- Apr 2024
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andysylvester.com andysylvester.com
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https://andysylvester.com/2024/04/12/knowledge-management-and-organizing-information-for-use/
(6:13) Andy mentions lost "tribal knowledge" with respect to corporate information. This aphorism seems fairly regular in Western countries, but the interesting part about actual tribal knowledge is that it would have been stored with several people and spread out in ways to make the accidental deaths of individuals not able to take the knowledge to their graves with them.
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archive.org archive.org
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"He plans his work and works his plan".
Who originated this? Napoleon Hill? Here's an example of it in a sales video from 1937. (12:36)
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xxxx.micro.blog xxxx.micro.blog
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There is an ʻŌlelo Noʻeau, a Hawaiian proverb, that states: I ka ʻolelo no ke ola, i ka ʻolelo no ka make. This translates to “in speech is life, in speech is death.”
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- Mar 2024
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thebaffler.com thebaffler.com
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‘speak truth to power,’
simultaneously one should speak truth to the dis-empowered and dis-enfranchised to rise up against those who have power as a check to that power.
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Local file Local file
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Likewise, we “trusted the process,” but the process didn’t save Toy Story 2 either. “Trust theProcess” had morphed into “Assume that the Process Will Fix Things for Us.” It gave ussolace, which we felt we needed. But it also coaxed us into letting down our guard and, in theend, made us passive. Even worse, it made us sloppy.
Compare "trust the process" as a guiding principle with "let go and let God" which has a much more random and chaotic potential set of outcomes.
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I read many such books as I set about trying to become a better, more effective manager.Most, I found, trafficked in a kind of simplicity that seemed harmful in that it offered falsereassurance. These books were stocked with catchy phrases like “Dare to fail!” or “Followpeople and people will follow you!” or “Focus, focus, focus!” (This last one was a particularfavorite piece of nonadvice. When people hear it, they nod their heads in agreement as if agreat truth has been presented, not realizing that they’ve been diverted from addressing thefar harder problem: deciding what it is that they should be focusing on. There is nothing inthis advice that gives you any idea how to figure out where the focus should be, or how toapply your energy to it. It ends up being advice that doesn’t mean anything.) These sloganswere offered as conclusions—as wisdom—and they may have been, I suppose. But none ofthem gave me any clue as to what to do or what I should focus on.
Curious that he might write this in a business book on creativity which is highly likely to fall trap to the same simple advice or catchy phrases.
Does he ultimately give his own clear cut advice that means something?
I'm reminded here of Dan Allosso's mention of the David Allen quote from Getting Things Done: "It is better to be wrong than to be vague."<br /> https://hypothes.is/a/yOFrNubcEe6AsafBDjDzBw
Are business books too often vague when it would be better for them to be wrong instead?
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lifelonglearn.substack.com lifelonglearn.substack.com
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[[Dan Allosso]] in Vague or Wrong?
He highlights the David Allen quote from Getting Things Done: "It is better to be wrong than to be vague."
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- Feb 2024
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Las Vegas, he said, “no longer has the charm of motorcycle gangs, fringe gamblers and desert drifters. It’s this corporate zenith of mass consumerism run amok.”
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- Jan 2024
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www.newyorker.com www.newyorker.com
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Because it’s “A Mattel Production,” as the opening credits inform us, it wants to have its cake, eat it, mock it, smear it on the faces of the manufacturers, and still sell a shitload of dolls—or, as a recent piece in the Times suggested, “drive near-infinite brand synergies,” the sort of phrase that makes me want to move to Bhutan and raise goats.
Indeed.
And that last phrase is truly brilliant.
still sell a shitload of dolls—or, as a recent piece in the Times suggested, “drive near-infinite brand synergies,” the sort of phrase that makes me want to move to Bhutan and raise goats.
I want to add that, having seen the film, it is indeed v postmodern in both mocking consumerism and profiting from it. Yes it mocks patriarchy and mattel etc but all in the end in the service of an escapist comedy that will promote barbie and ken (or, at least, that's what its owners think).
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- Oct 2023
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www.reddit.com www.reddit.com
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Each page just has a page number at the top corner, as far as I can see. The German Wikipedia entry says that from notebook E, he numbered the front pages with Arabic numerals and the back pages with Roman numerals, so his notes began at both ends and met in the middle of the book. This is clear in the original, but hard to understand. And he would at least have been able to refer to his notes in the form {volume letter, page number}.It seems he didn’t number consecutive entries himself, but that in later Lichtenberg scholarship there developed an editorial convention to do so. After his death they only published his ‘aphorisms’, organised by theme, and later re-organised by date, but still missing his scientific and other writings.
