The 11 Rules of Alchemy How to Succeed With Nonsensical Ideas Rory Sutherland ✦
Instead, focus on extreme ideas that may be adopted by unusual consumers and then make their way into the mainstream.
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Everything I share — writing, short curated lists, and links. You can also find me on Threads.
Why Read the Classics ✦
In fact, reading in youth can be rather unfruitful, owing to impatience, distraction, inexperience with the product’s “instructions for use,” and inexperience in life itself.
In Praise of Hassles- Why “Rationing Through Inconvenience” May Be More Ethical Than Other Mechanisms for Allocating Care - Health Law ✦
First, they note that, like other forms of indirect rationing, rationing through inconvenience preserves patient choice.
One Medical Soars in Public Debut as CEO Aims to ‘Transform Health Care’ ✦
The space has certainly been ripe for innovation, with most millennials eschewing regular checkups. Forty-five percent of 18- to 29-year-olds don’t have a primary care physician, according to a 2018 Kaiser Family Foundation poll. Along with One Medical, startups like Forward, Cityblock and Oak Street are also trying to make health care less miserable — and more millennial.
A Design for Death- Meeting the Bad Boy of the Euthanasia Movement ✦
The Sarco concept came to Nitschke while watching "Soylent Green", a 1970s sci-fi movie in which Charlton Heston, disgusted by a world ravaged by global warming, seeks euthanasia in the serenity of a customised government clinic. It’s set in 2022. Eventually, Nitschke wants the 3D-printed Sarco to be accessible on demand to anyone, anywhere – a sort of cosmic Uber into the great beyond.
A Sick Giant — Wait but Why ✦
Psychology is just a microcosm of sociology. And sociology is higher-emergence psychology—it’s the psychology of giants.
Analysis in Overworked Japan, Microsoft Tested a Four-Day Workweek. Productivity Soared 40 Percent. ✦
The test run, which took place in August and gave employees five consecutive Fridays off, boosted sales per employee by 40 percent, compared with the same month a year earlier, according to the post. The number of pages printed in the office fell by 59 percent, electricity consumption dropped 23 percent, and 94 percent of employees were satisfied with the program.
How to Give People Advice They’ll Be Delighted to Take ✦
Make sure you’re actually being asked to give counsel. It’s easy to confuse being audience to a venting session with being asked to weigh in. Sometimes people just want to feel heard.
It Should Be Easier to Fake Your Own Death ✦
But there is a certain freedom in the knowledge that you can just up and vanish at any given moment — it means that you’re never trapped by your circumstances, and instead you’re making a conscious decision to be where you are, doing what you’re doing, that you’re invested in the life you’re living.
The Age of Instagram Face ✦
The face is distinctly white but ambiguously ethnic—it suggests a National Geographic composite illustrating what Americans will look like in 2050, if every American of the future were to be a direct descendant of Kim Kardashian West, Bella Hadid, Emily Ratajkowski, and Kendall Jenner (who looks exactly like Emily Ratajkowski).
The Map Is Not the Territory ✦
If a map were to represent the territory with perfect fidelity, it would no longer be a reduction and thus would no longer be useful to us.
A Battle for the Soul of Marfa ✦
The sky by day is limitless, at night a feast of stars. The sun’s movement across the land makes for a parade of shadows and hues unlike in any other place on the planet. The Chisos Mountains form a majestic blue boundary off in the distance. It’s country as inhospitable as it is spectacular, for eons a place that attracted folks as irascible as the porcupines that nestle in the rocks around these parts.
Climate Change Is a Political Crisis, Not a Reproductive One ✦
Climate change is a structural problem involving politics and economics, not personal choices, and solving it will require huge political and economic changes.
