Randomness #4

Esta semana fue contra la corriente y sin miedo a la confrontación intelectual porque a veces eso es lo único que lo saca a uno del estancamiento mental. Estos ensayos/posts ayudaron a encontrar energía para avanzar en cosas que necesitaban de mi impulso y por eso me siento agradecido.

Against Waldenponding by Venkatesh Rao (~10 mins)

Encuentro cierta satisfacción en leer cosas que me obligan a cuestionarme. Este ensayo me hizo dudar el si estaba exagerando con este experimento. Esa, luego entendí, era la pregunta equivocada porque rara vez es cuestión del cómo sino del por qué. Bajo ese lente este experimento sigue más vigente que nunca. https://studio.ribbonfarm.com/p/against-waldenponding

If FOMO, Fear Of Missing Out, is the basic fear exploited by third parties that want to drown you in information, the basic fear exploited by people telling you to unplug and retreat is FOBO: Fear Of Being Ordinary.

If you don't manage your information economy career, you will default to the lowest-level job in the social computer: processing very low-latency information with small-minded cognition (bottom left) for small bets.

The way to manage your attention is not to "unplug" or do some sort of bullshit Classical Liberal virtue signaling crap of "I only read Ancient Greek authors" but to be sensitive to your current mind size (small to great) and consciously target the zone you want to be in, moving fluidly between small/great mind.

If you choose to be small-minded today, that's good. If you find you are always small-minded and can't ever break up into mediocre, that's bad. So is always being great-minded and never being able to break downwards.

A real adept ought to have strength-trained attention so they can spend an hour either reading a tweetstream or a once-in-a-generation history-disrupting philosophy book. No hack designer or advertiser should be able to lock them down in the 0.1-10 second range.

There’s No Speed Limit by Derek Sivers (~3 mins)

Hoy el vivir haciendo lo básico, sin mayor esfuerzo, no castiga mucho a quienes lo tienen como filosofía de vida. Ser del montón es suficiente para sobrevivir y parece común el esperar que el mundo se acomode a cada quien porque no hacerlo les resulta injusto. Ignorar esa narrativa e ir a otra velocidad es un antídoto contra la irrelevancia que entristece el que muy pocos decidan aprovechar. https://sive.rs/kimo

Recently I heard him tell the story from his perspective. He said, “My doorbell rang at 8:59 one morning and I had no idea why. I run across kids all the time who say they want to be a great musician. I tell them I can help, and tell them to show up at my studio at 9:00 if they’re serious. Nobody ever does.

The pace was intense, and I loved it. Finally, someone was challenging me — keeping me in over my head — encouraging and expecting me to pull myself up quickly.

He taught me that “the standard pace is for chumps” — that the system is designed so anyone can keep up. If you’re more driven than most people, you can do way more than anyone expects. And this principle applies to all of life, not just school.

Is It Worth Being Wise? by Paul Graham (~15 mins)

Este es un ensayo que pudo escribirse mejor pero que tiene su premio al final, al menos para mi. De alguna manera hace cierto contrapeso a la idea con la que enmarqué el post de Derek Sivers. https://paulgraham.com/wisdom.html

"Wise" and "smart" are both ways of saying someone knows what to do. The difference is that "wise" means one has a high average outcome across all situations, and "smart" means one does spectacularly well in a few. That is, if you had a graph in which the x axis represented situations and the y axis the outcome, the graph of the wise person would be high overall, and the graph of the smart person would have high peaks.

Another sign we may have to choose between intelligence and wisdom is how different their recipes are. Wisdom seems to come largely from curing childish qualities, and intelligence largely from cultivating them.

of course it's worth being wise. But I think it's important to understand the relationship between intelligence and wisdom, and particularly what seems to be the growing gap between them

The path to wisdom is through discipline, and the path to intelligence through carefully selected self-indulgence. Wisdom is universal, and intelligence idiosyncratic. And while wisdom yields calmness, intelligence much of the time leads to discontentment.

If you feel exhausted, it's not necessarily because there's something wrong with you. Maybe you're just running fast.

Cositas varias

The Aarthi & Sriram show With David Heinemeier Hansson (DHH) DHH es el creador de Ruby on Rails y fundador de Basecamp. Es danés y al final del podcast cuenta cómo cambió su visión sobre las políticas públicas danesas, que muchos en este lado del mundo sueñan con tener y que él mismo exigía se implementaran en Estados Unidos.

Founders podcast: Napoleon’s Maxims and Strategy Esto puede ser confirmation bias pero pues lo dice Napoleon entonces publicado quedará. El podcast en general hace resúmenes de libros y vale la pena tenerlo en la rotación.

Random Post en Twitter: La ex-esposa de Elon Musk mencionando uno de los aspectos que ella considera lo ayudan a ser quien es. Otra vaina seguramente impulsada por confirmation bias pero relacionado con el cierre de un artículo de la semana pasada y el cómo cada vez más somos definidos por aquello a lo que decimos no. https://twitter.com/smb_attorney/status/1758660244463550558?s=12&t=AFz3Ttry60_nKUYSfmBC9g