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ucscollections.wordpress.com ucscollections.wordpress.com
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Proverbs 21:5 New Living Translation, “Good planning and hard work lead to prosperity, but hasty shortcuts lead to poverty.”
similar to plan your work and work your plan
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www.ebay.com www.ebay.com
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Plan Your Work and Work Your Plan. <br /> —Memindex price list booklet circa 1913 https://www.ebay.com/itm/166293242710
Surely this was in use prior to this version...
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- Jul 2023
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Local file Local file
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to recycle a familiarphrase taught at journalism schools—without fear or favor, and letthe chips fall where they may.
Which journalism schools taught "without fear or favor"? When?
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- Jun 2023
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danallosso.substack.com danallosso.substack.com
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I do think it’s helpful for members of the public to know some basic facts about the past. For me, it’s the same idea as the saying “If you don’t stand for something, you’ll fall for anything.” Similarly, if you know nothing you can be convinced of anything.
These are much pithier versions of what Robert Hutchins is getting at when he's talking about the importance of the Great Conversation with respect to Democracy.
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- Apr 2023
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Samuel Butler had made the phrase ‘Spare the rod and spoil the child’immortal in his satirical poem Hudibras.
While the original proverb appears in King James Version of the Bible, Book of Proverbs 13:24, the satirical poem Hudibras is the first appearance of the quote and popularized the aphorism "spare the rod and spoil the child".
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Hudibras
https://en.wiktionary.org/wiki/spare_the_rod_and_spoil_the_child
syndication link: https://en.wikipedia.org/w/index.php?title=Hudibras&oldid=1148518740
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- Mar 2023
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scienceblog.com scienceblog.com
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“Money is the snare the god has placed on earth for the impious man so that he should worry daily.”
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“Do not sit or stand still in an undertaking which is urgent”
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“Pride and arrogance are the ruin of their owner”
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www.ebay.com www.ebay.com
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Plan Your Work and Work your Plan An Infallible Rule for Success
was there a prior source for this aphorism?
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en.wikipedia.org en.wikipedia.org
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The old saying "a bad penny always turns up" is a colloquial recognition of Gresham's Law.
The colloquialism "a bad penny always turns up" is recognition of Gresham's law because the bad (cheap) pennies will be in higher circulation compared with purer or more valuable copper pennies which will have been hoarded or left circulation.
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In economics, Gresham's law is a monetary principle stating that "bad money drives out good". For example, if there are two forms of commodity money in circulation, which are accepted by law as having similar face value, the more valuable commodity will gradually disappear from circulation.[1][2] The law was named in 1860 by economist Henry Dunning Macleod after Sir Thomas Gresham (1519–1579), an English financier during the Tudor dynasty. Gresham had urged Queen Elizabeth to restore confidence in then-debased English currency. The concept was thoroughly defined in medieval Europe by Nicolaus Copernicus and known centuries earlier in classical Antiquity, the Middle East and China.
Gresham's law is an economic monetary principle which states that "bad money drives out good."
It relates to commodity value, particularly in coinage, where cheaper base metals in coins will cause more expensive coinage to disappear from circulation.
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- Feb 2023
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www.saysomethingin.com www.saysomethingin.com
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‘Dyfal donc a dyr y garreg’, we say in Welsh – ‘persistent knocking will break the stone’. In other words, perseverance pays in the end.
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- Dec 2022
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www.newyorker.com www.newyorker.com
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But taste is not an act—it’s an opinion.
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- Nov 2022
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www.rtqe.net www.rtqe.net
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http://www.rtqe.net/ObliqueStrategies/Acute.html
Acute Strategies are a crowdsourced deck of advice and aphorisms collected by Gregory Taylor as an homage to the original deck of Oblique Strategies.
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www.youtube.com www.youtube.com
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https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=pRc7MUybCsE
Interview with BBC in which Brian Eno discusses the origin of his Oblique Strategies with Peter Schmidt.
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en.wikipedia.org en.wikipedia.org
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In the mid-1970s, he co-developed Oblique Strategies, a deck of cards featuring aphorisms intended to spur creative thinking.
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- Oct 2022
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Mark Twain quipped, ‘I have never let my schooling interfere with myeducation.’
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- Sep 2022
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www.nytimes.com www.nytimes.com
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every billionaire is a policy failure
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- Aug 2022
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takingnotenow.blogspot.com takingnotenow.blogspot.com
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Ballpoint pens are not tools for marking books, and felt-tip highlighters should be prohibited altogether.
How is one to have an intimate conversation with a text if their annotations are not written in the margins? Placing your initial notes somewhere else is like having sex with your clothes on.
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The narrator considers this as vandalism and finds it hard to believe how anyone "educated enough to have access to a university library should do this to a book." To him "the treatment of books is a test of civilized behaviour."
