Grounded intellectual work, when it happens, if it ever happens again, is uncomfortable. It tells you things you don't want to hear, makes arguments that threaten positions you hold, points out problems you'd rather not see. The public intellectuals of the past, at their best, did this. Our current crop // slop does the opposite.

Westenberg.

Comfort Food for the Thinking Class: The Great Intellectual Stagnation

Wander into any bookstore (I dare you.)  The non-fiction table will be all but dominated by the usual suspects: Malcolm Gladwell's latest explora...

Charles Dickens in 1843: "what if I wrote a story where a man learns not to be a dick" Humanity: "holy shit" Humanity: makes 400 adaptations Humanity: continues being dicks Humanity: "we should adapt this again"

My conscious brain: 'We should learn linear algebra to better understand neural networks.' My revealed preferences: 'We are going to scroll specifically the parts of Wikipedia that list defunct 19th-century breakfast cereals.'

Would you accept "Oopsie!" from your accountant? Your doctor? Why do we accept it from companies holding our data and our money?

Westenberg.

Uh Oh! The Infantilization of Failure

When apps fail, when software breaks, you'll likely encounter a message constructed from a specific vocabulary: "Oops!" "Uh oh!" "Whoops!" Sometim...

Conservative: "Companies say 'Happy Holidays' because they hate Jesus." Economics 101: "Companies say 'Happy Holidays' because they want to sell cheap plastic garbage to 100% of the population instead of 65%." The 'War on Christmas' is just the Free Market you claim to worship working exactly as intended. You are fighting the Invisible Hand. And losing.

The Culture War is a toxoplasma. It bypasses your rational defenses by hacking your tribal loyalty circuits. If you find yourself genuinely furious about a minor controversy involving a sub-group you didn't know existed last week, you aren't "informed." You are being optimized for engagement.

I don't have a particular hill I'm prepared to die on, but there are a handful of slight inclines on which I'd be okay with experiencing mild discomfort.

"Facts don't care about your feelings" has mutated into a much dumber heuristic: "If I am hurting your feelings, I must be stating a fact." This is a logical fallacy. It is entirely possible to be an asshole and be factually incorrect. In fact, the correlation is likely positive.

I am begging you to stop calling your rambling 2-hour conversation a "deep dive." It is not a deep dive. It is snorkeling in the shit-infused shallow end of the Dunning-Kruger pool while shouting about supplements.

I'm skeptical of any productivity advice that requires you to be a completely different person. 'Wake up at 5am!' What if my comparative advantage is being someone who doesn't wake up at 5am