The Calculus of Grit

Expert Generalists

Being an Expert Generalist should be treated as a first-class skill, one that can be assessed and taught.

The language of generalization.

The Illusion of Asymmetric Insight

The Misconception:  You celebrate diversity and respect others’ points of view. The Truth: You are driven to create and form groups and then believe others are wrong just because they are oth…

The Death Of Expertise

To reject the notion of expertise, and to replace it with a sanctimonious insistence that every person has a right to his or her own opinion, is silly.

Commodity Intelligence

The seductiveness of “general intelligence” is rooted in a costly category error

The phony comforts of useful idiots

On Casey Newton and the shallowness of anti-skepticism.

Metamodern Individualism Anonymous

Diunital Cognition, Emotional Intelligence and Archaeological Therapy

Opinion | Can You Get Smarter? (Published 2015)

There is much that you can do to keep cognitively sharp.

Meditations on Machinic Desire

The philosopher and accelerationist Nick Land writes, in his 1993 essay Machinic Desire, three of the most insight-dense paragraphs I’ve ever encountered:

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

Why Generalists Own the Future

In the age of AI, it’s better to know a little about a lot than a lot about a little

Sources of the Self — Harvard University Press

“Taylor has taken on the most delicate and exacting of philosophical questions, the question of who we are and how we should live…and he has made this an adventure of self-discovery for his reader.” —Martha Nussbaum, New RepublicIn this extensive inquiry into the sources of modern selfhood, Charles Taylor demonstrates just how rich and precious those resources are. The modern turn to subjectivity, with its attendant rejection of an objective order of reason, has led—it seems to many—to mere subjectivism at the mildest and to sheer nihilism at the worst. Many critics believe that the modern order has no moral backbone and has proved corrosive to all that might foster human good. Taylor rejects this view. He argues that, properly understood, our modern notion of the self provides a framework that more than compensates for the abandonment of substantive notions of rationality.The major insight of Sources of the Self is that modern subjectivity, in all its epistemological, aesthetic, and political ramifications, has its roots in ideas of human good. After first arguing that contemporary philosophers have ignored how self and good connect, the author defines the modern identity by describing its genesis. His effort to uncover and map our moral sources leads to novel interpretations of most of the figures and movements in the modern tradition. Taylor shows that the modern turn inward is not disastrous but is in fact the result of our long efforts to define and reach the good. At the heart of this definition he finds what he calls the affirmation of ordinary life, a value which has decisively if not completely replaced an older conception of reason as connected to a hierarchy based on birth and wealth. In telling the story of a revolution whose proponents have been Augustine, Montaigne, Luther, and a host of others, Taylor’s goal is in part to make sure we do not lose sight of their goal and endanger all that has been achieved. Sources of the Self provides a decisive defense of the modern order and a sharp rebuff to its critics.

Who are you?

A wonky romp through identity, classification, and power.

Technorealists, the silent majority? · Openness Praxis

you might find yourself standing in the unremarkable center

Never Underestimate the Ignorance of the Powerful

When you’re a star, people let you think you're smart

Individualism Reconsidered

Joe Peacott Individualism Reconsidered with a bibliography by Jerry Kaplan 1991