Lucienne Moran

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on the atlas — 91

highlights — 45

Hormesis is a term used by toxicologists to refer to a biphasic dose response to an environmental agent characterized by a low dose stimulation or beneficial effect and a high dose inhibitory or toxic effect. In the fields of biology and medicine hormesis is defined as an adaptive response of cells and organisms to a moderate (usually intermittent) stress. Examples include ischemic preconditioning, exercise, dietary energy restriction and exposures to low doses of certain phytochemicals. Recent findings have elucidated the cellular signaling pathways and molecular mechanisms that mediate horme…
Hormesis Defined - PMC
One day during lecture he pulled out a package of crackers and started eating them. He offered some to his students, and some of them ate. “Nice biscuit, don’t you think?” he said, so the story goes. One the students had all nodded along, Professor K turned the package around and showed them that he had been eating dog biscuits. At least one student is said to have run to the toilet to vom. Said jolly old Alf, “I have just demonstrated that people don’t just eat food, but also words, and that the taste of the former is often outdone by the taste of the latter.”
Against Manualized Relating - by Sorbie - Miss Apprehension
This solution was called E Prime (standing for English Prime, as contrasted to Simple English (the language in which I am writing)), and its mechanism was…to get rid of the copula entirely. No is, am, was, be, are. The idea was that doing so would keep the speaker tethered to the highest level of abstraction instead of letting him confuse his perceptions for the literal truth, for the Thing That Happened. I think Bourland and Marsha Linehan would have got along.
Against Manualized Relating - by Sorbie - Miss Apprehension
This is problematic because humans are essentially locked into the Verbal level of apprehension, but Language itself obscures this fact. The “electro-colloidal” experiences in the brain alluded to in the diagram above iterate on one another over the course of a person’s life, thereby encoding his subjectivity in his Brain. But he is chained to the clumsy apparatus of Language to express his subjectivity. Though language is shared, perception can never be.
Against Manualized Relating - by Sorbie - Miss Apprehension
“A map is not the territory it represents, but, if correct, it has a similar structure to the territory, which accounts for its usefulness. If a map could be ideally correct, it would include, in a reduced scale, a map of the map.”
Against Manualized Relating - by Sorbie - Miss Apprehension
Manualized Relating is fundamentally dishonest because it doesn’t even know what it is talking about most of the time. Manualized Relating thinks that a group is the size of a person and a person is the size of the world. Manualized Relating doesn’t know what the World is. Manualized relating knows about Things in the World, and it has systematized these Things in the Manual so that you never have to suffer the discomfort of experiencing the World. You never have to learn that the Thing in the Manual is not the Thing in the World.
Against Manualized Relating - by Sorbie - Miss Apprehension
In Manualized Relating there is talk of the Demographic, of the Identity Group. We don’t really mean this, though. We don’t mean “listen to black people” when we say “listen to black people”—how could we? We don’t know every single black person. All black people are not one person. We mean Listen To My Opinion, which we wish was held by all black people. We don’t mean “from the river to the sea” when we say “from the river to the sea”—how could we? We don’t even know which river or which sea. We mean Listen To My Opinion, which is that it is wrong to murder civilians. Are these even My Opinion…
Against Manualized Relating - by Sorbie - Miss Apprehension
we’ve seen your kind before. Our list of archetypes has every conceivable archetype. There is no problem you can have for which we don’t have a solution. We have a recipe you can follow right here in our Manual, if you want to get better badly enough. If the recipe doesn’t work, maybe you didn’t follow it right. Or maybe our recipe isn’t quite right. Could it be? Here, let’s add a step. There, that’s better. Now we have a Special Flexible Recipe for Extra Special Difficult Cases Like Yours. But don’t you forget how hard you made us work. We won’t let you forget.
Against Manualized Relating - by Sorbie - Miss Apprehension
Historically you could find these Manuals in book stores and libraries.
Against Manualized Relating - by Sorbie - Miss Apprehension
How These 3 Types of Attention Interact with Each Other Spotlight makes Daylight possible. By being able to focus on what’s in front of you, you gain greater control over your day and can make constructive self-reflection a regular practice. Daylight points toward Starlight. Getting in touch with yourself and your life story helps you choose and commit to a long-term vision and goal. Starlight makes sense of Spotlight. Strong Spotlight without Starlight makes you into an empty productivity machine. You become great at getting things done, but are you getting the right, meaningful things done? …
Why you don't know yourself as well as you could
If your mind is constantly filled with distractions and you’re not making the time and effort to spend time with yourself and your life story, you lose yourself. You become unable to figure out who you are, what made you who you are, who you’re supposed to become, and where you want to go. When you lose your daylight, you’re most susceptible to having your values, opinions, and life goals influenced by external noise. This explains why a lot of people you meet nowadays sound like they picked one of the pre-packaged identities from social media and are designing their life around it.
