Timeless Ideas | June 6, 2021
Here’s your weekly dose of timeless ideas to sharpen your mind, make smarter decisions, and live better.
Quotes
I.
We need to accept that we won’t always make the right decisions, that we’ll screw up royally sometimes – understanding that failure is not the opposite of success, it’s part of success.
― Arianna Huffington
II.
People are trying to be smart—all I am trying to do is not to be idiotic, but it’s harder than most people think.
― Charlie Munger
III.
Desire is a contract you make with yourself to be unhappy until you get what you want.
― Naval Ravikant
Ideas
I.
In life there isn’t always such an easy resolution. One has to treat people as responsible for their actions, and yet also recognize that they can’t help what they do. It’s always easier to regard others from the outside. But one can also try to imagine them as they experience themselves, as we all do, from the inside. Then it becomes possible to see that we all deserve mercy.
Emanuel Derman in Models Behaving Badly.: Why Confusing Illusion with Reality Can Lead to Disaster, on Wall Street and in Life
II.
When we don’t act out and we don’t repress, our passion, our aggression, and our ignorance become our wealth. We don’t have to transform anything. Simply letting go of the story line is what it takes, which is not all that easy.
Pema Chödrön in Comfortable with Uncertainty: 108 Teachings on Cultivating Fearlessness and Compassion
III.
The grand illusion of life is that our minds have the capacity to understand reality. But human minds didn’t evolve to understand reality. We didn’t need that capability. A clear view of reality wasn’t necessary for our survival. Evolution cares only that you survive long enough to procreate. And that’s a low bar. The result is that each of us is, in effect, living in our own little movie that our brain has cooked up for us to explain our experiences
Scott Adams in Win Bigly: Persuasion in a World Where Facts Don't Matter
Articles Worth Reading
I.
Feel free to stop striving: learn to relish being an amateur
Xenia Hanusiak | Psyche
The soundtrack of our lives is the sound of striving. Psychologists, philosophers and behavioural scientists are all coaxing us to strive with variations of the same loop: strive for accomplishment, strive for prosperity, and strive for happiness. We must act fast and slow, or think big and small; be calm, be on edge, eat more, eat less, dance more and sleep more, want more – or less; practise for 10,000 hours or don’t practise at all; be deliberate, habitual, and intuitive, or just simply Zen out to zero. But every once in a while, and for every one of our aspirations, there’s a contrarian voice screaming: Enough already! Can’t we stop succeeding for just one moment? Cease trying to be exceptional at something?
II.
How to Make Sense of Contradictory Science Papers
Haixin Dang & Liam Kofi Bright | Nautilus
The science you can come across today can often appear to be full of contradictory claims. One study tells you red wine is good for your heart; another tells you it is not. Over the past year, COVID-19 research has offered conflicting reports about the overall effectiveness of wearing a mask. What is more, today, scientists often communicate results to each other outside of traditional publication venues. But this openness, of course, can also lead people to misunderstand what scientific papers are meant to communicate. These preprints are even further from being final, necessarily reliable discoveries. What we are witnessing is the process of science at play—the messy, inspired guesswork. We would do well to remember that.
III.
I’m Not Scared to Reenter Society. I’m Just Not Sure I Want To.
Tim Kreider | The Atlantic
The forces of money and power would certainly like us to forget all about this year and go back to exactly the way things were, like a teacher intoning, “All right, class, back to your desks,” while the first flurries are falling outside. Maybe we will; insights are evanescent, and habit has a leaden inertia. But a lot of people went very far away over the course of this past year, deep into themselves, and not all of us are going to come all the way back.
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