Analects

Filter by type: All · Articles · Audio · Marginalia

Filter by anthology: All · Betterment · Gratification · Connection · Somatic Architecture · Spiritual Architecture · Thought Architecture · Wealth Architecture · Digital Architecture · Collective Architecture

• [article] Voluntary Censorship — 8 Sep 2021
  Our education bestows on us a ‘common sense’ that narrows our vision to only those things that ‘can be said’. We censor ourselves and, as a result, have a schizoprenic approach to important issues.
• [article] The Value of the Sacred — 24 Aug 2021
  The sacred isn’t a social myth; a delusion of the religious. It is what happens when we bind moments of personal meaning and power to something greater than ourselves. And, without the sacred, we are left unable to transform meaning into purpose.
• [article] In praise of the sage — 19 Jul 2021
  Our culture spurns the ‘guru’ as a charletan and the traditionalist as a relic. Legitimate knowledge comes from reasoned observation, not intuition. Except that this is a lie that we tell ourselves and which blinds us to how useful the sage can be.
• [article] Emotion and the Mind — 2 Jun 2021
  The rational mind is new, and it is weak in the face of emotion. Emotions motivate us to act, but our mind takes these visceral feelings and tangles them. Pay not attention to the mind or the emotion, but to the source of the emotion and its meaning.
• [article] The Scientific Ritual — 13 May 2021
  The scientific method is just another belief system, a ritual subject to errors of application like any other. In being thus, it has become ‘a machine for generating exaggerations’.
• [marginalium] Excellent literature review of the effects of intermittent and periodic fasting — 3 May 2021
• [article] Insight and the Sciences — 21 Apr 2021
  Varela’s gestures of awareness—suspension, redirection, letting go—align with cognitive science findings on insight, emphasizing their value in understanding human thought and experience.
• [article] Varela's Gestures — 10 Apr 2021
  Neuroscientist Francisco Varela’s “gestures” of awareness—suspension, redirection, and letting go—are an incredibly simple guide to understanding the connection between the brain and the phenomenon of insight, both those mundane and profound.
• [article] The Millennium Myth — 22 Mar 2021
  Year 2000 predictions once foretold catastrophe, but now we laugh at those predictions. The same is true of many historical cycles and years with big, round numbers. They become significant simply because we collectively believe in their importance.
• [article] From Zero — 13 Mar 2021
  Hydraulic despotism is the idea the critical resources are used to control populaces. Once, water. Now tech. To counter this, we should learn to recreate more basic systems from scratch, fostering self-reliance and innovation.
• [marginalium] Anthropological Case Study for the Lockdown as a ‘Spiritual and Economic Reset’ — 10 Mar 2021
• [marginalium] On the decline of global democracy since the misleading ‘boom’ following the Cold War — 10 Mar 2021
• [marginalium] On McMaster’s New Memoir — 10 Mar 2021
• [marginalium] This blog, called ‘Statistical Modeling, Causal Inference, and Social Science’ has a ‘Zombies’ category, and it’s great — 7 Mar 2021
• [marginalium] The ‘marshmallow test’ has consistently failed the replication challenge — 7 Mar 2021