted.

recommend: 3/10

my notes:

Freedom, for him, lay at the heart of all human experience

As a human being, I have no predefined nature. I create that nature through what I choose to do. I am always one step ahead of myself, making myself up as I go along.

Ex-student of his had come to him for advice. Sartre listened to his problem and said simply, ‘You are free, therefore choose — that is to say, invent.’

Trolley problem? “trolleyologists” Sartre was not concerned with reasoning his way through an ethical calculus in the traditional way of philosophers.

None can relieve you of the burden of freedom. Ultimately you must do something, and it’s up to you what that something is.

You might think you are guided by moral laws, or that you act in certain ways because of your psychological make-up or past experiences, or because of what is happening around you. But the whole mixture merely adds up to the ‘situation’ out of which you must act. And in choosing, you also choose who you will be.

It is forbidden to forbid.

Be realistic: demand the impossible.

Sartre had taught me to drop out, an underrated and sometimes useful response to the world.

Merleau-Ponty was a brilliant essayist. Merleau-Ponty’s main work The Phenomenology of Perception. I was amazed afresh at how adventurous and rich his thinking was.

Read: * Sartre on freedom * Beauvoir on the subtle mechanisms of oppression * Kierkegaard on anxiety * Camus on rebellion * Heidegger on technology * Merleau Ponty on cognitive science Their philosophies feel current - and remain of interest.

Existentialists inhabited their ideas. This notion of ‘inhabited philosophy’ is one I’ve borrowed from the English philosopher and novelist Iris Murdoch, who wrote the first full-length book on Sartre. She later moved away from it. She observed that we need not expect moral philosophers to ‘live by’ their ideas in a simplistic way, as if they were following a set of rules. But we can expect them to show how their ideas are lived in. We should be able to look in through the windows of a philosophy, as it were, and see how people occupy it, how they move about and how they conduct themselves.

Philosophy becomes more interesting when it is cast into the form of a life. Likewise, personal experience is more interesting when thought about philosophically.

His aim was always to work in whatever topic seemed the ‘most distressing and uncertain’ to him at any time — the ones that filled him with most anxiety and self-doubt.

Phenomenology describes stripping away clichés of thought, presumptions and received ideas, in order to see the ‘things themselves’, exactly as they appear. As it presents itself to my experience, rather than as it may or may not be in reality. Set aside both the abstract suppositions and any intrusive emotional associations. A general suspension of judgement about the world. Phenomenology is useful for talking about religious or mystical experiences: We can describe them as they feel from the inside without having to prove that they represent the world accurately. In forcing us to be loyal to experience, and to sidestep authorities who try to influence how we interpret that experience, phenomenology has the capacity to neutralise all the ‘isms’ around it.

If we are nothing but what we think about, then no predefined ‘inner nature’ can hold us back.

He was so absorbed in his reading that at first he barely noticed the outside world. He drank and went for long walks. “I rediscovered irresponsibility.”

Argumentative Indian - by Amartya Sen

2025-12-25T05:00:00Z

summary:

Famous analysis of India’s intellectual and political heritage, quite against Hindu nationalism. I learned a lot. I’d happily read ten more books like this.

recommend: 8/10

my notes:

When taking a view of Indian civilization, don’t forget the period preceding the Muslim conquest. Muslim Arab traders settled in India from the eighth century. India was not a ‘Hindu country’ even before the arrival of Islam. Buddhism was the dominant religion in India for nearly a millennium. The Chinese in the first millennium CE standardly referred to India as ‘the Buddhist kingdom’.

The roots of scepticism in India go back a long way, and it would be hard to understand the history of Indian culture if scepticism were to be jettisoned. There’s a long tradition of accepted heterodoxy in India. See how much heterodoxy there has been in Indian thoughts and beliefs from very early days. Not only did Buddhists, Jains, agnostics and atheists compete with each other and with adherents of what we now call Hinduism (a much later term) in the India of the first millennium BCE, but also the dominant religion in India was Buddhism for nearly a thousand years.

Bhagavad Gītā presents a tussle between two contrary moral positions: 1. Krishna’s emphasis on doing one’s duty 2. Arjuna’s focus on avoiding bad consequences (and generating good ones) … Arjuna questions whether it is right to be concerned only with one’s duty to promote a just cause and be indifferent to the misery and the slaughter that the war itself would undoubtedly cause. Krishna argues against Arjuna. His response takes the form of articulating principles of action – based on the priority of doing one’s duty – which have been repeated again and again in Indian philosophy. Krishna insists on Arjuna’s duty to fight, irrespective of his evaluation of the consequences. It is a just cause, and, as a warrior and a general on whom his side must rely, Arjuna cannot waver from his obligations, no matter what the consequences are. Krishna’s view is the form of an admonishment: ‘And do not think of the fruit of action. / Fare forward.’

The univocal message of the Gītā requires supplementation by the broader argumentative wisdom of the Mahābhārata, of which the Gītā is only one small part.

India was the first country in the non-Western world to choose a resolutely democratic constitution.

World-conquering Alexander received some political lecturing as he roamed around north-west India in the fourth century BCE. For example, when Alexander asked a group of Jain philosophers why they were paying so little attention to the great conqueror, he got the following – broadly anti-imperial – reply (as reported by Arrian): “King Alexander, every man can possess only so much of the earth’s surface as this we are standing on. You are but human like the rest of us, save that you are always busy and up to no good, travelling so many miles from your home, a nuisance to yourself and to others! … You will soon be dead, and then you will own just as much of the earth as will suffice to bury you.”

The secular demand that the state be ‘equidistant’ from different religions. The inclusiveness of India made it easy for Christians, Jews, Parsees and other immigrants to settle in India to lead ‘their own lives’, coming from places where they had been persecuted,

Relations between Bangladesh and India demand much subtlety of perception, linked as the two countries are not only by history, but also by language and literature (Bengali culture flourishes on both sides of the border), religion (the Muslim minority in India constitutes about the same proportion of the Indian population as the Hindu minority does of the Bangladeshi population),

The important thing about a man is his dharma [roughly, the personal basis of behaviour], not necessarily his religion.’

Following the electoral victory of coalitions led by the BJP in 1998 and 1999, various arms of the government of India were mobilized in the task of arranging ‘appropriate’ rewritings of Indian history. The rapidly reorganized National Council of Educational Research and Training (NCERT) became busy, from shortly after the BJP’s assumption of office, not only in producing fresh textbooks for Indian school children, but also in deleting sections from books produced earlier by NCERT itself (under pre-BJP management), written by reputed Indian historians. The ‘reorganization’ of NCERT was accompanied by an ‘overhaul’ of the Indian Council of Historical Research (ICHR), with new officers being appointed and a new agenda chosen for both, mainly in line with the priorities of the Hindutva movement.

Rabindranath Tagore, who died in 1941 at the age of 80, is a towering figure in the millennium-old literature of Bengal. His poetry as well as his novels, short stories and essays and songs.

Tagore did come from a Hindu family in what is now Bangladesh. The newly independent Bangladesh choose one of Tagore’s songs as its national anthem. India chose a song of Tagore’s (‘Jana Gana Mana Adhinayaka’) as its national anthem. He may be the only one ever to have written the national anthems of two different countries.

Tagore popularized the term ‘Mahatma’ – great soul – as a description of Gandhi.

Schopenhauer argued that the New Testament “must somehow be of Indian origin: this is attested by its completely Indian ethics, which transforms morals into asceticism.”

Fling away your promise if it is found to be wrong.

The works of Satyajit Ray (1921–92): his Pather Panchali – the profound movie that immediately made him a front-ranking film-maker in the world – was directly influenced by Vittorio De Sica’s Bicycle Thieves. Using natural locations and unknown actors.

Chili was brought to India by the Portuguese. Tandoori came from the Middle East.

Factfulness - by Hans Rosling

2025-12-12T05:00:00Z

summary:

What a great man. Empathy and charity embodied. I love his worldview. Written as he was dying. Its main message is to help us see the world more accurately - to see how much it’s improved. Shows why we tend towards us-versus-them stories, the difference between frightening versus dangerous, focusing on the system.

recommend: 8/10

my notes:

People think the world is more frightening, more violent, and more hopeless - in short, more dramatic - than it really is.

Our cravings for drama are causing misconceptions and an overdramatic worldview. When we realize we have been wrong about the world, feel not embarrassment, but that childlike sense of wonder, inspiration, and curiosity: “Wow, how is that even possible?”

Embrace facts that don’t fit your worldview and trying to understand their implications. Let your mistakes trigger curiosity instead of embarrassment. “How on earth could I be so wrong about that fact? What can I learn from that mistake? Those people are not stupid, so why are they using that solution?”

Misconceptions disappear only if there is some equally simple but more relevant way of thinking to replace them.

People’s knowledge is outdated, often several decades old. Their worldview dates to the time when their teachers had left school. Update your knowledge. Some knowledge goes out of date quickly. Technology, countries, societies, cultures, and religions are constantly changing. Collect examples of cultural change. Challenge the idea that today’s culture must also have been yesterday’s, and will also be tomorrow’s.

The vast majority of the world’s population lives somewhere in the middle of the income scale, not extreme poverty. Their girls go to school, their children get vaccinated, they live in two-child families, and they want to go abroad on holiday, not as refugees. Step-by-step, year-by-year, the world is improving. Only 9 percent of the world lives in low-income countries.

There is no gap between the West and the rest, between developed and developing, between rich and poor. We should all stop using the simple pairs of categories that suggest there is.

Human beings have a strong dramatic instinct toward binary thinking, a basic urge to divide things into two distinct groups, with nothing but an empty gap in between. Good versus bad. Heroes versus villains. My country versus the rest. Dividing the world into two distinct sides is simple and intuitive, and also dramatic because it implies conflict. Journalists know this. They set up their narratives as conflicts between two opposing people. The fragile individual against the big, evil corporation.

Negativity instinct: our instinct to notice the bad more than the good. There are three things going on here: 1. the misremembering of the past 2. selective reporting by journalists and activists 3. feeling that as long as things are bad it’s heartless to say they are getting better.

When we hear someone say things are getting better, we think they are also saying “don’t worry, relax” or even “look away.” Things can be both bad and better.

We pay attention to information that fits our dramatic instincts. We believe that the unusual is usual: that this is what the world looks like. The image of a dangerous world has never been broadcast more effectively than it is now, while the world has never been less violent and more safe.

The fear instinct is a terrible guide for understanding the world. It makes us give our attention to the unlikely dangers that we are most afraid of, and neglect what is actually most risky.

“frightening” and “dangerous” are two different things. Something frightening poses a perceived risk. Something dangerous poses a real risk.

When helping those in deepest poverty, don’t aim to do anything perfectly. If you do, you are stealing resources from where they can be better used. Paying too much attention to the individual visible victim rather than to the numbers can lead us to spend all our resources on a fraction of the problem, and therefore save many fewer lives.

Items on a list: just a few of them are more important than all the others put together.

To avoid misjudging something’s importance, avoid lonely numbers. Never, ever leave a number all by itself. Never believe that one number on its own can be meaningful. If you are offered one number, always ask for at least one more. Something to compare it with. Number in a news report triggers an alarm: What should this lonely number be compared to? What was that number a year ago? Ten years ago? What is it in a comparable country or region? And what should it be divided by? What is the total of which this is a part? What would this be per person?

Preference for single causes and single solutions: Being always in favor of or always against any particular idea makes you blind to information that doesn’t fit your perspective. Instead, constantly test your favorite ideas for weaknesses. Be humble about the extent of your expertise. Be curious about new information that doesn’t fit, and information from other fields. See people who contradict you, disagree with you, and put forward different ideas as a great resource for understanding the world.

Look beyond a guilty individual and to the system.

Every activist exaggerates the problem to which they have dedicated themselves. It hurts our ability to develop a true, fact-based understanding.

Urgency instinct: The call to action makes you think less critically, decide more quickly, and act now. Relax. It’s almost never true. It’s almost never that urgent, and it’s almost never an either/or. The constant alarms make us numb to real urgency.

Art of Spending Money - by Morgan Housel

2025-12-05T05:00:00Z

summary:

Philosophical thoughts on what to do with your money, which then relates to happiness, independence, envy, scarcity, and more. Putting money into savings is like buying independence. Imagine a 5-star chef cooks the most amazing meals for you 3× a day, every day. You’d lose the joy of a great meal since it’s no longer scarce. Implications for life?

recommend: 7/10

my notes:

Those happiest with money tend to be those who have found a way to stop thinking about it.

All behavior makes sense with enough information. What have you experienced that I haven’t that makes you believe what you do? And would I believe the same if I experienced what you have?

Everyone driving slower than you is an idiot, and everyone driving faster than you is a maniac.

If flying first-class to a five-star resort and building sandcastles on the beach with my kids is a 10, playing LEGOs with my kids on the living room floor of a small apartment was still a solid 8 or 9.

People will admire you more if they aren’t jealous of you.

Happiness is when you stop asking what else you need to be happy.

Not needing wealth is more valuable than wealth itself.

If you don’t have those things, then they can mean a great deal to you. When you do have them, they mean nothing to you.

So much of a good life is about what didn’t happen.

The most valuable financial asset is not needing to impress anyone.

A good life is everything you need and some of what you want. If you have everything you want, you appreciate none of what you have.

When you live a simple and modest life, your occasional experience with nice things can generate more joy than if you had those things all the time.

A simple life can be the most potent way to enjoy luxury items. It’s the power of contrast. Imagine if you had a 5-star chef on staff, cooking you 3 amazing meals a day. You’d lose the joy of eating an exceptional meal at a nice restaurant.

Taking too little risk is like smoking cigarettes, taking too much risk is like doing heroin. Both will harm you, the only difference is how quickly.

If you knew you’d live to be 102, you wouldn’t feel guilty sleeping in, taking a sabbatical. You’d be more willing to learn a new skill. You’d take better care of your joints, and long-term investing would be more exciting.

Instead of “Live for today” or “Save for the future”, try “Minimize future regret.” You will regret different things as you age. Experience things for which you will later experience nostalgia.

Formula for a nice life: independence plus purpose.

If I move $500 into my savings account, I purchased $500 of independence. No different than if I had purchased a $500 item. The money is “spent” in either scenario. Spend to have control of my calendar. Spend on autonomy. Independence has the highest ROI.

