flâneur

Khalid Ali

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on the atlas — 176

highlights — 386

  • However, East Asians were lower in assertiveness, which consistently mediated the leadership attainment gap between East Asians and South Asians. These results suggest that East Asians hit the bamboo ceiling because their low assertiveness is incongruent with American norms concerning how leaders should communicate.
    Why more South Asian than East Asian CEOs? - Marginal REVOLUTION
  • “Anything that can be done chemically can be done in other ways.”
    The Mourning After, by Maggie Nelson
  • As the philosopher Judith Butler writes about mourning—and I consider early sobriety a form of mourning, insofar as it requires letting go of forms of coping that one previously felt unable to go on without—it involves “agreeing to undergo a transformation (perhaps one should say submitting to a transformation) the full result of which one cannot know in advance.”
    The Mourning After, by Maggie Nelson
  • However, even if you are skeptical about the social value of earning a PhD, the number of mentored individuals who go on to start firms or earn patents appears substantial. Just as athletic talent can wither without guidance, it seems that intellectual talent may also be underutilized without proper mentorship, with many high-IQ individuals failing to reach their full potential.
    Increasing the Supply of Very High-IQ Workers - Marginal REVOLUTION
  • You already know the world, people are what make life special
    Travel philosophies for the well-traveled - Marginal REVOLUTION
  • Try to visit “events,” especially temporary events
    Travel philosophies for the well-traveled - Marginal REVOLUTION
  • As Thiel says in his book, the complex multi-step plans work. Try it! The rush of achieving one is incomparable.
    Making Things Happen
  • a significant fraction of Anthropic technical staff is accomplishing their core work multiple times faster than they could without AI assistance.
    When AI builds itself \ Anthropic
  • Building a frontier model takes two broad categories of work. There is engineering: writing the code, standing up the infrastructure, and overseeing the model training. And there is research: deciding what experiments to run, interpreting what comes back, and figuring out which ideas to try next.
    When AI builds itself \ Anthropic
  • a salary, an identity, relationships, status, a sense of meaning, and so on.
    Everything that turned out well in my life followed the same design process
  • Are you looking for a partner? Talk to people who are happily married and ask them what they did.
    Everything that turned out well in my life followed the same design process
  • Instead you say, “I’m just going to pay attention to what happens when I hang out with various people and iterate toward something that feels alive”—you start from the context.
    Everything that turned out well in my life followed the same design process
  • I learned that there is a boy who fears that transformation and its consequences. That boy, I think, really loves the world. He is maybe a few years younger than me, maybe not.
    silencing thought - by Uzay - zephyr song
  • it took awhile to find my type of stories and there was a steep learning curve to loving things
    life recently - by nancy - general zuo's chicken
  • people enjoy art because of relatedness rather than separateness
    integration - by vincent huang - a slice of my mind
  • an inability to perceive the world as anything other than a reflection of yourself
    integration - by vincent huang - a slice of my mind
  • All that remains, then, is to construct new, flattened, and diversified hierarchies of desire. There is no reason to rail against the aspirants because they are the way that they are.
    Diversifying mimicry - Sungjoo
  • And in most cases, the veneration of signals prevent people from actually developing skills because they burn all their time on developing said signals.
    Diversifying mimicry - Sungjoo
  • It is equally ridiculous how poor of a conduit achievements are to skill nowadays.
    Diversifying mimicry - Sungjoo
  • The very real game of career Jenga, stacking test score on top of internship on top of degree on top of position, ends up prioritizing the accumulation of nominal achievements over the creation of real value
    Diversifying mimicry - Sungjoo
  • we should make visible the process of building companies.
    Diversifying mimicry - Sungjoo
  • Every billionaire should create their own Thiel Fellowship
    Diversifying mimicry - Sungjoo
  • We should thus try to revive an extensive system of patronage, which should provide seemingly-excessive amounts of capital to fund residencies and such and nurse the field back to its status of centuries prior.
    Diversifying mimicry - Sungjoo
  • If playing stupid games leads to stupid prizes, maybe we should find games that are invariably less stupid than bemoaning the fact that humans inevitably play games.
    Diversifying mimicry - Sungjoo
  • Senegalese women who were able to receive hidden income immediately cut transfers to relatives by a quarter and spent the money on healthcare for themselves.
    How funerals keep Africa poor - David Oks
  • we have an understandable wistfulness for the imagined world of warm communities and thick familial bonds. But we forget how suffocating that social world is, how parasitical it is on its most productive members, and how poisonous it is for any prospect of economic development.
    How funerals keep Africa poor - David Oks
  • why virtually every economically successful society has graduated from a social order that stresses the claims of kin into one that stresses the rights of individuals.
    How funerals keep Africa poor - David Oks
  • the demands that the kinship group makes on its most productive members are not simply demands for solidarity but demands for a kind of enforced mediocrity.
    How funerals keep Africa poor - David Oks
