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Don’t Surround Yourself With Smarter People
Don’t Surround Yourself With Smarter People

AI Summary: > This article challenges the common advice to "surround yourself with smarter people," arguing that it's logically flawed and potentially harmful. Instead, the author proposes seeking out "differently free" individuals who can provide non-sequiturs and unexpected perspectives, keeping one engaged in an "infinite game" of continuous learning and growth.

We can finally define what it means for someone to be differently free from you. They are people who are playing just a slightly different game than you are. That difference makes them a reliable sources of non sequiturs in your life. Waiting for nature to present you with a parrot or a piece of corn to awaken you out of a finite game is a tricky, chancy business.
Differently free people change the equation in an interesting way. When you include a person in your life, it is because they have a definite worth (possibly negative) in whatever finite game you’re asleep in at the time. This means there is at least some overlap between their game and yours; some similarity between how you keep score and how they do. Some meaningful relationship (possibly adversarial)  between how you define winning and how they do.
This means you have a model of the person in your head. One that predicts how they will value things.
it is the parts that don’t overlap that matter. There are things that have a defined worth in their lives that are non sequiturs in yours, and vice versa. When you see through the eyes of a differently free person, you expect to see a landscape of presumptively valued things. A landscape based on your predictions of how they value things. When the other person appears to value something that doesn’t even register with you, for a moment, that thing turns into a non sequitur, a candidate parrot. It lingers just a little bit longer in your own mind than it would if you yourself saw it. Long enough that you do a double take and notice it consciously.
My alternative to the heuristic, which many of you have heard in off-blog conversations, is that I am only interested in people as long as they are unpredictable to me. If I can predict what you’ll do or say, I’ll lose interest in you rapidly. If you can keep regularly surprising me in some way, forcing me to actually think in unscripted ways in order to respond, I’ll stay interested. It’s reciprocal. I suspect the people with whom I develop long-term relationships are the ones I surprise regularly. The ones who find me predictable don’t stick around. We’re not talking any old kind of surprise, but non sequiturs. Surprises that you can’t really relate to anything else, and don’t know what to do with. Mind-expanding surprises rather than gap-closing surprises.
#advice#lifestyle#culture#relationships#philosophy
·archive.is·
Don’t Surround Yourself With Smarter People
Everything that turned out well in my life followed the same design process
Everything that turned out well in my life followed the same design process
The useful thing about defining good design as a form-context fit is that it tells you where you will find the form. The form is in the context. To find a good relationship, you do not start by saying, “I want a relationship that looks like this”—that would be starting in the wrong end, by defining form. Instead you say, “I’m just going to pay attention to what happens when I hang out with various people and iterate toward something that feels alive”—you start from the context.
The context is smarter than you. It holds more nuance and information than you can fit in your head. Collaborate with it.
If you want to find a good design—be that the design of a house or an essay, a career or a marriage—what you want is some process that allows you to extract information from the context, and bake it into the form. That is what unfolding is.
The opposite of an unfolding is a vision. A vision springs, not from a careful understanding of a context, but from a fantasy
Anything that increases the rate and resolution of information you get from the context will help. And anything that makes it easier for you to act on the context.
A common reason we filter information and become blind to the context is that we bundle things when we think. Thinking about our career, we might think in abstractions like “a job.” But really a career is made up of a bunch of different things like a salary, an identity, relationships, status, a sense of meaning, and so on. It is often easier to find a fit if you unbundle these things, and think about the parts that matter to you individually. Do you actually need more status? Or can you find a better fit if you go low status?
Another common reason the feedback loop of unfolding often works poorly is that people have decided on a solution already. They have turned on their confirmation bias. They have decided that a certain solution is off-limits. Let’s say you are 34 and haven’t found a partner but want kids. If we unbundle this, it is clear that the problem of having a kid and the problem of love are not the same thing, so you could solve your problem by having a kid with your best friend instead. But this feels weird. It is not the vision you have for your life. And it seems dysfunctional. Observe that feeling—it is, perhaps, a part of the context. There is some information there. But to unfold, do not write off any solutions. Leave them all on the table; let them combine and recombine. Many good ideas look bad at first. To increase the rate at which you understand the context, you want to develop a certain detachment. When the context thrashes one of your ideas, you want to say, “Oh, that’s interesting.” It takes practice. But it is worth getting better at. Reality is shy—it only reveals itself to those who, like honest scientists, do not wish it to be something else.
