This Week I Learned #89
2020-02-10
Podcast interview with Clemency Burton-Hill. I’d never heard about her before but through this interview, I learned about someone who decided to combine her love for classical music with conversation to create a career as a podcast host of multiple shows and a host for various shows with WNYC/NPR. A fascinating story of someone who came from a single-parent home that defied the stereotypes of those who pursued classical music and used her knowledge to not pursue a career as a musician but someone who uses music to connect with people. For me, the big learning was on the possibility of creating such a career of conversation. One more data point for creating a career that doesn’t fit the common mould.
https://www.chasejarvis.com/blog/there-is-only-one-you-with-clemency-burton-hill/
2020-02-11
Interview on Farnham street with Jeff Hunter of Talentism… a look at thinking about hiring.. and the idea of using the investing model of going slow in the beginning to go far. Jeff references how in the automaker industry, the traditional American method was to just go fast where the Japanese automakers went slow to think about kinks etc… it’s somewhat applicable on whether people are misusing the lean startup model where there is an overemphasis on speed.. which makes the culture of choosing to think and deliberate feel like they are missing out but I think it’s good to go slow.
2020-02-12
An intriguing essay on an ‘embodied consciousness’ where it’s not merely the mind leading the body but an interconnection of both.
Cartesian dualism => referring to the myth of the skin-encapsulated ego, per Alan Watts, is referred to as the organizing principle for Western civilization where the focus is on the mind over body as the focus of human consciousness… where the body is a mere vessel of existence but the mind leads. What the author believes to be a disembodied consciousness.
A wonderfully interesting dissection of the WEIRD experiment and how the WEIRD people constructed a world they believe to be true and how we all live in it by its rules. (Western, Educated, Industrialized, Rich, Democratic) => the purveyor of the disembodied conscious
The article notes how if one wishes to communicate honestly, ‘presence’ is required, not just ’self-consciousness’. Something that needs to be expressed in tandem with mind and body with non-verbal signals. It’s something to be cognizant of as I interview individuals.
2020-02-13
Learning about the history of the Futura font. It’s the font I use for the majority of my website so it’s been interesting to learn more about how it came to be. Learned it’s a German font founded in the 1920s that was adopted internationally.
2020-02-14
Paul Graham’s thought-provoking essay titled “What You Can’t Say” and the various excerpts and my coinciding thoughts on them:
"Any idea that's considered harmless in a significant percentage of times and places, and yet is taboo in ours, is a candidate for something we're mistaken about.” => Think about this. Why is it okay there and not for us?
"For example, at the high water mark of political correctness in the early 1990s, Harvard distributed to its faculty and staff a brochure saying, among other things, that it was inappropriate to compliment a colleague or student's clothes. No more "nice shirt." I think this principle is rare among the world's cultures, past or present. There are probably more where it's considered especially polite to compliment someone's clothing than where it's considered improper. Odds are this is, in a mild form, an example of one of the taboos a visitor from the future would have to be careful to avoid if he happened to set his time machine for Cambridge, Massachusetts, 1992."
It’s thinking about what is “fashionable” in ideas and everything. Like clothes. You look in the past and you laugh now but back then this was “fashionable”… these are rules that change and nothing definite. This is unlike Human Nature or Physics (to a brand degree). Moral “fashion” as well… like the ridiculous witch-hunt people love to do to judge deeds of 10 years or even multi-decades past… when society worked in a completely different ‘moral fashion’.
Section called “Prigs” is wonderful.
To figure out what’s taboo = Thoughts/Mind of a well-lived interesting person from all sorts of life and occupation - mind of teenage girl in secluded suburb with doting average middle income parents who work salaried jobs.
"Imagine a kind of latter-day Conrad character who has worked for a time as a mercenary in Africa, for a time as a doctor in Nepal, for a time as the manager of a nightclub in Miami. The specifics don't matter — just someone who has seen a lot. Now imagine comparing what's inside this guy's head with what's inside the head of a well-behaved sixteen year old girl from the suburbs. What does he think that would shock her? He knows the world; she knows, or at least embodies, present taboos. Subtract one from the other, and the result is what we can't say."
"To launch a taboo, a group has to be poised halfway between weakness and power. A confident group doesn't need taboos to protect it. It's not considered improper to make disparaging remarks about Americans, or the English."
"We often like to think of World War II as a triumph of freedom over totalitarianism. We conveniently forget that the Soviet Union was also one of the winners."
"So if you want to figure out what we can't say, look at the machinery of fashion and try to predict what it would make unsayable. What groups are powerful but nervous, and what ideas would they like to suppress? What ideas were tarnished by association when they ended up on the losing side of a recent struggle? If a self-consciously cool person wanted to differentiate himself from preceding fashions (e.g. from his parents), which of their ideas would he tend to reject? What are conventional-minded people afraid of saying?"
These are all questions I should ask myself when I’m trying to think up of essay topics.. because those are the ones worth writing about.
"A good scientist, in other words, does not merely ignore conventional wisdom, but makes a special effort to break it. Scientists go looking for trouble. This should be the m.o. of any scholar, but scientists seem much more willing to look under rocks.”
"If you can think things so outside the box that they'd make people's hair stand on end, you'll have no trouble with the small trips outside the box that people call innovative.” -> beautiful
"Argue with idiots, and you become an idiot.” => pick your battles. Just choose to stay out of other games run by other idiots who follow moral fashion. Say you haven’t decided what side yet…. It’s not a priority… I don’t want to take no sides.. it’s not a game I want to play in. No need to ever answer in details
Absurd comedies are one way to fight such stupidity in the world of moral fashion.