Tag: Attention
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Write Things Down – Stratechery by Ben Thompson
Biological evolution is the slowest and most permanent form of learning, but it takes millennia; oral communication is like a context window, effective but lossy; actually writing things down is what made learning extendable and scalable. — Read on stratechery.com/2026/write-things-down/
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Are You Good at Mowing Lawns?
So it’s not about thinking more or faster, but when thinking happens. That’s what a good heuristic does: it spends your attention on the decisions that matter and nothing on the ones that don’t. — Read on kottke.org/26/08/are-you-good-at-mowing-lawns
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‘Am I 68? 69?’ Irvine Welsh on growing old, getting clean, bashing out his new novel – and flirting with guns | Irvine Welsh | The Guardian
“The worst part is the psychological thing. Once [drug use] is in your emotional vocabulary as your get-out – ‘I can stop feeling crap by doing this’ – you have to reorder your thinking.” View image in fullscreen Las Vegas, where Welsh’s new novel is set. Photograph: Heather Diehl/Getty Images Reordering thoughts isn’t always easy,…
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What training my chaotic dog taught me about power, control – and human beings | Dogs | The Guardian
The holy grail of dog training is focus, whereby the dog stares unerringly at their handler, waiting for instruction, regardless of distractions around them. The websites and YouTube videos of celebrity trainers feature images of smiling men and women sitting casually at picnic tables or standing in high streets while a seemingly hypnotised doberman or…
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Toward a theory of uni-context – Marginal REVOLUTION
Happiness depends on your context and who you are. There isn’t anything that will always make a person happy. But there are reliable ways to make people unhappy. There’s a set of evils that are close to universal: death, pain, illness, violence. Even if someone’s in very different circumstances from yours, if you see they’re…
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Why The Best Player Alive Barely Runs – Chunking
They’re chunking positions of people and angles of legs and spins of balls in order to understand immediately what’s going on and what might happen next. The more patterns you absorb in any domain, the less effort it takes to read what’s happening and to predict what’s coming next. So when Messi walks, he’s not…
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The End of Reading Is Here – The Atlantic
Maryanne Wolf, a cognitive neuroscientist at UCLA, argues that people are losing the ability to think deeply about writing. That doesn’t mean they are forgetting how to decode individual words. Rather, they are losing the higher-order abilities of comprehension and synthesis. America, in other words, isn’t illiterate. It’s postliterate. — Read on www.theatlantic.com/magazine/2026/08/reading-crisis-postliterate-age/687618/
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Decision Fatigue: Why You Feel Exhausted Without Having “Done” Anything Physically
None of these studies points to a magic solution, but they do, quite consistently, point in the same direction. The first is to reduce the number of trivial decisions we make without realizing it: the more routines and default settings we have for repetitive tasks, the fewer resources we spend on decisions that add no…