flâneur

Oliver Lin

4 followers · 2 following · 321 views

on the atlas — 27

highlights — 41

  • To spare a life Was the mark of the master; the mark of his slave Was fear.
    Mythologies by David Lehman | Poetry Foundation
  • Admit it: you used to walk around thinking there had To be a reason for things, for everything.
    Mythologies by David Lehman | Poetry Foundation
  • In economics, researchers typically perform “robustness checks” to demonstrate that their research findings hold up to different methods for analysing the data (a comprehensive version of this is often described as multiverse analysis in psychology).
    The speed of science - Works in Progress
  • extremely valuable product for the world: liquid, efficient markets
    Beyond the Sky - Colossus
  • people on the road to character understand that no person can achieve self-mastery on his or her own. Individual will, reason and compassion are not strong enough to consistently defeat selfishness, pride and self-deception. We all need redemptive assistance from outside. People on this road see life as a process of commitment making.
    Opinion | The Moral Bucket List - The New York Times
  • SELF-DEFEAT External success is achieved through competition with others. But character is built during the confrontation with your own weakness.
    Opinion | The Moral Bucket List - The New York Times
  • The nature of ambition exacerbates this problem. Ambition comes in two forms, one that precedes interest in the subject and one that grows out of it. Most people who do great work have a mix, and the more you have of the former, the harder it will be to decide what to do.
    How to Do Great Work
  • Before you’ve noticed important details they are, of course, basically invisible. It’s hard to put your attention on them because you don’t even know what you’re looking for. But after you see them they quickly become so integrated into your intuitive models of the world that they become essentially transparent. Do you remember the insights that were crucial in learning to ride a bike or drive? How about the details and insights you have that led you to be good at the things you’re good at? This means it’s really easy to get stuck. Stuck in your current way of seeing and thinking about things.…
    Reality has a surprising amount of detail
  • “If we ever get AI that is strong enough to basically be God and solve all of our problems, it will need to use the same techniques that the actual God uses in terms of maintaining some distance. I do think it’s possible that the AI will be like, Now I am God. I’ve concluded that the actual God made exactly the right decision on how much evil to permit in the universe. Therefore I refuse to change anything.”
    Child’s Play, by Sam Kriss
  • There are people who can’t order at a restaurant without having an AI scan the menu and tell them what to eat; people who no longer know how to talk to their friends and family and get ChatGPT to do it instead.
    Child’s Play, by Sam Kriss
  • “Humans are great at agency and terrible at book learning,” Alexander told me. “Lizards have agency. We got the agency with the lizard brain. We only got book learning recently. The AIs are the opposite.” He still thinks it’s only a matter of time before they catch up. “If you were to ask an AI how should the world’s savviest businessman respond to this circumstance, they could create a good guess. Yet somehow they can’t even run a vending machine. They have the hard part. They just need the easy part that lizards can do. Surely somebody can figure out how to do this lizard thing and then ever…
    Child’s Play, by Sam Kriss
  • “Wow,” she said. “You’re really tall.” “I suppose I am,” I said. “Do you think one day you’ll ever be as tall as me?” She considered this for a moment, at which point someone who may or may not have been one of her mothers swooped in. “Well,” she asked the girl, “how would you answer this question with your knowledge of genetics?”
    Child’s Play, by Sam Kriss
  • Alexander is one of the leading proponents of rationalism, which is—depending on whom you ask—either a major intellectual movement or a nerdy Bay Area subculture or a small network of friend groups and polycules.
    Child’s Play, by Sam Kriss
  • It is well that we are so foolish, or what little freedom we have would be wasted on us. It is for this that Book of Cold Rain says one must never take the shortest path between two points.
    The Whispering Earring (Scott Alexander) - Croissanthology
  • We must be willing to say that the hedge fund managers have no clothes and their parading about is an unpleasant sight for us all. Your daughter has taken a job at Blackstone? My condolences.
    Opinion | The Finance Industry Is a Grift. Let’s Start Treating It That Way. - The New York Times
