Here is your dose of “The Weekly Picks” , a curated list of what I’m enjoying.
This week's edition is dedicated to a truly deviant way of thinking.
A 20 second summary of what you can find more about down bellow:
🛑 Beau Lotto on halting judgement
🤔 Ideas to change your mind
✍️ Notes from Prince Harry’s Ghostwriter
🏠 Alternative designs: Habitat 67
Beau Lotto on halting judgement
“The key is to choose to look away from the meanings we have been layering onto stimuli. Stop your reflexive response with awareness… as one can do when one is able to see the cause of a reflex. Someone bumps into you on the street. Your first automatic response could be: What an asshole! That is “A.” But just stop. Don’t go to A. Go to not-A. Perhaps the person who bumped into me is ill; that’s why they stumbled, and they may need help. Or they may indeed be an asshole. Don’t know more. Stopping gives you the chance of knowing less, of halting the perception-narrowing force of the cognitive biases that we are always trying to confirm, of taking the jerk out of the knee-jerk and sitting with the meaninglessness of the stimuli, even if it doesn’t feel meaningless.”
— Beau Lotto in Deviate: The Science of Seeing Differently
Ideas That Changed My Life by Morgan Housel
You invest years in learning new things, but when you look back, you realize that only about ten major ideas have genuinely transformed your thinking and profoundly shaped your core beliefs. Here's what changed Morgan Housel's mind.
Here are my two favorite ideas from the blog post.
- Your personal experiences make up maybe 0.00000001% of what’s happened in the world but maybe 80% of how you think the world works.Personal experiences shape our biases. If you have experienced something, you understand it better than someone who has not. However, you may also overestimate the likelihood of it happening again or happening to others.
- Everything’s been done before. The scenes change but the behaviors and outcomes don’t. Historian Niall Ferguson argues that we can learn from the experiences of the dead, who outnumber the living 14 to 1. Their experiences show that they tried everything we're trying today, faced competition, and battled unsuccessfully against reversion to the mean. They learned that popular things are most competitive and therefore most dangerous. History is useful as a benchmark for how people react to risk and incentives over time, but not as a guide to the future based on specific events.
Notes from Prince Harry’s Ghostwriter
That’s the mystic paradox of ghostwriting: you’re inherent and nowhere; vital and invisible. To borrow an image from William Gass, you’re the air in someone else’s trumpet."
Habitat 67 by Safdie Architects
The major theme exhibition of the 1967 World Exposition in Montréal was called Habitat. It was a groundbreaking demonstration that introduced the design and construction of three-dimensional prefabricated housing units. Habitat aimed to combine residential, commercial, and institutional functions to create a vibrant neighborhood and offer the comforts of a single-family home in a flexible and cost-effective form suitable for high population densities and limited budgets.
Recently, Moshe Safdie's visionary Habitat 67 was brought to life with cutting-edge technology by Epic Games and Neoscape, allowing a new generation to experience its full masterplan in real-time.
Learn more about the project by watching this video.