Highlighted portion is a quote from Kuehn sub-quoting David Lodge, Deaf Sentence (New York: Viking 2008)
Ownership is certainly a factor here, but given how inexpensive many books are now, if you own it, why not mark it up? See also: Mortimer J. Adler's position on this.
Marking up library books is a barbarism; not marking up your own books is a worse sin.
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This pamphlet of direc-tions is not a medical prescri tion to he taken in a singledose: the result might be fataf
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- Jul 2022
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docdrop.org docdrop.org
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“Comparing notes” is a metaphor for talking throughideas for good reason
What is the origin of this metaphor?
One might suspect the 1500s or during the Scientific Revolution?
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medium.com medium.com
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In his interviews, he likes to emphasize that, in each book, he’s back to square one.
Where does Robert Greene specifically say this?
With a commonplace book repository, one is never really starting from square one. Anyone who says otherwise is missing the point.
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www.reddit.com www.reddit.com
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https://www.reddit.com/r/antinet/comments/vzertk/using_the_antinet_for_professional_conferences/
Thanks /ultwalt This seems to underline the aphorism, that the more you put into something, the more you'll get out of it. It's something that many miss as an underlying benefit to these processes in general.
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drive.google.com drive.google.com
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Filing is certainlynot their goal.
I'm reminded here of the old aphorism "Out of sight is out of mind."
This harkens back to the idea of oral cultures using their environments as memory palaces to remember their culture, laws, and knowledge. Things being within sight mean that they were immediately brought to mind.
For an office worker, filing an item is tantamount to literally putting both out of their sight as well as their mind.
Compare this to the more advanced zettelkasten methods where knowledge workers file everything away out of their sight, but with the tacit idea that they'll be regularly revisiting their ideas on index cards to link other ideas to them to keep building upon them. While things may be temporarily out of mind, they're regularly recycled and linked to new ideas. Their re-emergence can cause them to be remembered, re-contextualized, and often feel like serendipity for linking to other ideas in one's collection.
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- Jun 2022
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bulletproofmusician.com bulletproofmusician.com
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“If practicing feels easy, you’re probably not doing it right.
Link to: - plateau effect https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Plateau_effect, also described in Malcolm Gladwell's 10,000 hours rule
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- May 2022
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Local file Local file
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notes don’t need to be comprehensive or precise
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- Mar 2022
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en.wiktionary.org en.wiktionary.org
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https://en.wiktionary.org/wiki/idle_hands_are_the_devil%27s_workshop
Proverbs 16:27 "Scoundrels concoct evil, and their speech is like a scorching fire." (Oxford, NSRV, 5th Edition) is translated in the King James version as "An ungodly man diggeth up evil: and in his lips there is as a burning fire." The Living Bible (1971) translates this section as "Idle hands are the devil’s workshop; idle lips are his mouthpiece."
The verse may have inspired St. Jerome to write "fac et aliquid operis, ut semper te diabolus inveniat occupatum" (translation: "engage in some occupation, so that the devil may always find you busy.”) This was repeated in The Canterbury Tales which may have increased its popularity.
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- Feb 2022
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Local file Local file
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an archive – the bin for the indecisive
An archive is a trash can for the indecisive.
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the accidental encounters make up the majority of what welearn.
Serendipity is a valuable teacher.
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Planners are also unlikely to continue with their studies afterthey finish their examinations. They are rather glad it is over.Experts, on the other hand, would not even consider voluntarilygiving up what has already proved to be rewarding and fun: learningin a way that generates real insight, is accumulative and sparks newideas.
One cannot plan their way into expertise.
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every.to every.to
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You can’t take your audience with you.
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therebooting.substack.com therebooting.substack.com
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Most entertainment media are hits business.
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The old j-school saying is, “If you mother says she loves you, check it out.
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- Jan 2022
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And pundits quipped, "Nothing is more common than a fool with a strong memory."
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www.noemamag.com www.noemamag.com
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Unregulated parts can kill their wholes.
This is true in so many domains and not just biology.
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- Dec 2021
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aworkinglibrary.com aworkinglibrary.comAbout1
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books are a means of listening to the thoughts of others so that you can hear your own thoughts more clearly.
—Mandy Brown in https://aworkinglibrary.com/about/
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- Sep 2021
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history is an edit war.
what an aphorism for our time!
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finiteeyes.net finiteeyes.net
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Imitation, Paul says, allows us to think with other people’s brains. It is a key technique — globally and transhistorically — for learning, from babies imitating parents to apprentices imitating masters. And yet imitation is seen in contemporary US society, and schooling especially, as so debased that it is frequently punished. In fact, if Paul is correct (and I think she is, and have thought so for years when teaching writing), we should build imitation into many more of our lesson plans.