Doesn’t matter what you have, but what you are afraid of losing. The more you have to lose, the more fragile you are.

What do you do when your real life exceeds your dreams? Keep it to yourself.

For every substance, small doses stimulate, moderate doses inhibit, large doses kill. A little bit of sun exposure is healthy, even necessary. A moderate amount can cause sunburn. Way too much can cause lethal cancer. Money works in the same way. There’s an “ideal” net worth for everyone, when money not only stops bringing pleasure but becomes a social liability.

A family that was worth $8 billion: If you googled their name, nothing came up. No Forbes list, no gala photos, no profiles, no Wikipedia pages… nothing. They lived the most amazing life you could imagine, and they had virtually no social debt. They had total freedom, privacy, and independence. They chose their friends carefully and gave money away anonymously. Their lack of social debt may have been their most valuable asset. Be rich and anonymous.

A belief is not dangerous until it turns absolute. Mental liquidity: quickly abandon previous beliefs and strategies.

Spend extravagantly on the things you love, while you mercilessly cut the things you don’t. Try a million different things. Reject what doesn’t bring you joy.

The more susceptible you are to advertising, the less satisfied you are with your own life. You’re desperate for someone to tell you what you should like because you haven’t yet figured it out for yourself.

Pick your lifestyle carefully, as a parent, since it will set your children’s lifestyle expectations. Generational growth - the feeling that you have matched or exceeded the life built by your parents - is an important part of most people’s well-being.

Fail without failing so hard you can’t recover.

There’s no way to learn the value of money without feeling the power of its scarcity.

Learning that you can’t have everything you want is the only way to understand the difference between a need and a desire.

Be frugal without it hurting.

The opposite of a good idea can also be a good idea.

Man notices his coworker drinking a latte. Asks, “How often do you drink lattes?” “Every day,” says the coworker. “Wow! Every day for thirty years of your professional career! That’s so much money! A latte a day means you’re spending about $1,900 a year. If you invested that money instead at an eight percent return, you’d have $250,000. That’s enough to buy a Ferrari.” Coworker looks puzzled, asks, “Do you buy lattes?” she asked the man. “No.” “So where’s your Ferrari?”

Charisma Myth - by Olivia Fox Cabane

2025-12-01T05:00:00Z

summary:

Your body language, mannerisms, speaking habits, listening habits, all affect how you’re perceived. Many tips in here sound manipulative (to convey power, take up more space) - but are ultimately about helping your outside match your inside, for the desired effect including helping people feel more comfortable around you, more seen and understood. Empathetic advice like making sure you’re sitting at a 90° angle instead of directly across from someone, and making sure their back is not to an open space with people moving behind them, which makes us feel uncomfortable. I use these tips when meeting with strangers.

recommend: 8/10

my notes:

When we first meet someone, we instinctively assess whether that person is a potential friend or foe and whether they have the power to enact those intentions. Power and intentions are what we’re aiming to assess. “Could you move mountains for me? And would you care to do so?” To answer the first question, we try to assess how much power he or she has. To answer the second question, we try to assess how much he or she likes us. When you meet a charismatic person, you get the impression that they have a lot of power and they like you.

Show high power, high warmth, and presence: completely here with you, in this moment.

Lower the intonation of your voice at the end of your sentences. Reduce how quickly and how often you nod. Pause for two full seconds before you speak.

Someone who possesses warmth without power can come across as overeager, subservient, or desperate to please.

Just by getting into a charismatic mental state, your body will manifest a charismatic body language.

Michelangelo insisted that he never created his glorious statues - he simply revealed them. His only talent, he said, was in looking at the block of marble and discerning the statue within. All he then needed was the skill to chip away the excess, letting the statue emerge. Identify the obstacles that are holding back your charismatic self.

Physical discomfort affects your body language. Plan ahead to prevent the discomfort from occurring - to ensure you’re physically comfortable. Temperature and noise level. Clothing is loose enough for you to breathe well, makes you feel both comfortable and highly confident in your appearance. Arrive at the venue early so that you can get comfortable with the space. Assess the room before sitting down to make sure you won’t be facing the sun. Your face: notice if it is tense.

Our inability to tolerate uncertainty can cause us to make premature decisions - can lead us to feel anxious. People go to great lengths to get rid of the anxiety produced by uncertainty, from making premature decisions to forcing bad outcomes to numbing their anxiety with mind-altering substances. Envision a variety of ways it could play out, and you strategize how to best deal with each. Once you’ve thought through each scenario, the rational, reasonable, logical thing to do would be to put the situation out of your mind and go about your day until action is actually required. Get comfortable with uncertainty and ambiguity - and being uncomfortable.

To alleviate the discomfort of uncertainty: RESPONSIBILITY TRANSFER. In uncertain situations, we want to know that things are somehow going to work out fine. If we could be certain that things will work out - that everything will be taken care of - the uncertainty would produce much less anxiety. Take the weight of everything you’re concerned about off your shoulders and place it on the shoulders of another entity or spirit. They’re in charge now. Lift everything off your shoulders and feel the difference as you are now no longer responsible for the outcome of any of these things. Everything is taken care of. You can sit back, relax, and enjoy whatever good you can find along the way. Perform a quick visualization to transfer responsibility. Feel the instant sense of relief and the warmth, calm, and serenity rising. Feel your whole body relax.

Impostor syndrome: more than 70 percent of the population has experienced this. Impostor syndrome is worst among high performers.

Delve into those very sensations of discomfort. Give your full attention to the very sensations you’d instinctively want to push away. Focus on the minute sensations of your physical discomfort.

Humans are the most empathetic species on the planet.

Everyone you meet has stories to tell. Everyone has a few that would break your heart. Imagine their past. What if you had been born in their circumstances, with their family and upbringing?

Kindness charisma when you want to create an emotional bond or make people feel safe and comfortable. Radiate warmth and complete acceptance. People who may have never felt completely, wholeheartedly accepted suddenly feel truly seen and enveloped in acceptance. Kindness charisma is primarily based on warmth. It connects with people’s hearts, and makes them feel welcomed, cherished, embraced, and, most of all, completely accepted. Kindness charisma comes entirely from body language - specifically your face, and even more specifically your eyes.

One of the downsides of kindness charisma: it can lead to adulation and overattachment. She suffers when people, having become enchanted, feel hurt or resentful when she can’t make room for them in her life.

Clothing is one of our first and strongest clues in evaluating status, thus potential power, and thus authority charisma. If you want to make others feel comfortable, adapt to their tribal wear.

Authority charisma: To project power and confidence in your body language, you’ll need to learn how to “take up space” with your posture. Reduce nonverbal reassurances (such as excessive nodding), and avoid fidgeting. Speak less, to speak more slowly, to know how and when to pause. Warmth reduces the risk of your being perceived as arrogant or intimidating, it will also be more highly valued because you’re now seen as high-status.

Authority charisma disadvantages: It can inhibit critical thinking in others. It doesn’t invite feedback, so you risk not receiving information you actually need. It can easily make you appear arrogant.

Once we’ve made a judgment about someone, we spend the rest of our acquaintanceship seeking to prove ourselves correct. Everything we see and hear gets filtered through this initial impression. People were able to accurately judge nine out of ten personality traits by looking at a single photograph. Overall appearance is evaluated before demeanor and body language.

What’s the story? Asking for a story sends them straight into storytelling mode. Never interrupt - not even if the impulse to do so comes from excitement about something the other person just said. No matter how congratulatory and warm your input, it will always result in their feeling at least a twinge of resentment or frustration at not having been allowed to complete their sentence. They finish their sentence. Your face absorbs. Your face reacts. Then, and only then, you answer.

The longer you speak, the higher the price you’re making them pay.

When you consciously mirror someone’s body language, you activate deep instincts of trust and liking. People open up, and instinctively start sharing more.

Cases in which the other person is exhibiting negative body language? First mirror their body language, then gradually lead it in a more positive direction.

Carefully observe her posture - the way she’s sitting, holding her head, what her shoulders are like - and gradually move into the same position. Look for rhythms. Is she nodding her head periodically? Tapping her knee? Fidgeting with a button? You can find a way to loosely mirror that, too. And, of course, match your voice to hers: adopt a similar cadence, tempo, and volume. Once you’re in a mirrored position, spend your entire listening time in that mode: as long as you’re listening, match your body language to hers. Only when it’s your turn to speak should you start infusing the interaction with warmth, caring, and compassion through your voice, face, and eyes. As you speak, gradually shift into a more relaxed, calm, and, eventually, confident posture. There’s a good chance that she’ll follow. Mirror-then-lead is a smart strategy when the person you’re interacting with needs reassurance, when they’re feeling nervous or timid, anxious or awkward, stiff or withdrawn. With any of these emotional states, mirror them to establish comfort and rapport, and then gradually draw them out.

To establish warm rapport with someone, avoid a confrontational seating arrangement and instead sit either next to or at a 90-degree angle from them. These are the positions in which we feel most comfortable. If you want someone to feel comfortable, avoid seating them with their back to an open space, particularly if others are moving behind them.

Find a busy, crowded space. As you walk around, try to get other people to move aside for you. Not allowed to step aside to make way for others. Your subconscious mind is constantly scanning your surroundings as you move through your environment to glean the information you need to keep moving forward. Your eyes scan and assess potential obstacles, including other people in your way. To determine whether you need to modify your route to avoid them, you read their body language without even realizing it. If they’re broadcasting a body language that says, “You better move aside, baby,” you will most likely pick up on it and make way for them. Conversely, if you feel that you’re the bigger gorilla, you’ll stay your course and expect them to deviate. Imagine a very large gorilla. We read confidence the same way: how much space people are willing to take up. Powerful people sit sideways on chairs, drape their arms over the back, or appropriate two chairs by placing an arm across the back of an adjacent chair. They put their feet on the desk or sit on the desk. All of these behaviors are ways of claiming space. Assume expansive poses (taking up more space).

Regal Posture: cool, calm, and collected This kind of high-status, high-confidence body language is characterized by how few movements are made. Composed people exhibit a level of stillness, which is sometimes described as poise. They avoid extraneous, superfluous gestures like incessantly nodding their heads.

Excessive or rapid nodding. Excessive verbal reassurance: making a sound, such as “uh-huh.” Restlessness or fidgeting. Gestures, which behavior experts identify as low-status, are often signs used by someone wanting to convey reassurance to the person they’re interacting with. Empathy: wanting to ensure that the other person feels heard and understood and knows you’re paying attention Insecurity: wanting to please or appease the person you’re interacting with In contrast, people who come across as powerful, confident, or high-status are usually more contained. They don’t feel the urge to give so much reassurance because they’re not as worried about what their counterpart is thinking.

Broadcasting too much power can come across as either arrogant or intimidating

To help a shy colleague or subordinate feel comfortable and open up, punctuate with both nonverbal (nodding) and verbal (uh-huh) reassurance.

Asking for someone’s opinion is a better strategy than asking for their advice, because giving advice feels like more effort, as they have to tailor a recommendation to your situation, whereas with an opinion, they can just spout whatever is on their mind.

Bill Clinton was known to go around asking everyone, from his chef to his janitor, for their opinion on foreign policy. He’d listen intently, and in subsequent conversations would refer back to the opinion they’d offered.

Rule Makers, Rule Breakers - by Michele Gelfand

2025-11-30T05:00:00Z

summary:

Asks the question I love: Why are different cultures that way? Focuses particularly on strict versus loose cultures, hence the title. Some of its answers were insightful, but others feel dead wrong and easy to disprove. Still, a worthy read for the good bits. I liked that they used New Zealand as a frequent example.

recommend: 5/10

my notes:

Tight cultures have strong social norms and little tolerance for deviance, while loose cultures have weak social norms and are highly permissive. The former are rule makers; the latter, rule breakers.

Groups that experience any collective painful experience reported a remarkably higher sense of bonding.

Merely following the same exact routine with others is sufficient to increase cooperation.

In New Zealand, a highly permissive culture, women have the highest number of sexual partners in the world - an average of 20. Global average is 7.3. Kiwis tend to become acquainted very quickly, and they eschew formal titles. People are known to walk barefoot on city streets, in grocery stores, and in banks.

Tightest nations in our sample were Pakistan, Malaysia, India, Singapore, South Korea, Norway, Turkey, Japan, China, Portugal, and Germany. Loosest nations were Spain, United States, Australia, New Zealand, Greece, Venezuela, Brazil, the Netherlands, Israel, Hungary, Estonia, and the Ukraine. Based on how much freedom they had to choose what to do, whether they had clear rules for appropriate behavior, and whether they were required to monitor their own behavior and “watch what they do.”

Even tight nations have select domains where anything goes. Takeshita Street in Tokyo, in zany costumes. Tehran has developed a vibrant artistic culture. Theater and musical groups put on shows for large crowds, whether in isolated fields, tunnels, or caves. Facebook page “My Stealthy Freedom”. Photos of Iranian women removing their hijabs in public and enjoying other forbidden moments of independence.

Collectivist and tight (Japan and Singapore) Collectivist and loose (Brazil and Spain) Individualist and loose (the United States and New Zealand) Individualist and tight (Austria and Germany)

Researchers in Netherlands temporarily added graffiti to an alley near a shopping area - in essence, making it an impromptu “loose” environment. In the other condition, they kept the alley clean, making it a spotless, tight environment. Then they hung useless leaflets that read “We wish everybody happy holidays” on the handlebars of parked bicycles in both conditions. Bike owners would need to remove the leaflets from their handlebars to ride their bikes, yet there were no trash cans around. Would the riders take the leaflets with them or throw them on the ground? 70 percent in the loose, graffiti-ridden alley littered. 30 percent in the tight, clean alley did.

Loose cultures tend to be open, but they’re also much more disorderly. Tight cultures have a comforting order and predictability, but they’re less tolerant.

Crime rates are significantly lower in tight countries. Like Japan, China is known for its low level of crime, as are India and Turkey. In looser countries, like New Zealand, the Netherlands, and the United States, crime is much more common.

