Highlights from the Internet: Part 2
Below you'll find part 2 of my collection of highlights from the internet. I read and highlighted most of it in the Pocket app.
Surviving Superintelligence
Do you summarily deny the ability of members of any species the ability to offer you friendship or love, such as by declining to listen to them? Have you ever listened for such offers from a cow, pig, chicken, or fish?
What about an insect?
Perhaps one of the most intelligent associations we can bring to the advancement of humanity is to increase and deepen our capacity to love and care for other species, as well as to care for other members of our own species. Otherwise if we continue to advance our knowledge and power without also advancing our love, we’ll likely put ourselves on a path towards a very dystopian future. We’ll end up being treated much the same way we treat other species.
I’d say that the single most important thing we can do as individuals right now is to stop committing violent acts towards other species. Stop relating to them with such vicious indifference. Stop turning them into products. Stop egregiously overpowering them.
Notice where you’re committing acts of violence — including paying agents to do so on your behalf — and put an end to such behavior. You can do this today.
Then begin working on your capacity to love. Love other humans. Love animals. Love insects. Care. Relate to other beings with kindness and friendship by default. This aspect is a lifelong journey, albeit an intensely rewarding one.
Mindwise: How We Understand What Others Think, Believe, Feel, and Want - by Nicholas Epley
Be who you are and say what you feel, because those who mind don’t matter and those who matter don’t mind.
The expert’s problem is assuming that what’s so clear in his or her own mind is more obvious to others.
You define yourself by the attributes that make you different.
A man who claims to be searching for himself is looking for a sense of distinction.
How We Decide - by Jonah Lehrer
Brilliant book with one clear message: our emotional brain is faster and usually smarter than our logical brain. Our emotions are trained by years of logic and experience, retaining it all for real wisdom. Many decisions are better made by going with the gut feeling. Gets a little too technical with deep brain/neuro/cortex talk, but brings it back to usable points.
The world is full of things, and it is our feelings that help us choose among them.
Emotion and motivation share the same Latin root, movere, which means "to move."
Feelings are often an accurate shortcut, a concise expression of decades' worth of experience. They already know how to do it.
It's not the quantity of practice, it's the quality. The most effective way to get better is to focus on your mistakes. In other words, you need to consciously consider the errors being internalized.
Searching for his errors, dissecting those decisions that could have been a little bit better. He knows that self-criticism is the secret to self-improvement; negative feedback is the best kind.
An expert is a person who has made all the mistakes that can be made in a very narrow field.
E-Myth Revisited - by Michael Gerber
Survey the world and ask, "Where is the opportunity?"
Identify it, then go back to the drawing board and construct a solution to the frustration found in a group of customers.
Acts the way the customer needs it to act, not the Entrepreneur.
"How will my business look to the customer?" "How will my business stand out from all the rest?"
Within the customer is a continuing parade of changing wants, begging to be satisfied. Find out what those wants are, and what they will be in the future.
When Things Fall Apart - by Pema Chödrön
A monastery has very few means of escape: no lying, no stealing, no alcohol, no sex, no exit.
It’s so good to meditate every single day and continue to make friends with our hopes and fears again and again.
A thoroughly good relationship with ourselves means there’s no compulsiveness. We don’t overwork, overeat, oversmoke, overseduce. In short, we begin to stop causing harm.
Man's Search for Meaning - by Viktor Frankl
He who has a Why to live for can bear almost any How.Life is not primarily a quest for pleasure or a quest for power, but a quest for meaning.
The greatest task for any person is to find meaning in his or her life.
Three possible sources for meaning:
- in work (doing something significant)
- in love (caring for another person)
- in courage during difficult times
Spend More Time Managing Your Time
It’s hard work figuring out how to make a productive schedule come together: a goal that requires protecting long stretches of speculative deep thinking while keeping progress alive on long term projects and dispatching the small things fast enough to avoid trouble (but not so fast that the deep stretches fragment).
A Guide to the Good Life: The Ancient Art of Stoic Joy - by William Irvine
If you lack a grand goal in living, you lack a coherent philosophy of life.
When you are on your deathbed, you will look back and realize that you wasted your one chance at living.
Instead of spending your life pursuing something genuinely valuable, you squandered it because you allowed yourself to be distracted.
Why is self-discipline worth possessing? Because those who possess it have the ability to determine what they do with their life. Those who lack self-discipline will have the path they take through life determined by someone or something else.
The Time Paradox - by Philip Zimbardo and John Boyd
It's not the events of the past that most strongly influence our lives. Our attitude toward events in the past matter more than the events themselves.
WHO WAS I? Answer 20 times (forcing into creativity)
I was _______________
I was _______________
List 3 significant events that have occured in your life:
- __________
- __________
- __________
- __________
- __________
- __________
- __________
- __________
- __________
The present perspective has both good and bad effects, thoguh the good generally offset the bad. Hedonists live active high-intensity lives, filled with as much excitement, novelty, and spontaneity as possible. They engage in diverse activities, sports, and hobbies. They learn early to make friends and lovers easily and frequently, and are apt to fill their lives with people whom they find stimulating and with possessions they can show off. If they have enough money, they take great joy in living, appreciating nature, animals, and people around them. People like to be with them because, like children, they have an open-eyed readiness to connect and an intensity that comes from being totally in the moment. The demands of the to-do list never dilute their here-and-now. They generally do not make lists, and when they do, forget to check them.
Sensuality is central. They are always open to sensory input, taking time to spell the proverbial roses and to touch.