How a New Generation Is Reviving Small-Town Texas ✦
So, let’s recap: there’s affordability, a slower pace of life, top-shelf food and culture, and a welcoming, friendly community. During my travels, I found myself—a near-lifelong Houston resident—increasingly bewitched by the notion of small-town life. I began dreaming, to paraphrase Guy Clark’s “L.A. Freeway,” of packing up the dishes, making note of all good wishes, saying adiós to all this concrete, and getting me some dirt-road backstreets.
Nature’s Best Poetry of 2019- Clouds ✦
Clouds, their manifesto says, are not signs of negativity and gloom, but rather “nature’s poetry” and “the most egalitarian of her displays.”
Splendid Isolation- How I Stopped Time by Sitting in a Forest for 24 Hours ✦
This resource being as limited as it was, should I not be doing something better with it, something more urgent or interesting or authentic? At some point in my late 30s, I recognised the paradoxical source of this anxiety: that every single thing in life took much longer than I expected it to, except for life itself, which went much faster, and would be over before I knew where I was.
It's 2020 and You're in the Future ✦
It’s also weird that to us, the 2020s sounds like such a rad futuristic decade—and that’s how the 1920s seemed to people 100 years ago today. They were all used to the 19-teens, and suddenly they were like, “whoa cool we’re in the twenties!” Then they got upset thinking about how much farther along in life their 1910 self thought they’d be by 1920.
The 2030 Last-Minute Christmas Gift Guide ✦
Where did he go? Did he really make it to Mars? Is he hiding out on the dark side of the Moon? Has he really accepted Chinese citizenship? Or is he just chilling in his luxury bunker in New Zealand? Nobody knows for sure, but with this new mobile game from superstar designers Mindfield you can help track down America's greatest traitor! Based on the classic children’s book, Where’s Elon? challenges you to spot the world’s greatest entrepreneur-turned-environmental-criminal across a dozen beautifully illustrated, scrolling crowd scenes. When you see him point him out quick—and be rewarded with the satisfaction of watching a beautifully rendered drone strike! Fun for the whole family.
Good Science, Bad Science, Pseudoscience- How to Tell the Difference ✦
Science is not some big immovable mass. It is not infallible. It does not pretend to be able to explain everything or to know everything. Furthermore, there is no such thing as “alternative” science. Science does involve mistakes. But we have yet to find a system of inquiry capable of achieving what it does: move us closer and closer to truths that improve our lives and understanding of the universe.
On Pioneers, Settlers, Town Planners and Theft. ✦
Settlers are brilliant people. They can turn the half baked thing into something useful for a larger audience. They build trust. They build understanding. They make the possible future actually happen. They turn the prototype into a product, make it manufacturable, listen to customers and turn it profitable. Their innovation is what we tend to think of as applied research and differentiation. They built the first ever computer products (e.g. IBM 650 and onwards), the first generators (Hippolyte Pixii, Siemens Generators).
I Biohacked for 10 Weeks to Try to Live Forever ✦
I also get a Whoop band ($30 a month) and a $150 Fitbit Charge 3. I have three gadgets on at all times, and they all measure the same data. To a biohacker, there is no such thing as too much data.
Having Kids ✦
Adults are sophisticated enough to see 2 year olds for the fascinatingly complex characters they are, whereas to most 6 year olds, 2 year olds are just defective 6 year olds.
Why Books Don't Work ✦
The lectures-as-warmup model is a post-hoc rationalization, but it does gesture at a deep theory about cognition: to understand something, you must actively engage with it. That notion, taken seriously, would utterly transform classrooms. We’d prioritize activities like interactive discussions and projects; we’d deploy direct instruction only when it’s the best way to enable those activities. I’m not idly speculating: for the last few decades, this has been one of the central evolutionary forces in US K–12 policy and practice.
Lucid Dreaming- A Beginner's Guide ✦
Put a pad of paper next to your bed and record your dream immediately upon waking. Immediately means immediately. If you get dressed first, or even stare at the ceiling for a minute, dream recollection will be nil. Expect that you might not get more than a few lines for the first week or so, but also expect to get to multi-page recall ability within 2-3 weeks. This alone will make you look forward to going to bed.