Tight cultures maintain social order through threat of serious punishments. “Eyes are upon you” practice in fostering norm-compliant behavior. In their university coffee room, the researchers hung a banner with an image of a large pair of eyes above the coffee maker. Next to the machine, there was an “honesty box” as a collection receptacle for people’s payments for coffee, tea, or milk. During weeks when the banner with eyes hung above the coffee machine, people put almost three times more money into the honesty box.

Tighter countries tend to have more cleaning personnel on city streets. Not only keep things tidy but also a reminder to citizens about the value of doing so. When we’re exposed to untidy environments, it creates a powerful feedback loop that facilitates more norm violations and disorder.

Singapore rail operators can be fined up to one million dollars a year for delayed performance.

Tight cultures are synchronized. People are more likely to dress the same, buy the same things. There are far fewer “lefties” in tight cultures. Investors in tight cultures are more likely to make similar buying and selling decisions. Stock price synchronicity.

Connection between social constraint and self-constraint. The more people have to attune their conduct to others, the stronger their ability to regulate their impulses. People weigh much more, alcohol consumption, spending habits.

German word for debt and guilt is the same.

Loose cultures tend to be cosmopolitan, and more receptive to foreigners. Brazil, Australia, New Zealand, and the Netherlands, were the most welcoming, People in tight cultures are more likely to believe their culture is superior and needs to be protected from foreign influences.

Tight cultures of Sparta, the Nahua, and Singapore faced a common fate: Each had (or has) to deal with a high degree of threat. Loose cultures of New Zealand, Athens, and the Copper Inuit, the opposite: These groups had (or have) the luxury of facing far fewer threats.

Groups that deal with many ecological and historical threats need to do everything they can to create order in the face of chaos. Strong norms are needed to cultivate the societal order that is necessary for surviving the most difficult circumstances. Societies with low population density (such as Australia, Brazil, Venezuela, and New Zealand) can afford to be much looser.

Does diversity correlate with a country’s looseness? It does, at least up to a point. When diversity gets to be extreme, as it is in Pakistan, and India, diversity can cause conflict, which requires strict norms to manage.

Too little stress can be almost as harmful to well-being too much stress. Nations that were extremely tight and extremely loose had the lowest levels of happiness and the highest levels of suicide. Very tight and very loose nations had the lowest life expectancies.

Egypt’s swing from tight to loose and back to tight again: After ousting Mubarak, the Egyptian populace was ecstatic to have escaped decades of brutal rule. “Egypt is free!” Stock market was down more than 40 percent. Crime rates rose 200 percent. Reacting to the chaos following the ousting of Mubarak, people became amenable to yet another strong ruler who promised to restore the social order.

Nationalist groups that long for tightness are fighting back against globalists who embrace looseness.

How to Know a Person - by David Brooks

2025-11-26T05:00:00Z

summary:

First part was great - so empathetic - about how and why to really get to know someone. I skipped the middle part about difficult conversations in the Culture Wars. Last part was great, about what it is to be wise.

recommend: 8/10

my notes:

Sure it works in practice, but does it work in theory?

Building a friendship or creating a community involves performing a series of small, concrete social actions well: * revealing vulnerability at the appropriate pace * being a good listener * end a conversation gracefully * ask for and offer forgiveness * let someone down without breaking their heart * sit with someone who is suffering * host a gathering where everyone feels embraced * see things from another’s point of view. All these different skills rest on one foundational skill: the ability to understand what another person is going through.

See someone else deeply and make them feel seen. Accurately know another person, to let them feel valued, heard, and understood.

The #1 reason people don’t see others is that they are too self-centered to try. “I’m all about myself. Let me tell you my opinion. Let me entertain you with this story about myself.” Many people are unable to step outside of their own points of view.

Illuminate them with a gaze that is warm, respectful, and admiring. Offer a gaze that says, “I’m going to trust you, before you trust me.” A gaze that says, “I want to get to know you and be known by you.”

Resist the urge to project your own viewpoint. Do not ask, “How would I feel if I were in your shoes?”

Morality is mostly about how you pay attention to others.

We are constantly representing people to ourselves in self-serving ways, in ways that gratify our egos and serve our ends.

look at everyone with a patient and discerning regard,

Inspiration knocks softly and then goes away if we don’t answer the door.

Offer the kind of attention that can change people.

90% of life is just going about your business: supermarket, small talk while there are other people around. In these normal moments of life, you’re not staring deeply into another’s eyes or unveiling profound intimacies. You’re just doing stuff together - not face-to-face but side by side. You are accompanying each other. When you’re first getting to know someone, you don’t want to try to peer into their souls right away. It’s best to look at something together. Not studying a person, just getting used to them. Getting a sense of each other’s energy, temperament, and manner. Subtle, tacit knowledge about each other that is required before other kinds of knowledge can be broached. Becoming comfortable with each other, and comfort is no small thing. Until the situation feels safe and familiar.

Be willing to let the relationship deepen or not deepen, without forcing it either way. Act in a way that lets other people be perfectly themselves. Patience: Trust is built slowly.

People are more fully human when they are at play. Play isn’t an activity; it’s a state of mind.

Accompaniment is a humble way of being a helpful part of another’s journey. Let others voluntarily evolve.

Writers are at their best not when they tell people what to think but when they provide a context within which others can think. Man listens more willingly to witnesses than teachers, and if he does listen to teachers, it’s because they are witnesses.

An extrovert walks into a party and sees a different room than an introvert does.

A person is a point of view. We take the events of life and, over time, create a very personal way of seeing the world. Each person takes the experiences of a lifetime and integrates them into a complex representation of the world. A distinct way of seeing. People don’t see the world with their eyes; they see it with their entire life.

Someone who can tell funny stories? That’s a raconteur, but it’s not a conversationalist. Someone who can offer piercing insights on a range of topics? That’s a lecturer, but not a conversationalist. A good conversation sparks you to have thoughts you never had before.

There is a “novelty penalty” when we speak. People have trouble picturing and getting excited about the unfamiliar, but they love to talk about what they know.

People aren’t specific enough when they tell stories. They tend to leave out the concrete details. But if you ask them specific questions... (“Where was your boss sitting when he said that? And what did you say in response?”) ... they are likely to revisit the moment in a more vivid way.

The experience of being listened to all the way on something - until your meaning is completely clear to another human being - is extremely rare in life.

Nobody escapes high school. Whatever your high school fears were, they are still there.

Asking good questions can be a weirdly vulnerable activity. You’re admitting that you don’t know. Sometimes a broad, dumb question is better than a smart question, especially one meant to display how well-informed you are. The worst kinds of questions imply, “I’m about to judge you.”

Encourage the other person to take control and take the conversation where they want it to go.

Big questions interrupt the daily routines people fall into and prompt them to step back and see their life from a distance.

* “What crossroads are you at?” * “If you died tonight, what would you regret not doing?” * “Can you be yourself where you are and still fit in?” * “What is the no, or refusal, you keep postponing?” * “What have you said yes to that you no longer really believe in?” * “What forgiveness are you withholding?” * “How have you contributed to the problem you’re trying to solve?” * “Tell me about a time you adapted to change.” * “What’s working really well in your life?” * “What are you most self-confident about?” * “Which of your five senses is strongest?”

People are longing to be asked questions about who they are.

Social disconnection warps the mind. When people feel unseen, they tend to shut down socially. People who are lonely and unseen become suspicious. They start to take offense where none is intended. They become afraid of the very thing they need most. People become proud of their bitterness. To be moral in this world, they think you just have to feel properly enraged at the people you find contemptible. It’s a sadistic striving for domination. Love rejected comes back as hatred.

As a society, we have failed to teach the skills and cultivate the inclination to treat each other with kindness, generosity, and respect. How to restrain their selfishness and incline their heart to care more about others. How to find a purpose, so their life has stability, direction, and meaning. Basic social and emotional skills so you can be kind and considerate to the people around you. The breakdown in basic moral skills produced disconnection, alienation, and a culture in which cruelty was permitted.

If you want to know someone well, you have to see the person in front of you as a distinct and never-to-be repeated individual. But you’ve also got to see that person as a member of their groups. And you’ve also got to see their social location - the way some people are insiders and other people are outsiders, how some sit on the top of society and some are marginalized to the fringes. The trick is to be able to see each person on these three levels all at once.

Every conversation takes place on two levels: the official conversation and the actual conversation. The actual conversation occurs in the ebb and flow of underlying emotions that get transmitted as we talk. With every comment you are either making me feel a little more safe or a little more threatened. With every comment I am showing you either respect or disrespect. With every comment we are each revealing something about our intentions: “Here is why I am telling you this. Here is why this is important to me.”

Every conversation exists within a frame: What is the purpose here? What are our goals? A frame is the stage on which the conversation takes place. I should have stayed within her frame a little longer, instead of trying to yank the conversation back to my frame. The person who is lower in any power structure than you are has a greater awareness of the situation than you do.

The achievements which society rewards are won at the cost of a diminution of personality.

Get into narrative mode. Don’t ask, “What do you think about X?” Instead, “How did you come to believe X?” This is a framing that invites people to tell a story about what events led them to think the way they do. Don’t ask people to tell their values. Instead, “Tell me about the person who shaped your values most.” “Where’d you grow up?” “When did you know that you wanted to spend your life this way?”

Ask about intentions and goals. I’m asking myself as people tell me their stories: What’s the plot here? I’m not just listening to other people’s stories; I’m helping them create their stories.

Culture is a shared symbolic landscape that we use to construct our reality.

People who are descended from those who practiced plow-heavy agriculture tend to live in cultures that have strongly defined gender roles, because it was mostly men who drove the plow. People who are descended from those who did non-plow farming tend to have less defined gender roles. People descended from sheepherding cultures tend to be individualistic, because a shepherd’s job requires him to go off on his own. People descended from rice-farming cultures tend to be very interdependent, because everybody has to work together to raise and harvest rice.

For Jews, argument is a form of prayer.

When I’m trying to know you, I’m going to want to ask you how your ancestors show up in your life. That means asking certain key questions: * Where’s home? * What’s the place you spiritually never leave? * How do the dead show up in your life? * How do I see you embracing or rejecting your culture? * How do I see you creating and contributing to your culture? * How do I see you transmitting your culture? * How do I see you rebelling against your culture? * How do I see you caught between cultures?

WISE PEOPLE: Wise people don’t just possess information; they possess a compassionate understanding of other people. Wise people don’t tell us what to do; they start by witnessing our story. They take the anecdotes, rationalizations, and episodes we tell, and see us. They see the way we’re navigating the dialectics of life - intimacy versus independence, control versus uncertainty - and understand that our current self is just where we are right now, part of a long continuum of growth. They’re really good confidants - the people we go to when we are troubled - are more like coaches than philosopher-kings. They take in your story, accept it, but push you to clarify what it is you really want, or to name the baggage you left out of your clean tale. They ask you to probe into what is really bothering you, to search for the deeper problem underneath the convenient surface problem you’ve come to them for help about. Wise people don’t tell you what to do; they help you process your own thoughts and emotions. They enter with you into your process of meaning-making and then help you expand it, push it along. Wise people create a safe space where you can navigate the ambiguities and contradictions we all wrestle with. Receptivity, the capacity to receive what you are sending. Creating an atmosphere of hospitality, Free to be yourself, encouraged to be honest with yourself. Wise people help you come up with a different way of looking at yourself, your past, and the world around you. Very often they focus your attention on your relationships.

In Praise of Commercial Culture - by Tyler Cowen

2025-11-24T05:00:00Z

summary:

Cultural optimism! I’d never considered that term before, but I love its mindset. My life was changed when Camille Paglia said, in the 90s, that Hollywood movies are the high art of our times. It enriched my life to see them that way ever since. Now in this book Tyler uses her statement as an example of cultural optimism. I see it in his day-to-day writing and podcasting too. I recommend this book for its focus on that, and great art/cutlure insights. But the book is 25 years old now, with expired references, and he’s improved so much as a writer since then.

recommend: 4/10

my notes:

Successful high culture usually comes out of a healthy and prosperous popular culture.

Economic incentives affect the artist’s choice of audience. Poetry costs very little to write, and therefore can appeal to minority tastes. Most movies, in contrast, must cover their high capital costs.

Artistic values: One point of view = There’s nothing that an audience won’t understand. The only problem is to interest them. Once they are interested, they understand anything in the world. Another point of view = Masterpieces are inaccessible to most readers. Only those who read, reread, and study the classic works can hope to unlock their secrets. A work easily accessible on first reading is unlikely to be truly great. The best writers know far more than their audiences. ... Capitalism can support each kind of art.

Cultural optimist position: Modern creators offer a large variety of deep and lasting creations that are universal and significant. These creations delight and enrich large numbers of intelligent listeners, and continue to influence subsequent artists. We can expect many modern and contemporary works to stand the test of time.

Cultural pessimists take a strongly negative view of modernity, believing that the market economy corrupts culture. Pessimism of the neo-conservatives often extends beyond culture in the narrow sense. Many neo-conservatives believe that Western civilization is collapsing under a plague of permissiveness, crime, and loss of community.

Camille Paglia defends the Rolling Stones and Hollywood cinema as artistically vital forces in the modern world. She writes favorably about how capitalist wealth has stimulated artistic production.

Literacy has been increasing over time, rather than decreasing.

Material wealth helps relax external constraints on internal artistic creativity, motivates artists to reach new heights, and enables a diversity of artistic forms and styles to flourish.

Artists work to achieve self-fulfillment, fame, and riches. The complex motivations behind artistic creation include love of the beautiful, love of money, love of fame, personal arrogance, and inner compulsions. Creators hold strong desires to be heard and witnessed. The highest ambition of every artist is to be thought a man of genius.

Consumers and patrons stand as the artist’s silent partners. We support creators with our money, our time, our emotions, and our approbation. We discover subtle nuances in their work that the artists had not noticed or consciously intended. Inspired consumption is a creative act that further enriches the viewer and the work itself.

Wealth and financial security give artists the scope to reject societal values. The bohemian, the avant-garde, and the nihilist are all products of capitalism. They have pursued forms of liberty and inventiveness that are unique to the modern world.

A large market for art lowers the costs of creative pursuits and makes market niches easier to find. In the contrary case of a single patron, the artist must meet the tastes of that patron. Today it is easier than ever before to make a living by marketing to an artistic niche.