  • High-frequency trading is not necessary to provide liquidity.
    Opinion | The Finance Industry Is a Grift. Let’s Start Treating It That Way. - The New York Times
  • We should reform our laws so that when companies go belly up, workers and their communities get to join the line for compensation ahead of the lenders who financed the mess. We should ban stock buybacks, which were illegal until the 1980s.
    Opinion | The Finance Industry Is a Grift. Let’s Start Treating It That Way. - The New York Times
  • We should establish regulations to curtail the riskiest and most convoluted financial activities, just as we did with stocks and bonds back in the day. We should stop giving companies a tax advantage for carrying more debt and start imposing a transaction tax to make strategies like high-frequency trading unattractive.
    Opinion | The Finance Industry Is a Grift. Let’s Start Treating It That Way. - The New York Times
  • So few resources have gone toward new equipment, toward developing better ways to do things and toward hiring and training that productivity in America’s manufacturing sector — the output generated per hour of labor — has been falling. More workers are now needed than in 2012 for the same result.
    Opinion | The Finance Industry Is a Grift. Let’s Start Treating It That Way. - The New York Times
  • The more that pension funds allocate to these sophisticated, high-fee, “alternative” investments, the lower their returns.
    Opinion | The Finance Industry Is a Grift. Let’s Start Treating It That Way. - The New York Times
  • Businesses acquired by private equity firms are five to 10 times as likely to go bankrupt as those that aren’t. For the funds that buy and sell them, that’s merely the price of doing business.
    Opinion | The Finance Industry Is a Grift. Let’s Start Treating It That Way. - The New York Times
  • When your local hospital and nursing home get loaded with debt, cut back on staffing and start charging more for worse patient outcomes, that’s financialization as tragedy. When airlines earn more by selling miles to credit card companies than by flying passengers, with consumers footing the hidden bill every time they swipe at the register, financialization has become farce.
    Opinion | The Finance Industry Is a Grift. Let’s Start Treating It That Way. - The New York Times
  • Less than 10 percent of Goldman’s work in 2024, measured by revenue, was helping businesses raise capital. Loans of Goldman’s own funds to operating businesses accounted for less than 2 percent of its assets. At JPMorgan Chase the figures were 4 and 5 percent; at Morgan Stanley, 7 and 2 percent.
    Opinion | The Finance Industry Is a Grift. Let’s Start Treating It That Way. - The New York Times
  • The phrase “inconvenience is the cost of community” and variations on it – including “loneliness is the price you pay for a life of convenience”
    Is inconvenience the cost of community? | Dazed
  • in recent years it has become impossible to dodge the phrase “protect your peace” online, a mantra-turned-social-movement encouraging people to live stress-free lives by limiting exposure to ‘negativity’. While the idea isn’t inherently harmful, it has unfortunately become synonymous with the act of fully disengaging from people as soon as you’re faced with any emotional discomfort. Tired? Cancel your plans. Boyfriend left the bathroom a mess? Break up. Family member made a joke at your expense last Christmas? Well, you hope the laughs were worth it, as that’s the last festive drinks you’ll be…
    Is inconvenience the cost of community? | Dazed
  • A deep success story of modern neuroscience is the theory that dopamine neurons signal a prediction error, the error between what reward you expected and what you got.
    Why does the brain have a reward prediction error? | by Mark Humphries | The Spike | Medium
  • His father is dead now, but my husband tells me that in the days of their marriage his parents, on the rare occasions they went out for dinner, would often spend the evening in silence. They took pride in it; for them, he said, it signified that their intimacy was complete.
    Coventry | Rachel Cusk | Granta Magazine
  • Turns out confidence doesn’t come from external proof of things — it comes from deciding you’ll figure it out given time. Meeting people in SF who just did things, rather than ruminating about whether they were the right person for the task, taught me more than any project milestone ever could.
    i think about it all the time - by Claire Wang
  • The mountain tops are glorious But it’s in the valleys I grow!
    It’s In The Valleys I Grow | From Behind the Pen
  • theirs is the self-absorption of someone driving a car through long distances, seeing the world but shut off from it, both free and unfree.