Analysis the Decade Has Ended, but It Will Never Be Over ✦
At the end of the decade, users are still finding and commenting on that early crude photo posted by Krieger, as if they were visiting a World Heritage site, or scrawling on the Parthenon. “Where it all started,” one user wrote recently, and the “like” button became “more important than air and water.”
‘Here We Go. The Chaos Is Starting’- An Oral History of Y2K ✦
So I went to my boss and said, “We have a problem. The computers out there aren’t going to work properly when we hit the year 2000.” He looked at me and said, “You’re worried about a problem that isn’t going to happen for 22 years? Relax, somebody will fix it by then.” So I got up and left his office.
What We Get Wrong About Time ✦
But if you do want to shed that unsettling feeling on a Sunday evening that the weekend has whizzed by, there is something you can do: constantly seek out new experiences. Take up new activities at weekends and visit new places, rather than heading for the same pub or cinema. All this fun means the time will fly in the moment – but because you will lay down more memories, when you get to Monday morning, the weekend will have felt long.
Americans Are Fast to Judge Social Class ✦
This finding suggests that we infer people’s social class largely from how they talk rather than what they say.
Innocence Lost- What Did You Do Before the Internet ✦
For it’s in those lost hours that we unwittingly got to know ourselves; our imaginations, unbridled, were free to play and laze and wander. And while it was dull and uneventful at times it’s also true that all of humanity’s wonders – including the internet itself – have arisen from this one simple source: a person, a thought, a daydream.
How to Change the Course of Human History ✦
‘Inequality’ is a way of framing social problems appropriate to technocratic reformers, the kind of people who assume from the outset that any real vision of social transformation has long since been taken off the political table. It allows one to tinker with the numbers, argue about Gini coefficients and thresholds of dysfunction, readjust tax regimes or social welfare mechanisms, even shock the public with figures showing just how bad things have become (‘can you imagine? 0.1% of the world’s population controls over 50% of the wealth!’), all without addressing any of the factors that people actually object to about such ‘unequal’ social arrangements: for instance, that some manage to turn their wealth into power over others; or that other people end up being told their needs are not important, and their lives have no intrinsic worth. The latter, we are supposed to believe, is just the inevitable effect of inequality, and inequality, the inevitable result of living in any large, complex, urban, technologically sophisticated society. That is the real political message conveyed by endless invocations of an imaginary age of innocence, before the invention of inequality: that if we want to get rid of such problems entirely, we’d have to somehow get rid of 99.9% of the Earth’s population and go back to being tiny bands of foragers again. Otherwise, the best we can hope for is to adjust the size of the boot that will be stomping on our faces, forever, or perhaps to wrangle a bit more wiggle room in which some of us can at least temporarily duck out of its way.
Material World ✦
Gaia, that is, muddles our very notion of what the environment is. The air is not just a medium that surrounds us—it is literally made by living beings, ourselves included. From this view, seeing the Earth as a collection of “natural resources,” as inert matter, is absurd. All the world is reactions: chemical, biological, geophysical. It is preposterous to think you could take millions of tons of long-buried dead matter, burn it, and leave the rest of the world as it is. What have we undergone in the past few decades but the realization that we share the world with a set of previously ignored actors—the untold carbon molecules invisibly and gradually accumulating without so much as a peep?
We Are All Confident Idiots ✦
The most difficult misconceptions to dispel, of course, are those that reflect sacrosanct beliefs. And the truth is that often these notions can’t be changed. Calling a sacrosanct belief into question calls the entire self into question, and people will actively defend views they hold dear. This kind of threat to a core belief, however, can sometimes be alleviated by giving people the chance to shore up their identity elsewhere. Researchers have found that asking people to describe aspects of themselves that make them proud, or report on values they hold dear, can make any incoming threat seem, well, less threatening.
