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50 things I know - by Cate Hall - Useful Fictions

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You are allowed to care about people who don’t care about you, and even people who dislike you. The way you feel about someone else can be totally decoupled from how they feel about you. In fact, uncovering your capacity to love people who will never fully reciprocate it is the definition of grace. If you’re unsure how to have better opinions, try just having fewer of them for a start. The most dangerous people have an exquisitely tuned sense of just how much they can get away with when it comes to how they treat different people, so pay special attention when others have sharply diverging experiences of someone’s character. Lots of variance in opinion about whether an idea is good means there’s a good chance the idea is good; lots of variance in opinion about whether a person is good is a warning sign. Lots of things that look like reverse correlation are actually Berkson’s paradox. Or: relationships that look like tradeoffs sometimes arise because of selection effects. It’s not a coi

50 things I know And wish I'd known sooner Cate Hall Jul 30, 2025 2,750 173 566 Share Illustration by Alexander Naughton You are allowed to care about people who don’t care about you, and even people who dislike you. The way you feel about someone else can be totally decoupled from how they feel about you. In fact, uncovering your capacity to love people who will never fully reciprocate it is the definition of grace. If you’re unsure how to have better opinions, try just having fewer of them for a start. The most dangerous people have an exquisitely tuned sense of just how much they can get aw

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