Stravinsky, Picasso, and the Beatles outpaced their competitors, at least for a while, by undergoing several metamorphoses of style.

Artistic fertilizations and innovations also occur backwards in time, as later works improve the quality of earlier ones by changing their meaning. Verdi’s opera Otello and Orson Welles’s film Othello tell us more about Shakespeare’s Othello than does any piece of literary criticism. These variations on the work, through different media and presentation, enable us to see Shakespeare’s work anew. The more notable works that are produced, the greater the significance of the best works from the past. The present therefore deserves at least partial credit for our understanding of the past.

The very best creators manage to anticipate the future development of their genre and to produce works that will subsequently exhibit an ever greater richness.

Growth eventually transforms popular culture into high culture. As popular culture genres lower their costs, they achieve the potential for greater diversity and exoticism. Art films, documentaries, and avant-garde movies have expanded since the early days of the medium.

Charles Perrault’s late seventeenth-century versions of folk tales - “Mother Goose,” “Little Red Riding Hood,” “Cinderella,” and “Sleeping Beauty” - served as a broadside in these debates. Perrault defended cultural optimism and printing with enthusiasm. By writing his fairy tales, he hoped to show that modernity could match such ancient achievements as Aesop’s Fables.

Criticisms of contemporary culture strongly resemble the criticisms leveled at past masterworks.

History often judges a culture differently than do critics or participants of that time.

A culture already admired by the establishment usually is a culture whose best days lie in the past.

Pessimists focus on the decline of what they like and neglect the nascent forces that will appeal to others.

Cultural products compete with churches and religious figures for the attention of the populace. Religious and ideological competition tend to turn monotheism into polytheism. Islam, the most self-consciously monotheistic of the major religions, has placed especially severe restrictions on the depiction of images in the mosque.

Cultural pessimism is not easily accountable to controlled experiment. The magician can be asked to perform, but the cultural pessimist need only point to artistic failures

The Christian right are not concerned first and foremost about family values per se. Family is a codeword for constraint. Families and family values place constraints on individuals more effectively than any other institution, including government. The Christian right seeks a society in which all are constrained. They reject big government for failing at constraint. This hidden agenda helps account for the obsession of the Christian right with homosexuals: Gay males often have no commitments to children, and no other culture has so proudly paraded a conscious rejection of external constraint.

Multiculturalists have shied away from the cultural optimist position. Cultural optimism would create the impression that today’s world, no matter how imperfect, was somehow on the right track. Embracing cultural optimism might also appear to diminish the moral force of past injustices.

Cultural pessimists seem to enjoy envisioning themselves as superior to the medium of TV. Deep down, an improvement in the quality of television would disappoint them by removing this source of satisfaction.

Pessimists who question contemporary trends help the modern world sort out good from bad. If no one attacked contemporary culture, our understanding of that culture would remain at a low level. The attacks force us go back and reread, relisten, and reexamine our basic assumptions about art.

Bohemians write or paint in response to the establishment. The criticism they encounter helps them define their roles as outsiders and innovators.

We understand Gauguin better by knowing what his work reacted against. The Clash and the Sex Pistols were fortunate to have had Margaret Thatcher in office during a period of resurgent social conservatism.

A sense of impending decline sometimes will spur cultural creativity. Pessimistic creators wish to capture a mood, spirit, or times before it vanishes.

Stefan Zweig and Arthur Rubinstein, who portrayed the decline of pre-War Europe in their writings, in fact produced some of the finest portraits of that world.

Mathematica - by David Bessis, Kevin Frey

2025-11-14T05:00:00Z

summary:

Math is imagination, visualization, and intuition. The symbols are just a language to explain the mind’s image - like sheet music. You can train your intuition and develop visualization skills with practice. Math is an inner tool to enhance human cognition, more akin to psychology.

recommend: 8/10

my notes:

If we taught children music by giving them the written scores to decipher - without their ever having heard it played - music would be as universally hated as math.

Intuition is the soul of mathematics.

No one really knows how to define mathematics.

By studying math, you can learn how to translate your visual intuition into rigorous proofs. It will never be a perfect translation. It takes a lot of words to express a simple intuition. It all seems so clear in your head. But once you start to write it down, it seems technical and complicated.

There are many different sizes of infinity that can be precisely described.

Everyone around me seemed to be better at math. I wanted to know how to do real math, difficult math. But all that I was able to learn was the easy math. It was only an optical illusion. The horizon was shifting with me - always staying at my level. When you learn a magic trick, it ceases being magical. That may be sad, but you’d better get used to it. If you find that the math you do understand is too easy, it’s not because it’s easy, it’s because you understand it.

He doesn’t really read what’s in the book. He prefers to concentrate on “the thoughts between the lines.” Once he has a clear idea, the formalism and all the technical details suddenly seem useless and superfluous: “When the idea is clear, the formal setup is usually unnecessary and redundant. I often feel that I could write it out myself more easily than figuring out what the authors actually wrote.” “It’s like a new toaster that comes with a 16-page manual: If you already understand toasters and if the toaster looks like previous toasters you’ve encountered, you might just plug it in and see if it works, rather than first reading all the details in the manual.”

You’re capable of synesthesia. Looking at the word chocolate, are you able to sense a sound, a color, a taste? Looking at “999,999,999,” do you get the feeling of something large? Be aware of your capability for synesthesia and try to develop it systematically. Secret math is a mental yoga whose goal is to retake control over our ability for synesthesia.

Mathematics is a sensual and carnal experience that is located upstream from language.

The quality of your inventiveness and your imagination comes from the quality of your attention, listening to the voice of things.

You find yourself in the pilot’s seat of a commercial jet or the command post of a nuclear generator: There are a lot of buttons and screens, but you have no clue how they work and an intense desire not to make a mistake. You would love to know how it all works, but you don’t. The normal reaction is to stay seated and not touch anything. Before making any move you need to study and think about it. But if you put any two-year-old in the pilot’s seat, they’ll act differently. They’ll push all the buttons, starting with ones that are red or blinking. Act like the two-year-old. When you want to understand something, go straight at it, without hesitations, as a child would. Don’t wait to understand before launching into it. Act without thinking, a bit haphazardly.

Interrogating things, listening to the voice of things, means trying to imagine them, examining the mental images that form within you, seeking to solidify these images and make them clearer, working at unveiling more and more details, as when you try to recall a dream.

It’s worthless to gather information about things that you can’t yet see. Instead, allow yourself to imagine the things right away, without waiting. Even when you’re well aware that it might not work and your mental images will likely be terribly wrong. Don’t be afraid of failure. Even be certain that you’ll be wrong, and that’s exactly what you’re looking for. Actively seek out the error as a young child actively seeks mischief.

Each time you find something bizarre or intriguing, unclear or unsatisfactory, incoherent or disagreeable, that’s where you began digging. Finding mistakes is a crucial moment, a creative moment, in all work of discovery. It’s a moment when our knowledge of the thing being examined is suddenly renewed.

Fear of mistakes and fear of the truth is one and the same thing. The person who fears being wrong is powerless to discover anything new.

Learning to see, to walk, use a spoon, tie your shoelaces, talk, read and write, is always about reconfiguring your brain. And it’s never done in one shot. Children don’t learn how to walk until they’ve tried and failed. They need to fall in order to learn how to stand up. It’s the accumulation of errors that allow them to develop their intuitive sense of balance.

Logic doesn’t help you think. It helps you find out where you’re thinking wrong.

The written transcription of what seems obvious to you might be 10, 100, 1000 times as long as the summary you make for yourself in your head. Even then, you’ll have to leave aside a bunch of details you won’t have the heart to write down. Visualize what you do when you tie your shoes. Now take pen and paper and try to describe each movement exactly, so that an absolute beginner could follow your instructions and get the same result.

Mathematical comprehension is creating within yourself the right mental images in place of a formal definition, to turn this definition into something intuitive, to “feel” what it is really talking about.

Mathematicians use logic and language as an apparatus for learning to see.

If you’ve never learned to think in multiple dimensions, you’ve missed out on one of the great joys of life. It’s like you’ve never seen the ocean, or never eaten chocolate.

When you look at photos, you have the sense of actually seeing scenes that occur in three dimensions. It doesn’t require any particular effort. It doesn’t tire you out.

Transforming mathematical definitions into mental images is so important. When you’re unable to imagine mathematical objects, you don’t really understand them.

The fourth dimension is whatever you want it to be. When you do geometry in two dimensions, on a plane, a point is determined by two coordinates, generally called x and y, that represent exactly what you want them to represent. In a space with ten dimensions, a point is determined by ten coordinates that are generally called x1...x10. If you want these coordinates to represent something, it can be whatever you want. If you wanted to describe the geographic expansion of an invasive population of rabbits, you would need to think in four dimensions, since you’d need four coordinates: longitude, latitude, time, and population density.

The sole function of mathematical statements is to help you generate mental images, and only these images will lead to comprehension. Once you have the correct mental images, everything else becomes clear.

Mathematical intuition is so banal, simple, and stupid, that you need a lot of self-confidence not to throw it in the trash.

The work of reeducation is based on the repetition of the same exercises of imagination. Progress is slow because the body needs time to transform itself. You just need to commit to a regular training schedule.

Five-dimensional shapes are hard to visualize - but it doesn’t mean you can’t think about them. Thinking is really the same as seeing. For a mathematician, “seeing” signifies thinking in a rapid and intuitive manner, directly, without need for reflection, as if the object really existed, as if it were right there in front of you.

The essence of mental plasticity is to transform audacity into competence. The process is slow and invisible, and at first success seems unachievable. That’s the biological reality of our learning mechanisms. By an unfortunate coincidence, that’s also the perfect recipe for discouragement. You need a lot of self-control and self-confidence to commit to a process that’s confusing, slow, and uncertain.

Try to recall your dreams, to put words to the fleeting impression that left a strange taste in your mouth, to sort out your most confused and contradictory ideas.

The stupid images in my head had a tendency to correct themselves once I made the effort to describe and name them, when I got into the habit of lending an ear to the dissonance between my intuition and logic.

If my intuition tells me to choose option A and my reason tells me to choose option B? I tell myself there’s something going on and I’m not ready to make the decision. That’s the moment to resort to an assortment of introspection and meditation techniques aimed at establishing a dialogue between intuition and rationality. In practical terms, here’s what that means. When my intuition tells me A and rationality tells me B, I put myself in the position of a referee. I force myself to translate my intuition into words, to tell it like a simple and intelligible story. Vice versa, I try to picture what logical reasoning is actually expressing, to experience it in my body, to hear what it’s trying to say. I ask myself if I really believe it. The goal is to understand where things are going wrong. In the end, it’s almost always my intuition that wins. When I force it to listen to what logic is saying, it takes that into account and adjusts its position. Logic is something inert, like a pebble. My intuition is organic, it is living and growing. I’m personally incapable of thinking against my intuition and I have serious doubts as to the sincerity of people who claim they can.

When I’m able to put my finger on an error in my intuition, I know it’s good news, because it means that my mental representations are already in the process of reconfiguring themselves.

You can reprogram your intuition. Any misalignment between your intuition and reason is an opportunity to create within yourself a new way of seeing things. Don’t expect it all to come at once, in real time. Developing mental images means reorganizing the connections between your neurons. This process is organic and has its own pace. Don’t force it. Simply start from what you already understand, what you can already see, what you find easy, and just play with it. Try to intuitively interpret the calculations you would have written down. If it helps, scribble on a piece of paper. With time and practice, this activity will strengthen your intuitive capacities. It may not seem like you’re making progress, until the day the right answer suddenly seems obvious.

Nothing is counterintuitive by nature. Something is only ever counterintuitive temporarily, until you’ve found means to make it intuitive. Explaining something to others is proposing simple ways of making it intuitive.

Every time we practice a given activity we habituate our System 1 to the specifics of that activity.

By telling us there was a “trick,” he sent us the wrong message. There are no tricks. There never were any and there never will be. Believing in the existence of tricks is as toxic as believing in the existence of truths that are counterintuitive by nature.

Superstition: This belief that our intuition isn’t worth a dime and that we have to mechanically apply methods that we don’t fully understand.

It can happen that things work without our understanding. But it’s always a temporary situation that’s just waiting for an explanation. Believing that tricks exist is to accept the idea that there are things you’ll never understand and that you have to learn by heart.

Each time someone talks to you about “tricks,” they’re telling you to stop thinking at precisely the moment when it starts to get interesting.

Mathematics is the science of imagination. The real enemy of imagination, which blocks understanding and makes us feel like fools, is fear.

Descartes positioned himself in opposition to official knowledge. He lived in a world where truth was still conflated with authority: truth was tradition, what was written in books.

Take doubt seriously. Everyone can get personal benefit from Cartesian doubt.

You can only doubt with your gut. All Cartesian doubt is visceral. Doubt is personal and intimate.

To doubt is to give an argument the sniff test and sense that there’s something off. It’s allowing yourself to ask, “What? Really?” To doubt something is to be able to imagine a scenario, even seemingly improbable, where the thing could be untrue. Doubt not only what others say, but also, and above all, your own certitudes. Cartesian doubt is a universal technique for reprogramming your intuition. Doubt is a technique of mental clarification. It serves to construct rather than destroy.

Arrogant people who love being contradicted? Show-offs who smile when you prove them wrong? Dogmatists ready to change their mind in a heartbeat? I’ve encountered this singular attitude only among very good mathematicians.

If only the mental actions of mathematicians were visible. In losing the possibility of imitation, we also lose our main driver of desire. When you were a child, no one needed to make you want to ride a bike. No one had to convince you that it would serve you well later on in life, or that it would look good on your CV. You saw other kids riding bikes. You liked it and you wanted to do the same.

Transcribing my dreams: As an effect of my trying to memorize them and put them into words, my dreams grew in richness and precision. Each with a complete story and enough details to fill up a lot of pages. I wasn’t looking for meaning in them. I just wanted to master the art of writing them down. To me, this is the essence of writing. Starting from images and sensations and seeking a way to render them in words, to make them clear and solid. Transcribing the situations, what’s at stake - capturing the moods, the music, the smells, the textures. If you can do that, you can do anything. It’s an ability you develop through practice. There are techniques to begin and techniques to get better. The more faithfully you learn to transcribe what you see, the more you see.

