Substrate

#behavior
orbits
orbits
New behaviors create new graphs. New graphs don’t necessarily create new behaviors. What you’ve got to develop is a passing comet that can fly-by Saturn with a uniquely better offering. This offering is giving Saturn orbiters a chance to do something they can’t do at all today. It’s not about making what they can do slightly better or easier, it’s giving them a path to something bold and unmet.
·notion.so·
orbits
Remains of the Day: Issue 06
Remains of the Day: Issue 06
It feels almost insensitive to focus on anything else right now, like bringing up celebrity gossip at a funeral. ​ This is that emergency episode that falls outside the overarching narrative continuity of our lives. ​ Living in a house where adults are screaming at each other in the next room from dusk until dawn chips away at the membrane of one’s inner peace. ​ More and more of the information is simply adding to the fog of war, and some shoddy graphs of all sorts of really varied data sets and cohorts aren’t helping. ​ For all the chaos on Twitter, some of the smarter voices there still strike me as the most sensible ones.
·eugenewei.substack.com·
Remains of the Day: Issue 06
College as an incubator of Girardian terror
College as an incubator of Girardian terror
When we’re not so different from people around us, it’s irresistible to become obsessed about beating others. ​ Still here’s my answer: If one must go to college, I advise cultivating smaller social circles. Instead of going to class and preparing for exams, to go to the library and just read. Finally, not to join a fraternity or finance club, but to be part of a knitting circle or hiking group instead. ​ In Canada, people apply to major in certain subjects; if they earn admission, it’s not so easy to switch, so there’s less of this intellectual loitering that one finds on American campuses. And when I attended a German university, students told me that German 18-year-olds don’t usually go directly to university after high school. Instead, they take a year off to travel, work, or volunteer. These experiences create difference and maturity, thus better inoculating people against mimetic contagion. ​ Girard presents a model of human conflict that is Shakespearean, not Marxist. That is, he thinks that people are not engaged in class struggle, in which proletarians unite against the bourgeoisie; instead, people reserve horror and resentment for people most like themselves. ​ If one is a Girardian, then there is perhaps no greater catastrophe than the growing tendency of the American meritocracy to be incubated in elite colleges. Is it not worth fretting that the people running the country are coming in higher numbers from these hothouse environments at a young age, where one is inflamed to compete over everything and where tiny symbolic disputes seem like life and death struggles? How much of the governing class has fully adopted this attitude, and to what extent can we see our recent political problems to be manifestations of this tendency?
·danwang.co·
College as an incubator of Girardian terror
“Most profound thing I've learned in the past eight years is the difference between behavior and intention. Behavior is what someone is doing, intention is why they're doing it. You judge yourself based on your intention, and everyone else based on thei
“Most profound thing I've learned in the past eight years is the difference between behavior and intention. Behavior is what someone is doing, intention is why they're doing it. You judge yourself based on your intention, and everyone else based on thei
Most profound thing I've learned in the past eight years is the difference between behavior and intention. Behavior is what someone is doing, intention is why they're doing it.You judge yourself based on your intention, and everyone else based on their behavior.— Sahil Lavingia (@shl) March 21, 2019
·twitter.com·
“Most profound thing I've learned in the past eight years is the difference between behavior and intention. Behavior is what someone is doing, intention is why they're doing it. You judge yourself based on your intention, and everyone else based on thei