Twenty years after my own graduation, I have come gradually to understand that the liberal arts cliché about teaching you how to think is actually shorthand for a much deeper, more serious idea: learning how to think really means learning how to exercise some control over how and what you think.
It means being conscious and aware enough to choose what you pay attention to and to choose how you construct meaning from experience. Because if you cannot exercise this kind of choice in adult life, you will be totally hosed.
1. This Is Water
2. Socially Distance This & Related: Shipping Out
3. Allow Fiona Apple to Reintroduce Herself & Related: Why Do We Even Listen to New Music?
4. COVID and Forced Experiments
5. My Restaurant Was My Life for 20 Years. Does the World Need It Anymore?
6. To Run My Best Marathon at Age 44, I Had to Outrun My Past
7. Tyler Cowen & Philip Tetlock on Forecasting and Foraging as a Fox
8. Entropy: Why Life Always Seems to Get More Complicated
9. Amazon Sees Like A State
10. IT’S TIME TO BUILD & Related: Why it’s hard to build
“One day in 1961, the famous physicist Richard Feynman stepped in front of a Caltech lecture hall and posed this question to a group of undergraduate students: “If, in some cataclysm, all of scientific knowledge were to be destroyed, and only one sentence was passed on to the next generation of creatures, what statement would contain the most information in the fewest words?”
Gerd Janson’s Boiler Room set from 2018 is on repeat in my nuraphones right now.
I’d never heard of Gerd before this week, so I’m in that honeymoon discovery phase which is always the best.
I’m in this moment.