While humans are excellent at empathizing with individuals, we are pretty terrible at empathizing with large groups of people who aren’t us; in part this is because we are collectively interacting with systems, which we aren’t very good at understanding and interacting with either. One person’s lack of access to medical care is cause for a fundraiser, but thirty million people without health insurance is a ‘choice’ that needs to be protected. One teenager from a disadvantaged background who gets to go to Harvard is a triumph; the systematic increase of student debt and exclusion of large chunks of the population from public higher education is necessary belt-tightening.
Metafoundry 60: Tendril Perversion 4:39pm on July 11, 2016Little children love the world. That is why they are so good at learning about it. For it is love, not tricks and techniques of thought, that lies at the heart of all true learning.
Austin Kleon — John Holt, How Children Learn Children do not… 2:57pm on July 11, 2016Birds fly, fish swim; man thinks and learns. Therefore, we do not need to “motivate” children into learning, by wheedling, bribing, or bullying. We do not need to keep picking away at their minds to make sure they are learning. What we need to do, and all we need to do, is bring as much of the world as we can into the school and the classroom; give children as much help and guidance as they need and ask for; listen respectfully when they feel like talking; and then get out of the way. We can trust them to do the rest.
Austin Kleon — John Holt, How Children Learn Children do not… 9:00am on July 9, 2016You can recognize a deep truth by the feature that its opposite is also a deep truth. You have to view the world in different ways to do it justice, and the different ways can each be very rich, can each be internally consistent, can each have its own language and rules, but they may be mutually incompatible, and to do full justice to reality, you have to take both of them into account.
Transcript: Frank Wilczek — Why Is the World So Beautiful? | On Being 4:05pm on May 6, 2016A decent swimmer in his own estimate, Vedantam went out into the sea one day and discovered that he had become superb and powerful; he was instantly proud of his new abilities. Far from shore, he realized he had been riding a current and was going to have to fight it all the way back to shore. “Unconscious bias influences our lives in exactly the same manner as that undercurrent,” Vedantam writes. “Those who travel with the current will always feel they are good swimmers; those who swim against the current may never realize they are better swimmers than they imagine.”
Bird in a Cage, by Rebecca Solnit | Harper’s Magazine 2:09pm on March 19, 2016Wherever we are, what we hear is mostly noise. When we ignore it, it disturbs us. When we listen to it, we find it fascinating.
John Cage, Silence: Lectures and Writings A good… 5:35pm on March 4, 2016The best thing I know is to do exactly what you wish for a while.
Roman Holiday 1953 – Quotes 11:24pm on February 22, 2016A man said no person is educated who knows
only one language, for he cannot distinguish
between his thought and the English version.
Holding myself tenderly in this marred body.
Wondering if the quiet I feel is that happiness
wise people speak of, or the modulation
that is the acquiescence to death beginning.
The heart
never fits
the journey.
Always
one ends
first.
This is what youth must figure out:
Girls, love, and living.
The having, the not having,
The spending and giving,
And the meloncholy time of not knowing.
This is what age must learn about:
The ABC of dying.
The going, yet not going,
The loving and leaving,
And the unbearable knowing and knowing.
If the world were merely seductive, that would be easy. If it were merely challenging, that would be no problem. But I arise in the morning torn between a desire to improve the world and a desire to enjoy the world.
Quote by E.B. White: “If the world were merely seductive, that would …” 11:38pm on February 8, 2016For some reason, online communities seem particularly resistant to the type of elitist promotion structure common in real world institutions. In Academia, high school students have to fight to become undergraduates. Undergraduates have to fight to become PhD candidates. PhD candidates have to fight to become adjuncts. Adjuncts have to fight to become tenured and tenured professors have to fight to become Dean. I can’t even think of a single online community that bears even the slightest resemblance to this sort of power structure.
Social Software Sundays #2 – The Evaporative Cooling Effect « Bumblebee Labs Blog 11:21pm on February 8, 2016Good art is pointable. Something complex occurs, and you can’t quite explain how you feel about it. Instead, you find the appropriate book, song, poem, whatever, then point to it, and say “That. That is how I feel.” It’s a shorthand that stands in place of your own words. It speaks for you.
Frank Chimero – Portraits 4:07pm on February 7, 2016Young people often signal through their pretensions what they hope to become… They see people whom they admire, or are in some way attracted to, and they try to copy the preferences of those paragons. Such copying can lead to more and more pretension; but in many cases the pretense becomes real: the tastes we aspire to often become our own tastes.
Austin Kleon — Alan Jacobs, The Pleasures of Reading in an Age of… 1:46pm on February 7, 2016It would’ve been a better essay if I’d explained how disillusioned and lost I felt at that moment in my life. But that’s not how we did it back then. We changed every first-person confession into a royal “we” (or a less royal “you”).
Ask Polly: Why Did My Dream Man Dump Me? — The Cut 9:43am on February 4, 2016The essential thing about writing is not understanding, but the pleasure of reading.
Saul Steinberg Talks (1967) – YouTube 2:47pm on February 3, 2016I use a very poor alphabet to express ideas which are very complicated.
Saul Steinberg Talks (1967) – YouTube 2:35pm on February 3, 2016Write about the lessons now so familiar they can be recited in your sleep. Write about the insights not yet sighted, their silhouettes blurry like the edges of a distant shore. Write about the job, the joy and chaos of designing and building. Write at least once a week. Write to learn how to write, and write to understand, the process itself like a looking glass through which you may yet discover a strange new world. Write so something meaningful can be said to others. Write to be accountable, write with honesty. Above all, write to preserve the scrap of an age, a voice; write so you won’t forget.
The Curmudgeonly January — The Year of the Looking Glass — Medium 2:18pm on February 2, 2016