The faster you can collide your ideas against reality, the faster you get feedback.
The school system is centered around visions, not unfolding. You are asked to make decisions about realities that are five, ten years down the line, and you get no feedback on your decisions.
you’re less torn by anxious attachments when you recognize how something must naturally and necessarily unfold.
Knowledge is freedom from getting mad at facts.
Detachment does not mean you don’t care what happens. It just means you don’t care whether a specific thing happens or not. You want to know the outcome of the coin-toss (you care), but you don’t care whether it is heads or tails even if you’ve bet on heads (you’re not attached to a specific outcome). The important thing is that something happens, which means you’ve successfully kept play going, but without keeping score.
Emotional Self-Management: I like to think of this as accepting the emotions you have instead of having emotions about having emotions in an endless stack.
Fear. Not fear, plus anxiety about fear, plus guilt about anxiety about fear, plus shame about displaying guilt about experiencing anxiety about having fear. This is emotional focus. Instead of retreating from an emotion through layers of additional emotions until you find one you can deal with, you experience the actual emotion for what it is.
#lifestyle#philosophy#design#self improvement#career#advice#relationships#design/processes
·archive.is·
Everything that turned out well in my life followed the same design process
Diary of a Lover Girl - Sherry Ning
Diary of a Lover Girl - Sherry Ning
Flirting isn’t limited to romance. Flirting is an attitude that only playful and happy people can have and enjoy. It’s the virtue of being uncommitted—to people, to philosophies, to bets. Flirting turns uncertainty, something we usually fear, into pleasure. It’s being able to take yourself less seriously. It’s being able to react to discomfort with humor. Fortune is a lady and she favors whoever makes her laugh. Most people can sting like a bee but not everyone can float like a butterfly. You can change a conversation you don’t want to have by turning your shoulder, lowering your chin, giving a mischievous smile—a gesture my mother would call “coquettish”—and asking a slightly provocative personal question. Flirting lets you turn the tables without killing the tête-à-tête.
#relationships#lifestyle#themes#philosophy
·sherryning.com·
Diary of a Lover Girl - Sherry Ning
I Know Why You're Sad
I Know Why You're Sad
Religion prescribes, but even religion doesn’t give you the reasons for its prescriptions—that’s why it’s called faith. Like a child who doesn’t understand why she has to sleep before 9 P.M. (and has to take the unsatisfactory answer of “because you’re still growing!”), we can’t comprehend why our soul needs holy vitamins. And we don’t need to.
You can’t “think” your way to the soul. You also can’t “feel” your way to it. The soul is at the core of everything; when you neglect it, it doesn’t just go away, it turns to weird forms of obsession, addiction, and nihilism. It’s not something you grasp; it’s something that grasps you. It’s why our qualitative experiences are treated mechanistically, like how screen time-limiting apps temporarily block your social media addiction without addressing the real reason for your anxiety, loneliness, or envy.
·sherryning.com·
I Know Why You're Sad
‘Babygirl’ Review: Nicole Kidman Is Fearless in an Erotic Office Drama About the Age of Control
‘Babygirl’ Review: Nicole Kidman Is Fearless in an Erotic Office Drama About the Age of Control
The fact that she’s having an affair with an intern from her own company, risking everything that she’s built, is part of the turn-on. The spark plug of Kidman’s performance is that she plays this sick recklessness as something fully human: the expression of a woman too compartmentalized to put the different parts of herself together. She’s caught up in an erotic fever, but it’s one that’s laced with agony.
#reviews#profiles#films#identities/femininity#work-life#sex
·variety.com·
‘Babygirl’ Review: Nicole Kidman Is Fearless in an Erotic Office Drama About the Age of Control
How Elon Musk Got Tangled Up in Blue
How Elon Musk Got Tangled Up in Blue
Mr. Musk had largely come to peace with a price of $100 a year for Blue. But during one meeting to discuss pricing, his top assistant, Jehn Balajadia, felt compelled to speak up. “There’s a lot of people who can’t even buy gas right now,” she said, according to two people in attendance. It was hard to see how any of those people would pony up $100 on the spot for a social media status symbol. Mr. Musk paused to think. “You know, like, what do people pay for Starbucks?” he asked. “Like $8?” Before anyone could raise objections, he whipped out his phone to set his word in stone. “Twitter’s current lords & peasants system for who has or doesn’t have a blue checkmark is bullshit,” he tweeted on Nov. 1. “Power to the people! Blue for $8/month.”
#twitter#people/elon musk#tech#business#platforms#internet#misinfo#politics#business/models#bts#profiles
·nytimes.com·
How Elon Musk Got Tangled Up in Blue
How Elon Musk Got Tangled Up in Blue
How Elon Musk Got Tangled Up in Blue
Mr. Musk came to hate what he saw as Twitter’s two-tiered class system of the verified and unverified, and to him, selling off the check marks was the ultimate democratization of the site. Soon after completing his acquisition, he assigned Ms. Crawford to assemble a team and gave her a deadline of Nov. 7, 2022, for Blue’s relaunch. She had 10 days to deliver or risk being fired, three people with knowledge of the conversations said.
