This is The Praxis Circus.
And unfortunately it is going to be a short one.
I traveled to my hometown last week for a funeral and most of the proceedings were over the weekend so I couldn’t write this yesterday. The deceased was my cousin and only five years older than me. His passing so suddenly in a car accident was really tragic and seeing his wife so shattered was heartbreaking. They had two adorable little girls who were scampering about throughout the funeral and thanksgiving mass, mostly oblivious to why all the adults around them were so solemn and it got me marveling at this life that we live. People leave and people come; life goes on.
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Richard Feynman is one of my heroes and the Feynman Technique is one of the many things he blessed us with before he died.
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The Aesop newsletter is really cool and very different from what one imagines a marketing newsletter should be. Definitely worth a subscription for those of you that still use email for stuff (hopefully, since you are reading this!). The science fiction author Hannu Rajaniemi has also started a newsletter called The Entangled that is also worth a subscription.
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There’s been a lot of discussion recently about algorithms and privacy and the power massive Silicon Valley corporations are currently wielding. A lot of it is pretty worrying from a political, social and maybe even existential point of view, but there is also an aesthetic and cultural component as well. This article in The Verge talks about the advent of what they term Airspace, an aesthetic inadvertently been spread by companies like Airbnb as people hone in on the most successful interior design choices. This effect can also be seen on Instagram with particular camera angles and subject matter being replicated all over the place by unconnected people as we all move towards peak likes. The Kinspiracy tumblr shows loads of examples of one of these sorts of aesthetics and I am sure you would have noticed it yourselves across different sectors of Instagram. It’s funny, but it is also pretty scary and just highlights how vulnerable we have become to the tools we have made. We are gradually becoming the nails to our hammers.
Speaking of Silicon Valley and algorithms, this Bloomberg story about super secret Peter Thiel company Palantir is a glimpse behind the curtain that I have been waiting for (complete with screenshots of actual software!). If you haven’t heard of Palantir, they are a company that claim to be able to give police in various states in the US the ability to predict people that will commit crimes before they do - this is the more sensational thing they are involved in, but they also work or have worked for the CIA (including helping with Bin Laden), Homeland Security, we’re approached by Cambridge Analytica and a LOT more.
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I’ll leave you with this (highly edited) snippet by Daniel Schmachtenberger from a much longer podcast as food for thought this week -
We do have an innate impulse towards agency, towards self-actualization. Within a win/lose game structure that will look like a competitive impulse. But within other structures, within win/win structures that will look like the desire to go beyond my own previous capacity but not to necessarily be better than or, you know, consume somebody or something else.
And so, that’s where there’s an innate impulse but that expresses itself through context. Now, let’s take the next step…Until very recently humans didn’t have any concept of what evolution was…and we’re only right now beginning to have a deep sense of what it actually is, not just biological natural selection. But the process by which subatomic particles come into atoms, come into molecules, come into more complex organic structures, dust clouds turn into stars in spiral galaxies. That evolution is this process of increasing orderly complexity in a way that has more and more synergy…
And as we’re starting to understand this…We can actually become conscious agents of evolution. We can like, say, “Holy shit, the universe is actually doing something. It’s actually moving in this direction of increasing orderly complexity.” We can consciously participate with that and we move from just being part of the whole, where evolution is just kind of this unconscious algorithmic process to thinking about, feeling about, identifying with, and being an agent for the whole.
And so, then evolution itself becomes an agentically mediated process, like we actually say, “Shit, the whole evolutionary process resulted in me…So, in a way, the evolutionary process has kind of awoke to itself in me as I’m contemplating it.”…Because we actually identify as evolutionaries, right? As part of the evolutionary impulse, and in doing so really obsolete the need for pain as an evolutionary driver…human nature has the capacity to transcend much of what human behaviour has been so far.
Stay safe, appreciate your loved ones and have a great week.