Recent Feeds + Reads

The important thing to realize is that the conjuring up of the idea is not a deliberate, voluntary act. It is something that happens to us rather than something we do.

To be genuinely thoughtful, we must be willing to sustain and protract that state of doubt which is the stimulus to thorough enquiry, so as not to accept an idea or make a positive assertion of a belief, until justifying reasons have been found.

New associations and fresh ideas are more likely to come out of a varied store of memories and experience than out of a collection that is all of one kind.

The most characteristic circumstances of an intuition are a period of intense work on the problem accompanied by a desire for its solution, abandonment of the work perhaps with attention to something else, then the appearance of the idea with dramatic suddenness and often a sense of certainty. Often there is a feeling of exhilaration and perhaps surprise that the idea had not been thought of previously.

Dave Lee: GTD sucks for creative work. Here’s an alternative system.

heydave7:

A friend asked me this question about what system I use to manage my todo list:

Your todo list is probably like mine, a million items long and constantly growing… Do you use a system or systems to manage your todo list? I’ve been loosely following GTD, and currently using a text document to…

Newton, Reconsidered: A hands-on assessment of Apple’s pioneering, ill-fated Personal Digital Assistant, twenty years after its original unveiling.

The source has to be liked and trusted, or else the evidence will have very little coherence. As Kahneman puts it, “the basis of belief for most people is we believe people.” We believe people that we like and trust, and this is the basis of most of our beliefs. We don’t feel the same degree of belief with people we don’t like and trust, because it’s not emotionally and associatively compatible.

The mere threat of being on the outs with one’s tribe can be enough to make us avoid thinking independently and rationally about issues like peak oil and climate change.

Knowing that stories are fundamental to how we “think” and what we believe, it behooves us to consider their import on our dialogue, and how we convey our thoughts to others in different tribes, or who have different experiences. Storyteller Bill Harley offers some useful insights on this in his delightful TEDx lecture. “Stories are how we make sense of our lives, how we explain how we got where we are, how we imagine where we might go,” he says. “I think actually that story-making is at the very center of what it is to be human.”

Jane McGonigal argues that games are not a waste of time. In fact, she argues, “we need to look at what games are doing for gamers, the skills that we’re developing, the relationships that we’re forming, the heroic qualities that we get to practice every time we play.”

What are these types of skills and how can they help us enhance, rather than detract from our ambitions as humans?