Why you don't know yourself as well as you could
“It’s called the starlight because when you feel lost, you look up to the stars, and you remember the direction you are travelling in.” -Johann Harri (Stolen Focus)
Why you don't know yourself as well as you could
How is this helpful? If you take the time to ask this question, think, and answer honestly, you can experience a newfound inner strength. Once you’ve identified these personally relevant temptations, you’re way more likely to catch them as they come up in your day, identify them for what they are — false ideas, and move on.
A simple thought experiment for cultivating inner strength
I love struggling, actually. It makes me feel alive. (60 Minutes on CBS news)
Effortless Action Is The Most Stupid Idea Ever
First, this idea is spread by those who want to make themselves feel better about their inability to put in consistent effort. They are philosophizing and spiritualizing their failure to do what needs to be done. They are constructing a narrative that this wasn’t “their thing” because, if it was, they would’ve been able to do it effortlessly.
Effortless Action Is The Most Stupid Idea Ever
“The discipline of suffering, of great suffering — do you not know that only this discipline has created all enhancements of man so far?” — Friedrich Nietzsche
Effortless Action Is The Most Stupid Idea Ever
Just like we have hustle culture driving people straight to burnout, we have the bastardized version of Eastern Spirituality driving people, especially creatives, to getting zero work done.
Effortless Action Is The Most Stupid Idea Ever
What came first: Our lack of engagement in life, which made us more vulnerable to digital distractions and temptations? Or getting hooked on the screen, which made us less able to focus and create moments of deep engagement and meaning.
You Will Live Like a Lobotomized Pigeon If You Don’t Reclaim Your Focus
The Austrian writer Robert Musil, one of the prophets of the uni-context, wrote: The probability of learning something unusual from a newspaper … is far greater than that of experiencing it; in other words, it is in the realm of the abstract that the more important things happen in these times, and it is the unimportant that happens in real life
A Philosopher’s One-Word Theory to Explain Why the World Feels So Weird
I’m holding an essay by Georg Simmel you assigned me, The Metropolis and Mental Life. It was published in the early 1900s. Here’s a quote: Money takes the place of all the manifoldness of things and expresses all qualitative distinctions between them in the distinction of how much. To the extent that money can become a common denominator of all values, it becomes the frightful leveler. All things rest on the same level and are distinguished only by their amounts.” Simmel is putting his finger on the idea that in the modern world, local norms are melting, and what replaces them is the psycholog…
A Philosopher’s One-Word Theory to Explain Why the World Feels So Weird
Suppose one gets less popular because it doesn’t teach many AP classes. They were offering an individualized curriculum, but now everyone’s going to the other school, so they say, “We’ve got to teach AP classes too.” The process homogenizes the two schools, so they can compete. That’s not the only possible result. They could specialize, with one becoming the school for freshman and sophomore years, the other becoming the school for junior and senior years. But if they don’t recreate a normative barrier, you get homogenization from comparison.
A Philosopher’s One-Word Theory to Explain Why the World Feels So Weird
Callard: Imagine two school districts with two high schools that do things slightly differently. If you’re in district A, you go to school A, and if you’re in district B, you go to school B. There might be a lot of information about what they do, but people treat it as: I’m in this district, so I go to this school. Then they change the rule: You can go to either school no matter where you live. Suddenly there is motivation to compare. You had the information before, but no motivation to compare, because the schools were not in the same space of choice, the same evaluative field.