Many of the employees on the Blue team came to view the project as pointless at best and, at worst, something that could undermine trust. If everyone could be verified, then no one would truly be verified. As one Blue worker later wrote in a journal: “It was such an obvious train wreck, that the main job of everyone on the team was to make sure it was the safest train wreck possible.”
While many people saw the check mark as a designation of fame, it became an important part of Twitter’s utility. It marked the real accounts for brands like McDonald’s and Coca-Cola, making the platform much more attractive to advertisers. And it signified authenticity for governments and emergency services, which provided information about train delays, elections and tornado warnings.
Mr. Sacks insisted that they should raise the price to $20 a month, from its current $4.99. Anything less felt cheap to him, and he wanted to present Blue as a luxury good. “Chanel could make a fortune selling a $99 bag, but it would be a one-time move,” he wrote. “A ‘promotional offer’ may not be the position we want. A luxury brand can always move down-market, but it’s very hard to move up-market once the brand is shot.” Jason Calacanis, a friend of Mr. Musk’s, disagreed. “It should be $99 a year,” he insisted. During one meeting, he launched into a spiel about how Twitter users were more likely to open their wallets for a $100-per-year subscription if it seemed slightly cheaper at the $99 price, as though he had just watched a YouTube video explaining the basics of consumer psychology.
To employees, the discussions were baffling. There was Mr. Musk, a man who had built multibillion-dollar companies, soliciting advice from a small inner circle of advisers who had little experience building social networks. Sure, they used Twitter, but these rich men were not representative of the hundreds of millions of people who logged in every day.
Ms. Crawford came up with her own tactics for dealing with Mr. Musk. She quickly learned that she could challenge him in one-on-one settings. Individually, Mr. Musk could be charming, willing to engage in discussion and listen to the expertise of his counterpart. Put him in a larger group setting with people outside his inner circle or those he didn’t trust, however, and Mr. Musk’s ego ran wild. He could never be seen as inferior or uninformed.
As the new Blue came into focus, so did the fears about how it would be exploited for impersonation. What would happen if an account pretending to be a local fire department declared an emergency? Or an account posing as a politician spread a lie about an upcoming vote? Image
The weekend before U.S. voters headed to the polls, Ms. Crawford made one last attempt in a private chat with her boss. “Do you want to be blamed for the outcome of this election?” she asked. “Well, when is it?” Mr. Musk replied. “It’s in two days,” Ms. Crawford said, stunned that he hadn’t clocked the date that she and her team had been warning him about since the start of the project. Mr. Musk paused, processing. “Oh, I didn’t realize,” he said after a moment. “OK, yeah, it’s fine. We can wait. Why don’t we wait?” The launch was moved to Nov. 9, the day after the election.
A software engineer calling in to the meeting posed a question to Mr. Musk: “What would you consider a serious incident that would require us to put back such a label or some other differentiation between accounts?” Mr. Musk intertwined his fingers and paused for a few seconds. “If there’s like death or serious injury or something like that, um, you know, uh,” he said, fidgeting. “Something beyond annoyance or mild confusion — that would be enough.”
·nytimes.com·
How Elon Musk Got Tangled Up in Blue
Among America’s “Low-Information Voters” | The New Yorker
Among America’s “Low-Information Voters” | The New Yorker
“The important thing is that you’re informed on issues you care about.” Of course, finding good information is increasingly difficult. Decades ago, there were just a few channels on television; the Internet has broadened the choices and lowered the standards. “Now people might seek out information about a particular candidate on a particular policy and think they have genuine info, but they’re being misinformed or misled,” Kalla said. The decline of newspapers has led to a decrease in split-ticket voting: voters know less about the candidates in their districts, so they simply vote along party lines. This has helped to nationalize politics. Cable news, which voters increasingly rely on, “carries a lot less information than the New York Times,” Schleicher said.
#politics#culture#opinion#elections#trends#misinfo#journalism#gop
·archive.ph·
Among America’s “Low-Information Voters” | The New Yorker
Culture Council: The Future Belongs to Impact-Driven Creators: The Shift in the Creator Economy
Culture Council: The Future Belongs to Impact-Driven Creators: The Shift in the Creator Economy
Fun fact: The exit cycles of movies can be 2x shorter than those of tech startups.
all of these emerging movements start with major capital injections, therefore, novel fundraising systems, i.e., equity crowdfunding along with increasing institutional trust, could be useful catalyzers for this new era in Hollywood.
·rollingstone.com·
Culture Council: The Future Belongs to Impact-Driven Creators: The Shift in the Creator Economy
Editors who left the field or take less work: what came next? : r/editors
Editors who left the field or take less work: what came next? : r/editors

