Slow Like Whisky

Tag: Attention

  • Booksmaxxing: how reading became sexy | Books | The Guardian

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    robert.adlington
    in

    This is beginning to sound a trifle insane. That’s booksmaxxing! Isn’t this all coming at a time when book reading is actually in decline? Overall, yes. Since 2003 the number of Americans reading for pleasure has dropped by 40%. So booksmaxxing is a niche trend cocooned within a much larger trend that’s heading in the…

  • We Are Living in Pinocchio’s World – On my Om

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    robert.adlington
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    The grifters and the hucksters and the influencers selling impossible things succeed because audiences reward certainty and punish doubt. They honor confidence and resist complication. A clean story about a genius who will fix everything travels faster than a difficult story about tradeoffs. The Field of Miracles stays open because people keep wanting to bury…

  • Satisficing vs Maximizing

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    robert.adlington
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    Maximizers tend to be less satisfied with their decisions and their lives. They are typically less happy, more prone to regret and more likely to compare themselves endlessly with others. Satisficers don’t necessarily have low standards. Their standard is “good enough for me” rather than “the best out there,” and that makes it possible to…

  • Being Fed Content

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    robert.adlington
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    The point was to get out and to feel like you’re hunting, to feel like you’re living your life. I’m going to the movies, I’m going to this show. What streaming has done—it’s very convenient, but it’s taken the feeling of going hunting and turned it into we’re all just being fed. We’re all farm…

  • Do I belong in tech anymore? · Ky Decker

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    robert.adlington
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    I am coalescing around some core beliefs: Things that are worth doing are worth doing well. Things that are done well require time and effort. You make meaning through the doing. Ideas are common; effort is not. There are no shortcuts. — Read on ky.fyi/posts/ai-burnout

  • Working with agents doesn’t feel like flow — Bill de hÓra

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    robert.adlington
    in

    After a stint of deep work, I usually feel the tiredness of having held a line of thought together for a long time via concentration. After a stint with agents, the tiredness feels more like the aftermath, again, of sustained play or competition. The accumulation of lots of small judgments, many state updates, repeated course…

  • What major works of literature were written after age of 85? 75? 65?!

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    robert.adlington
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    Unless an author makes a major stylistic turn later in their career, I can’t imagine any new work being favorably compared against the earlier work that established the style and sounded so fresh. On the other hand, it’s not always the first work that is considered the best. It can still take time to perfect…

  • AI Doesn’t Reduce Work—It Intensifies It

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    robert.adlington
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    the productivity boost these things can provide is exhausting. AI introduced a new rhythm in which workers managed several active threads at once: manually writing code while AI generated an alternative version, running multiple agents in parallel, or reviving long-deferred tasks because AI could “handle them” in the background. They did this, in part, because…

  • Stop Meeting Students Where They Are – The Atlantic

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    robert.adlington
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    The iterative process of confusion, endurance, and incremental understanding is what literature professors teach when they assign whole books. This march toward understanding doesn’t have a great name other than reading. We need to help students grow into the difficulty of reading. The best way to do that is not to “meet them where they…

  • Blind to the solutions we were never taught to see

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    robert.adlington
    in

    Programmers are trained to see everything as a software-shaped problem: if you do a task three times, you should probably automate it with a script. Rename every IMG_*.jpg file from the last week to hawaii2025_*.jpg, they tell their terminal, while the rest of us painfully click and copy-paste. We are blind to the solutions we…