At the risk of beating a dead horse, I've had a rather pedestrian realization following Kami's post on the red button/blue button hypothetical. A few disclaimers; I agree with Kami on it being an…

Pablo Picasso (on social media, anyway.) Quote Investigator says David S. Viscott, with a slight nod at Ralph Waldo Emerson. Picasso sounds nice tho. The post The Meaning of Life is to Find Your…

Anglerfish are a deep-sea animal that uses its bioluminescent lure to capture prey and court mates. Along the way, as the males lack a phallus, they bite onto the larger female Anglerfish, which then…

Man, rationality is such a meme. I think rationality is important when you have something tangible you're dealing with, like a problem at work or figuring out what you need to say; but when it's just…

memory Memory has a way of polishing people into archetypes

love in memory It's fascinating how easy it is to love in memory

Life exists in partnership with the world around it.Everything that lives is part of a shared space, air, soil, water, light, other beings. Nothing lives alone. Every living thing gives something and…

(Which, incidentally, raises the delirious spectre of the converse of a p-zombie: a being that shows all the properties of being aware, except awareness—wait. No. Strike that. Reverse it.)

about 6 years ago and for about 6 months, i experienced the stress-induced delusion that i was already dead. i believed for a time that the world just hadn't caught up yet, hadn't realised the facts…

After writing a short take about system dynamics I recently picked up the book Thinking In Systems again. And this time I finished it.

Portugal is a country of charming, acceptable sloppiness where there is no patience whatsoever for YOUR sloppiness because everyone's entirely fed up with the pervasive sloppiness (including, of…

Moralized Epistemology I recently read a sentence by the German labor minister: “Nobody immigrates into our social welfare systems.” What struck me about the sentence was not primarily whether it was…

One of my favorite essays of all time is Robert J. Hastings, "The Station". It speaks volumes about where you want to be in life, what you want to accomplish, and how far you want to go in order to…

there is an apposite quality to {my} time these days been reading Jung's quasi-autobiography of that title and a strange if expected familiarity has arisen in the experience once upon a time there…

By: Cody Bechberger/ HelloYesToast I’ve been away for a little bit. Got myself wrapped up in a lot of things and felt like I wasn’t giving my family the attention they needed (still don’t, but that’s…

I know it sounds insensitive to say we choose our lives before we live them, because some of us live very hard lives, but that’s what I believe. I believe we specifically choose our family, the…

Hey friends, Chase here Let’s talk about one of the most important questions every creator eventually asks: How do I find my creative voice? Or maybe you’ve heard it framed another way: How do I…

Stop. Look Around. Go again. 53 years old. It's the second mountain. I can't do it like the first. I don't want to do it like the first. I don't want the worry or the anxiety. I don't want to be…

peace will never prevail. it lurks between fists of brothers, sisters cursing sisters, spouses sleeping in separate rooms as contempt sulks in air. we are a jealous people. we want. we desire. we…

On hardening as a senior leader, the cost of walls that read as wisdom, and the quiet work that keeps a dent from becoming a crater.

Lately I’ve been putting more effort into trusting and verifying my instincts. When I recognize they’re trying to get me do something, I give them my full attention. Then I pry and rip (aka writing)…

You've sprung a leak and what to do about it.

On discovering that “show your work” is not the same thing as “do the work well.”

AbstractThis essay addresses three connected questions. First, can genius be separated from moral character? Second, does Martin Heidegger's moral failure stand outside his philosophy, or reveal…

Note: This post is a followup to a piece I had written earlier. You can find that post Why Sal Khan’t: On Learning by Making but Teaching by Telling. This post was also cross-posted on the Civics of…

The caption appears as one column, but it's two. Here's a more readable version - "It all depends upon the quality of imagination just how real reality may be.

We are grossly underreacting.

The line separating good and evil passes not through states, nor classes, nor political parties; but through every human heart.

STAR-perfect interview answers fail because they're recall, not insight. The two-sentence rule that makes a story memorable: a counterintuitive POV plus the proof only you could have.

the perpetual trap of pessimism

When the wrong score changes who you become

I just read my previous four essays on artificial intelligence and this is absolutely the wildest series yet given where it’s started and where it’s going.

An introspective piece on transcending collective reality and rediscovering a part of yourself that always existed beneath the surface.

Artists and engineers seem to be at different ends of the debate on the use of AI in their fields. While I see much more open contempt for AI from the artistic community than I do the engineering…

Remember when Neo wakes up in The Matrix? A machine grabs him by the neck and flushes him into the sewers. That's awakening. We often imagine awakening as transcendence. I did too. I thought it would…

Photo by Goran Vučićević on Unsplash When she gives a talk, a coach and author, Martha Beck, sometimes asks people in the audience whether they are sitting comfortably. When everyone politely nods,…

Starting any kind of "work" amidst what to me looks like chaos and an incessant stream of distractions is a challenge. Starting "creative" / "knowledge" work even more so, of course. Somehow along…

I can’t help but notice a pattern: I seem to end up writing circular or recursive ideas. I think it’s a thinking habit, for better or worse. Recursive thinking is good at finding the hidden…

On starving yourself to keep the world fed, and other problems.

There are a lot of folks out there tell you that what matters now is 'taste'. Some loosely defined term that boils down to "know if the output is slop or not slop". While it is…

Driving through northern Iowa last week, the flattest farmland in America, I thought of my Uncle Jim and the old Keillor farm I loved as a kid, the big barn and haymow, The cows he milked by hand…

It was, she thought, a kind of moving portrait of summer evening. The sort of lazy contentment that only comes on breathless summer days right before the kids are called in for supper and the porch…

一切都是空的。 一旦你理解，你會在所有的地方看見這個空洞── 在你女兒踏出第一步時湧上你心頭的那股愛裡；在你和太太大吵時嘴裡冒出惡毒字句的那瞬間；在你坐在媽媽的病床旁無限下沉的絕望裡；在你存了五年錢、終於把那只勞力士戴上手腕的那一刻。 為什麼？ 你以為你要的是那個升遷、那枚戒指、那只勞力士。你以為你要的是被愛、被肯定、被人記住。…

I've always been a bit of a hater. Chaitanya's Moving on from being a Hater post makes some good points about this frame of mind. Being a hater can create a negative perception of the world, that…

It feels as if I’m tied to the shore. As if something - whatever it is that binds me - won't allow me to drift into the open, into the deep waters. Tied here, I've already found comfort. At some…

A subjective attempt at an objective look at manipulation Manipulation is such a big deal that it takes a broad perspective — the broadest possible perspective — to appreciate it properly. So, let’s…

On dreams and transitions.