AI summary: An experienced video editor is experiencing burnout and seeking advice from others who have transitioned out of or reduced their work in the editing field, exploring alternative career paths or ways to balance editing with other pursuits.

  1. Industry challenges:

    • The post suggests that career progression and financial growth in editing may be stagnating
    • There's an indication that the editing field might not be as rewarding or sustainable as it once was

  2. Digital fatigue:

    • The mention of "computer burnout" points to a growing issue of digital exhaustion in tech-heavy professions
    • This reflects a broader trend of professionals seeking balance in the digital age

  3. Shift in career values:

    • There's a noticeable desire for tangible, physical work, suggesting a potential pushback against purely digital careers
    • This could indicate a broader trend of reevaluating career satisfaction beyond traditional metrics of success

  4. Gig economy pressures:

    • The consideration of part-time work combined with freelancing hints at the challenges of stability in the gig economy
    • It suggests that full-time roles in editing might be less available or less appealing

  5. Community support importance:

    • Reaching out to peers for advice highlights the value of professional communities in navigating career challenges
    • This reflects a broader trend of using online platforms for career guidance and support

  6. Work-life balance concerns:

    • The post indicates a growing prioritization of lifestyle and well-being over traditional career paths
    • This aligns with wider discussions about work-life balance, especially post-pandemic

