Super important questions here. A few highlights for me:

There is a natural pace to human deliberation. A lot breaks when we are denied the luxury of time.

The challenges of having time for deliberation and organizing global coordination … issues for both climate and AI.

The “thinking,” for lack of a better word, is utterly inhuman, but we have trained it to present as deeply human.

Would you work on a technology you thought had a 10 percent chance of wiping out humanity?

How many other times in history could a similar question have been asked, and was it asked, I wonder?

Small glimmers of hope here and there…

Really good stuff in here.

The one point I find tricky is the part about fast responses—I find this does work well when people are “in the zone” together, but if one person’s in the zone and the other isn’t in the same zone, it can just feel like interrupting/not fully listening and then it doesn’t create that floating/nicely bouncing off each other quality.

So it’s a tricky dance in practice, but the suggestion to offer some craggy affordances is a good, practical one!

I found this article a helpful illustration of the role of fascia.

The traditional biomechanical theory of the musculoskeletal system says that muscles attach to bones via tendons that cross the joints and pull bones toward each other, restricted by other “machine parts” called ligaments. But all these anatomical terms, and the separations they imply, are false. No ligaments exist on their own; instead they blend into the periosteum—vascular connective tissue that serves as cling-wrap around the bones—and the surrounding muscles and fascial sheets. What this means is that you weren’t assembled in different places and glued together—rather, all your parts grew up together within the glue.

Somewhat obvious if you stop to think about it, but it’s true that sometimes our ways of being and exercising fall more into the machine theory of the body than the plant theory :)

I love reading about all the different methods of living humanity has tried…

Whether monks built arks, angels, or palaces, vigilance was expected of them all, and metacognition was one of their most critical duties, necessary for determining whether any given thought served God or the Devil. For the truly devout, there was no such thing as overthinking it; discernment required constantly monitoring one’s mental activity and interrogating the source of any distraction. Some monasteries encouraged monks to use checklists for reviewing their thoughts throughout the day, and one of the desert fathers was said to keep two baskets for tracking his own. He put a stone in one basket whenever he had a virtuous thought and a stone in the other whenever he had a sinful thought; whether he ate dinner depended on which basket had more stones by the end of the day.

We inherited the monkish obsession with attention, and even inherited their moral judgments about the capacity, or failure, to concentrate. But most of us did not inherit their clarity about what is worthy of our concentration.

Appreciated this article for its overview of shifting attitudes toward work over the decades and putting discussions of "quiet quitting" in that context.

Interesting slice of life in a scientific village close to the North Pole.

Funny :) I’m a soaker!

Local communities are the battlegrounds for so many pertinent issues today from climate, ecology and biodiversity, to housing regulations and affordability. There is so much to discuss and resolve, and I wonder often how to open these conversations without creating hostile situations between neighbors and community members who disagree. Perhaps a local ombudsperson could facilitate discussions about community disagreements before taking them to the courts?

Really appreciate this look at a local, non-partisan approach to building support for improved health care access in the US.

Sometimes it’s challenging to get creative in our ideas for developing or inviting new friendships, so I appreciate that some ideas for that are shared here.

research suggests people are usually better liked by strangers than they assume.

That’s encouraging too :)

Solid, practical advice for this moment.

I found this a helpful reflection and reminder that sometimes gratitude can morph into a kind of safety mechanism of ego-preservation. Discernment has been a rich topic of exploration throughout my life and there's always more to uncover.

I too am more of a proponent of permastandard time, but we’ll see what wins out in the end! We could always change our societal clocks, anyway… what time we set to when things begin and end.

This link is the article I meant to post, which was somehow replaced on ReadUp by an older article above. https://notebook.drmaciver.com/posts/2022-11-02-15:46.html

Interesting to read this reporter’s stories about how it is to interact with people in meta’s metaverse as it stands so far. It’ll be interesting to see how it evolves and how useful or mainstream it becomes over time. I haven’t yet met anyone who has tried it so extensively.