The special state of mind just before falling asleep: On subjects that preoccupy me, I let myself be filled with them. Contemplating it without a goal, almost like dreaming. I try to remember all the rooms I’ve slept in.

To practice switching viewpoints, a good exercise: 1. Choose a random reference point around you, for example, the corner opposite from you in a room, or the window of a house when you’re walking in the street. 2. Try to imagine what you’d see if you were looking in your direction from this reference point.

Creativity emerges when we force ourselves to continue looking at things that intimidate us until they finally become familiar and obvious.

Our well-being depends on many things we do that are hard to explain in an intellectual way. Bare reason is likely to lead you astray. None of us are smart and wise enough to figure it out intellectually.

When someone comes up with a reasoning where everything all fits together too neatly, suspect that something isn’t right. In some cases, rationality leads you astray from the truth. You can apply the methods used by mathematicians outside of math. But when we use it outside of mathematics, we need to be careful: it’s only within mathematics that this method is able to produce unshakeable truths. By anchoring our convictions in indisputable evidence and rigorous deduction, we can turn them into certitudes that, over time, become as strong as reinforced concrete. Except that sometimes these certitudes are false.

The riddle of the chicken and the egg is supposed to present us with a “paradox.” A sort of unbreachable wall to human comprehension, before which we have no other choice but to bow down. Being a paradox is always a temporary status, in wait of a resolution. Presenting a problem as structurally being a paradox is just a pompous way of saying you can’t solve it. This way of solving the riddle, however, leaves aside its most troubling aspect: Why was there a riddle in the first place? How can it be that, starting from a hypothesis that is indisputably true, following a reasoning that is indisputably correct, we arrive at a conclusion that is indisputably false? Language is structurally incompatible with logical reasoning, and we can never have 100 percent certainty in truths expressed in human language and arrived at through deductive logic.

Rationality should be used as a guide rather than an ultimate judge.

When we say that something is “true,” we never mean it literally. We only ever use the word as a shortcut for all these other things, because otherwise we’d have no occasion to use it.

In acknowledging the intrinsic limitations of our language, Wittgenstein made one of the great philosophical breakthroughs: He broke with a multi-millennial tradition dominated by metaphysics, in which philosophers believed that it was possible to attack, using rationality, problems

Math is an inner tool. Its main purpose is to enhance human cognition. To develop an intuitive and familiar understanding of mathematical notions extends our intuitive understanding of the world. The math that you understand augments reality and adds layer of intelligibility.

Without numbers, without your perception of points and trajectories in a three-dimensional space, without x and y, without the concepts of distance, speed, and acceleration, without probabilities, ... the whole world around you would suddenly become so blurred and unsteady that you’d feel like you’d been lobotomized.

In the 1800s, there were still serious mathematicians who claimed that negative numbers were nothing but a fairy tale. In the 1500s, even their advocates labeled them absurd numbers. Since then, it’s as if reality itself had changed.

In practice, mathematics doesn’t have much to do with the hard sciences. It’s rather more related to psychology, of which it’s a kind of esoteric and applied sub-branch.

To understand math is to reprogram your intuition. It’s a matter of neuroplasticity.

We learn precisely when we force ourselves to imagine things that we don’t yet understand.

Vagabonding - by Rolf Potts

2025-11-05T05:00:00Z

summary:

I read it long after release, when its ideas are thoroughly ingested into my culture, so it had few surprises. I prefer his newer “Vagabond’s Way”.

recommend: 5/10

my notes:

Three general methods to simplifying your life: 1. stopping expansion 2. reining in your routine 3. reducing clutter.

The best way to prepare for a trip was to “throw some tea and bread into an old sack and jump over the back fence.”

Vagabonding is like a pilgrimage without a specific destination or goal.

Tourists from Los Angeles will travel to Thailand to see relatively modernized Hmong villagers don ethnic costumes, yet those same tourists would never think to visit a community of similarly modern Hmong-Americans in Los Angeles. People travel to faraway places to watch, in fascination, the kind of people they ignore at home.

Which is the real adventure: Buying into a guided expedition? Or lingering for a few weeks in some Bolivian village to learn a local craft without fully knowing the local language?

The secret of adventure, then, is not to carefully seek it out but to travel in such a way that it finds you. To do this, you first need to overcome the protective habits of home and open yourself up to unpredictability.

View each new travel frustration — sickness, fear, loneliness, boredom, conflict — as just another curious facet.

Adventurous men enjoy shipwrecks, mutinies, earthquakes, conflagrations, and all kinds of unpleasant experiences. What seems nasty, painful, evil, can become a source of beauty, joy and strength, if faced with an open mind. Every moment is golden for him who has the vision to realize it as such.

At home, political convictions are a tool for getting things done within your community. On the road, political convictions are a clumsy set of experiential blinders, compelling you to seek evidence for conclusions you’ve already drawn. If a Japanese college student tells you that finding a good husband is more important than feminist independence, she is not contradicting your world so much as giving you an opportunity to see hers. If a Paraguayan barber insists that dictatorship is superior to democracy, you might just learn something by putting yourself in his shoes and hearing him out. Mute your compulsion to judge what is right and wrong, good and bad, proper and improper. Have the tolerance and patience to try to see things for what they are.

Create Your Own Economy - by Tyler Cowen

2025-10-28T04:00:00Z

summary:

Surprised me by being a book about autism. But it had some good points anyway.

recommend: 2/10

my notes:

Framing effects are irrational but framing effects help. We spend time and energy framing things in the right way so that we can enjoy them more or learn more from them. Framing helps us care and it gives meaning to our experiences.

Good mental ordering is how you can create your own set of frames and thereby create your own economy.

Autism often comes with problems. But a correlation should not be turned into a definition, any more than we should define sub-Saharan Africa as being full of poor people. If we define autism in terms of its problems, we will find it harder to understand how those problems come about, how to remedy them, and how to appreciate and build upon autistic strengths.

We tend to miss unfamiliar forms of beauty, hidden to us because they are hard to see from the outside looking in. We now have unprecedented access to small bits of culture.

When it comes to romance not so many people are willing to fly across the country for a peck on the cheek. When the cost of a trip is high, usually you want to make sure it is worth your while. It was common for a classical music concert to last five or six hours. If people were walking long distances or arriving by slow coach, the trip had to be worth their while. When access is easy, we tend to favor the short, the sweet, and the bitty. When access is difficult, we tend to look for large-scale productions, extravaganzas, and masterpieces.

Shorter bits of culture makes it easier to try new things - to indulge your desire to sample. You want to be trying new things all the time so you have something to look forward to and so you have the thrill of ongoing discovery.

A blog will fail if the blogger doesn’t post every day or at least every weekday. People don’t like the idea of visiting the blog and coming away empty-handed. In my emotional universe that site no longer exists for me and it holds a status lower than the proverbial needle in the haystack. Top websites supply of new bits of information and pleasure each day.

Individuals can learn to improve their productivity at multitasking and task-switching. Small bits are building blocks for seeing and understanding some larger trends and narratives.

There is no information overload, there is only filter failure.

Shift in the meaning of cultural literacy: Not whether you know the classics but whether you can operate an iPhone

Bypass traditional cultural canons and go to a more direct perception of the underlying aesthetic values.

Daydreaming = internally directed resting thoughts.

No one has compared modern education to a placebo. What if we just gave people lots of face-to-face contact and told them they were being educated? Maybe that’s what current methods of education already consist of.

Buyers of useless things are wiser than is commonly supposed. They buy little dreams.

Smith’s life’s work was to mix economic reasoning with Stoic moral philosophy and applied psychology, most of which he generated from his own reasoning.

A lot of human behavior is about creating artificial scarcity and then choosing a quest. Quests are stories of overcoming scarcity. If you want to go on a meaningful quest, you must be lacking in something. The protagonist cannot focus on everything and thus must choose and discard priorities to define a preferred quest.

Paradise doesn’t make for good fiction.

My dreams, my fantasies, my deepest visions of what I can be: I pull them from social context. I pull them from celebrities, from ads, from popular culture, and most generally from ideas that are easy to communicate and disseminate to large numbers of people. We all dream in pop culture language to some degree.

The choice is not “Fantasy: yes or no?” but rather “How much fantasy do we want in our lives?” Our minds shape and frame truth as much as track it. Few people would want, upon reflection, to live a life unadorned by the power of framing effects. Beneficial self-deception is common in human life. A lot of human achievement takes place only because we tell ourselves - often contrary to reason - that we are in fact smarter or wiser or better than other people. Let’s put down our polemic against living in our heads and let’s put down our bias against interiority. Let’s give our stories their proper due.

The more mixed the crowd, and the greater the number of dimensions of status and achievement, the greater the chance that unusual people will find a means of excelling or just surviving or fitting in. To put it another way, the mixing of populations lowers the cost of being unusual. It is through exchange that difference becomes a blessing, not a curse.

In Japan there is explicit recognition of hobbyist obsession as a way of life. Tokyo is a paradise for people with unusual or highly specialized interests. Tokyo is the world’s biggest, richest, and most highly educated collection of consumers in one place. You’re supposed to obsess about things there and that’s part of the charm of the place. That’s why the Italian food in Japan is so good, even outside of the fine or expensive restaurants. The Japanese man cooking it probably had apprenticeship in Italy for a few years and he has been perfecting his technique ever since.

Advice on Upskilling - by Justin Skycak

2025-10-09T04:00:00Z

summary:

Super motivating book about effective learning and improvement. He’s a math, memory, and weightlifting expert from justinmath.com and MathAcademy.com, so the advice leans that way a bit, but applies to anything you want to learn.

recommend: 8/10

my notes:

Build a habit with some less effective but more enjoyable form of practice. Optimize for fun at the beginning to help you build a habit. Start simple, whatever gets the ball rolling. It will grow on you and seep into your identity Procrastinating builds up the dread. Just getting started makes it dissipate. Once you've got a good habit going, do everything you can to protect it.

Hardcore skills are always the answer. People want to make a big impact on the world and in their own lives. But desire is not enough. You can’t do anything big unless you have big skills. Hardcore skill development is also one of the greatest social mobility hacks.

Consuming is only helpful insofar as it enables you to produce.

Pursue a domain you love, but simultaneously get so insanely technically skilled at math and coding that you can apply them to your domain of interest in an innovative way. Deep domain expertise plus alien-level technical skills equals lots of interesting and rewarding work to do.

Learn the combination of: (1) Domain expertise to identify an important problem and envision a solution, (2) math and coding to build it, (3) communication to deliver it. Without (1) domain expertise you'll choose an unimportant problem or your solution won't really solve the problem (because you don't really understand the problem). Without (2) math and coding you'll be limited to whatever someone or something else (without domain expertise) can build for you. Without (3) communication skills your solution won't be understood and adopted: You'll mistake lack of traction for lack of merit when it's really just a failure to articulate value.

You can make serious progress climbing pretty much any skill tree if you just put in 30 minutes of focused effort every day. But it has to be fully focused, continually upping the level of challenge. Work intensely enough that you come out of each session seriously winded. Your brain feels like mush or your body feels like jell-o.

To get the equivalent of 30 minutes full-assed, you have to put in at least 2 hours half-assed. If you put in 30 minutes half-assed, you get the equivalent of 7.5 minutes full-assed, which doesn’t move the needle fast enough. What you expect to take 5+ years turns out to only take a single year or less if you train seriously, consistently, efficiently. Don't get discouraged by how long it takes people who don't take their training seriously.

The most superior form of training is “deliberate practice”: mindful repetition on performance tasks just beyond the edge of one’s capabilities.

Strain can be unpleasant. It’s taxing and it leaves you fatigued. You may feel weak, untalented, and dumb. You feel weak while exercising but you come back stronger. You feel dumb while studying but you come back smarter.

Ability is NOT something to be “unlocked” by curiosity and interest (which seems easy). It’s built by deliberate practice. Curiosity and interest “grease the wheels” but they don't actually move the wheels.

Confidence needs hindsight. If you feel confident, it’s not because the task in front of you seems easy It’s because you’ve been in situations before where tasks felt challenging relative to your abilities but you’ve always managed to come out successful.

Grinding through concrete examples gives you intuition that you will not get if you jump directly to studying the most abstract ideas. If you go directly to the most abstract ideas then you’re basically like a kid who reads a book of famous quotes about life and thinks they understand everything about life by way of those quotes. The way you come to understand life is not by just reading quotes. You have to actually accumulate lots of life experiences. You might think you understand the quotes when you’re young, but after you accumulate more life experience, you realize that you really had only the most naive, surface-level understanding of the quotes back then, and you really had no idea what the hell you were talking about.

A company's balance sheet can tell an incredibly interesting story if you have visceral experience with success and failure in business. But if you don't, then analyzing financials will make you feel like a robot checking whether numbers match semi-arbitrary conditions for being "good" or "bad".

If you’re pushing 25% of the time, then there would be a 4x multiplier by pushing 100% of the time. 4x speedup is the difference between a decade of work vs a couple years. If you’re pushing 90% of the time, then the multiplier is down to 1.1x. It’s basically max capitalization with a slight rounding error. That last turn of the dial from 90% to 100% is not going to change the overall outcome – all it will do is create regret in other areas of your life.

Practice is supposed to challenge you, but how hard is too hard? Focus less on feelings, and more on measurable progress.

Want to practice effectively? You absolutely must: 1) Have some concrete way of measuring your progress 2) Make sure that whatever you’re doing is actually increasing that progress 3) Make sure that the progress is increasing fast enough that you’ll reach your goal in a reasonable (but realistic) amount of time.

Get in this cycle: * Put in the work in a favorable practice environment. * Build up your ability. * What used to be hard becomes easy. * See the growth you've achieved. * Imagine how much more growth is in your near future. * Gain confidence in your present skills and future trajectory. * Gain motivation to keep on working hard.

