Psychology. 8 notes.

A few musings on self help.

It’s an obvious, but underappreciated, fact that technology reshapes reality. But we don’t often think about it much less care about it. If you even spend a minute thinking about just how much of the shape of our lives is sculpted by the technologies we use and rely on, your mind will be blown, and I’m not even talking…

Beautiful meditation on attention:

McGilchrist considers the way our attention constructs our reality and becomes the beating heart with which we love the world:

The whole illuminates the parts as much as the parts can illuminate the whole… The world we experience — which is the only one we can know — is affected by the kind of attention we pay to it.

Defining attention as “the manner in which our consciousness is disposed towards whatever else exists,” he writes:

The choice we make of how we dispose our consciousness is the ultimate creative act: it renders the world what it is. It is, therefore, a moral act: it has consequences.

This post by Bruce Sorkin hit hard because I’m most often than not a tourist in the present, with permanent residences in the past and the future: Csikszentmihalyi talked about challenge, but I would also here invoke the Japanese concept of Beginner’s Mind or Shoshin. Derived from Zen Buddhism, and particularly…

Brilliant post by Andy Masley as usual: I’ve been in a lot of conversations with people who are seemingly structuring their whole lives around a belief, but when I poke them and ask them simple obvious questions they act like they’ve never thought about it before. This happened a lot in education and pedagogy, a field…

Will Manidis hits the nail on its head:

the things that drive humans have been remarkably consistent across time, across technological progress, and across societies.

no matter what kind of millenarianism you are indulging in (ai, ufos, etc)— you can bet the forces of pride, greed, lust, gluttony, etc are constant

Amen!

Markets change.

Businesses change.

Technologies change.

Human nature is a CONSTANT.

Read Shakespeare to grok people…

— Josh Wolfe

Reminds me of something I’ve heard Jim O’Shaughnessy say often:

“At the centre of all market pricing are human beings. I joke the Four Horseman of the investment apocalypse are fear, greed, hope and ignorance, only one of which is not an emotion. Fear, greed and hope have wiped out more money than any market downturn. Because of all the foibles of human nature that are well documented by behavioural research – and now by neuroloigical research – people are always going to overshoot and undershoot when pricing securities. A review of financial markets all the way back to the South Sea company proves this out. As long as human nature doesn’t fundamentally change, we can continue to arbitrage the pricing inefficiencies it creates.”

“As long as human beings price securities, we’ve got something to arbitrage.”

This tweet thread by Jake resonated deeply with me. We all seem to be becoming increasingly adversarial in how we think about the world, and that’s not a good thing:

The deepest divide in today’s world, whether in economics, politics, investing, or even religion, seems to come down to those who view society as a zero-sum game and those who believe in shared growth. This is increasingly showing up everywhere, from relatively benign issues like tariffs and tax policy to more consequential debates over social rights and aid (and even territorial ambitions). Decisions being made seem shaped by a mindset that there needs to be a winner and loser over collective progress… at the expense of longstanding norms and values.

And

If you see the world as zero sum, you end up resenting people who are different from you or who enter your space (whether in the economy, schools, or country) because you view them as an opponent and their presence as a direct cost to yourself.