Tag: knowledge
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It’s Easier to Say Wise Things than Do Them
It is so much easier to say something sage-like and wise than to live out the implications of that wisdom. I touched on this a bit in my yearly review from last week, but it’s one of the core things that reading through this site regularly reminds me. Doing wise things requires actually facing up […]
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Never Assume You Know Their Reason
One of the most valuable lessons I learned in my life was to stop assuming that I understood a person’s motivations for doing something. I used to think that the obvious (and usually malicious) motivation that I first came up with to explain another person’s behavior was probably theirs. That is, if someone was driving in […]
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Culture Is A Series of Lossy Compression Algorithms
Compression algorithms are all around you in a modern digital life. But you may not actually know what they are, so let me explain: raw data taken from the world is rarely very efficiently packed. So to save file size and computational sanity, most data is compressed. JPEG is an image compression format — it takes […]
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The Value of Curiousity
There’s a saying I don’t much like; maybe you’ve heard it. It says “curiosity killed the cat.” The reason I don’t like it is pretty simple: it’s wrong. It drags the good name of curiosity through the mud for the sake of some supposed safety. It’s possible that curiosity contributed to the cat’s death, but […]
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The Power of Understanding the Different Levels of Knowing
We humans are complicated and intelligent creatures. We know a lot of stuff. A lot a lot. We can name hundreds of different plants and animals. We can cook. We can speak a language. We can read that same language from symbols put on paper. We can make paper. We can understand what it means […]
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The Depths of Our Ignorance
When you stop to think about it, it’s shocking how little we actually understand about anything. We know only the edges of things, and use them to guide our reasoning about them. Neuroscientists and psychologist are increasingly aware how few of our decisions and thoughts are a result of careful consideration. We constantly make inferences […]
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On the Banality of Profound Truths
If there was one obstacle, beyond laziness, that made me hesitate to get back to writing in more than the few-sentence bursts I regularly produce for Link Banana it was my uncertainty about what of value I could say. It’s not that I don’t think people need to hear things I think that I know–while […]
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In Defense of Wikipedia
For those not following closely, it’s probably news that Wikipedia’s management structure–Wikipedia has a management structure?–is being critiqued because of what The Register, an online technology newspaper, said was new evidence that “the site’s top administrators are using a secret insider mailing list to crackdown on perceived threats to their power.” You can read all […]
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Other People’s Words: Happiness
These words are from Happiness: A Guide to Developing Life’s Most Important Skill by Matthieu Ricard and translated by Jesse Browner. I really enjoy this book, and would encourage you to read it. This quote is about the difference between genuine happiness and what we often think of as means of achieving it. Once at […]