A Philosopher’s One-Word Theory to Explain Why the World Feels So Weird
For most of human history, people judged norms based on local context. A home had its own rules, a cathedral its own rules, and a classroom or bar or funeral parlor had its own rules. But now it is almost like we are constantly living in universal rooms, and the universal room we occupy is assumed to have universal values and universal norms. That has specific implications. First, rather than talk about what is good, which is context-dependent, we tend to focus about universal truths, and it’s easier to talk about universal bads than goods, so people focus on negativity. Two, character is cont…
A Philosopher’s One-Word Theory to Explain Why the World Feels So Weird
And then, there’s virtue. Think about Aristotle, because he’s my prime example of a virtue ethicist. By its nature, virtue is a concept that privileges the good side rather than the bad. Aristotle’s Nicomachean Ethics tells you what it is to be courageous and wise and just and generous. There are corresponding discussions of how you might go wrong. But those are predicated on first understanding the positive value of certain kinds of behavior. So virtue ethics naturally has a positivity bias that is precisely the opposite of the bias we have now
A Philosopher’s One-Word Theory to Explain Why the World Feels So Weird
The thing about character is that it shows up differently in different circumstances. Say I’m irascible, easily provoked to anger. Even an irascible person isn’t angry all the time. There might be circumstances where everybody gets angry, and so you can’t see my irascibility, because even though I’m angry, so is everybody else. Grasping character requires a lot of context. To understand someone’s character, you need to know them well and to have experienced them in a variety of contexts before you can generalize. With identity categories like woman, disabled, gay, Jewish, or American, the stri…
A Philosopher’s One-Word Theory to Explain Why the World Feels So Weird
Callard: One way I illustrate the norms that are distinctively uni-contextual, and contrast them with our older multi-contextual norms, is to think about ways I might correct a student. Suppose they come late to class, or interrupt another student, or raise their hand to say something that has nothing to do with what the previous person just said. Those are all ways I can correct a student in my capacity as teacher. The other students cannot make those corrections. But now imagine that a student makes a sexist or racist comment. I can correct that too, but so can another student in the class. …
A Philosopher’s One-Word Theory to Explain Why the World Feels So Weird
You might say your chicken enchilada thing just isn’t that important or good. But let’s say something really good happened. Someone in Iran wrote an amazing poem. Even then, well, they wrote it in a language a lot of us don’t speak, and we need time to evaluate and culturally assimilate it. So even pretty significant goods are going to be throttled in their ability to reach a substantial audience. From chicken enchiladas to great works of art, we’ve got the same problem.
A Philosopher’s One-Word Theory to Explain Why the World Feels So Weird
Callard: In general, goodness is more context-dependent than badness. There isn’t really anything that’s good all the time for everyone independent of context. Happiness depends on your context and who you are. There isn’t anything that will always make a person happy. But there are reliable ways to make people unhappy. There’s a set of evils that are close to universal: death, pain, illness, violence. Even if someone’s in very different circumstances from yours, if you see they’re being subjected to one of those, you can interpret it as suffering and understand it. So we should predict that w…
A Philosopher’s One-Word Theory to Explain Why the World Feels So Weird
What the techno-determinism angle misses is: Why did these technologies catch on in the first place? Why was radio popular? Why did we come up with new things—television, smartphones—and why did they catch on, too? Not every technology people have invented has caught on the way these forms have. They caught on in large part because of this impulse people have to live in a uni-context. Thompson: Does the uni-context flow out of this adventurousness in the human spirit to become bigger than ourselves, to be everywhere, and to know everything? Callard: Yeah, it absolutely does. There’s a conversa…
A Philosopher’s One-Word Theory to Explain Why the World Feels So Weird
For most of human history, contexts were local and multiple. If you wanted to know how you should act, you would look around. Am I in a field? Am I inside my home? Am I in the church? Am I in a bar? You would immediately get guidance by looking both at your physical environment and at the people around you and how they were acting. The uni-context is a scenario in which the ways you should act become the same across all different contexts. There’s just one set of norms you should follow all times, irrespective of context.
A Philosopher’s One-Word Theory to Explain Why the World Feels So Weird
Callard takes the idea significantly further. She asks: How do all other norms—our morals, our ethics, our sense of what is good for us and for others—change when we continually imagine ourselves to be living in a universal room with everybody else?
A Philosopher’s One-Word Theory to Explain Why the World Feels So Weird
One way to prepare your mind for Callard’s theory of the uni-context is to think about the better-known concept of “context collapse.” If you post something to social media, it will be simultaneously visible to your boss, your parents, your ex, and total strangers. So, while your offline life might be distinct with each of these groups—you might be differential to your boss, childish with your parents, and bawdy with your friends—all of those distinctions are flattened on the internet. That’s context collapse, and you can think of it as the answer to a question: How do informational norms chan…
A Philosopher’s One-Word Theory to Explain Why the World Feels So Weird
Without the freedom facilitated by myth and symbols, one is “nothing but” an architect, an office worker, a parent, a director, or whatever limited horizon they adopted. And that narrow spiritual horizon leads, Jung claimed, to neurosis. Talking about his clients who had successful lives “on paper” but were suffering psychologically and spiritually, he said, “They seek position, marriage, reputation, outward success of money, and remain unhappy and neurotic even when they have attained what they were seeking. Such people are usually confined within too narrow a spiritual horizon. Their life ha…
How To Mythologize Your Life to Survive and Thrive in The AI Age
The point of having a personal myth is in having an internal structure that supports you as you navigate this overwhelming world. The point is in having all of your inner resources united and channeled in the same direction. The point is in feeling like you’re standing on firm ground even when the whole world is shaking. Still, all of these greater benefits of having a personal myth come directly or indirectly from an increased capacity to focus. To be more precise, they come from strengthened micro and macro focus.
