flâneur

Victoria Ren

13 followers · 13 following · 1009 views

on the atlas — 45

highlights — 46

  • And in so many ways I think that psychological separation is the source of all our suffering.”
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  • how wonderful, to finally be able to process existence without judgement. it’s difficult to pinpoint how i learned to do this.
    Gmail
  • This is another common pattern among people who have a hacker mindset. They have gotten their hands dirty playing around with the technical parts, insisting on understanding every aspect of the work, “weaving [the] system into [their] mind[s] so tight that it’s hard to find the stitches after a while,” as Alice Maz writes about her experience becoming incomprehensibly good at Minecraft.
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  • To be lonely is to be in need, and the loneliest group in society is young people who are about to miss rent. The new political focus on affordability is perfectly timed for anyone who wants to make a dent in loneliness and suicides; helping more people maintain economic security is one of the best levers we have.
    Gmail
  • The lie at the heart of liberal politics. Liberals often insist on deep natural equality between all individuals such that, in a fair environment, anyone can do anything. The unequal outcomes we observe are all the result of unjust historical contingencies. What people hear liberals saying here is: “when we’re in charge, group x and group y will thrive because fairness and equality will reign.” Against a backdrop that contains some immutable-by-policy differences in both individual and group outcomes, this has a couple of effects. First, if you’re not a part of group x or y, that’s an instant …
    12 Theses on Politics - by Matt Reardon - From Matter
  • Wokism as an autoimmune disease. It’s not exactly an original take that many on the social justice left regarded themselves as the inheritors of the civil rights movement and that this led to some excessive self-righteousness about e.g. pronouns and microaggressions. I personally think that most social justice folks would in fact be productive members of the civil rights movement if they lived in the 60s and that their main problem was simply being politically active in the 2010s — an admittedly quite rare period where there was no legitimate oppression to fight. Some people just have a revolu…
    12 Theses on Politics - by Matt Reardon - From Matter
  • Give a clear problem and solution overview. What is problem you are solving? What is your proposed solution? Outline your plan: What is your plan for what you will do for the duration of the grant? What do you expect you’ll have at the end of the grant? (It’s OK if you can’t be hyper-specific or it’s open ended, just explain why and make sense) Answer the question, why you? Why are you the right person to solve this problem in this way? This could be track record, it could be something else. Connect to a long-term vision: Explain how your work could create large-scale impact beyond the grant. …
    How to fundraise one million million dollars, part 1
  • In the end, I had wandered by accident into the back office of his love for me and found the paperwork. The doubts, the calculations, the small private notations beside my name. Maybe this is ordinary. Maybe all love looks less romantic under fluorescent light
    I Stumbled Across My Boyfriend's ChatGPT and It Ended Our Relationship
  • if you want the rewards of intimacy, sooner or later, you risk colliding with the version of yourself that exists outside your own narration and in somebody else’s unvarnished language … and finding the result less poetic than you hoped.
    I Stumbled Across My Boyfriend's ChatGPT and It Ended Our Relationship
  • The problem was not that he had doubts, or which I suspect most relationships do. The problem was that unfortunately I saw them in their raw form, stripped of tact and timing and love’s softening language.
    I Stumbled Across My Boyfriend's ChatGPT and It Ended Our Relationship
  • Accordingly, I see the driver of really great projects as having courage in your convictions despite the absence of pre-committed funding.
    We Are Always Talent/Idea Constrained - by Matt Reardon
  • But the point above is that money doesn’t really do causes any good. Money does interventions good, by scaling them up, assuming the interventions help (a lot) in the first place. If you don’t have those, you shouldn’t be so concerned about how much money is ready to be deployed in theory. We’ve even lived through this at least once before. In the FTX era, money was deployed profligately in hopes of leading to good projects and good ideas, which relatively rarely materialized in the wake of that money.
    We Are Always Talent/Idea Constrained - by Matt Reardon
  • The question presented there is whether the universe has some predictable ultimate end state based on the types of actors and incentives that get selected for, given enough time for them to emerge and compete, and whether that end state is good. The problem within that is whether the universe invariably selects for power and the ability to occupy matter and space. If the answer is yes, it seems like “goodness,” as we conceive of it, might not have a place in the limit. This is because any resource dedicated to goodness—things like rest, beauty, or joy—is a resource that could have been dedicat…
    Is This All a Doomed Enterprise? - by Matt Reardon
  • -- I wanted to send a note thanking you and sharing an SFA update!
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  • It’s imaginary (but not unreal).
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  • highlighted in yellow are references to the notes I've written in the annotations
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  • What I saw was a comic responding to the incentives of a culture that not only prefers its politics wrapped inside a personal emotional story, but also gives clout to dramatic displays of victimhood.
    Was a Scandal the Best Thing to Happen to Hasan Minhaj? - The New York Times
  • The other reasons for staying married were not so charming. If I had thought, I’m staying for the money, I might have questioned the lies I told my sons about where their father was on the nights he spent with his future husband. Or if he had thought, I’m staying to promote my career as a psychoanalyst, he might have felt a little heavy on the ambition scale. Or if we both had realized that we were just too scared to face the world alone, I might have given up some of the pretending, and he might have realized the gravity of his original secret.
    Opinion | My Gay Husband - The New York Times
  • “He had a very tender heart,” she said. “Seeing pain and suffering was very hard for him. It just hurt him. I’m a social worker by training. One thing I learned is about detachment. He wasn’t detached from anyone. That’s the beauty of it.”
    Paul Farmer, Pioneer of Global Health, Dies at 62 - The New York Times