  7. Adaptability and multi-skilling:

    • Considering diverse career options suggests a need for adaptability in the current job market
    • It points to a trend of professionals looking to diversify their skills and income streams
#discourse#trends#editing#careers#tiktok#social media#burnout
·reddit.com·
Editors who left the field or take less work: what came next? : r/editors
Sam Altman doesn’t care about you
Sam Altman doesn’t care about you
through technological intervention in human biology, not by improving the collective conditions of human life. If he was serious about wanting to extend people’s lifespans by 10 years, he wouldn’t be looking at sci-fi fantasies, but at the policies that can deliver those benefits and how to get the US political system to move them forward
It’s not just that the United States is very economically unequal, but one of the consequences of that is that the rich live, on average, 10 to 15 years longer than the poor.
No tech company is going to roll out some new digital service or AI-powered platform that is going to make any significant dent in the factors that are causing such a disparity in the number of years poor and rich Americans — or Americans and citizens of other countries — actually live.
billionaires in Silicon Valley, many of whom want us to believe they’re on our side, have no real interest in the policies and political action that would be necessary to close that gap. Instead, they want to hoard as much wealth as possible so they can pretend they’re building the sci-fi visions they spent their youths reading about.
We can see many examples through history where the rollout of new technologies has improved our quality of life and increased our lifespans. But when tech billionaires use that term, they actually means letting VC-funded tech companies deploy whatever they want on an unsuspecting public with little regulation and no threat of accountability when things go wrong.
·disconnect.blog·
Sam Altman doesn’t care about you
Why Creators Have Stopped Editing Their Content
Why Creators Have Stopped Editing Their Content

AI Summary: A new trend is emerging among content creators on platforms like YouTube and TikTok, where they are moving away from heavily edited videos to more raw, unedited content. This shift is driven by audience fatigue with overstimulating, retention-edited videos and a desire for more authentic, relatable content. Creators like Dan Hentschel and Sam Sulek have gained large followings by posting unedited videos, finding that this approach saves time, money, and resonates better with viewers. The trend is seen as a reaction to the oversaturation of highly produced content, with even top creators like MrBeast acknowledging the benefits of a more stripped-down approach. Industry experts and creators alike report that unedited content often outperforms edited videos in terms of views and engagement, as it creates a sense of intimacy and authenticity that audiences crave in the current social media landscape.

See also [[companionship content]]

