DANIEL ( Read more... )

"Would you rather wear a collar to a job interview in 2013, or a fursuit to Eurofurence in 2015 ( Read more... )

At dinner one night during the Blueprint trip to D.C. (I pause here to do a shot of bourbon remembering myself as an even more annoying 17ish-year-old, but also remembering the charming drunk social workers and wishing the people in the stairwell would burn alive; it was an interesting time), Mr. O said something of which I wouldn't grok the ( Read more... )

When someone tells me it's important to have "boundaries" in interpersonal relationships, I know what they mean. I know that they're right, in a sandboxed way. As with the interpersonal, so with the geopolitical: when someone says that controlling national borders is important, they're right. In both cases, if you accept the legitimacy of ( Read more... )

From one of NNT's weird little tables, this one on page 214 of Antifragile:

Narrative knowledgeAntifragile: Optionality-driven tinkering, trial and errorNarrative is epistemologicalNarrative is instrumentalTrapped into a storyNo meaningful dependence on a story - the narrative can be just for motivation
Boom!

"He has the brilliance and stupidity of the patriarchal male, he can play the dominance games cleverly, but wouldn't be able to string together a sentence about why or whether they're worth playing ( Read more... )

"[I]t was the brutal way they took your lives and made them trite, over hundreds and hundreds of pages. How comfortably these people fit your lives into their own way of seeing the world. Even if the facts that the observers reported on and a senior official occasionally summarized were true - which was by no means always the case; they had to be ( Read more... )

There are three basic approaches we can take to the things that assault our authenticity:

1) Surrender
2) Contention
3) Cooptation (turn it into a game)

I preached this as a teenager, I had Steve #2 hammer it into my brain about a dozen different ways in my 20s, and finally, finally, I'm grokking it.

"If children today are at greater risk for obesity than those of previous generations, it's not simply because they're less physically active as a result of being absorbed in TV or computers. It's primarily because under ordinary peacetime conditions there has never before been a generation so stressed and so starved of nurturing adult ( Read more... )

Taleb again: "Older people are most beautiful when they have what is lacking in the young: poise, erudition, wisdom, phronesis, and this post-heroic absence of agitation."

This post-heroic absence of agitation. I've been looking since my early-mid-20s - from the just-post-Paul time onward - for such a wonderful formulation of it ( Read more... )