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"Never Interfere With an Enemy While He’s in the Process of Destroying Himself” - Napoleon
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The biomass distribution on Earth
This cool paper estimates the total biomass on earth. Animals constitute 2Gt of carbon. (1 Gt=1e15 g) This is mostly marine arthropods (1 Gt) and fish (0.7 Gt). Humans just 0.06 Gt. For comparison, plants are 450 Gt.
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"A lie keeps growing and growing until it's as clear as the nose on your face." - The Blue Fairy, from Pinocchio
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The Leisurely Manifesto - Otium is Hard Work - The Original Affluent Society
There is vast confusion around leisure. Leisure does not mean doing nothing, etymologically it means doing what you enjoy. Leisure, not "productivity", should be the end goal of all of our work, we need to aim for something much higher than productivity
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Rize.io - "an intelligent time tracker that improves your focus"
#Comment: This app represents late capitalism tech design at its finest. It helps you to meticulously track, surveil, measure and analyze every millisecond - cause "time is money and efficiency is paramount". The philosophy the app embodies is frankly nauseating and insane. The app's developers and users should take a very, very long break and ask themself "Save Time? Who for?, what is the value of laziness and productivity? What is the nature of being and time?
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Kua Kua groups: pay your way to adulation
If you say "I lost my bicycle today. I have looked for it for a long time, but failed." How will you expect others to reply? If you are a member of a "Kua Kua" online chat group, you will receive positive responses like "In spite of losing your bike, you are not irritated, which shows your elegance. Well done!"In recent days, WeChat "Kua Kua" groups have drawn increasing attention in China, especially among young people. In Chinese, "Kua" literally means to praise. The "Kua Kua" groups are online chat groups, in which group members can respond positively to whatever you say, even if the things you tell them are negative.
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Research on the “Phantom Effect” - Presentation by Serge Kernbach (Cybertronica Research)
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Why can some people ‘see’ uncomfortable things while others can’t?
- 🙈 Wilful Blindness (also known as the Ostrich Effect): our minds wont let us acknowledge something if it will cause psychological pain. So we ignore it, say it doesn’t matter, rationalise excuses, etc.
- 🍼 Regression (and fear of freedom). Freedom comes with risk and responsibility. Most crave a return to the submissive comfort of childhood, where adults took care of everything. They want the state to take care of them.
- 🏛 System Justification: We cannot imagine that the system we grew up in and benefited from could do us harm. We assume it always has our best interests at heart.
- 💀 Terror Management: Thinking about death (or the idea that our psychological construction of reality might go extinct) causes us to ‘close up’ psychologically and become intolerant of other ideas.
- 🐑 Conformity: We assume the crowd must know what it’s doing, and we are terrified of being ostracised, since this meant death in evolutionary terms.
- 💥 Cognitive Dissonance: When something doesn’t match our expectations of the world, it causes uncomfortable psychological tension, which we seek to minimise through defence mechanisms like denial.
- 💙 In-Group Bias: Being social animals, we tend to reject information if it clashes with our group identity (“it must be wrong if the other side said it”). In fact, it can just make us even more polarised.
- 😴 Cognitive Misers: We simply don’t have the time nor the energy to process a lot of new, complex information or change thinking habits.
- ⛓️ Learned Helplessness: If we have learned / feel that we are powerless, we don’t even bother to try challenging the status quo. We just become passive and accepting.
- 👨⚕️ Authority: We assume that those with credentials or in positions of authority must know what they are doing, so we trust them implicitly and follow their instructions.
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Mark Lombardi (1951 - 2000) was an American artist who's drawings documented alleged financial and political frauds by power brokers, and in general "the uses and abuses of power".
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Zuowang (坐忘) - A classic Daoist meditation technique. The non-conceptual experience of sitting and forgetting. By definition can not be expressed in words.