  • The kinship network has a strong interest in preventing any of its members from becoming prosperous enough to no longer need it: someone who no longer needs your help is also someone who might not help you.
    How funerals keep Africa poor - David Oks
  • Ghanaian hospitals were earning more from storing dead bodies than from treating living patients.
    How funerals keep Africa poor - David Oks
  • rural Kenyan women were willing to pay significant sums in order to hide their income from relatives; likewise, in Cameroon, it’s common for people to pretend to be poorer than they are, and thus avoid sharing obligations, by taking out unnecessary bank loans fully collateralized by their savings.
    How funerals keep Africa poor - David Oks
  • And so, in a kinship society, nothing that you earn is truly yours. If you make money beyond the point of subsistence, you’ll be expected to share it with your less-fortunate relatives; if you start a business, you’ll be expected to hire your cousins or nephews or in-laws, even if they’re not the best possible employees; if you buy a car, you’ll be expected to lend it out to relatives who need it.
    How funerals keep Africa poor - David Oks
  • A person who fails to demonstrate loyalty to the group risks losing access to everything the group provides. And this threat is powerfully enforced in traditional cultures. In a society where your standing in the kinship network is often the single most important thing about you, being cast out is a kind of social death.
    How funerals keep Africa poor - David Oks
  • And you can’t really say no to these obligations.
    How funerals keep Africa poor - David Oks
  • what the kinship group gives, the kinship group must also take.
    How funerals keep Africa poor - David Oks
  • African societies, as a broad pattern, have extraordinarily intense kinship ties.
    How funerals keep Africa poor - David Oks
  • Kinship societies are actively hostile to economic growth, because economic growth undermines the basis of kinship: that is why kinship societies demand constant, visible sacrifices of wealth—funerals being the most spectacular—that make it extraordinarily difficult for any individual to accumulate capital, reinvest their assets, and pull ahead.
    How funerals keep Africa poor - David Oks
  • far more attention is given to their funeral than to caring for them while they’re alive?
    How funerals keep Africa poor - David Oks
  • reverence toward elders
    How funerals keep Africa poor - David Oks
  • Sometimes they’ll have insurance of some kind: funeral insurance, where the payout is earmarked for the funeral costs, is one of the most popular financial products in sub-Saharan Africa—often, in fact, more popular than health insurance.
    How funerals keep Africa poor - David Oks
  • The pro-social script—date around, marry, settle down, buy a house, have a kid—feels more like a luxury every year.
    The Monks in the Casino
  • Just as poor people buy lotto tickets when they feel their income is “low relative to an implicit standard,” perhaps young people today are drawn to get-rich-faster schemes precisely because middle-class hallmarks, such as homeownership and children, feel like luxuries that require the sort of unlikely windfalls that only come from risky speculation.
    The Monks in the Casino
  • “We talk a lot about the ‘male loneliness crisis’ but in my estimation we don’t talk enough about the ‘male suckerfication crisis,’” Max Read wrote. Young men are “continuously cultivated” by their media to become dupes and suckers “in service of the profits of an ever-expanding roster of gambling and gambling-adjacent industries In the 2010s, the professional sports leagues saw that transforming themselves into legal gambling platforms would be a quadruple-win: They would get more viewers, more ads, more business partnerships, and more overall revenue.
    The Monks in the Casino
  • “secular monks” to describe young men who associate solitude with strength.
    The Monks in the Casino
  • has also mostly come from an increase in solo workouts—particularly for young men. Every gender and age group is more likely to work out alone than they were at the beginning of the 21st century, according to an analysis by Luke Pardue
    The Monks in the Casino
  • My wife and I used to look at our baby daughter in real profound disbelief that she would someday grow into a toddler, a child, a person with her own thoughts and agency and personality that we could actually carry a conversation with. She eventually did, and then some, but what’s amazing is that she’s so obviously been in there the whole time. All of what makes her her, her curiosity, her meticulousness, her emotional intelligence, her imagination, it was always all there from the beginning even as she was going through all of the stages and perpetually transforming. We think back to when we’…
    On Being a Dad - Derek Thompson
  • There is the third reason to become a parent: It gives the people you love another way to know you.
    On Being a Dad - Derek Thompson
  • line I love from the book & Sons by David Gilbert. Two men walk into a pub and see their mother: “The brothers straightened, reshaped as sons.” How true, how strange. It is an awkward pleasure to see an old friend around his parents. Some softening or hardening in their face, some slouching or straightening in their back. The presence of a parent remakes a child, transforms them back into a child.
    On Being a Dad - Derek Thompson
  • There is no such thing as a baby,” the psychologist D. W. Winnicott once said. “If you set out to describe a baby, you will find you are describing a baby and someone”—such as a parent, a nanny, or an older sibling. “A baby cannot exist alone but is essentially part of a relationship.”
    On Being a Dad - Derek Thompson
  • Parenthood abruptly catapults us into a permanent relationship with a stranger,” Andrew Solomon wrote in Far From the Tree.
    On Being a Dad - Derek Thompson