Vintra Suno

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Wealth inequality

Wealth inequality is a problem that most of us recognize is just humming along in the background all the time, but we can sort of ignore it. Yet it is just a fact that people are obliged to spend their time, even most of their time, in ways they wouldn’t otherwise want to spend it, because of the need to earn money to survive. And people who are more fortunate have the freedom not to do that, they have the freedom to pay people to do the things they don’t want to do. And people who are more fortunate still don’t have to do anything, they can retire and basically every moment they spend in life is discretionary. This is just the status quo that everyone tacitly accepts.

- Sam Harris - Making Sense podcast #149

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VEDANTAM: So all this raises a really interesting question. You know, we spend years teaching children about how to use language correctly. As someone who works in media, I often find that people who can write well are often people who know how to think well, so I often equate clarity of writing with clarity of thought.

Hidden Brain - Why It's Literally Not Wrong To Say 'Literally'

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Vigorous writing is concise. A sentence should contain no unnecessary words, a paragraph no unnecessary sentences, for the same reason that a drawing should have no unnecessary lines and a machine no unnecessary parts. This requires not that the writer make all his sentences short, or that he avoid all detail and treat his subjects only in outline, but that every word tell.

William Strunk Jr. - The Elements of Style

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YANSS Podcast – Episode Four – The Self Illusion

The Topic: The Self The Guest: Bruce Hood The Episode: Download – iTunes – Stitcher – RSS – Soundcloud – Transcript You are a pile of atoms. When you eat vanilla puddi…

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This is the interview with Donald Hoffman from episode 090 of the You Are Not So Smart Podcast. Download – iTunes – Stitcher – RSS – Soundcloud In this episode of the podcast, we talk to Donald Hof…

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YANSS 090 – Questioning the nature of reality with cognitive scientist Donald Hoffman

Back in the early 1900s, the German biologist Jakob Johann Baron von Uexküll couldn’t shake the implication that the inner lives of animals like jellyfish and sea urchins must be radically differen…

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In this episode the Waking Up podcast, Sam Harris speaks with Michael Pollan about his new book “How to Change Your Mind.” They cover the the resurgence of interest in psychedelics in clinical practice and end-of-life care, the “betterment of well people,” the relationship between thinking and mental suffering, the differences between psychedelics and meditation, the non-duality of consciousness, the brain’s “default mode network,” their experiences with various psychedelics, and other topics. You can support the Waking Up Podcast and receive subscriber-only content at SamHarris.org/subscribe.

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Episode 26: Don Hoffman | Reality Isn't | Click to Listen

Quantitative Psychologist Don Hoffman has a head-spinning take on the true nature of reality vs. what our senses report to us. Is it the most counterintuitive insight since Pythagoras figured the Earth is round?

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I’m burning a way of life, just like that way of life is being burned clean of Earth right now. Forgive me if I talk like a politician. I am, after all, a former state governor, and I was honest and they hated me for it. Life on Earth never settled down to doing anything very good. Science ran too far ahead of us too quickly, and the people got lost in a mechanical wilderness, like children making over pretty things, gadgets, helicopters, rockets; emphasizing the wrong items, emphasizing machines instead of how to run the machines. Wars got bigger and bigger and finally killed Earth. That’s what the silent radio means. That’s what we ran away from.

Ray Bradbury - “The Million-Year Picnic” from The Martian Chronicles

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Some people turn sad awfully young. No special reason, it seems, but they seem almost to be born that way. They bruise easier, tire faster, cry quicker, remember longer and, as I say, get sadder younger than anyone else in the world. I know, for I'm one of them.

Ray Bradbury - Dandelion Wine

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I hate being clever, thought the captain, when you don’t really feel clever and don’t want to be clever. To sneak around and make plans and feel big about making them. I hate this feeling of thinking I’m doing right when I’m not really certain I am. Who are we, anyway? The majority? Is that the answer? The majority is always holy, is it not? Always, always; just never wrong for one little insignificant tiny moment, is it? Never ever wrong in ten million years? He thought: What is this majority and who are in it? And what do they think and how did they get that way and will they ever change and how the devil did I get caught in this rotten majority? I don’t feel comfortable. Is it claustrophobia, fear of crowds, or common sense? Can one man be right, while all the world thinks they are right? Let’s not think about it. Let’s crawl around and act exciting and pull the trigger. There, and there!

Ray Bradbury - “And The Moon Be Still As Bright” from The Martian Chronicles

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One Art BY ELIZABETH BISHOP The art of losing isn’t hard to master; so many things seem filled with the intent to be lost that their loss is no disaster. Lose something every day. Accept the fluster of lost door keys, the hour badly spent. The art of losing isn’t hard to master. Then practice losing farther, losing faster: places, and names, and where it was you meant to travel. None of these will bring disaster. I lost my mother’s watch. And look! my last, or next-to-last, of three loved houses went. The art of losing isn’t hard to master. I lost two cities, lovely ones. And, vaster, some realms I owned, two rivers, a continent. I miss them, but it wasn’t a disaster. —Even losing you (the joking voice, a gesture I love) I shan’t have lied. It’s evident the art of losing’s not too hard to master though it may look like (Write it!) like disaster.

Elizabeth Bishop, “One Art” from The Complete Poems 1926-1979. Copyright © 1979, 1983 by Alice Helen Methfessel.

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“In the South”

Fiction: “To him the waves were Death itself and needed no other name.”