flâneur

Amy Li

28 followers · 17 following · 1592 views

on the atlas — 51

highlights — 68

  • What I learned from trying to study philosophy is that the place to look is in other fields. If you understand math or history or aeronautical engineering very well, the most abstract of the things you know are what philosophy is supposed to be teaching.
    RAQs
  • Rather than curating friends based on our first-order values, our friends are ways to develop our values and how we see the world.
    Stop trying to have "interesting" friends - by Eli Qian
  • the long run society at large captures 98% of the value of new innovations, and the innovator 2%
    The rise and fall of the industrial R&D lab - Works in Progress
  • the tension between managing scientists with their own pure research goals in such a way that they produce something commercially viable, while still leaving them enough latitude to make important leaps, seems huge. But these problems were always there in the model. What is harder to identify is an exogenous shock or set of shocks that changed the situation that existed from the 1930s until somewhere between the 1960s and the 1980s.
    The rise and fall of the industrial R&D lab - Works in Progress
  • They did this by creating a risk that if you did go from zero to one and manage to gobble up the whole marketplace, you’d have that taken away.
    The rise and fall of the industrial R&D lab - Works in Progress
  • Unlike physics and chemistry, which describe things simply as they are, biological processes can be meaningfully considered to function or dysfunction.
    The evolution of psychiatry - Works in Progress
  • what bothers me about this educational approach—the “problem” approach, the “STEAM” (STEM + arts) approach—is what it leaves out. It leaves out the humanities. It leaves out books. It leaves out literature and philosophy, history and art history and the history of religion. It leaves out any mode of inquiry—reflection, speculation, conversation with the past—that cannot be turned to immediate practical ends. Not everything in the world is a problem, and to see the world as a series of problems is to limit the potential of both world and self. What problem does a song address? What problem will…
    Deep Reading Will Save Your Soul - by William Deresiewicz
  • Self-defense,1 as described here, refers to holding onto your dreams and cares.2 It refers to not losing certain parts of you that make you, you.
    Six Selections on Self-Defense - by Andrew Wu
  • We are looking for social connection, yes, but we are also looking for intellectual connection, which is just another way of saying that we long to know. We desire an understanding of things and take pleasure in learning. Just as with our desire for community, the desire for knowledge is itself both deeply rooted in us and deeply good. Both can orient us toward the path of human flourishing. Indeed, I’m tempted to say that the whole of the human condition could be summed up this way: we desire to know and to be known.
    Desire, Dopamine, and the Internet - by L. M. Sacasas
  • There’s another question we could ask. What am I looking for when I scroll? One answer to this question is simple and obvious—we’re looking for each other. We’re looking, in other words, for human connection. We are social creatures and among our most profound immaterial needs is the need for community.
    Desire, Dopamine, and the Internet - by L. M. Sacasas
  • Behind the twinge of ethnocentrism, I think, lies a more neutral conclusion. To understand oneself is to know one’s history. To understand one’s values is to know how they were formed. I have nothing more to add, other than that it was a great time. It’s really never too late to learn more about yourself. If you’re not close with your grandparents, call them. Better yet, visit them. If you’re like me, and you frequent identity crises, it might even make you feel a little better. At the very least, you’ll have some dad lore to pass on to your kids.
    A conversation with my dementia-stricken grandmother
  • I have been to H Mart hundreds of times in my life. Not once have I thought that its cultural significance lay in the selection of the chip aisle, nor have I ever seen anyone cry there. What I have seen are tens of thousands of Korean American parents, bodies aching after sixteen hours of work, suffering in silence—all under the philosophy that they owe their kids better lives. Perhaps it is not aesthetic, but that is the reality and beauty of our culture. That is what we have to contribute to the marketplace of identity, and it is far more robust than the flavor profile of kimchi. We should s…
    Stoicism, not crying, in H Mart - by Sungjoo Yoon