You Will Not Survive the AI Age if You Don’t Have a Personal Myth
“Every individual seeks—indeed must seek if he or she is to remain sane—to bring some order and coherence into the stream of sensations, emotions, and ideas entering his or her consciousness. Each one of us is forced to do deliberately for oneself what in previous ages was done by family, custom, church, and state, namely, form the myths in terms of which we can make some sense of experience.” — Rollo May (The Cry For Myth)
You Will Not Survive the AI Age if You Don’t Have a Personal Myth
As James Baldwin said (in a 1963 Life profile, just a week after he appeared on the cover of Time): “You think your pain and your heartbreak are unprecedented in the history of the world, but then you read. It was Dostoevsky and Dickens who taught me that the things that tormented me most were the very things that connected me with all the people who were alive, or who ever had been alive.”
The End of Reading Is Here - The Atlantic
Before the newspaper, the novel was seen as a threat to good reading habits and moral stature. Thomas Jefferson thought that one of the greatest obstacles to educating women was their passion for fiction, which seduced them away from “wholesome reading.” Once a woman has fallen for novels, he wrote, “nothing can engage attention unless dressed in all the figments of fancy.”
The End of Reading Is Here - The Atlantic
The trouble is that writing is not merely the act of transcribing fully formed thoughts—if it were, it wouldn’t be hard. Writing is the way people figure out what they think, and how to convey those thoughts to someone who doesn’t already share them. Cal Newport, a computer-science professor at Georgetown University, argues that the process of writing forces people to think in an orderly, linear fashion. It exposes flabby thoughts and shoddy reasoning. And the time and focus it takes to form thoughts into words, sentences, and paragraphs allow the author to make new connections and discover ne…
The End of Reading Is Here - The Atlantic
Print media gave the public access only to politicians’ polished remarks; video let Americans see their presidents sweat, sneeze, and stammer. Voters began to focus on “dating criteria” instead of “résumé criteria,”
The End of Reading Is Here - The Atlantic
Speakers can’t edit their words the way writers can, so they press on without admitting their mistakes. If they later contradict themselves, they don’t expect the audience to recall their earlier statements. Meaning depends on the identity of the speaker, not on any concept of objective truth.
The End of Reading Is Here - The Atlantic
In Plato’s Phaedrus, Socrates famously argues that the advent of writing “will create forgetfulness in the learners’ souls, because they will not use their memories; they will trust to the external written characters and not remember of themselves.”
The End of Reading Is Here - The Atlantic
Alexander Luria, who traveled to remote villages in Uzbekistan and Kirghizia in the 1930s, when peasants were starting to receive rudimentary reading and writing instruction. Luria met his subjects at teahouses, in field camps, and around evening fires. There, he posed a number of questions designed to elucidate differences in how illiterate and literate peasants thought. Luria told the peasants: “In the Far North, all bears are white. Novaya Zemlya is in the Far North.” He then asked them the color of bears in Novaya Zemlya. The literate peasants were able to complete the syllogism. But the i…
The End of Reading Is Here - The Atlantic
This disequilibrium, which made my life a kind of endless disputation, is the main reason why I became an intellectual.
Simone de Beauvoir
Writing detaches the message from the messenger, allowing for a more dispassionate spread of information than was possible in oral societies. Because writing a phrase takes longer than speaking it, writing forces the author to slow down and reflect. Written language tends to employ more complex sentence structures and vocabulary than spoken language. And unlike speech, it doesn’t disappear into the ether. Readers can return to a text and plumb it for new meaning and understanding. Because writing endures, individuals can temporarily forget what they’ve written but trust that it won’t be lost f…
The End of Reading Is Here - The Atlantic
Starting [at a young age] he’s read everything that he could find about business. The subject that interests him, he’s read newspapers, biographies, trade press. He went over to his grandfather who was a grocer and he read the progressive grocer magazine, and he read articles on how to stock a meat department... What he’s really done is he’s created this immense vertical filing cabinet in his brain of layers and layers and layers of files of information that he can draw back on now for more than 70 years worth of data.
Curius / Onboarding