flâneur

Jasmine Sun

68 followers · 32 following · 2465 views

on the atlas — 21

highlights — 26

  • Prediction science makes us feel as though we have little agency over what happens. We lose faith in our ability to beat the odds, because we have created odds for ourselves to beat in the first place.
    🍀 Chaos Theory - by Tina Mai - Reboot
  • Physical access is granted by holding a web3 cryptopassport, and mixed reality is used to seamlessly link the online and offline worlds.
    The Network State in One Thousand Words | The Network State
  • That doesn’t mean each network state must grow to infinity, or that all states need accept the same kind of person, but that the community of network states as a whole is focused on building admirable societies that people want to join. Different states will focus on different metrics; imagine a network state premised on improving its citizens’ overall life expectancy, or one aimed at provably right-shifting the income distribution for all. You get what you measure.
    The Network State in One Image | The Network State
  • The dashboard shown combines concepts from coins, companies, and countries to focus a society on growth in people, annual income, and real estate footprint.
    The Network State in One Image | The Network State
  • In supplying the personal narrative Sontag withheld, Moser’s biography is essentially following her call to replace metaphor with actuality. He is replacing the metaphor of Sontag—the impersonal narrator of her work, the self-curated public figure, and the cult of personality that grew around her—with the actual Sontag: in all her passion, her pretension, her cruelty, her generosity, her fallibility, and her intoxicating, demanding grace.
    The Remaking of Susan Sontag | The New Republic
  • This lack of evolution—the absence of a neat narrative arc of growth or liberation—admits an even deeper truth, not just about Sontag’s life but about anyone’s: Every life involves reckoning with the same dilemmas over and over again. It’s a truth that emerges most clearly from what’s frustrating about the experience of reading biographies: Every life is structured by repetition. As Jean Rhys’s biographer, Carole Angier, once lamented: “her life really was just the same scene repeated over and over again.” We just keep having the same dilemmas and epiphanies. That stubborn constancy—the ways i…
    The Remaking of Susan Sontag | The New Republic
  • Sontag was deeply obsessed with the idea of reinvention. At the age of 38, she wrote: “I’m only interested in people engaged in a project of self-transformation.” Her phrasing suggests a deeply intentional endeavor, a project: the self not a condition one has to passively endure, but an artifact one could actively sculpt
    The Remaking of Susan Sontag | The New Republic
  • Let me posit a simple framework: the agency-risk tradeoff curve. There is *usually* a monotically increasing relationship between how much agency you have in your job and how much risk you take on by doing that job. To specify, this risk is "brain damage risk" - when numbers go up, everything is fine, but when the line stops going up, how much blame/stress/responsibility/brain damage will fall on you?
    Agency vs brain damage - by Chris Hua
  • If you are over the curve, I guess you are trading your personal brain damage for the good of the economy, but like, why?
    Agency vs brain damage - by Chris Hua
  • When women writers of my generation speak in awed tones of Didion’s “style,” I don’t think it’s the shift dresses or the sunglasses, the cigarettes or commas or even the em dashes that we revere, even though all those things were fabulous. It was the authority. The authority of tone. There is much in Didion one might disagree with personally, politically, aesthetically. I will never love the Doors. But I remain grateful for the day I picked up “Slouching Towards Bethlehem” and realized that a woman could speak without hedging her bets, without hemming and hawing, without making nice, without p…
    Joan Didion and the Opposite of Magical Thinking | The New Yorker
  • I feel no allegiance toward Vietnamese, Vietnamese(-)American, Asian, or Asian(-)American “communities” because no such things can be composed of millions of individuals without interpersonal relationships. I graduated from law school recently, and you could not have caught me dead at any Asian Pacific American Law Student Association events making polite small talk with people headed to clerk for the country’s foulest xenophobes. I do not care for the nation-state, any nation-state; I care about people who have fed and held and loved me, and those I’ve tried to love back.
    Blunt-Force Ethnic Credibility | Som-Mai Nguyen
  • When people say the X community, I wonder whether they just mean some X people I know and refuse to say that because it sounds sillier to extrapolate uniform feeling from the latter, as there’s no X convention where everyone votes on a slate of propositions.
    Blunt-Force Ethnic Credibility | Som-Mai Nguyen
  • On the insufficiency of image when it comes to representation, the academic Kristen Warner coined the term “plastic representation” as that which “uses the wonder that comes from seeing characters on screen who serve as visual identifiers for specific demographics in order to flatten the expectation to desire anything more” (Warner was specifically writing about Black audiences, but the term feels widely relevant.) Weeping that a Chinese woman won an Oscar, sobbing even more because a Korean man announced it! The Internet’s idiom of hyperbole notwithstanding — why? Keening, cloying racial cosp…
    Blunt-Force Ethnic Credibility | Som-Mai Nguyen
  • But while I crave — so deeply! — the right to be mediocre and rewarded for it, “more voices,” even in publisher and critic positions, seems too vague a means to address the way audiences discover and choose whom to listen to. Work by non-White, non-anglophone, and/or non-Western writers deserves the respect of rigorous, sensitive, specifically equipped criticism and publicity, not just rubber-stamps from celebrities that usher them into legible categories based on biographical bullet points.