Benjamin Bloom discovered this in the 1980s while studying the training backgrounds of 120 world-class talented individuals across 6 talent domains (piano, sculpting, swimming, tennis, math, and neurology): + STAGE 1: Fun and exciting playtime. Students start to develop awareness and interest in the talent domain. Teacher provides copious positive feedback and approval, and encourages students to explore whatever aspects of the talent domain they find most exciting. Students are rewarded for effort rather than for achievement, and criticism is rare. + STAGE 2: Intense and strenuous skill development. Students are committed to increasing performance. Teacher becomes or is replaced by a coach, who focuses on training exercises where the sole purpose is to improve performance. Exercises are demanding, and coach provides constructive criticism to help the student perform the exercises properly. Positive feedback is provided in response to achievement. Effort is assumed. + STAGE 3: Developing individual style while pushing the boundaries of the field. Students are proficient in the foundational skills. They are so committed that they center their entire lives around the talent domain, no matter the sacrifice, and typically work with a world-class expert in the talent domain. Expert helps the student identify and lean into their individual strengths so that they can excel beyond perceived human capabilities. + However, there are several failure modes that one can run into when attempting to make the journey through these stages: + FAILURE 1: The permastudent perpetually avoids the leap into creative production, opting instead to “expand sideways” and acquire skills that are not foundational for their talent domain. + FAILURE 2: The wannabe jumps the gun on creative production before their foundational skills are in place. They build a portfolio of work that lacks substance and is made trivial by foundational knowledge. Not only is it cringe, but it also has high opportunity cost because all this time could be put to better use actually acquiring the foundational knowledge. + FAILURE 3: The dilettante cuts their journey even shorter than the permastudent – they never even make it past playtime, they never commit to serious foundational skill development in anything. The dilettante spends all their time in the land of diminishing returns, engaging in perpetual playtime across a large number of talent domains.

If you’re not measuring performance and taking actions to improve it, then you’re not seriously training. You’re just playing around.

Day-to-day variety can arise from focusing single-mindedly on one big mission.

One of the best career hacks for a junior is to knock out your work so quickly and so well that you put pressure on your boss to come up with more work for you.

Consistently hardcore people achieve extraordinary outcomes through extraordinary actions. These actions go beyond the ordinary and are often seen as crazy. Framed as love, this is familiar: everyone knows that love makes people do crazy things.

Why extrinsic motivation matters: People whose motivation is entirely intrinsic sometimes prioritize “fascinating distractions” over other things that would be more productive to their long-term happiness. Intrinsic motivation gets you working on interesting things with a unique perspective. Extrinsic motivation keeps you on the rails with your long-term goals and keeps you from falling victim to fascinating distractions.

For super-productivity, interleave a wide variety of productive work that you enjoy. You get tired, bored, and unproductive if you’re moving along one dimension for too long.

Fluency in consuming information is not a proxy for actual learning. You haven’t learned unless you’re able to consistently reproduce the information you consumed and use it to solve problems. That comfortable fluency you feel while following along is arising from the fact that the surrounding context is already on your mind – you’re not made to pull it from long-term memory. When you feel like you’re absorbing information while passively following along, what you perceive is information sitting in your working memory, not your long-term memory. If you want to test whether information is in your long-term memory, you have to actively attempt to retrieve it when it's not already at the front of your mind Switch over to active problem-solving immediately after consuming a minimum effective dose of information. Reviews should feel as mentally taxing as initial learning.

In weightlifting, you need to increase the weight to the point where you struggle to lift it, but you are able to overcome the struggle. That’s how you build muscle, and that’s also how you build long-term memory. Spaced repetition = “wait”lifting. Spaced repetition is so similar to weight training that you might as well call it wait training. You’re lifting a memory off the floor of long-term memory and raising it up into working memory. The fuzzier that memory, the harder it is to lift. The wait creates the weight. And just like successfully lifting heavy weight strengthens muscles, successfully recalling a fuzzy memory (lengthy wait) strengthens memory.

The typical approach to education involves maximizing other things like fun and entertainment while, as a secondary concern, meeting some low bar for shallowly learning some surface-level basic skills.

Every time you study, imagine the Grim Reaper is going to show up at the end of your session to quiz you on what you covered, and if there’s any question you can’t answer correctly, you die. Whatever study techniques you’d use in that situation, you better be using them already.

Learning is memory. Understanding amounts to memory that is well-connected and deeply ingrained. If someone is "just memorizing" as opposed to "deeply understanding," it really means they haven’t stored enough information in memory.

The most effective way to learn is to use memory-supporting training techniques. It’s easy to get confused, thinking: "Truly understanding something is different from just memorizing it, so learning doesn’t require memory-focused techniques like retrieval practice, spaced review, and interleaving (mixed practice). Those are about memorization, not true understanding." If that’s what you think, then you'll likely shirk the hard work required to build memory,

Cosmopolitanism - by Kwame Anthony Appiah

2025-09-28T04:00:00Z

summary:

So many interesting ideas and questions about relativism, beliefs vs desires, openness, authenticity, pluralism.

recommend: 7/10

my notes:

Cynics ~400 BC first coined the word “cosmopolitan”: citizen of the cosmos. It was meant to be paradoxical. A citizen belonged to a city to which he or she owed loyalty. Cosmopolitanism originally signaled a rejection of the conventional view that every civilized person belonged to a community among communities.

There is much to learn from our differences. We neither expect nor desire that every person or every society should converge on a single mode of life.

Hitler and Stalin launched regular invectives against “rootless cosmopolitans”. Anti-cosmopolitanism was often just a euphemism for anti-Semitism. Patriotism requires loyalty to one portion of humanity - a nation, a class - ruling out loyalty to all of humanity.

How real are values? What do we talk about when we talk about difference? Is any form of relativism right? When do morals and manners clash? Can culture be “owned”? What do we owe strangers by virtue of our shared humanity?

A cosmopolitan openness to the world: picking and choosing among the options you find in your search.

Words like “right” and “wrong” make sense only relative to particular customs, conventions, cultures.

What grounds modern relativism is a scientific worldview that makes a sharp distinction between facts and values.

Those who claim that they are just talking common sense are in the grip of an old theory.

Beliefs are supposed to reflect how the world is. Desires reflect how we’d like it to be. Beliefs are meant to fit the world. The world is meant to fit desires. So beliefs can be true or false, reasonable or unreasonable. Desires are satisfied or unsatisfied. Beliefs are supposed to be formed on the basis of evidence. Desires are just facts about us.

In an earlier philosophical language, desires would have been called “passions” from a Latin root meaning something you suffer, or undergo. Because passions are just things that happen to us, no evidence determines which ones are right.

When we act, we use our beliefs about the world to figure out how to get what we desire.

Because beliefs are about the world, and there’s only one world, they can be either right or wrong, and we can criticize other people’s beliefs for being unreasonable or simply false. But desires can’t be right or wrong, in this sense, because desires are simply not responses to the world; they’re aimed at changing it, not at reflecting how it is.

Much of what we ordinarily desire has beliefs built into it. This is the only way desires can be criticized: by criticizing beliefs they presuppose.

Desires set the ends we aim for. Beliefs specify the means for getting to them.

When we talk about what we take to be universal values, we’re talking about what we want everyone to want. If we say democracy is valuable, then we want everyone to want to live in a democracy. We might say that someone who wants everyone to want X “believes that X is valuable,” but that is still just a complex desire. I value kindness intrinsically, unconditionally. Even if you showed me that some acts of kindness would have effects I didn’t want, that wouldn’t persuade me to give up kindness as a value. It would only show me that kindness can sometimes conflict with other things I care about. To value something is to want everyone to want it. Values are naturally imperialist.

Positivism doesn’t motivate intervention, but it doesn’t motivate nonintervention. British officer trying to stop a suttee was told by an Indian man, “It’s our custom to burn a widow on her husband’s funeral pyre.” To which the officer replied, “And it’s our custom to execute murderers.” Toleration is just another value.

Care how other people think and feel about stories? People tell stories - discussed, evaluated, referred to in everyday life. Evaluating stories together is one of the central human ways of aligning our responses to the world.

If relativism about ethics and morality were true, then at the end of many discussions, we would each have to end up saying, “From where I stand, I am right. From where you stand, you are right.”

Living effectively in different worlds: Without a shared world, what is there to discuss? People think relativism will lead to tolerance. But if we cannot learn from one another what it is right to think and feel and do, then conversation between us will be pointless. Relativism of that sort is just a reason to fall silent.

Ghana’s atheists could hold their meetings in a phone booth.

It’s impossible to present data in language that isn’t infused with theoretical ideas. What it’s reasonable for you to believe, as you look out on the world, depends both on what you believe already and on what ideas you have been introduced to.

Everyone has his own taboo: the ruler, the royal, and the slave. The ruler’s taboo is disagreement. The royal’s is disrespect The slave’s is the revealing of origins.

People eat pigs but won’t eat cats. Since there are societies where people eat cats, we know it’s possible. The defense is that the very thought of it fills them with disgust.

We defend them as rational, yet these reactions are not really explained by the stories we tell. You might think that failing to respect your parents is a bad thing, but that it’s bad in a way that’s different from adultery; different, too, from sex with an animal; different, again, from incest. In Leviticus 20:9–13, all of them are deemed worthy of death.

Courage is an intelligent response to danger, not just ignoring it.

When we disagree, it won’t always be because one of us just doesn’t understand the value that’s at stake.

Golden Rule: When you do something to someone, what you do can be truly described in infinitely many ways. I have to know not just why I am doing what I am doing unto others, but also how the act will strike those others.

Kant argued that whenever you were trying to pick the right thing to do, you should identify a universal principle on which to act (he called it a “maxim”). Universalizing the maxim: Would you be happy if everyone had to act on that maxim?

Tragedy is not a clash between good and evil but between two goods.

Be able to agree about practices while disagreeing about their justification.

In medieval Spain, Jews and Christians lived under Muslim rule. It was possible only because the various communities did not have to agree on a set of universal values. These historical examples of religious toleration were early experiments in multiculturalism. Shared values help us live together. But we don’t have a shared theory of value or a shared story. As long as this settled pattern is not seriously disrupted, we do not worry much about whether our fellow citizens agree with us or their theories about how to live.

We do what we do because it is just what we do. Justifications come not when we are going on in the usual way, but when we are thinking about change.

What moves people is a gradually acquired new way of seeing things. In places where a generation ago gays were social outcasts and gay acts were illegal, gay couples are increasingly being recognized by their families, by society, and by the law. What has produced this change? Instead of thinking about the private activity of gay sex, people started thinking about the public category of gay people, and got used to it.

We should learn about people in other places, take an interest in their civilizations, their arguments, their errors, their achievements, not because that will bring us to agreement, but because it will help us get used to one another. We don’t understand things. We just get used to them.

We can live in harmony without agreeing on underlying values. It works the other way, too: We can find ourselves in conflict when we do agree on values.

One of the effects of colonialism was not only to give many of the natives a European language, but also to help shape their purposes. The independence movements of the post-1945 world that led to the end of Europe’s African and Asian empires were driven by the rhetoric that had guided the Allies’ own struggle against Germany and Japan: democracy, freedom, equality. This wasn’t a conflict between values. It was a conflict of interests couched in terms of the same values.

Conversations across boundaries of identity - whether national, religious, or something else - begin with the sort of imaginative engagement you get when you read a novel or watch a movie or attend to a work of art that speaks from some place other than your own. Conversation not only means literal talk but also as a metaphor for engagement with the experience and the ideas of others. It doesn’t have to lead to consensus. It’s enough that it helps people get used to one another.

In Ghana, success in life depends on being enmeshed in a web of relationships. To get things done, you need to be someone or know someone with the social standing to work your will. Since most people don’t have that status, they need to find someone - a patron - who does. In a society like this, to ask someone for something is to invite him to become your patron. It’s a sign that you think he has the status to get things done. It’s a way of indicating respect. If someone hates you, he won’t ask you for things.

Ludwig Wittgenstein: “If a lion could speak, we couldn’t understand him.”

Cosmopolitan curiosity about other people: We start with some small thing we two singular people share. Once we have found enough we share, there is the further possibility that we will be able to enjoy discovering things we do not yet share. That is one of the payoffs of cosmopolitan curiosity. We can learn from one another, or we can simply be intrigued by alternative ways of thinking, feeling, and acting.

Cross-cultural communication can seem immensely difficult in theory, when we are trying to imagine making sense of a stranger in the abstract. But when the stranger is no longer imaginary, but real and present, you may like or dislike him.

Homogeneity produced by globalization? Globalization is also a threat to homogeneity. Trade means travelers.

Different people require different conditions for their spiritual development. The same things which help one person towards the cultivation of his higher nature, are hindrances to another. A wide range of human conditions allows free people the best chance to make their own lives.

Trying to find some primordially authentic culture can be like peeling an onion. What people think of as traditional West African cloths are known as java prints, and arrived with the Javanese batiks sold, and often milled by, the Dutch. The traditional garb of Herero women derives from the attire of nineteenth-century German missionaries. A tradition was once an innovation. Should we reject it for that reason as untraditional? How far back must one go? Cultural purity is an oxymoron. People wear Levis on every continent. In some places they are informal wear; in others they’re dressy. You can get Coca-Cola on every continent. In Kumasi you will get it at funerals. People in each place make their own uses even of the most famous global commodities.

People die when their bodies die. Cultures die without physical extinction.

Islam is universal, but it has always been embedded in given cultures - the results of many influences. For fundamentalists, there is nothing in these cultures to be proud of, because they have altered the pristine message of Islam. Globalization is a good opportunity to dissociate Islam from any given culture and to provide a model that could work beyond any culture. Such neofundamentalists reject the culture within which their religion was embedded. The failure of Osama bin Ladin’s jihad may have turned many fundamentalists back to dawa - preaching and precept, exhortation and example. Quest for a universal community beyond cultures and nations. Individualized Islam of universal ethics that inverts the picture of cosmopolitanism.

Cosmopolitan commitment is to pluralism: There are many values worth living by. You cannot live by all of them. So we hope and expect that different people and different societies will embody different values.

Another aspect of cosmopolitanism is what philosophers call fallibilism - the sense that our knowledge is imperfect, provisional, subject to revision in the face of new evidence.

Ghana is a country where Christians, Muslims, and the followers of traditional religions live side by side.

If someone really thinks that some group of people genuinely doesn’t matter at all, he will suppose they are outside the circle of those to whom justifications are due.