  • when restrictions are imposed to prevent crime, the burden of those restrictions must not be targeted at innocent victims or potential victims of crime. Consider the idea that society ought to force women to dress modestly in order to prevent rape. One counter-argument is that rapists don’t really target women based on their clothing; but a more powerful counter-argument is that, irrespective of what rapists do, women’s rights should remain intact. If society robs women of their rights to bodily autonomy and self-expression based on the actions of rapists – even if it does so with the best int…
    Omegle
  • “What are you learning in school anyway?” the scene murmurs. You think about it and realize you have an answer: you’re learning how to live. You stay put, savoring the last months you have in the comfort of still being a kid.
    how to be a kid that goes places - by Molly Mielke
  • this is what school could be, as a place that leaves much more room to reflect and learn at one's own pace, and encouraging opportunities to meet and chat with others 1-1 to get to know each other outside the class setting.
    coming full circle - by nancy - general zuo's chicken
  • relentless, uncritical quest for self-optimization over self-esteem. What Instagram influencers do for body image, growth mindset does for skills, and effective altruism for morality.
    🌻 same old - by Jasmine Sun - half-baked futures
  • I have another working theory that you know you love someone when each new weakness uncovered no longer changes how you feel. Time and trust can turn any blemish into a beauty mark.
    🌻 same old - by Jasmine Sun - half-baked futures
  • Sometimes, repetition emerges from desire, the feeling of I need to binge everything this person has ever made. But more often than not, it stems from curiosity and familiarity—not with the object, but with its maker.
    🌻 same old - by Jasmine Sun - half-baked futures
  • And the more people you fall in love with, the more lenses you’ll have to see the world through.
    🌻 same old - by Jasmine Sun - half-baked futures
  • Perhaps growing up means choosing the same thing over and over again.
    🌻 same old - by Jasmine Sun - half-baked futures
  • rivers of blood spilled by all those generals and emperors so that, in glory and triumph, they could become the momentary masters of a fraction of a dot ...
    All Possible Views About Humanity's Future Are Wild
  • Unique places form unique people, who create unique works
    That which is unique, breaks - by Simon Sarris
  • The divine is still within people, and will not leave.
    That which is unique, breaks - by Simon Sarris
  • The hands that build the ship have knowledge that cannot be fully spoken, only taught by other hands. Each pair of hands must find another pair to learn from, and no pair of hands are the same. The injection-mold and metal die machines can make one thousand toys each minute, but they have no hands, they cannot teach.
    That which is unique, breaks - by Simon Sarris
  • The more finished goods become commodities, the fewer opportunities an individual has to generate new creation. The ability to mass-produce removes the opportunity for the great many to learn to produce at all.
    That which is unique, breaks - by Simon Sarris
  • If you commoditize toys, you remove the toymaker. If you remove the toymaker, the toy is only an object of consumption. It ceases to be an object of wonder.
    That which is unique, breaks - by Simon Sarris
  • the world is that it is a very malleable place
    The Most Precious Resource is Agency - by Simon Sarris
  • The act of creation causes imagination, not the other way around. To understand this is to understand the ecology that fosters the unique.
    The Most Precious Resource is Agency - by Simon Sarris
  • It seems that the more you ask of people, and the more you have them do, the more they are able to later do on their own.
    The Most Precious Resource is Agency - by Simon Sarris
  • so far and abstract that some children seem to apprise the opposite of agency, they take on a learned helplessness,
    The Most Precious Resource is Agency - by Simon Sarris
  • By confining meaningful work to an adult-only activity, it is little wonder that adolescence is a period of great depression. It would be surprising if it was not.
    The Most Precious Resource is Agency - by Simon Sarris
  • Much of the fault for this lies in an attempt at systematizing skill and knowledge transfer so thoroughly that people begin to conceive of it as the task of school, rather than a normal consequence of work. Because of this shift, childhood contains the age where one can intuit very well how the world works while being prevented from acting upon it meaningfully. Instead of an adolescence full of rites of passage, where one attempts to master something and accept responsibility, we have made it full of waiting, and doing work—for school is work—that nearly everyone knows is fake.
