“Although I never considered it at the time, it is impossible for me now not to frame the intensity of this devotion to music as a counterpart—a harmony—to my OCD. Every moment I was poring over tablature or trying to master a new chord was a moment not spent, say, touching a byzantine pattern of bricks on the fireplace wall. When I was playing, writing, recording music, I was safe.” – Paris Review
Category: ideas
How Do Bubbles Happen? When The Stories We Tell Get Detached From The Evidence
“Bubbles inflate as the distance between fiction and reality increases. Contexts – such as investor liquidity, regulatory frameworks and cultural and macro-economic factors – establish boundaries on how far our stories can depart from reality. But entrepreneurs are also creatures of context, and some are better than others at ‘entrepreneuring’, stretching the limits of plausibility and maximising time for their imagined realities to catch up to their promises.” – Aeon
Study: Speaking Of Yourself In The Third Person Might Make You Smarter
Imagine, for instance, that you are arguing with your partner. Adopting a third-person perspective might help you to recognise their point of view or to accept the limits of your understanding of the problem at hand. Or imagine you are considering moving jobs. Taking the distanced perspective could help you to weigh up the benefits and the risks of the move more dispassionately. – Aeon
The Big Questions At The Heart Of “Peanuts”
Through “Peanuts,” Schulz wanted to tell hard truths about, as he said, “intelligent things.” But the main truth he tells is that there are no answers to the big questions. – The New Yorker
When My Taste Is Your Nightmare
“We tend to think of aesthetic disputes as reflecting the least substantive differences between people—you like vanilla, I like chocolate, there’s no arguing over taste, let’s move on. But that point of view may be infected by the wishful thinking of backwards argumentation: given that there is no arguing over taste, those differences had better be unimportant. What if some of them are not?” – The Point
Email Seems Efficient. Science Has Figured Out Why It Isn’t
As e-mail was taking over the modern office, researchers in the theory of distributed systems were also studying the trade-offs between synchrony and asynchrony. As it happens, the conclusion they reached was exactly the opposite of the prevailing consensus. They became convinced that synchrony was superior and that spreading communication out over time hindered work rather than enabling it. – The New Yorker
Bank Discovers AI Writes Better Ads Than Their Ad People Do
In tests, JPMorgan Chase found that Persado’s machine-learning tool crafted better ad copy than its own writers could muster, as measured by the higher click rates—more than double in some case—on digital ads for Chase cards and mortgages. – Quartz
Pew: Only 35% Of Public Trust Scientists (But Hey, It’s More Than It Used To Be)
The Pew data makes clear how this happens: some people are just uninformed, while others cling to opposing political values. People with a high degree of familiarity with what nutritional, medical, or environmental science researchers or practitioners are studying are nearly twice as likely to trust them. – Fast Company
Does Imagining Our Extinction Change Who We Are?
As ideas go, human extinction is a comparatively new one. It emerged first during the 18th and 19th centuries. Though understudied, the idea has an important history because it teaches us lessons on what it means to be human in the first place, in the sense of what is demanded of us by such a calling. – Aeon
What Psychopaths Can Teach Us About Ourselves
Psychopaths are sick, deranged, lacking in moral conscience. In other words, they’re nothing like you or me. But this is false. Rather than freakish outliers then, psychopaths reveal important truths about human morality. But are we ready to accept what they might teach us? – Aeon