On the importance of imitation...
I'm reminded of Benjamin Franklin imitating what he thought were good writers to make his own writing more robust.
See: https://via.hypothes.is/https://www.gutenberg.org/files/20203/20203-h/20203-h.htm
Maybe the aphorism: "Imitation is the sincerest form of flattery," should really be "Imitation is the sincerest form of learning."
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marksstorm.medium.com marksstorm.medium.com
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‘Assert nothing audaciously, deny nothing frivolously.’
---Michel de Montaigne
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- Aug 2021
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awarm.space awarm.space
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I like the differentiation that Jared has made here on his homepage with categories for "fast" and "slow".
It's reminiscent of the system 1 (fast) and system2 (slow) ideas behind Kahneman and Tversky's work in behavioral economics. (See Thinking, Fast and Slow)
It's also interesting in light of this tweet which came up recently:
<script async src="https://platform.twitter.com/widgets.js" charset="utf-8"></script>I very much miss the back and forth with blog posts responding to blog posts, a slow moving argument where we had time to think.
— Rachel Andrew (@rachelandrew) August 22, 2017Because the Tweet was shared out of context several years later, someone (accidentally?) replied to it as if it were contemporaneous. When called out for not watching the date of the post, their reply was "you do slow web your way…" #
This gets one thinking. Perhaps it would help more people's contextual thinking if more sites specifically labeled their posts as fast and slow (or gave a 1-10 rating?). Sometimes the length of a response is an indicator of the thought put into it, thought not always as there's also the oft-quoted aphorism: "If I Had More Time, I Would Have Written a Shorter Letter".
The ease of use of the UI on Twitter seems to broadly make it a platform for "fast" posting which can often cause ruffled feathers, sour feelings, anger, and poor communication.
What if there were posting UIs (or micropub clients) that would hold onto your responses for a few hours, days, or even a week and then remind you about them after that time had past to see if they were still worth posting? This is a feature based on Abraham Lincoln's idea of a "hot letter" or angry letter, which he advised people to write often, but never send.
Where is the social media service for hot posts that save all your vituperation, but don't show them to anyone? Or which maybe posts them anonymously?
The opposite of some of this are the partially baked or even fully thought out posts that one hears about anecdotally, but which the authors say they felt weren't finish and thus didn't publish them. Wouldn't it be better to hit publish on these than those nasty quick replies? How can we create UI for this?
I saw a sitcom a few years ago where a girl admonished her friend (an oblivious boy) for liking really old Instagram posts of a girl he was interested in. She said that deep-liking old photos was an obvious and overt sign of flirting.
If this is the case then there's obviously a social standard of sorts for this, so why not hold your tongue in the meanwhile, and come up with something more thought out to send your digital love to someone instead of providing a (knee-)jerk reaction?
Of course now I can't help but think of the annotations I've been making in my copy of Lucretius' On the Nature of Things. Do you suppose that Lucretius knows I'm in love?
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- Jul 2021
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www.theatlantic.com www.theatlantic.com
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The most durable narratives are not the ones that stand up best to fact-checking.
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- Jun 2021
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en.wikipedia.org en.wikipedia.org
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Journalist and writer Paul Barker points out that "irony is a dangerous freight to carry" and suggests that in the 1960s and '70s it was read "as a simple attack on the rampant meritocrats", whereas he suggests it should be read "as sociological analysis in the form of satire".
"irony is a dangerous freight to carry" —Paul Barker
a great aphorism
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www.nytimes.com www.nytimes.com
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We are living increasingly in a culture of response.
This could be its own essay...
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Local file Local file
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The adulating por-trait of the perfect writer who never blots a line comes express mail from fairyland.
what a great sentence!
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- May 2021
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crookedtimber.org crookedtimber.org
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Code is law, and that code is misogyny.
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- Mar 2021
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en.wikipedia.org en.wikipedia.org
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Illich often used the Latin phrase Corruptio optimi quae est pessima, in English The corruption of the best is the worst.
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danallosso.substack.com danallosso.substack.com
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Overcompensation is an interesting idea. Again, its effect is non-linear (can't write on the Heathrow runway), but in a line that got 4,500 highlights in Kindle, Taleb said "The excess energy released from overreaction to setbacks is what innovates!" (52)
This highlighted portion sounds deep, but what the hell does it really mean? I feel like I'm missing some context.
Somewhat more interesting is the notice here that it's such a heavily highlighted passage. I love that Dan pays attention to these bits much as I do.
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- Jul 2020
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en.wikipedia.org en.wikipedia.org
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en.wikipedia.org en.wikipedia.org