    The Most Precious Resource is Agency - by Simon Sarris
  • When I read biographies, early lives leap out the most.
    The Most Precious Resource is Agency - by Simon Sarris
  • Two types of people have the greatest capacity for learning: Those who are intensely mimetic and those who are incapable of mimesis.
    College as an incubator of Girardian terror | Dan Wang
  • trying to outdo each other in explicitness. Instead of being focused on real goals, their gaze is directed at each other,
    College as an incubator of Girardian terror | Dan Wang
  • I advise cultivating smaller social circles. Instead of going to class and preparing for exams, to go to the library and just read. Finally, not to join a fraternity or finance club, but to be part of a knitting circle or hiking group instead.
    College as an incubator of Girardian terror | Dan Wang
  • Mimetic contagion magnifies small fights by making people focus on each other. These processes follow their own logic until they reach conclusions that look so extreme to the outside world
    College as an incubator of Girardian terror | Dan Wang
  • There’s very little external intermediation, instead all competitive dynamics are internally mediated.
    College as an incubator of Girardian terror | Dan Wang
  • Where should we expect Girard’s predictions for mimetic crises to run most rampant? At places where values are confused and people are much the same. To me, that description best fits one place in particular: the American college.
    College as an incubator of Girardian terror | Dan Wang
  • The closer we are to other people—Girard means this in multiple dimensions—the more intensely that mimetic contagion will spread.
    College as an incubator of Girardian terror | Dan Wang
  • Girard presents a model of human conflict that is Shakespearean, not Marxist. That is, he thinks that people are not engaged in class struggle, in which proletarians unite against the bourgeoisie; instead, people reserve horror and resentment for people most like themselves. Consider the origin of the ancient grudge laid out in the opening line of Romeo and Juliet: “Two houses, both alike in dignity…” The Montagues and Capulets fight not because they’re so different but because they’re so alike.
    College as an incubator of Girardian terror | Dan Wang
  • Be suspicious of roles that compensate you with status or non-financial rewards.
    Mimetic - Brian Timar
  • …it’s better to be in an expanding world and not quite in exactly the right field, than to be in a contracting world where people’s worst behavior comes out and your mind is grooved in defensive and rent-seeking types of ways.
    Mimetic - Brian Timar
  • Among experimentalists, it’s not hard to find graduate students who can tell you every detail about how a particular machine operates, and almost nothing about why it should be built.
    Mimetic - Brian Timar
  • Some theorists seem to work primarily on fad topics inherited from other prominent departments
    Mimetic - Brian Timar
  • That’s the mimetic trap in a nutshell: it hurts to leave, and there’s nowhere to go. It decouples the social reward signal from the rest of objective reality
    Mimetic - Brian Timar
  • “Metamodern principles are already inherent to the contradictions of modern society; late modern society is pregnant with metamodernism. People need irony in order to build interpersonal trust based on self-knowledge, humor and critical thinking. Only when such trust is in place can we successfully gather around a meaningful struggle for something greater than ourselves, like the climate crisis. There, another ironic quirk of our age: Irony brings trust. And trust crowns a winner.”
    What is Metamodernism? - The Living Philosophy
  • From the perspective of Metamodernism, the Postmodernists had thrown a lot of baby out with the bathwater of Modernity. There’s no doubt that these traits can have dark sides and turn toxic but that does not mean they should be discarded.
    What is Metamodernism? - The Living Philosophy
  • It gave a platform to the voices exploited and neglected by Modernity’s narrative: the voices of African-Americans, women, the LGBT community, colonial voices and those of prisoners and the insane.
    What is Metamodernism? - The Living Philosophy
  • Hegel believed we lived at the end of history, Wittgenstein believed he had dissolved all the problems of philosophy, Freud believed he had found the source of all mental illness, Einstein came up with his theory of relativity and believed that a theory of everything was within his grasp. In short, we seemed to be solving all the problems that faced us at an incredible pace and ultimate truth seemed to be just around the corner.
    What is Metamodernism? - The Living Philosophy