    Coventry | Rachel Cusk | Granta Magazine
  • What other people don’t like, I suppose, is the idea that on the other side of all that effort, all those years of joy and toil and creation, all that suspension of disbelief, there is nothing – or nothing palpable – to look forward to; that one might wake from family life as from a bacchanal into the cold light of day. I wonder whether the silent couples once spent two thirds – or more – of their time talking about their children. I wonder whether their silence represents the problem of reconnecting to reality once the story has ended.
    Coventry | Rachel Cusk | Granta Magazine
  • Families tend to be conscious of being looked at: they perform themselves as though in expectation of a response, a judgement.
    Coventry | Rachel Cusk | Granta Magazine
  • There’s an idea that a successful narrative is one that gives you no choice in the matter; but mostly I imagine it’s a question of both sides conspiring to keep the suspension aloft. Being sent to Coventry is perhaps an example of such a conspiracy: it would be hard to send someone to Coventry who refused to believe they were there, just as it’s hard to fight a pacifist. Much of my being in Coventry, I now realise, lay in my willingness to recognise and accept the state of being outcast. I suspended my disbelief and, having done so I jeopardised, in some sense, my relationship with reality.
    Coventry | Rachel Cusk | Granta Magazine
  • One afternoon, at her house, she talks about a feeling she’s been having lately – that she’d like to see, piled up in a great mountain, all the things that have been bought and thrown away over the course of their family life. All the toys and the tricycles, the Barbie dolls, the babygros, the cribs and the chemistry sets, the outgrown shoes and clothes, the abandoned violins and sports equipment, the bright crumpled paper plates from birthday parties, the Christmas trinkets, the souvenirs, the tat from countless gift shops acquired on countless days out, the faddish electronics – everything w…
    Coventry | Rachel Cusk | Granta Magazine
  • War is a narrative: it might almost be said to embody the narrative principle itself. It is the attempt to create a story of life, to create agreement. In war, there is no point of view; war is the end of point of view
    Coventry | Rachel Cusk | Granta Magazine
  • It’s probably impossible to ever make fully… rational decisions that are not colored by the current mental state. (My solution so far has been to write down the entire mental state you’re in when you truly believe something and go back to it at moments of big decisions.) When I tell older people about these feelings, they write it off as youth. They’ve told me that, at some point, your priorities will just click and change, and you’ll wake up. I don’t quite buy it. Who gets to make decisions about your future? Twenty-year-old you or forty-year-old you?
    i think about it all the time - by Claire Wang
  • I’m not sure there’s any greater fortune than loving the work you do during the day and the family you go home to at night.
    Lilian | Substack
  • This city which cannot be expunged from the mind is like an armature, a honeycomb in whose cells each of us can place the things he wants to remember: names of famous men, virtues, numbers, vegetable and mineral classifications, dates of battles, constellations, parts of speech. Between each idea and each point of the itinerary an affinity or a contrast can be established, serving as an immediate aid to memory. So the world's learned men are those who have memorized Zora. But in vain I set out to visit the city: forced to remain motionless and always the same, in order to be more easily rememb…
    Invisible Cities Chapter One - 卡尔维诺中文站
  • Isidora, therefore, is the city of his dreams: with one difference. The dreamed-of city contained him as a young man; he arrives at Isidora in his old age. In the square there is the wall where the old men sit and watch the young go by; he is seated in a row with them. Desires are already memories.
    Invisible Cities Chapter One - 卡尔维诺中文站
  • Our object of desire (what Lacan terms the "objet petit a") is a way for us to establish coordinates for our own desire. At the heart of desire is a misrecognition of fullness where there is really nothing but a screen for our own narcissistic projections. It is that lack at the heart of desire that ensures we continue to desire. To come too close to our object of desire threatens to uncover the lack that is, in fact, necessary for our desire to persist, so that, ultimately, desire is most interested not in fully attaining the object of desire but in keeping our distance, thus allowing desire …
    pan(ama)demonium - helen's substack
  • 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