    Blunt-Force Ethnic Credibility | Som-Mai Nguyen
  • The real modern-day conundrum among those who agree the Earth isn’t 5,000 years old is this: Science answers the what?, economics and engineering can answer the how?, but it’s religion (or religions in secular guise) that answer the why? It’s that last bit where rationalist empiricism falls on its face. If your only metric for judging a worldview is its ability to predict empirical outcomes like lab experiments, then empiricist worldviews are all you’ll ever accept (and by the way, lab experiments are all you’ll ever be able to talk about). The why? is unanswerable. But answer the why? we must…
    The Holy Church of Christ Without Christ
  • The reality is there are no atheists in the, well, anything. Humans are incapable of living while staring into the abyss of total materialist nihilism, not to mention their own looming mortality, for very long. Those who truly internalize that view are likely in a dark pit of drugs, clinical depression, or both, and the goal of treatment is restoring the basic animating delusions—friends, family, a sense of purpose and overarching narrative—necessary for human life.
    The Holy Church of Christ Without Christ
  • Religion is fundamentally about dealing with reality via myth, ritual, and folklore, rather than data, empiricism, and skeptical inquiry
    The Holy Church of Christ Without Christ
  • Capital has this question, ‘do you work on the supply side or the demand side?’ My view of an anticapitalist world is that you should unify that. We should return to use value. What use values do people need and how to we organise production in such a way that it matches these?
    David Harvey interview: The importance of postcapitalist imagination
  • But housing is very interesting in this way because as a use value you can understand it as shelter, privacy, a world of affective relations with people, a big list of things you use a house for. But then there is the question of how you get the house. At one time houses were built by people themselves and there was no exchange value at all. Then from the 18th century onwards you got speculative house building – Georgian terraces which were built and sold later on. Then houses became exchange values for consumers in the form of saving. If I buy a house and I pay down the mortgage on it, I can …
    David Harvey interview: The importance of postcapitalist imagination
  • All commodities have to be understood as having a use value and exchange value. If I have a steak the use value is that I can eat it and the exchange value is how much I had to pay for it.
    David Harvey interview: The importance of postcapitalist imagination
  • The ‘depressive realism’ hypothesis remains controversial because it calls into question the tenets of CBT, which assert that the depressed individual has more thought biases and hence has to be healed in order to become more realistic. But subsequent studies have bolstered the idea. For instance, the Australian social psychologist Joseph Forgas and colleagues showed that sadness reinforces critical thinking: it helps people reduce judgmental bias, improve attention, increase perseverance, and generally promotes a more skeptical, detailed and attentive thinking style. On the other hand, positi…
    The voice of sadness is censored as sick. What if it’s sane?
  • The ‘depressive realism’ hypothesis remains controversial because it calls into question the tenets of CBT, which that the depressed individual has more biases and hence has to be healed in order to become more realistic. But subsequent studies have bolstered . For instance, the Australian social psychologist Joseph Forgas and colleagues showed that reinforces critical thinking: it helps people reduce judgmental bias, improve attention, increase perseverance, and generally promotes a more skeptical, detailed and thinking style. On the other hand, positive moods can lead to a less effortful and…
    The voice of sadness is censored as sick. What if it’s sane?
  • While people with depression can suffer from cognitive distortions, the scientific literature suggests that those with only mild-to-moderate depression can also have more accurate judgment about the outcome of so-called contingent events (events which may or may not occur), and a more realistic of their role, abilities, and limitations. This so-called 'depressive realism' may enable a person with depression to shed the Pollyanna optimism and rose-tinted spectacles that shield us from reality, to see life more accurately, and to judge it .
    Depressive Realism
  • For example, more scientifically literate people are more likely to have partisan positions on science (eg agree with their own party's position on scientifically contentious issues, even when outsiders view it as science-denialist). If they were merely biased, they should start out wrong, but each new fact they learn about science should make them update a little toward the correct position. That's not what we see. Rather, they start out wrong, and each new fact they learn, each unit of effort they put into becoming more scientifically educated, just makes them wronger. That's not what you se…
    Trapped Priors As A Basic Problem Of Rationality
  • Van der Bergh et al suggest that when experience is too intolerable, your brain will decrease bandwidth on the "raw experience" channel to protect you from the traumatic emotions. This is why some trauma victims' descriptions of their traumas are often oddly short, un-detailed, and to-the-point. This protects the victim from having to experience the scary stimuli and negative emotions in all their gory details. But it also ensures that context (and not the raw experience itself) will play the dominant role in determining their perception of an event.
    Trapped Priors As A Basic Problem Of Rationality
  • In Appetites, Caroline Knapp mentions that in AA meetings you often hear “people say that, by, definition, an addict is someone who seeks physical solutions to emotional or spiritual problems.”
    on hungry ghosts