think_y

Like an appreciation of progress, reading and literacy are among the things that are good but cognitively unnatural. That is, they go against our evolved nature. We didn’t evolve with print; it was a recent invention. Reading, for many of us, has become so second nature that we just assume it’s the most natural way of getting information. But what we’ve seen, especially in the last 10 years, when video has become so cheap because of the cloud computing revolution and the broadband revolution, is that a lot of people, unlike us, much prefer to listen and watch than to read. You just see this: when I go to Google and ask a basic question about how to unstick my printer or solve a problem, I get like five videos. And I just want a paragraph that would solve it. I don’t want to see Seth saying, “Hi, welcome to my show. If you like it, subscribe and give it a like.” So just help me solve the problem. But clearly there’s something unusual about me, because people are going for the video. And the massive availability of video—of TikTok, of YouTube—means that people may not be getting the practice or putting in the effort into literacy, which we have reason to believe was one of the drivers of the Flynn effect and of cognitive sophistication in general. @HumanProgress

Liberal academic @Musa_alGharbi's observations when he moved to Manhattan: "One of the first things that stood out to me is that there’s a racialized caste system here that everyone takes for granted. You have disposable servants who will clean your house, watch your kids, walk your dogs, deliver food to you... mostly minorities and immigrants and disproportionately women... And this is basically taken for granted in New York, that this is the way society operates. And yet... this is not how things are in many other parts of the country. Most other places, the person buying a pair of shoes and the person selling them are likely to be the same race — white — and the gaps between the buyer and the seller are likely to be much smaller. Even the most sexist or bigoted rich white person in many other contexts wouldn’t be able to exploit women and minorities the same way as the typical liberal professional in a city like Seattle or New York; the infrastructure simply isn’t there. It’s these progressive bastions associated with the knowledge economy that have these well-oiled machines for casually exploiting the vulnerable, desperate and disadvantaged. And it’s largely Democratic-voting professionals who take advantage of them. A few months after I arrived at Columbia, Trump won. I expected this to happen, but for most people, that was not the expectation. So here at Columbia, the day after Trump won, a lot of the students claimed to be so traumatized that they couldn’t do tests or homework. They needed time off. Now there are two things striking about that to me. First, these are students at an Ivy League school, overwhelmingly people from wealthy backgrounds — and even if they don’t come from wealth, they’re likely to be well-positioned... [but these] students seemed to view themselves as somehow uniquely vulnerable to Trump and his regime, as being especially threatened or victimized. And so they demanded all of these accommodations for themselves. Meanwhile, there was this whole other constellation of people [mostly minorities and immigrants] around them who seemed to be literally invisible to them. The people doing all the work on the campus... these ignored laborers — the people with the most at stake in this election — [were not] saying they needed time off because they were too traumatized. They showed up to work the next day and did their jobs. They weren’t making a scene, sobbing as they scrubbed rich kids’ mess out of the toilets. The juxtaposition was sobering... When I left campus, walking around the Upper West Side, or other affluent parts of Manhattan, similar scenes were playing out. Nor was New York City unique in this regard. Other knowledge economy hubs had similar scenes playing out. And the same drama that was playing out in Columbia was unfolding at colleges and universities across the country. This is precisely what I found so troubling, so difficult to shake off: It wasn’t about my own school. It was about this broader disjuncture between knowledge-economy elites, their narratives about the world, and the realities on the ground."

Great men of history had little to no introspection. The personality that builds empires is not the same personality that sits around quietly questioning itself. @pmarca and I discuss what we both noticed but no one talks about: David: You don't have any levels of introspection? Marc: Yes, zero. As little as possible. David: Why? Marc: Move forward. Go! I found people who dwell in the past get stuck in the past. It's a real problem and it's a problem at work and it's a problem at home. David: So I've read 400 biographies of history’s greatest entrepreneurs and someone asked me what the most surprising thing I’ve learned from this was [and I answered] they have little or zero introspection. Sam Walton didn't wake up thinking about his internal self. He just woke up and was like: I like building Walmart. I'm going to keep building Walmart. I'm going to make more Walmarts. And he just kept doing it over and over again. Marc: If you go back 400 years ago it never would've occurred to anybody to be introspective. All of the modern conceptions around introspection and therapy, and all the things that kind of result from that are, a kind of a manufacture of the 1910s, 1920s. Great men of history didn't sit around doing this stuff. The individual runs and does all these things and builds things and builds empires and builds companies and builds technology. And then this kind of this kind of guilt based whammy kind of showed up from Europe. A lot of it from Vienna in 1910, 1920s, Freud and all that entire movement. And kind of turned all that inward and basically said, okay, now we need to basically second guess the individual. We need to criticize the individual. The individual needs to self criticize. The individual needs to feel guilt, needs to look backwards, needs to dwell in the past. It never resonated with me.

.@SecDuffy: "I'm a Republican, and I love transit…You should be able to have your 14-year-old daughter get on a metro train in New York City at 7 o'clock at night and feel safe. And there's no way in hell I would ever put my daughter on the MTA in New York."