WHEN DAN HENTSCHEL, a 28-year-old comedic YouTuber, goes to make a video, he props his phone up on the dashboard of his car, talks for up to 40 minutes uninterrupted, and posts it.
social media users are getting fatigued by the overstimulating, brain-rot style of videos, where graphics and sounds appear every 1.5 seconds. No-edit creators, he says, are building deeper relationships with their followers.
“The no-edit format feels more intimate. It’s as if you’re hanging out with your friend at the gym, going for a car ride, or just hanging out at home. These no-edit creators, in particular, replicate face-to-face communication, which creates a sense of intimacy. They speak directly into the camera as if they’re looking at you directly.”
Adam Meskouri, who negotiates content and licensing partnerships with creators and runs the Instagram page @baai, which posts viral content, says that he’s seen no-edit content take off in the past couple of months. “The videos that perform the best are videos that don’t have text overlays, or cuts, or special effects,” he says. “They’re usually just continuous clips.”
#video editing#trends#YouTube#culture#editing
·rollingstone.com·
Why Creators Have Stopped Editing Their Content
Alien: Romulus Director Fede Álvarez Breaks Down That Controversial Cameo
Alien: Romulus Director Fede Álvarez Breaks Down That Controversial Cameo
I think they make too many. [Laughs.] I think Hollywood has to learn to be missed. Hollywood used to be, at least, not too long ago, a place where you were begging for the movie; you were begging for them to give you a new Star Wars, a new this, a new that, you just couldn’t wait … Now it kind of feels the other way around. Hollywood is like, Do you want another one, do you want another one? I’ll give you two of these for the price of one! They’re just giving people too much that they’re not even asking for, and I think that’s never a good position. The whole system that controls [the] IPs should be more precious about them, and really pace themselves, and make sure the audience is dying for one, instead of just giving them five a year.
It gets to a point after 100 years of cinema that a lot of the big ideas that we came up with have a brand. If I told you, “I’m gonna write this original movie about a bunch of kids in a colony in space, and they go to the space station, and there’s a monster in there,” you’re gonna go, “It's Alien.” And I’ll go, “Oh no, it’s not Alien, it’s something else,” you’ll lose interest right away, go like, “Pfft, it’s a rip-off.”
·gq.com·
Alien: Romulus Director Fede Álvarez Breaks Down That Controversial Cameo
A.I. Artificial Intelligence movie review (2001) | Roger Ebert
A.I. Artificial Intelligence movie review (2001) | Roger Ebert
After faithfully following his instructions in such a way that he nearly drowns Martin, he loses the trust of the Swintons and they decide to get rid of him, just as parents might get rid of a dangerous dog. Monica cannot bring herself to return David to Cybertronics. She pauses on the way and releases him into a forest, where he can join other free-range mechas. He will not die. He doesn't get cold, he doesn't get hungry, and apparently he has an indefinite supply of fuel. Monica's decision to release him instead of turning him in is based on her lingering identification with David; in activating him to love her, she activated herself to love him. His unconditional love must have been deeply appealing. We relate to pets in a similar way, especially to dogs, who seem to have been activated by evolution to love us.
·rogerebert.com·
A.I. Artificial Intelligence movie review (2001) | Roger Ebert
The AI summer — Benedict Evans
The AI summer — Benedict Evans
an LLM by itself is not a product - it’s a technology that can enable a tool or a feature, and it needs to be unbundled or rebundled into new framings, UX and tools to be become useful. That takes even more time.
·ben-evans.com·
The AI summer — Benedict Evans
Mulholland Dr. movie review & film summary (2001) | Roger Ebert
Mulholland Dr. movie review & film summary (2001) | Roger Ebert
I gave my usual speech about how you can't take an interpretation to a movie. You have to find it there already. No consensus emerged about what we had found. It was a tribute to Lynch that the movie remained compulsively watchable while refusing to yield to interpretation. The most promising direction we tried was to delineate the boundaries of the dreams(s) and the identities of the dreamer(s).
·rogerebert.com·
Mulholland Dr. movie review & film summary (2001) | Roger Ebert
IndieWire Best movies of the 2000s - last page
IndieWire Best movies of the 2000s - last page
Many filmmakers have interrogated the dream factory that employs them, but only David Lynch understands that to capture its insidious beauty requires rendering it a dream itself, in all of its prismatic glory. While “Mulholland Dr.” is — and is about — a dream, it feels like a disservice to the film to describe in such elemental terms.
it’s eminently possible to pull apart the surrealism in Lynch’s masterpiece to determine “how it works,” but doing so can’t ruin or even explain the film’s magic, which lies in how Lynch organizes every element at his disposal until real and unreal become indistinguishable.
their journey from A to B animates the desperate mystery at the film’s core, which revolves around personal identity and encompasses a web of taciturn mobsters, dopey hitmen, soothsaying cowboys, and ambitious filmmakers cut down at the knees.
Watts’ disarming portrayal of a wide-eyed naif evaporates the instant Betty enters a crucial audition; when it’s over, Watts and her character(s) suddenly feel unknowable and out of reach, just like movie stars.
the ugliness of the factory’s gears become readily apparent, and “Mulholland Dr.” becomes about the despair and heartbreak that comprise Hollywood’s background.
Time and again, Yang’s characters return to the feeling that something isn’t enough. A child’s presence isn’t seen as enough comfort to his comatose grandma if he can’t think of something eloquent to say. The effort spent on a massive video game project at work inevitably means not spending enough time with family (and vice versa). And the makeshift pile of memories and bonds that we acquire over the course of a lifetime — always doing our best — never feels like enough when we compare it against our Platonic fantasies of what could have been.
The finished film feels like a parting gift from an artist — already at the end of his tragically short life — who came to appreciate that a well-lived human life contains more poetry than all of the planet’s art put together.
David is unique because the love he carries for Monica quite literally allows his mommy to be real again, and in doing so it sees him become the only son humanity has left. The super robots designate him as an original because he actually knew a living person — he’s the realest boy in the whole wide world. And so the artifice of their experiment gives way to the most genuine of truths:  Love doesn’t exist in defiance of time — love is the defiance of time. And like David, the movie that Spielberg has made about him will never age a day.
#films#reviews#sci-fi#themes
·indiewire.com·
IndieWire Best movies of the 2000s - last page