flâneur

Will O'Brien

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on the atlas — 46

highlights — 271

  • Perhaps the mighty industrialists and financiers who steer so much money towards think tanks to promote their goals can consider culture more often. Fewer op-eds on how people should feel about upcoming legislation; instead, more creation of cultural products that get people excited about the technological future. These kinds of efforts to promote definite optimism, rather than a continuous focus on never-ending political battles, might result in greater economic growth in the long run.
    Definite optimism as human capital | Dan Wang
  • First, we can all try to engage more actively with the material world, not merely the digital or natural world. Go ahead and pick an industrial phenomenon and learn more about it. Learn more about the history of aviation, and what it took to break the sound barrier; gaze at the container ships as they sail into port, and keep in mind that they carry 90 percent of the goods you see around you; read about what we mold plastics to do; meditate on the importance of steel in civilization; figure out what’s driving the decline in the cost of solar energy production, or how we draw electricity from n…
    Definite optimism as human capital | Dan Wang
  • The fewer the manufacturing workers and engineers, the more removed everyone is from the particulars of industrial processes, and the more remote that knowledge becomes in each successive generation. We become think tankers and app designers and restaurant hosts, while the details of the industrial world become further and loftier abstractions. How many of our grandparents were familiar with the details of ball bearings, wire production, concrete mixing, industrial chemicals, while we are not? I regret this abstraction of the material world. Most of our living standards are tied to the world o…
    Definite optimism as human capital | Dan Wang
  • Let’s have more movies and books that look forward to the technological future.
    Definite optimism as human capital | Dan Wang
  • The dominant mode in modern sci-fi movies is dystopia, and perhaps even nihilism. Today, the contrarian project is to present an earnest, joyful vision of the technological future. That kind of undertaking will invite mockery from commentators posting essays on Medium, but one can hope that younger, less jaded people will find attractive that daring imagination.
    Definite optimism as human capital | Dan Wang
  • I’ve come to the view that creativity and innovative capacity aren’t a fixed stock, coiled and waiting to be released by policy.
    Definite optimism as human capital | Dan Wang
  • “The more I study the lives of British innovators, the more convinced I am that innovation is not in human nature… People innovate because they are inspired to do so. And when people do not innovate, it is often simply because it never occurs to them to do so. Incentives matter too, of course. But a person needs to at least have the idea of innovation—an improving mentality—before they can choose to innovate.”
    Definite optimism as human capital | Dan Wang
  • When I say “positive” vision, I don’t mean that people must see the future as a cheerful one. Instead, I’m saying that people ought to have a vision at all: A clear sense of how the technological future will be different from today. To have a positive vision, people must first expand their imaginations. And I submit that an interest in science fiction, the material world, and proximity to industry all help to refine that optimism. I mean to promote imagination by direct injection.
    Definite optimism as human capital | Dan Wang
  • I wonder if economists overrate the easier-to-observe policy factors and under-theorize the idea that positive visions of the future drive long-term growth.
    Definite optimism as human capital | Dan Wang
  • “What we've always seen is that members love their home away from home,” Jones said. “They don't like giving up their membership because there is a very long queue to join to get back in.”
    Soho House is pushing 30 and still isn’t profitable. That could change by the end of this year - The Points Guy
  • Members also seem to be happy once they are in, as the company’s retention rate is roughly 95%, Soho House and MCG founder Nick Jones said during the investor call.
    Soho House is pushing 30 and still isn’t profitable. That could change by the end of this year - The Points Guy
  • Though they are willing to adapt to changing circumstances, they root themselves in a core set of principles. Too open, and their strong culture disappears. Too closed, and they lack the dynamism that generates progress. With the right social dynamics in place, the group becomes a scenius.
    Find Your Scenius - David Perell
  • On an average day 20 years ago, according to the Bureau of Labor Statistics’ Time Use Survey, 38 percent of Americans socialized or communicated with friends. By 2021, that number was down to 28 percent.
    Hanging out: Americans report fewer friends. Could the cure be simple?
  • The first adaptation might just be to consciously prioritize in-person interaction, instead of just waiting for it to happen like we used to. Dan Kois has an excellent article in Slate about Sheila Liming, whose new book Hanging Out: The Radical Power of Killing Time provides a much-needed alternative to phone addiction. Perhaps hangouts will go from being something that everyone just naturally did because it was the only way to get human contact to being something that people deliberately carve out time for and put on their calendars.
    Honestly, it's probably the phones - by Noah Smith
  • Side note: Interestingly, teen loneliness briefly went way down from about 1996 to about 2006. That’s consistent with the idea that the old computer-based internet was a complement to in-person interaction — a place you could build an alternative social circle — instead of a substitute for it. Like I always say, the internet used to be an escape from the real world; now, the real world is an escape from the internet.
