I have come to suspect that to most people thinking is painful. Some of us are addicted to thinking. Some of us find it a necessity. Johnny ...
The Man from the Future: Why Johnny Can't Stop Abstracting
I have come to suspect that to most people thinking is painful. Some of us are addicted to thinking. Some of us find it a necessity. Johnny ...
» EverQuest The Digital Antiquarian
It isn’t always or even usually the pioneers who reap the rewards of the trails they blaze. As often as not, some pragmatic Johnny-come-lately pops in to make off with the booty.
The Mind-Expanding Ideas of Andy Clark
The tools we use to help us think—from language to smartphones—may be part of thought itself.
Six Ways to Think Long-term: A Cognitive Toolkit for Good Ancestors
None of these six ways is enough alone to create a long-term revolution of the human mind — a fundamental shift in our perception of time. But together — and when practised by a critical mass of people and organisations — a new age of long-term thinking could emerge out of their synergy.
Your Brain Can Only Take So Much Focus
Research has shed light on the power of focus and its role as a hidden driver of success. Yet as helpful as focus can be, research also shows there’s a downside to it: excessive focus exhausts the focus circuits in your brain. It can drain your energy, make you lose self-control, impair your decision-making, and make you less collaborative. The brain operates optimally when it toggles between focus and unfocus. When you unfocus, you engage a brain circuit called the default mode network (DMN). The DMN activates old memories, goes back and forth between the past, present, and future, and recombines different ideas. Using this new and previously inaccessible data, you can imagine creative solutions or predict the future, and more. There are many simple and effective ways to activate this circuit in the course of a day, such as positive constructive daydreaming, napping, and consciously thinking from another person’s perspective.
The obsolescence of man, vol I , part 2: The world as phantom and as matrix: philosophical considerations on radio and television - Günther Anders
The first complete English translation of a remarkable 1956 essay about television from Vol. I of The Obsolescence of Man by Günther Anders, who—using phenomenological analyses, excerpts from his diaries and reflections on daily life—depicts a capitalist world that manufactures a warped “mass-man” by imposing nonparticipation, consumption of images, artificial “needs” (“drug addiction is the model for today’s needs”), separation, “conditioning”, an eternal present, commodified leisure and the dissolution of the individual in vapid mass produced roles, in a text that in many ways anticipates the theory of the “spectacle” of Guy Debord and the situationists.
Smoke-away on Twitter / X
Andrej Karpathy: "What you want is the inner thought monologue of your brain... The trajectories in your brain as you're doing problem solving, if we had a billion of that, AGI is here roughly speaking." pic.twitter.com/C0kBUITPBv— Smoke-away (@SmokeAwayyy) October 18, 2024
A revolution in our sense of self | Nick Chater
Psychologists have tried to plumb the depths of human motivation to make sense of our behaviour. But our inner mental world is a fiction, sustained by constant improvisation
To Make Sense of the Present, Brains May Predict the Future | Quanta Magazine
A controversial theory suggests that perception, motor control, memory and other brain functions all depend on comparisons between ongoing actual experiences and the brain’s modeled expectations.
People Who Can't Visualize Anything Are Challenging a 300-Year-Old Theory of Thought
Mental imagery might not be as central to complex human thought as we believed, philosophers say.
‘Ugh Fields’, or why you can’t even bear to think about that task
Have you ever had a long-overdue task — a task which isn’t so bad in itself — but which you can’t even bring yourself to think about?
Do not give up your brain
It's tempting to just let tools think for you, but you still need to be able to think for yourself and stay sharp.
“If you keep your mind too open, your brain falls out”: interview with theoretical ecologist Chuliang Song
Welcome to our latest interview with the author of a recent(ish) interesting paper. Today’s interview is with theoretical ecologist Chuliang Song. I asked Chuliang about Song & Levine 202…
Generative AI runs on gambling addiction — just one more prompt, bro!
You’ll have noticed how previously normal people start acting like addicts to their favourite generative AI and shout at you like you’re trying to take their cocaine away. Matthias Döpm…
Andy Matuschak on Twitter / X
We might become grey goo, but before that, what about our spirits? "The world it envisions for all of us is small, flat, grey, leveled of all exception… a world without heroes or glory… without myths, without men who rise above the rest…"That quote is from a Marco Rubio…— Andy Matuschak (@andy_matuschak) September 9, 2026