Half Known Life - by Pico Iyer

2025-09-14T04:00:00Z

summary:

Travels in Iran, Jerusalem, Kashmir, Broome. Talks with tour guides. Writes some insights.

recommend: 3/10

my notes:

Mashhad festival: The anniversary of Imam Reza. Five million people had gathered from every corner of the Shia world - from Yemen and Pakistan and Beirut and Iraq, from all the provinces of Iran - to mark the auspicious occasion, at the shrine of the imam.

The Iranian film, “A Separation”: Every scene (in a straightforward-seeming story of a young couple in Tehran filing for divorce) disclosed a new detail or point of view that overturned the assumptions of the previous minute. There were so many sides to every question that one could not be sure of a thing or see how any issue could be resolved. That seemed to be the Iranian way: to undermine every certainty and recognize how every presumption was provisional. The beauty of films like A Separation, I realized, is that they hold you for two hours with supple and constant swerves, and at the end you’re farther from a clear conclusion than ever.

I moved to Japan in part because it was the most inward and subtle culture I’d met. The relation of surface to depth remains beguilingly uncertain there and I can never begin to imagine I can get to the bottom of things.

The devout driver who had taken me to the central shrine my first evening here had, when we arrived back at my hotel, refused to take payment for his four hours of showing me around. “Please,” I said. “No!” he protested. “This is friendship.” “I know. But this is your job as well.” “No. It is my honor. How can I charge a guest?” At last I pushed some of the money into his hand, knowing full well that he would feel cheated—and suffer—if I didn’t. My research had reminded me of the custom of ta’arof, or never saying exactly what you mean, and three-part refusals. But I’d barely guessed, when reading of Iran, how hard it might be in life to tell where custom ends and conviction begins.

Like many a mystic, Hafez professed to have no interest in names or distinctions: he was neither Christian nor Hindu nor Muslim nor Buddhist nor Jew, this teacher of Koranic studies wrote in one celebrated poem. Heaven was the place where such divisions fell away.

In Japan my neighbors are generally quite content to play their parts in the orchestrated pantomime that is public life, if it will help sustain a safe, clean, smoothly running harmony from which almost everyone can benefit. But my friends in Japan remain as brightly colored, as passionate, often, within their homes as they are self-effacing in the street.

Much of India has this feeling of a fictional, dressed-up England created by displaced Brits glad to be far from the land they knew.

Kashmir: “I am being rowed through Paradise on a river of hell.”

In Kashmir, hope and history are in hourly collision.

Jerusalem is like the family home in which everyone is squabbling with his siblings over a late father’s will. How could one ever solve the problem of a country in which two opposing groups both have fair claim to the land beneath their feet?

Peacemakers are irresistible targets for the violent.

Jerusalem was a parable that had turned into a cautionary tale, a warning about what we do when we’re convinced we know it all.

The musty deposits of 2,000 years of inhumanity, intolerance and foulness lie in Jerusalem’s reeking alleys.

Jerusalem: “Anything done to desecrate and defile the sacred has been done. It’s impossible to imagine so much falsehood and blasphemy.”

Israel t-shirt: “Guns ’N’ Moses”

Jerusalem: The lines were so clearly drawn that almost everything constituted a trespass. A riot of merchants and pilgrims, each one advancing his own vision of salvation.

Jerusalem is the center of a thousand clashing pasts, and all of them made up the nightmare from which it is longing to awaken.

Israel: “It’s not a problem. It’s an issue. A problem you can solve. An issue you have to live with.” “We’ve been coexisting, not always peacefully, for thousands of years. So long as no one tries to solve their problems, they’ll be okay.” “If I’ve left you feeling frustrated and confused, I’ve succeeded! Now you know what it’s like to be an Israeli.”

In Jerusalem, go to the rooftop of the Church of the Holy Sepulchre.

Dalai Lama never suggested that one belief system was truer than any other. Whenever someone asked him what to do after you’ve been disappointed in some dream (to bring peace to the Middle East, to reverse climate change, to protect some seeming idyll), the Dalai Lama looked over at the questioner with great warmth and said, “Wrong dream!” You have to analyze, research real causes and conditions and take the long view, he always stressed, before coming up with any plan. Pursuing an unrealistic dream was an insult to reality, as well as to dreamer and to dream.

To have all the answers might be proof that you weren’t asking the right questions.

Real faith might have less to do with a conviction that everything will turn out all right than with the simple confidence that something makes sense, even when everything goes wrong.

Joy, for a monk, is never the same as pleasure, because it has nothing to do with changing circumstance.

The Dalai Lama for more than thirty years is constantly in the thick of things, on the streets of India, where so many are in crying need, visiting Belfast and Jerusalem, going to the places where life and death seem overpowering. It was relatively easy to find paradise on top of a mountain or in a monastery, but he was never set away from us, never distant from our sorrow or confusion. “I want to serve where I am needed.”

Dalai Lama: Hardly anyone has suffered more: nine of the sixteen children his mother would bear died young, the government of the largest nation on earth called him a demon and he’d had to try to protect six million people from across a distant border for half a century. Yet no one I knew was better able to project confidence, or readier to smile and laugh. In all our time together, I always saw him avoid the otherworldly. The meaning of life, he said, lies in what we can do right now. When people came to him in search of blessings, he stressed that he was no miracle worker. “You bless yourself with your actions. For example, give money to a school.”

The more you try to avoid suffering, the more you suffer.

Death is not the opposite of life; it is, rather, the opposite of birth.

Waste Books - by Georg Christoph Lichtenberg

2025-09-03T04:00:00Z

summary:

Tweets from 1765-1799 by a 4’9” hunchback physicist, friends with Goethe and Kant, admired by Nietzsche, Schopenhauer, etc. Such wonderful random thoughts, beautiful perspectives on thinking for yourself, observing nature, language, freedom, philosophy, religion, and more. Hundreds of initial insights, especially inspiring because they’re undeveloped.

recommend: 10/10

my notes:

He called them his “waste books” after the name given to notebooks kept by accountants in England for their rough calculations and lists of transactions, which were later transferred to a journal and finally to a formal ledger.

There is never a time when we are not doing philosophy, since our common language is embedded with philosophical views and commitments with which we always operate.

To match versification to thought is a very difficult art, the neglect of which is responsible for much ridiculous verse. Versification and thought are related to one another as in everyday life savoir-vivre is to occupation.

The superstition of ordinary people originates in their early and all too zealous instruction in religion, where they hear of secrets, miracles, and acts of the devil and believe it probable such things might occur everywhere in anything. If, however, they were first taught about nature, they would more readily regard the supernatural and mysterious aspects of religion with greater awe.

Prejudices are acquired instincts. Through prejudice we can accomplish many things we would find too difficult to think through to the point of decision.

Tone lends meaning to a word. It opens the possibility of infinitely enriching language without increasing the number of words. A phrase pronounced in five different ways, each time with another meaning. Yet a third variable: the facial expression.

We call people insane when their concepts no longer correspond to our orderly world. Thus a careful observation of nature, or even mathematics, is certainly the most effective preventative of insanity. Nature is the guide rope by which our thoughts are lead, so they do not stray.

It is a common source of our misfortune that we believe things actually to be what they really only mean. Don’t believe things actually to be what they really only mean.

Passions and natural desires are the wings of the soul.

Be attentive. Experience nothing in vain.

Whatever you see, do, or read, it should always be brought to such a degree of clarity that you can at least answer the most general objections against it.

Growing wiser means becoming increasingly acquainted with the errors of feeling and judging.

Where must I turn my eyes to discover what no man has discovered before?

Things most often forgotten, places overlooked, and things accepted without question deserve most often to be investigated.

What we do not observe does not exist for us.

Whenever he had to reason, he felt like someone who had always used his right hand but was now forced to do something with his left.

To the wise, nothing is immeasurable and nothing insignificant. In minor everyday occurrences one can discover a moral principle just as readily as in the major ones.

In our too-extensive reading, a profound philosophy is often required to restore to our feelings their initial state of innocence. To extricate one's self from the detritus of alien ideas, to begin to feel for oneself, to speak for oneself, and, I might almost say, to exist for oneself.

Something that covers the distance between two ends of a grain of sand with the speed of lightning or light will appear to us to be at rest.

With history and knowledge, the beliefs of man also change. To advance in one and abide in the other is impossible.

Do you perhaps believe that your convictions owe their strength to arguments? Then you are undoubtedly mistaken, for if it were true everyone who heard them would have to be as convinced as you are.

Once we know our weaknesses, they cease to harm us.

Why they eat alone: because it is the right thing to do. But why it is right? They would not and could not say.

The actual possession of something sometimes gives us no greater pleasure than merely imagining we possess it.

One can repeat something in a way that it has already been said, remove it from human understanding, or draw it closer. The shallow mind does the first; the enthusiast, the second; and the true philosopher, the third. = The shallow mind repeats something in a way that has already been said. The enthusiast removes it from human understanding. The true philosopher draws it closer.

Observing most educated people, one finds they do nothing themselves except cut their nails and quills. Their hair is styled by others, their clothes made by others, their dishes prepared by others. All so they can observe the weather in their own heads. The man was such an intellectual he was of hardly any use in this world. All mind and theory. All head and not enough hand to sew on a button.

He had constructed for himself a certain system, which thereafter exercised such an influence upon his manner of thinking that onlookers always saw his judgment walking a few steps in front of his perceptions, though he himself believed it followed.

Many people know things in the way one knows the solution to a riddle after reading it or being told of it.

Cultivate the kind of knowledge that enables one to discover for oneself, when needed, what others must read or be told in order to know.

To do exactly the opposite of something is also a form of imitation.

A man of keen senses a shadow on the face appears blue or black. Another who judges in advance does not see this and takes the entire face to be flesh colored. It is thus essential to investigate correctly and compare what the senses show correctly.

Nothing is more difficult in philosophy than to take up an idea from the beginning, without already having in mind a certain end or purpose.

There is a great difference between still believing something and believing it again. Still believing that the moon influences plants reveals stupidity and superstition. But believing it again indicates philosophy and reflection.

If it were true, what in the end would be gained? Nothing but another truth. Is this of such great advantage? We have enough old truths still to digest.

Once people have gotten such ideas into their heads, they are not so easily removed. The best thing they can do is take a sound system of logic and go through their entire system of beliefs piece by piece until they have cleaned it up.

If mankind suddenly became virtuous, thousands would starve.

A book is a mirror: if an ape looks into it, an apostle is unlikely to look out. We have no words for speaking about wisdom to idiots. Whoever understands the wise is wise already.

We, the tail of the world, have no idea what the head is planning.

When we employ an old word, it often follows the channel dug in our understanding by the dictionary. Metaphors dig a new channel, and often break through entirely.

The metaphor is far more clever than its author. The author gives the metaphor its body, but the reader gives it its soul.

Among all the scholars I have known, the greatest thinkers I have known are those who had read the least.

I am often of one opinion while lying down and of another while standing.

That people who read so astonishingly much are often such bad thinkers may also have its origin in the constitution of our brain. It is certainly not all the same whether I learn a proposition without effort or if I finally arrive at it myself through my own system of thought. In the latter everything has its roots. In the former it is merely superficial.

One rule in reading is to condense the intention and main thoughts of the author into a few words and in this way to make them one's own. Whoever reads in this way is occupied and gains something. When one reads without comparison with one's own inventory of knowledge or without synthesizing it with one's own system of thought, the mind gains nothing and loses much.

What people call a subtle knowledge of human nature is for the most part nothing other than one's own weaknesses reflected back from others.

Whoever knows himself properly can very soon know all other men. It is all reflection.

Most men live more according to fashion than reason.

The flour is important, not the mill. The fruits of philosophy, not the philosophy itself.

Philosophy is a laudable science, yet nobody uses it for their happiness or that of others.

Quite a few people read simply to prevent themselves from thinking.

Strive constantly for clear concepts - not merely by relying on the definitions of others, but as far as possible by personal inquiry.

Repeatedly scrutinize things with the intention of discovering something others have not yet observed.

It is so easy to shut our eyes and so difficult to shut our ears.

The greatest discoveries were made by people who regarded as merely probable what others advanced as certain.

If only I could dishabituate myself from everything, so I could see anew, hear anew, and feel anew. Habit corrupts our philosophy.

The spider spins its web to catch flies. It does this before it knows flies exist.

If only children could be educated so that all things unclear were entirely incomprehensible to them.

With prophecies, the interpreter is often a more important man than the prophet.

Writing allows the thoughts and opinions of one man to reach posterity undistorted.

Tradition acquires something from every mouth. Speaking is always a translation.

As soon as I know I am being deceived, it is no longer a deception.

What am I? What shall I do? What may I hope and believe? All things in philosophy can be reduced to this.

Philosophers must consider and write about all things, even the most common ones. This more than anything else brings focus to a system.

If the New Testament accurately contains the precepts of the Christian religion, then the Catholic religion is hardly Christian. The Catholic religion received its present form in times of the grossest ignorance in which minds were fettered. Now man who is once again permitted to exercise reason is supposed to continue to adhere to it.

It is necessary to agitate all of our knowledge and then let it settle again in order to see how everything is arranged.

Writing is an excellent means of awakening the system sleeping within each of us. Anyone who has ever written will have discovered that writing always awakens something that, though it lay within us, we did not previously clearly recognize.

How did men ever arrive at the concept of freedom? It was grand idea.

Whoever has less than he desires must know he has more than he is worth.

The fly that does not want to be swatted is safest when it sits on the fly swatter.

Understanding something is no reason for believing that it is true.

In the end, everything leads to the question: “Does thought originate in feeling or feeling in thought?” This is the ultimate principle of religion. The answer to the question, “Is the power of feeling or the power of thought the ultimate reality?” indicates the final limit between theism and atheism.

No matter how simple an idea, it will always govern something and abound somewhere.

The more one knows about a subject, the more quickly one is able to make an abstraction from it.

He shoots everything down from the mobile ambush of a kind of floating philosophy.

People learn to regard things as their teachers and acquaintances do. That is why it would be quite useful for once to give instructions on how one can deviate from the rule.

Whenever I arrive at a new thought or theory, always to ask: Is this really as new as you believe it to be? This is also in general the best reminder never to be amazed at anything in the world.

Seek to see in everything something no one has yet seen or thought.

Ask in everything the question: Is this true? Then seek reasons for why one believes it is not true.

