Join 📚 Christian Champ's Highlights
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“Burning Man really has given me this incredible social framework — it has showed me by example how people should interact in a perfect world. I’m now selective about who I hang out with — only with people who are creative and fun. When I was in high school and college, I went to parties, and no one was doing anything. People were just all bored, drinking and looking for something to do. Burning Man is full of people who need to be doing something all the time, obsessive-compulsive creative people with this hyperactivity.” And that, saith Megavolt, makes for a party worth attending.
This Is Burning Man
Brian Doherty
Which is fine if we anticipate it, but demoralizing if we don’t. “Most people overestimate what they can do in one year,”11 Bill Gates once said, “and underestimate what they can do in ten.” In bringing back ecstatic insights, it’s critical that we calibrate the difference between the reach-out-and-touch-it immediacy of the “deep now” with the frustratingly incremental unfolding of the day-to-day. As Zebulon Pike learned the hard way, at high elevations, objects in the mirror are sometimes much farther away than they appear. Remember: It’s not about Now.
Stealing Fire
Steven Kotler, Jamie Wheal
The critiques are valid, and are based on the observation that thinking in terms of stories leads to all sorts of biases. What critics miss, however, is that there is no such thing as non-narrative thought, free of possible worlds and ongoing enactments. There are always multiple narratives at work, framing our perceptions, memories, active thoughts, decisions and actions. The idea that there is always a narrative at work is one aspect of the decision-making philosophy in this book, which is a situated decision-making philosophy. It is based on the assumption that there is no meaningful way to talk about specific decisions outside of a narrative frame and a concrete context, any more than it is possible to talk about physics without reference to a specific, physical coordinate frame (the basic idea in Einstein’s relativity). For this reason, I think of situated decision analysis as a sort of theory of relativity for rationality.
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