flâneur

Talha Ashraf

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on the atlas — 12

highlights — 14

  • GO BLIND, GET HIGH, INVENT PSYCHOLOGY Which brings us to psychology. No offense to the mathematicians, but most of us find people way more interesting than numbers. So why did we spend centuries studying numbers, while we've only recently started studying people? Maybe it's because psychology is the domain with the deepest illusion of explanatory depth. You open your eyes and see stuff, and although this requires lots of complicated calculations and several anatomical miracles, it doesn't feel mysterious at all. You hear a song and remember the lyrics years later, and this seems totally natura…
    On the importance of staring directly into the sun
  • The more precise and niche the words I input, the better the internet would match me with people I could forge meaningful relationships with. This precision was hard for me, partly because my sense for how communication is supposed to work is shaped by reading mass media. Writing for a general public, you need to be broad and a bit bland. I didn’t want a general public. I wanted a specific set of people, the people who could help me along as a human being obsessed with certain intellectual problems. I didn’t know who these people were. I only knew that they existed. Hence my writing was a sear…
    A blog post is a very long and complex search query to find fascinating people and make them route interesting stuff to your inbox
  • ve noticed very ambitious people often fall into this sort of trap. Any old slob can predict what will happen tomorrow, they think, but I want to be truly great, so I will pick a much harder challenge: I will predict what will happen in a hundred years. It comes in lots of forms: instead of building another silly site like Instagram, I will build an artificial intelligence; instead of just doing another boring experiment, I will write a grand work of social theory. But being great isn’t as easy as just picking a hard goal — in fact, picking a really hard goal avoids reality almost as much as p…
    Confront reality (Aaron Swartz's Raw Thought)
  • If you try to tell the chess grandmaster that he’s no better than a random college professor, he can easily play a professor and prove you wrong. Every time he plays, he’s confronted with inarguable evidence of success or failure. But therapists can often feel like they’re helping — they just led their client to a breakthrough about their childhood — when they’re actually not making any difference. Synthesizing hundreds of these studies, K. Anders Ericsson concluded that what distinguishes experts from non-experts is engaging in what he calls deliberate practice.5 Mere practice isn’t enough — …
    Confront reality (Aaron Swartz's Raw Thought)
  • To find out if they can get stuff done, I just ask what they’ve done. If someone can actually get stuff done they should have done so by now.
    How I Hire Programmers (Aaron Swartz's Raw Thought)
  • I propose instead that one ask “What have you been thinking about lately?” First, the question is extremely open-ended. The answer could be a book, a movie, a relationship, a class, a job, a hobby, etc. Even better, it will be whichever of these is most interesting at the moment. Second, it sends the message that thinking, and thinking about thinking, is a fundamental human activity, and thus encourages it. Third, it’s easiest to answer, since by its nature its asking about what’s already on the person’s mind. Fourth, it’s likely to lead to productive dialog, as you can discuss the topic toget…
    The Smalltalk Question (Aaron Swartz's Raw Thought)
  • The people you consider eloquent may be otherworldly wordsmiths, but chances are they’ve just thought about it before. There is already a repository of preconceived ideas they remix into a response. You can do this too, and writing is a great tool for it.
    look what the cat brought in - by Anson Yu
  • Montessori schools are sensitive to the introduction of students who transfer from normal schools. If more than 10% to 20% of the older students have transferred from other schools, the culture will be perturbed and important norms will be lost. A common example of this is how non-Montessori school children tend to view self-directed time as a chance to socialize, which leads them to speak during the extended periods of self-directed work — a norm that tends to spread, since conversations attract more participants.
    Culture Studies—Asterisk
  • Children are biologically programmed to imitate the behavior of our older peers. There are no actions that an adult can take to rival the effectiveness of older children modeling desired behaviors for younger children.”
    Culture Studies—Asterisk
  • Whenever a new school was opened, Loyola seeded it with a set of teachers and exemplary students, usually future priests. New students arrived to join a group that was already established — a culture and a status hierarchy they had to adapt to.
    Culture Studies—Asterisk
  • In the classrooms, pupils sat in rows arranged not by age but by how far along they were in their studies. Rows would take turns reciting Latin, conjugating, paraphrasing, and so on. The students seated closest to the teacher would be given the most difficult assignments. As they improved, they would progress row by row, getting closer to the teacher until they were promoted to the next class.
    Culture Studies—Asterisk
  • The context is smarter than you. It holds more nuance and information than you can fit in your head. Collaborate with it.
    Everything that turned out well in my life followed the same design process
  • An essay is good if it fits a context made up of 1) the truth, 2) the intellectual needs of the writer, and 3) the reader's mind. The better the form fits that context—the truer, more insight-generating, and resonant it is—the better the essay.
    Everything that turned out well in my life followed the same design process
  • Another example of easy things being hard is that when you want to lose weight, deciding to eat less seems easier than exercising, but it's actually much harder. It's easier to exercise than it is to control food. When you get into the details you realize that choosing not to eat is a thought that needs to be fought all the time you're awake but the decision to exercise is a one time decision. To fail at diet, you only need to fail at the decision once during the day, but to succeed at exercise you only need to succeed once during the day. This is also a matter of working with your brain inste…
    Activity | Talha Ashraf | LinkedIn