  • Disagreement about values and priorities is inevitable in politics, but self-deception is dangerous.
    Every policy objective, all the time, all at once
  • In other words, it’s not that Trump “had to” pivot right in order to win the nomination. He ran and won saying that he would protect Medicaid (along with Social Security and Medicare) and tax the rich, but then he endorsed congressional Republican efforts to do the reverse.
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  • If there’s one message liberals need to hear in America, it’s that we’re not the Revolution any more — we’re the Establishment, and we need to assume the responsibility that comes with being the Establishment.
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  • Many parents told him they couldn’t take off work to take their children to get shots. So Mr. Kiplinger coordinated with a city program to hold Covid vaccine clinics in the school’s cafeteria during the caregiver-friendly hours of 3:30 p.m. to 7 p.m. He attends each one, greeting families, holding and hugging children as they close their eyes and extend their arms.
    Wary Parents Are Target of New Appeals to Vaccinate Children 5-11 - The New York Times
  • mental health gap by social class
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  • I thought it was ironic that I came into the internship as a borderline prison abolitionist and ended it by receiving a job offer in a warden’s conference room. But by the end of that summer, I had grown to like many of the people running Rikers, bonding with the jail’s most senior uniformed officer over our mutual love of Led Zeppelin. It was an early lesson that interpersonal kindness is not the same as actual goodness.
    Confessions of a McKinsey Whistleblower | The Nation
  • Talking about currency changes as a way to generate prosperity sounds nice because it’s very high-level. But the core problem in Argentina is their productivity has been stagnating since the mid-1990s, and they need to do something to fix that.
    Gmail
  • Republicans often complain of leaving meetings with Obama after being lectured about their own political self-interest. He seems more interested in hearing himself talk than in listening to what they want, they complain.
    Understanding Hillary: The Clinton America sees isn’t the Clinton colleagues know. Why are they so different?
  • Bob Greenstein is the president of the Center on Budget and Policy Priorities. He has devoted his life to understanding and improving policy that affects the poor. He is among the people in Washington whom I respect most.
    Understanding Hillary: The Clinton America sees isn’t the Clinton colleagues know. Why are they so different?
  • I just got published in Nature because I stuck to a narrative I knew the editors would like. That’s not the way science should work.
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  • There is an exact ratio between the level of the technology with which nature is controlled, and the degree of severity of its accidents.
    A Posthumous Shock, by Will Self
  • “National trauma” was useful; it allowed the U.S. to frame itself as a victim rather than a global aggressor.
    Bessel Van der Kolk on Trauma, America’s Favorite Diagnosis
  • It is a great paradox that the contemporary tech world is enthralled by two simultaneous narratives: one of techno-libertarianism, that all government interventions are seen as an impediment to all entrepreneurial spirits of the free market; the other of what we might call techno-militarism, which sees the expansion of US military power as a vehicle for the scientific progress. Whereas the former has largely dominated our tech discourse after the Cold War, the industry’s close historical associations with the military-industrial complex are conveniently swept under the rug. What we now see as …
    On Oppenheimer and Progress
  • For a liberal politics of inclusion founded on claims of injury, what could be more useful than a way to turn that injury into biological trauma, something objective, observable, and measurable in the brain?
    Bessel Van der Kolk on Trauma, America’s Favorite Diagnosis
  • Does trauma happen when stress tips over some acute threshold, or are people traumatized because of some underlying vulnerability that makes trauma out of what, for someone else, might just be stress? Is trauma even a useful concept, scientifically?
    Bessel Van der Kolk on Trauma, America’s Favorite Diagnosis
  • Pill for postpartum depression approved. Yesterday, the FDA signed off on the first pil
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  • If liberalism is about having the freedom to own things and having your ownership protected by the state, neoliberalism is about having more freedom to own more things, and being held responsible for how much you do or do not own.
    Boundary Issues — Parapraxis
  • Writing a book is a horrible, exhausting struggle, like a long bout of some painful illness. One would never undertake such a thing if one were not driven on by some demon whom one can neither resist nor understand.
    George Orwell: Why I Write
  • The great mass of human beings are not acutely selfish. After the age of about thirty they almost abandon the sense of being individuals at all — and live chiefly for others, or are simply smothered under drudgery. But there is also the minority of gifted, willful people who are determined to live their own lives to the end, and writers belong in this class.
    George Orwell: Why I Write
  • I had the lonely child's habit of making up stories and holding conversations with imaginary persons, and I think from the very start my literary ambitions were mixed up with the feeling of being isolated and undervalued.
    George Orwell: Why I Write
  • You make a comfortable home in what Dickens called “the vanity of unworthiness.”
    The Yale Review | Jean Garnett: "There I Almost Am"
  • “Whatcha reading?” is never an innocent question with us now; we are often racing to finish the same batch of submissions.
    The Yale Review | Jean Garnett: "There I Almost Am"
  • One victory is permissible, but take care.
    The Yale Review | Jean Garnett: "There I Almost Am"
  • General Groves and George Mueller
    ‘Two hands are a lot’ — we’re hiring data scientists, project managers, policy experts, assorted weirdos… – Dominic Cummings's Blog
  • Victoria Woodcock ran Vote Leave — she was a truly awesome project manager and without her Cameron would certainly have won
    ‘Two hands are a lot’ — we’re hiring data scientists, project managers, policy experts, assorted weirdos… – Dominic Cummings's Blog
  • Feeling isolated and disconnected.
    How to explain what Coworking is | Alex Hillman
  • "power elite," which we formally define as "those people who serve as directors or trustees in profit and nonprofit institutions controlled by the corporate community through stock ownership, financial support, involvement on the board of trustees, or some combination of these factors."
    Interlocks and Interactions Among the Power Elite