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Economy of Small Pleasures

• [marginalium] Gnosticism in Blood Meridian — 26 Jan 2026
• [article] Hydraulic Despotism — 1 Dec 2025
  Control the water, control the people. Today’s water is energy, social media, infrastructure. We’re coerced through convenience, not malice. There are many vectors for control—we don’t need to hand them over.
• [marginalium] Is culture socially costly — 30 Jun 2025
• [marginalium] The Personal and Private Nature of Smartphones — 25 Jun 2025
• [marginalium] We enjoy ‘waiting’ — 18 Feb 2025
• [article] Anticipation beats reward — 31 Jan 2025
  Basically, reward and ancipation both use the same system, but differently. Anticipation seems to come in through the senses and get sent throughout the brain, but pleasure seems to come in from more evaluatey bits—maybe to help us learn what’s rewarding.
• [article] Addictive Work — 24 Jan 2025
  The neural reward circuit implies that small, rewarding tasks that share environmental context are going to be the most addictive, so break tasks into small steps that end in a clear good feeling and optimise for a shared environment.
• [article] It's not social media, life is just worse — 2 Aug 2024
  Social media use probably isn’t the problem. Social media use is probably just the most obvious manifestation of lots of problems. And in fact, social media could probably be a solution. It’s up to you.
• [marginalium] More evidence against the marshmallow test — 2 Aug 2024
• [marginalium] The man who won the lottery 14 times — 2 Jul 2024
• [marginalium] AIs are coming for social networks — 21 Jun 2024
• [article] Active listening is misleading — 11 Jan 2024
  Active listening isn’t about ticking boxes in conversation; it’s about diving into emotions to transform surface-level chit-chat into deep, collaborative dialogue. Forget models, focus on feelings.
• [marginalium] Economist preferences by cognitive skill and personality — 12 Sep 2023
• [marginalium] A short list of heuristics or principles for doing good creative research work — 9 Sep 2023
• [marginalium] A Wikipedia page on science in 2023 — 8 Sep 2023