    Honestly, it's probably the phones - by Noah Smith
  • Creators could make money from the initial sale of their content, as well as royalties and protocol rewards, while collectors of content could profit from any increase in the content’s market value.
    The Internet of NFTs - by Musashi - Ronin Report
  • giving rise to a global marketplace for content curation
    The Internet of NFTs - by Musashi - Ronin Report
  • a new equilibrium where a healthy and competitive marketplace of platforms are built around an open content standard / marketplace.
    The Internet of NFTs - by Musashi - Ronin Report
  • And yet, the only obvious alternative to monetising attention is to somehow value information itself — a most ethereal entity that insists on being “free”. Thus is our dilemma.
    The Internet of NFTs - by Musashi - Ronin Report
  • Even if we aspire to engage with ‘quality media’ — however we might define such a thing — we no longer have the bandwidth for it. Exhausted, we thumb our way through endless 5 second shorts instead.
    The Internet of NFTs - by Musashi - Ronin Report
  • Naturally, with less money going towards the ‘production of information’ and more going towards the pipes that manage its flow, the quality of information invariably declines.
    The Internet of NFTs - by Musashi - Ronin Report
  • Unfortunately, as we’ve discovered, when you reduce the marginal cost of information to zero, you don’t so much remove economics from the picture, so much as you merely move the economics elsewhere. In the case of the Internet, the economics of information have shifted away from those who produce it in favour of those who simply control its distribution.
    The Internet of NFTs - by Musashi - Ronin Report
  • With advertising as the underlying business model, the Internet is effectively an attention-maximization machine
    The Internet of NFTs - by Musashi - Ronin Report
  • the thing that’s ultimately being valued is attention
    The Internet of NFTs - by Musashi - Ronin Report
  • consider what crypto actually amounts to: collectively owned distributed infrastructure, magic internet money, programmatic and internet-native political economies, digital sovereignty. When viewed at this level of abstraction, crypto is almost jarringly the Web’s missing piece — the socioeconomic substrate it both requires and deserves.
    The Internet of NFTs - by Musashi - Ronin Report
  • Building out the core infrastructure of the Internet / Web was expensive and necessarily required a deep source of funding. Advertising was simply the low-hanging fruit in the room, a quick and cheap economic fix.
    The Internet of NFTs - by Musashi - Ronin Report
  • As is now well understood, the ultimate source of this misalignment here is advertising, and the logic of lock-in, surveillance and extraction it implies.
    The Internet of NFTs - by Musashi - Ronin Report
  • First, we need only appreciate that the perversions of the Internet are primarily the result of a misalignment of incentives between the provisioners of Internet products and services — Facebook, Google etc. — and their users (that is, the world of humans).
    The Internet of NFTs - by Musashi - Ronin Report
  • As remarkable as the Web is, though, it has — for reasons social, economic and technological — become concentrated in the hands of a very small handful of actors whose interests are proving highly misaligned with our broader interests as a global community.
    The Internet of NFTs - by Musashi - Ronin Report
  • While precision and rigour are important, the emotional drive of awe is what matters – it might be, as Heschel speculated, our only path to knowledge and wisdom.
    How awe drives scientists to make a leap into the unknown | Aeon Essays
  • Awe increases our tolerance for uncertainty and opens our receptivity to new and unusual ideas, which are crucial for paradigm change.
    How awe drives scientists to make a leap into the unknown | Aeon Essays
  • Next to ritual, there is a second way in which we can cultivate awe. We can experience it vicariously, by reading the writings of others.
    How awe drives scientists to make a leap into the unknown | Aeon Essays
  • How is awe evoked? Heschel argued that Jewish rituals are conducive to awe: there are blessings that orthodox Jews utter at particular occasions, for example, when you see a rainbow, or notice the first tenuous blossoms on fruit trees, or meet a wise person, or hear good news. These blessings are embodied physical actions that one performs to mark certain emotional states in response to the environment. The repetition of ritual practices trains our minds and bodies to respond with awe and wonder to the world around us. By uttering a blessing, you become more attuned to how precious and fleetin…
    How awe drives scientists to make a leap into the unknown | Aeon Essays
  • Heschel thought that people are taking the world for granted, thereby losing their ability to experience it with depth and reverence. We have taken to a kind of complacency where we think that science can solve all our problems, without pausing to think about the marvels that science has revealed to us. ‘Modern man fell into the trap of believing that everything can be explained, that reality is a simple affair which has only to be organised in order to be mastered,’ he wrote. According to Heschel, awe and wonder are the antidotes.
    How awe drives scientists to make a leap into the unknown | Aeon Essays
  • One recent study showed participants a movie montage of the BBC TV series Planet Earth, containing sweeping vistas of waterfalls, canyons, forests and other awe-inducing views. Participants in a control condition watched humorous videos of cute animals engaged in capers and antics. Those who saw the awe-inspiring videos were more aware of gaps in their knowledge than those who saw the funny videos.