To sense something outside oneself is a contradiction. We sense things only within ourselves.

Wit is the finder, and understanding, the observer.

What odd chatter there would be in the world if we were to transform the names of things into definitions!

All mathematical laws we discover in nature are, despite their beauty, always suspect to me. They bring me no joy. They are merely for utility. In close proximity, nothing is true.

The vibration of the air first becomes a sound where there is an ear.

What makes the study of a profound philosophy so difficult is that in everyday life we regard a host of things as being so natural and simple that we believe it would not be possible for them to be any different, yet we have to recognize that we must first accept that these supposed trivial things are of great importance in order then to explain what is pronounced difficult about them.

What is really singular seldom remains unexplained for long. What is inexplicable is usually no longer really singular and perhaps never has been.

If we regard nature as a teacher and poor mortals as her pupils, we are inclined to make room for an altogether extraordinary idea about the human race: We are sitting all together in a class and possess all of the principles necessary for understanding what is said, yet we pay more attention to the chatter of other pupils than to the teacher's lessons. And indeed when someone next to us does take notes, we cheat from him, stealing some remark that he himself perhaps indistinctly heard, and supplementing it with our own orthographic and intellectual errors.

The prerogatives of beauty and those of happiness: the matter is quite different. To enjoy the advantages of beauty in this world, other people must believe that we are beautiful. Yet in the case of happiness, this is not necessary, for it is perfectly sufficient that we ourselves believe it.

Theorizing is excusable, for it is an impulse of the soul that can be useful to us as soon as we have accumulated sufficient experience. Thus all our current follies of theorizing could be impulses that will find their application only in the future.

In dreams we so often take our own objections for those of another. As for example when we dispute with someone, it surprises me that the same does not occur more often when we are awake. The state of being awake seems primarily to consist in our making a sharp and conventional distinction between what is in us and outside us.

Spectacles for the powers of the mind just as there are for the eyes.

To make a vow is a greater sin than to break one.

It is a danger to the perfection of our spirit to receive acclaim for deeds that did not demand the entirety of our powers. Thereafter one usually comes to a standstill. No man has ever yet done all of which he was capable.

I do not believe that so-called truly pious people are good because they are pious but pious because they are good.

To establish liberty and equality as many people now think of them would mean to declare an eleventh commandment through which the other ten would be abolished.

Books are printed by people who do not understand them, sold by people who do not understand them, bound, reviewed, and read by people who do not understand them, and now they are even written by people who do not understand them.

Comparison of a preacher and a locksmith: One says: “You should not want to steal”. The other says: “You should not be able to steal.”

The Socratic method sharpened: I mean torture.

Regarding things of a large scale, ask always: “What is this on a small scale?” And with the small: “What is this on a large scale? How does this appear on a large or small scale?” It is also good to make something as general as possible and explore from top to bottom the entire series of which it is a member. All things belong to such a series whose polar members no longer appear to belong together.

Doubt all things at least once.

We have fallen into such a deep rut that we always follow others.

Great men are reproached for not having done as much good as they could have done. They could reply: “Think of all the evil we could have done but did not do.”

Neither deny nor believe.

God is a sphere whose center is everywhere and whose surface is nowhere.

The defense of the monastic life is usually founded on an entirely erroneous concept of virtue. These people have about the same concept of virtue as those who wish to call madhouses “academies of science” have of science.

Hamlet said that there are many things in heaven and on earth that are not mentioned in our compendia. But then there are also many things in our compendia that can be found neither in heaven nor on earth.

Four principles of morality: philosophical: do good for its own sake, out of respect for the law religious: do good because it is God's will, out of love for God human: do good because it promotes your happiness, out of self-love political: do good because it promotes the welfare of society

English, French, German: the languages are all equally familiar to me. It is harmful in a psychological respect to have so many signs in our heads for the same thing.

The word “incomparable” shows what can become of words in the world.

What most clearly characterizes true freedom and its true use is its abuse.

We speak often of enlightenment and desire more light. But, my God, what good is all of this light when people either have no eyes or deliberately shut those they have?

We acquire the feeling of health only through illness.

The fewer needs one has, the happier one is.

Men are so glad to fight for religion and so reluctant to live according to its precepts.

How is whispering differentiated from speaking?

We so often speak of our persistence after death and so little about our existence before birth. We should not say after death but before and after life.

Man is ultimately so free a being that his right to be what he believes himself to be cannot be contested.

We truly do a disservice to human nature when we believe that in order to have an opinion we must know what opinion another had.

There are plenty of men who trade in the ideas of others. They find it a great merit to have discovered that a tenet thought new is already old. This is done with the laudable intention to harm and belittle living men.

Expert Author Community by Kelly Irving

2025-08-29T16:00:00Z

Writers talking about writing. A community of authors talking about the process and craft, story telling vs raw truth, the business and purpose of writing, and a humble mindset for creators.

Community Collective by Paz Pisarski

2025-08-27T19:30:00Z

Marie Kondo your goals, mistakes are the fountain of youth, Buridan's donkey, suspending judgement, concise writing, your first thought is an obstacle.

Victory Degree by Nik Atanackovic

2025-08-27T13:00:00Z

Social media, pleasing the algorithm is not worth the price, virtual progress, run the program, no need to struggle, entrepreneur is moot, expire your labels quickly, death as a tool for focus.

Learning Leader by Ryan Hawk

2025-08-20T11:00:00Z

No speed limit, creating your own opportunities, adding value, First Follower, Useful Not True, Explorer vs Leader

Get Yourself Optimized by Stephan Spencer

2025-08-13T23:00:00Z

Creative process, authenticity, vulnerability, feeling untethered from your country of origin, belief, spirituality, interpreting reality.

Less Clueless by Steve Sima

2025-08-06T12:00:00Z

How to Live and its orchestra metaphor, Asian parent guilt, family dynamics, romantic relationships, loneliness, money and morality of business, shallow vs deep joy from money, everything is figureoutable.

Spaghetti to Bento by Alexandre Petit

2025-07-30T17:00:00Z

Effectiveness of programming solo, my tech preferences, software philosophy, my people database and productivity tools, writing, social travel, dating, questioning beliefs.

Abundant Thinking by Elan Gelfand

2025-07-23T16:00:00Z

Reframing, choosing new beliefs, balancing self-conviction with others' opinions, consistency vs change, expiring your self-definitions, manufacturing urgency, helping others change.

Between Views by Alec Kosky

2025-07-16T16:00:00Z

Minimalism, De-othering, I'm not from here, Heroes, Protecting your inputs, writing as self-exploration, balancing consumption and creation, my life story in four nutshells.

WanderLearn by Francis Tapon

2025-06-25T16:00:00Z

What we learn from travel, Useful Not True, empathy, embracing discomfort, modern China.

Icons by Motiversity by Tyler Waye

2025-06-19T12:00:00Z

Definition of success, philosophy of growth and challenge, whatever scares you go do it, developing rare skills, input vs output, simplicity, journaling.

Going Solo by Matthew Mayer

2025-06-11T12:00:00Z

After 17 years of emailing, we talk about music, CD Baby, living an unusual life, useful not true, and more.

Polish Anything You Want by Krzysztof E. Socha-Zalewski

2025-06-05T12:00:00Z

Polish publisher of Anything You Want, about success, opportunity, timing, journaling, neuroplasticity, minimalism, musicians and programmers, Poland.

Focused by David Sparks and Mike Schmitz

2025-06-04T12:00:00Z

Journaling, writing, personal agency, life experiments

Crazy Good Turns by Frank Blake

2025-06-03T12:00:00Z

Generous host on applied generosity as applied to different aspects of my career: business and writing.

Kyle Thiermann

2025-05-20T16:00:00Z

Different than most! Ping pong, surfing, waves and trains, asking bold questions, anti-role-models, expanding self-identity, making a habit of philanthropy, what's loyalty?

Community Collective by Paz Pisarski

2025-05-14T16:00:00Z

Happy smart and useful, saying no, making the best of a situation, managing overwhelm, what's enough?, passion and purpose, instilling values in kids.

Blind Blaming by Kevin St. Clergy

2025-05-14T14:00:00Z

Why my company succeeded when others failed, how limitations help, how I almost shut down my company, and asking yourself if you'd be doing this without sharing.

Drink and Think by Tate Hackert

2025-05-14T12:00:00Z

Negotiability of Rules, Intrinsic Motivation, Happy Smart Useful, Embracing Change, Pace of Life.

Reframeables by Rebecca and Natalie

2025-05-07T12:00:00Z

Fun conversation about reframing (of course), creativity, empathy, living a full life, and collaborating instead of just talking.

Less Clueless by Steve Sima

2025-05-06T12:00:00Z

Great conversation around reframing beliefs and limitations. Cut off at the end but that's OK because we'll probably do a Part 2.

Patterns of Success, Freedom, and Happiness by Oskar Woehr

2025-05-01T18:00:00Z

About my books, who they're for, how I write, my non-distracting technology setup.

Ike Inspiration by Ike Okwerekwu

2025-05-01T14:00:00Z

Fun conversation about Useful Not True as applied to religion!

Think Like a Game Designer by Justin Gary

2025-04-09T12:00:00Z

Choosing an unconventional path, embracing your weirdness, choosing the harder path to build strength and resilience, experimenting, being vulnerable to create deeper connections, the value of conciseness for clarity and memorability, living deliberately.

The Armen Show by Armen Shirvanian

2025-04-08T12:00:00Z

Fun broad conversation about websites, writing, productivity, critical thinking, advice, Useful Not True, women podcast guests, friction in life, blogging, and complexity.

The past is not true : https://sive.rs/pnt

2023-07-20T00:00:00Z

The past is not true : sive.rs/pnt

dashing dog, searching for purpose : https://sive.rs/pdog

2023-06-30T00:00:00Z

dashing dog, searching for purpose : sive.rs/pdog

$575K of books sold. $575K to save lives. https://sive.rs/575k

2023-05-18T00:00:00Z

$575K of books sold. $575K to save lives. sive.rs/575k

The joy and freedom of harmlessly upsetting social norms : https://sive.rs/nor

2023-04-21T00:00:00Z

The joy and freedom of harmlessly upsetting social norms : sive.rs/nor

Why I let go of my U.S. citizenship : https://sive.rs/xus

2023-04-20T00:00:00Z

Why I let go of my U.S. citizenship : sive.rs/xus

the Michael Browne suits : https://sive.rs/suits

2023-04-15T00:00:00Z

the Michael Browne suits : sive.rs/suits

Aim off-center to counter a bias : https://sive.rs/aim

2023-03-08T00:00:00Z

Aim off-center to counter a bias : sive.rs/aim

Thinking something nice about somebody? Tell them. https://sive.rs/nice

2023-03-07T00:00:00Z

Thinking something nice about somebody? Tell them. sive.rs/nice

50 conversations in Bangalore and Chennai : https://sive.rs/meet-chbg

2023-03-02T00:00:00Z

50 conversations in Bangalore and Chennai : sive.rs/meet-chbg

Derek Sivers

Geography is four-dimensional: https://sive.rs/4d

Geography is four-dimensional

1993 communal internet shaped me: https://sive.rs/netizen

Netizen

I’m not autistic, but my heroes are.

Since we moved from city to rural land, to a house where the bathroom and kitchen are outside, my boy observed: “This year there are way more full moons.”

My favorite LLM prompt: “List the top cities in {COUNTRY}, and anthropomorphize each one, listing the good-natured stereotypes and jokes that other people in {COUNTRY} say about people in this city.”

Good book on cultural psychology: Tribal. Great insights and examples of how change happens on the personal, cultural, and institutional level. My notes at https://sive.rs/book/Tribal

Fascinating book: Nineteen Ways of Looking at Consciousness - https://sive.rs/book/Conscious19 - uses one true story, 19 times, of the laughing brain patient - https://sive.rs/u12 - in the format of Nineteen Ways of Looking at Wang Wei - https://sive.rs/book/WangWei - to explore the subject.

Travelling While Black - by Nanjala Nyabola

summary:

recommend: 3/10

my notes:

Tribal - by Michael Morris

summary:

recommend: 8/10

my notes:

Nineteen Ways of Looking at Consciousness - by Patrick House

summary:

recommend: 7/10

my notes:

Elephant in the Brain - by Kevin Simler and Robin Hanson

summary:

recommend: 8/10

my notes:

People of India! My OCI + Airtel + HDFC has culminated in a massive achievement and rite of initiation. I have made my first UPI payment. I’m now unstoppable.

China in Ten Words - by Yu Hua 余华

summary:

recommend: 5/10

my notes:

“Purpose” and “passion” are words we use when we’re not working.

I was inconsiderate but now I’m everywhere

I was inconsiderate but now I’m everywhere: https://sive.rs/socials

I love people. I love when they’re not around.

Great book: “You’re Not Listening” by Kate Murphy. My notes: https://sive.rs/book/NotListening

About my book notes

My notes are not a summary of the book!

Notes don’t replace the book

“Which one should I read?”

“How do you choose the rating?”

“How do you use these notes?”

“Why don’t I see __(some book)___?”

“Don’t the authors get mad?”

“Exactly how do you take these notes?”

“Hey you might like this other book summary site!”

“Why are there not more women authors?”

Go to sive.rs/book to browse the notes.

I highly recommend the book "Factfulness" by Hans Roling. My notes: https://sive.rs/book/Factfulness

Maintenance of Everything, part one - by Stewart Brand

summary:

recommend: 3/10

my notes:

Offline 23 hours a day

I’ve been offline 23 hours a day: https://sive.rs/off23

Got my own ActivityPub server running at https://sive.rs/d though still super basic and testing

You’re Not Listening - by Kate Murphy

summary:

recommend: 9/10

my notes:

You Will Not Stampede Me - by Bryan Caplan

summary:

recommend: 3/10

my notes:

What next?

Reframing death

You are what you pretend to be

Keep tuning and adjusting

Take the first step immediately

Why your choice is wrong

Talk with friends to solidify it

Private journal to internalize it

No new instructions for the computer

From explorer to self-leader

How to decide and make the best choice

An awesome collection of great questions

Five tiny tales of reframing

Kingdom of Characters - by Jing Tsu

summary:

recommend: 2/10

“Why don’t I see (some book)_?”