The Attention Span. “Racehorses and Psychopaths.”

“For the most important inquiry, however, there is a method. Let the young soul survey its own life with a view of the following question: “What have you truly loved thus far? What has ever uplifted your soul, what has dominated and delighted it at the same time?” Assemble these revered objects in a row before you and perhaps they will reveal a law... See more

Consciousness exists on a spectrum from pure abstraction (map) to pure engagement (territory).

Of the fifty-odd biases discovered by Kahneman, Tversky, and their successors, forty-nine are cute quirks, and one is destroying civilization. This last one is confirmation bias - our tendency to interpret evidence as confirming our pre-existing beliefs instead of changing our minds.

Perhaps the simplest and best definition of wisdom I’ve heard is “knowing what information is important.” This kind of knowing is not solely done in the intellect. Data is constantly being fed into your unconscious, then cross referenced against your experience.

This is the difference between dissonance and resonance. When head and body are aligned or conflicted. As in the famous example of George Soros and his back pain, bodily sensation is a key indicator of unconscious dissonance; of when your intellect is missing something important from the outside world. His back hurt when his portfolio was positione... See more

As the author of Sapiens, Yuval Noah Harari, puts it: “you could never convince a monkey to give you a banana by promising him limitless bananas after death in monkey heaven.”

Once you know exactly where you are on the map, you still need to orient yourself and move in the territory. And this is the key insight I learned from writing this piece. If you rebuild your new model based on abstractions it’s no more likely to be correct than the old one. So, you need to rebuild it in harmony with the world around you. The Taois... See more

The value of information is determined by what’s discarded in the process of creating it.

Galef’s Scout Mindset sets out to remove information to provide a clearer view of the territory. Soldier Mindset just adds more confirmations to make the map more elaborate, regardless of its accuracy.