Future-oriented folks can also become totally absorbed in their work: get into the flow.
Characteristics of FLOW:
- Clear goals
- Concentrating and focusing
- Loss of self-consciousness
- Distorted sense of time
- Balance between ability level and challenge (not too easy or too hard)
- Personal control over the situation or activity
- The activity is intrinsically rewarding, so there's an effortlessness of action
WHO WILL I BE? Answer 15 times:
I will be _____
I will be _____
Concrete future goal: __________ Completed by: _____
Concrete future goal: __________ Completed by: _____
Mentally rehearse reaching goals. Focus on the outcome. Rehearse the individual steps, step-by-step.
Smartcuts - by Shane Snow
Pattern recognition seems to come with experience and practice.
While logging hours of practice helps us see patterns subconsciously, we can often do just as well by deliberately looking for them.
Pattern hunting and deliberate analysis can yield results with high accuracy on the first try.
Deliberate pattern spotting can compensate for experience. But we often don’t even give it a shot.
Through deliberate analysis, the little guy can spot waves better than the big company that relies on experience and instinct once it’s at the top. And a wave can take an amateur farther faster than an expert can swim.
Show Your Work - by Austin Kleon
Consistently post bits and pieces of your work, your ideas, and what you’re learning online. Instead of wasting your time “networking”, take advantage of the network.
Many people waste time and energy trying to make connections instead of getting good at what they do, when being good at things is the only thing that earns you clout or connections.
“Scenius”: great ideas are often birthed by a group of creative individuals - artists, curators, thinkers, theorists, and other tastemakers - who make up an “ecology of talent.”
Being a valuable part of a scenius is not about how smart or talented you are, but about what you have to contribute - the ideas you share, the quality of the connections you make, and the conversations you start.
Stop asking what others can do for us, and start asking what we can do for others.
You can move from mediocre to good in increments. The real gap is between doing nothing and doing something.
The first act is the past, the second act is the present, and the third act is the future. The first act is where you’ve been - what you want, how you came to want it, and what you’ve done so far to get it. The second act is where you are now in your work and how you’ve worked hard and used up most of your resources. The third act is where you’re going, and how exactly the person you’re pitching can help you get there.
The right motivation
The right motivation is a fire under your ass, not a Happy Place you retreat to in your mind when things are hard.
The right motivation is enduring, meaningful, and personal — and often times, painful.
Here’s what the right motivation is not:
- fantasies of acclaim
- fantasies of riches and luxury
- fantasies of retiring early to a Mojito Island
SpaceCurve: An Utterly Unique And Absurdly Fast Geospatial Database
CPU sharding brings “shared nothing” down into the silicon of a single server. It is an atypically effective macro-optimization and can improve operation throughput upwards of 10x versus conventional multithreading. In these architectures, every core has a single process locked to it and CPU-local RAM that it shares with no other process. This can be extended to I/O to the extent possible, giving each process direct access to dedicated hardware queues for networking and bypassing the kernel for disk operations. Every process shares its silicon with as few other processes as the hardware and operating system allow. There is only marginally more communication between cores on the same CPU than there is between cores on different servers. ScyllaDB, recently announced, is a rare open source example of a CPU sharding design.
A fully generalized solution produces a deep stack of novel computer science built on top of discrete topologies instead of ordered sets. Proper implementations have exotic characteristics:
The only primitive types are hyper-rectangles of infinite volume
Arbitrary compositions of primitives are computationally homomorphic
Data model representation is adaptive, distributable, and universal
Most algorithms built on topology manipulation are inherently parallelizable
The platform contains a state-of-the-art non-Euclidean geometry engine designed from scratch, with particular focus on correctness and precision. It is used to reason about relationships in its internal 3-space model of the physical world. The extent to which other popular geospatial platforms regularly produce different results due to defects in their geometry engines is astonishing.
How to Play to Your Strengths
Robert gathered feedback from 11 individuals from his past and present who knew him well. He selected a diverse but balanced group—his wife and two other family members, two friends from his MBA program, two colleagues from his time in the army, and four current colleagues.
Robert then asked these individuals to provide information about his strengths, accompanied by specific examples of moments when Robert used those strengths in ways that were meaningful to them, to their families or teams, or to their organizations.
Within ten days, Robert received e-mail responses from all 11 people describing specific instances when he had made important contributions—including pushing for high quality under a tight deadline, being inclusive in communicating with a diverse group, and digging for critical information. The answers he received surprised him.
Broken Edges
Get specific if you can. If you dislike your job, then what specifically do you dislike about it? Are your co-workers dreadfully boring? Does your boss fail to praise you enough? Does your cubicle smell funny?
A broken edge is a pattern that isn’t working for you. That pattern may be something pretty narrow and specific, or it may be something pretty broad and general. So define the pattern as narrowly as it actually comes up for you, but if it’s something fairly general, such as your boss’ overall negative attitude, it’s okay to keep it general.
So the next step is to use these broken edges to define your desires.
This is usually pretty easy. Just look at each broken edge, and write down what it will look like when it’s fixed. If the broken edges weren’t there, what would you experience instead? That’s your desire.
Now you have a list that expresses what you want instead of wallowing in what you don’t want. And you can begin working on the specific transformations, which could involve small tweaks to fix the broken edges or letting go of your current situation and starting something new, now that you know where to look.
When you create such a list for an area of your life, review the items carefully to gain a better understanding of the big picture. See how the pieces need to fit together. Get a better sense of what a viable solution would look like if you had it now.