    How awe drives scientists to make a leap into the unknown | Aeon Essays
  • Empirical evidence suggests that awe plays a role in the appreciation of science.
    How awe drives scientists to make a leap into the unknown | Aeon Essays
  • The feeling of awed wonder that science can give us is one of the highest experiences of which the human psyche is capable. It is a deep aesthetic passion to rank with the finest that music and poetry can deliver. It is truly one of the things that make life worth living, and it does so, if anything, more effectively if it convinces us that the time we have for living it is finite.
    How awe drives scientists to make a leap into the unknown | Aeon Essays
  • In one recent study, participants listed nature as their most common elicitor of awe, followed by scientific theories, works of art and the achievements of human cooperation.
    How awe drives scientists to make a leap into the unknown | Aeon Essays
  • In their classic account of awe, the psychologists Dacher Keltner and Jonathan Haidt characterise awe as a spiritual, moral and aesthetic emotion. In their view, all clear cases of awe have the following two components: an experience of vastness, and a need for cognitive accommodation of this vastness. You might feel awe for things that are physically large, but also for ideas that are conceptually vast. For example, at the end of the first edition of his Origin of Species (1859), Charles Darwin expressed awe for his theory of natural selection: There is grandeur in this view of life, with its…
    How awe drives scientists to make a leap into the unknown | Aeon Essays
  • And as for which emotion most helps scientists, I have a particular one in mind: awe.
    How awe drives scientists to make a leap into the unknown | Aeon Essays
  • Magical spells and incantations don’t change the physical environment, but they change our world, by shifting our desires and hopes
    How awe drives scientists to make a leap into the unknown | Aeon Essays
  • In his view, emotions transform the world like magic.
    How awe drives scientists to make a leap into the unknown | Aeon Essays
  • Sartre, by contrast, held that emotions are things that we do
    How awe drives scientists to make a leap into the unknown | Aeon Essays
  • a scientific paradigm breaks down, scientists need to make a leap into the unknown. These are moments of revolution, as identified by Thomas Kuhn in the 1960s, when the scientists’ worldview becomes untenable and the agreed-upon and accepted truths of a particular discipline are radically called into question. Beloved theories are revealed to have been built upon sand. Explanations that held up for hundreds of years are now dismissed. A particular and productive way of looking at the world turns out to be erroneous in its essentials.
    How awe drives scientists to make a leap into the unknown | Aeon Essays
  • Imagine cities built in a way that makes sense- based off our hunter gatherer roots, with a pastoral element to promote sustainable food production and a connection to our meals. Imagine quiet, efficient public transportation, and cities built around people instead of cars and parking lots. Imagine sculptures and art instead of gaudy advertisements and derelict slums. Imagine cities we wanted to plan for hundreds of years instead of buildings made to be as cheap as humanly possible. Imagine actually knowing and liking your neighbors. Imagine a social life centered around betterment and strivin…
    Aesthetic Warfare and the Dream of the Beautiful World
  • Cultivate the beautiful. Do not engage with ugliness in any form. Don’t watch movies that make you feel bad, or gross, or disgusted. Don’t listen to music that glorifies a way of life that lessens the greatness that humanity is capable of. Learn to believe in Love again, and don’t let the culture and bitter, lonely, miserable people tell you it doesn’t exist- not the cheap love that Disney and Hallmark peddle, but a deep, abiding belief that life is good and that we can have meaningful connections with other people beyond transactional, childish narcissism.
    Aesthetic Warfare and the Dream of the Beautiful World
  • One exception is my personal favorite living artist, Bryan Larsen, and the Nigerian Hyperrealists are another fascinating group to look at (although more for skill than theme).
    Aesthetic Warfare and the Dream of the Beautiful World
  • We need real heroes, people who can resist the decay and malaise that infest our society, not fantasy figures with magic powers or obscene wealth. Heroes are supposed to show us the right way to act in the world. They’re symbolically representations of ethics and aesthetics personified- while I’m ragging on Marvel (which I generally like, actually, but for this argument I have specific criticisms), Captain America is a great example of this. He’s the human version of American values, and he’s a great role model.
    Aesthetic Warfare and the Dream of the Beautiful World
  • Our art museums (as I’ve probably beaten to death) glorify mediocrity and contempt for skill. Our culture glorifies physically unhealthy bodies as well as mental illness. Our movies show dystopia, social decay, and misery- while it was a well made film, the recent Joker movie is the epitome of this aesthetic of nihilism. Where is the real heroism? Even the Marvel movies show superheroes, not regular people overcoming the difficulties of the world.
    Aesthetic Warfare and the Dream of the Beautiful World
  • What I am saying is that our experience in life and the world is directly influenced by our environment. If the environment is ugly and we have no connection to it, then we will feel isolated and crushed- look up Brutalist architecture for examples of soul-crushing via architecture.
    Aesthetic Warfare and the Dream of the Beautiful World