Frank Chimero · a Like Can’t Go Anywhere, but a Compliment Can Go a Long Way ✦
A like can’t go anywhere, but a compliment can go a long way. Passive positivity isn’t enough; active positivity is needed to counterbalance whatever sort of collective conversations and attention we point at social media. Otherwise, we are left with the skewed, inaccurate, and dangerous nature of what’s been built: an environment where most positivity is small, vague, and immobile, and negativity is large, precise, and spreadable.
Three Steps to Reinventing Your Career—even if You’re Not Sure What You Want to Do Next ✦
Is the person gritty, curious, and generous?
The Danger of Comparing Yourself to Others ✦
Life becomes about being a better version of yourself. And when that happens, your effort and energy go toward upgrading your personal operating system every day, not worrying about what your coworkers are doing. You become happier, free from the shackles of false comparisons and focused on the present moment.
Why No One Answers Their Phone Anymore ✦
No one picks up the phone anymore. Even many businesses do everything they can to avoid picking up the phone. Of the 50 or so calls I received in the last month, I might have picked up four or five times. The reflex of answering—built so deeply into people who grew up in 20th-century telephonic culture—is gone.
Silicon Valley’s Grow-or-Die Culture Is Costing Us ✦
We need to focus on and celebrate different kinds of successful organizations:
Are You Addicted to Doing - Mindful ✦
On that day I realized clearly that busyness is a choice. We may have deadlines, projects, and activities, but we have the freedom to choose whether we become action addicts and busy-lazy, or just observe the experience of many activities. It’s a choice. And the ability to make that choice comes from developing a clear mind, free of action addiction.
Workism Is Making Americans Miserable ✦
What is workism? It is the belief that work is not only necessary to economic production, but also the centerpiece of one’s identity and life’s purpose; and the belief that any policy to promote human welfare must always encourage more work.
Opinion Collusion Was a Seductive Delusion ✦
Indeed, the truest horror in Mr. Mueller’s finding is that we did not need Mr. Putin to be pulling the strings. We know now that under our shambolic democracy, a man as unfit as Mr. Trump really can legitimately acquire all the terrifying powers of the presidency without being controlled by a foreign puppet master.
The Reason Conspiracy Videos Work So Well on YouTube ✦
It’s probably just random flux or luck, but that doesn’t make it feel less weird. As the psychologist Rob Brotherton argues in Suspicious Minds, “Our ancestors’ legacy to us is a brain programmed to see coincidence and infer cause.” And what that means, Brotherton says, is that “sometimes, it would seem, buying into a conspiracy is the cognitive equivalent of seeing meaning in randomness.”
How Things Work ✦
As our experience has shown, that freedom was illusory. The system is still there. It pushed back. The power structure remains. There are just some new people at the apex, prime among them the techlords flush with monopoly profits. They are as sensitive to criticism as any other ruling class, but with the confidence that they can transform and disrupt anything, from government to the press.
Have Bad Handwriting The U.S. Postal Service Has Your Back ✦
If the computer can't read the address because of water damage or your grandmother's ornate script, it sends a picture of the address to a computer at the Remote Encoding Center.
On the Phenomenon of Bullshit Jobs - STRIKE! ✦
Huge swathes of people, in Europe and North America in particular, spend their entire working lives performing tasks they secretly believe do not really need to be performed. The moral and spiritual damage that comes from this situation is profound. It is a scar across our collective soul. Yet virtually no one talks about it.
The Secret Power of ‘Read It Later’ Apps — Forte Labs — Medium ✦
The end result is the same person who spends 127 hours per year on Instagram (the global average) complains that she has “no time” for reading.
How to Be Polite ✦
Sometimes I’ll get a call or email from someone five years after the last contact and I’ll think, oh right, I hated that person. But they would never have known, of course. Let’s see if I still hate them. Very often I find that I don’t. Or that I hated them for a dumb reason. Or that they were having a bad day.