A living collection of notes, ideas, and reflections from Doug Belshaw.
Ky Decker has written a really interesting post about quitting his tech job. Yes, the proximal cause is AI, but once you get past that, there some interesting points on productive friction, values, and burnout.
No matter how rapidly technology changes, I am coalescing around some core beliefs:
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Jason Zweig's father was a smart guy:
There are three ways to make a living:
Lie to people who want to be lied to, and you’ll get rich.
Tell the truth to those who want the truth, and you’ll make a living.
Tell the truth to those who want to be lied to, and you’ll go broke.
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NEET, rendered "Neet" in this BBC News article, stands for "Not in Education, Employment, or Training". The Milburn report shows that 13.5% of young people are NEET, with a sharp decline in entry level jobs, and vacancies in hospitality halving just in the last four years.
…I included this in the latest TechFreedom newsletter but I'm also sharing it here because I feel like I've been thinking about the power and pernicious quality of "the default option" my entire adult life.
…This post very much goes with my previous one about embodied cognition. Although we shouldn't allow people to wield capricious power based on "gut feel", nor should we accept the outsourcing of decision-making to LLMs. Especially when it's done in the way outlined below, by people unaware of the way that commercial full-stack AI tools are built to validate whoever is using them.
…This from Rachel Botsman, which I came across via OLDaily, is an object lesson in warm, fuzzy human experience and thinking over cold, clinical machine logic.
When, as an adult, you’re told to reflect on your childhood, you’re often asked to think about your interests. How did you become a consultant, which is so removed from your love of climbing and rocks? What triggered your interest in becoming a doctor? No one ever asks: when did you feel the most alive or playful? When were you most excited at school? Or even better: when did you feel curious and joyful with your learning?
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Calling someone an 'NPC' – a 'non-playable character' – is a pretty derogatory thing to do. It suggests that the person doesn't matter in the big scheme of things, that they don't have agency, that they are replaceable.
…I'm re-reading Jenny Odell's excellent book How to Do Nothing at the moment. Here are some of my highlights (emphasis, where it appears, is mine).
Nothing is harder to do than nothing. In a world where our value is determined by our productivity, many of us find our every last minute captured, optimized, or appropriated as a financial resource by the technologies we use daily. We submit our free time to numerical evaluation, interact with algorithmic versions of each other, and build and maintain personal brands. For some, there may be a kind of engineer’s satisfaction in the streamlining and networking of our entire lived experience. And yet a certain nervous feeling, of being overstimulated and unable to sustain a train of thought, lingers. Though it can be hard to grasp before it disappears behind the screen of distraction, this feeling is in fact urgent. We still recognize that much of what gives one’s life meaning stems from accidents, interruptions, and serendipitous encounters: the “off time” that a mechanistic view of experience seeks to eliminate.
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Some things are in our control and others not. Things in our control are opinion, pursuit, desire, aversion, and, in a word, whatever are our own actions. Things not in our control are body, property, reputation, command, and, in one word, whatever are not our own actions.
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