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Sloww Sunday Newsletter 084 (Nov 14, 2021) — What is Going On, Seeing Systems, Informavores, & More
Happy Sunday!
Here’s the latest from Sloww along with the most interesting things I discovered last week. To respect your time and attention, every newsletter can be read in under 5 minutes. 🙏
🆕 New News
Welcome to the 1,500+ new subscribers from Recomendo! I’m thrilled that the cognitive bias codex resonated with you. Here are a few more visualizations and lists you may enjoy:
🌀 Sloww Stuff
In Case You Missed It: Book Summaries Full List
This new page is a comprehensive list of all my book summaries—what I truly believe are the highest quality and most detailed book summaries anywhere online. Why are they the most useful? There are at least a few things that set them apart: author quotes, key themes, visual formatting, and concise comprehensiveness. You may also like my book recommendations of 25+ books and my full reading list of 250+ books (Google Sheet). Enjoy!
🔒 New Premium Post: What is Going On?
There are a number of things that seem to continually be top of mind for me lately. This is an attempt to synthesize them and see if I can do some sense-making. To be clear, this isn’t a post about what is going on with current news and events—this is about what is going on with life. The idea is that we can do better sense-making of current news and events with a better grasp on life. It covers tons of topics: the lottery of birth, who you are, deep realizations, mind battlefields, memes, polarization, and 10+ ways we can all move forward.
🧠 Modern Knowledge
Seeing Whole Systems
(59 mins | YouTube)
Nicky Case delivers a fun, visual introduction to systems thinking for the Long Now Foundation. This is for you if you want to learn more about core ideas like reinforcing loops, balancing loops, attractors, chaos, and emergence. If you want to go deeper, check out my book summary of “Thinking in Systems” by Donella Meadows.
“Usually people describe emergence as ‘the whole is greater than the sum of its parts’ … The phrase is better translated as ‘the whole is other than the sum of its parts’ … Emergence is not going to be a theory of everything, but it could be a theory of everything in between.” — Nicky Case
🌎 Timeless Wisdom
Why Ancient Wisdom Matters in the Modern World
(67 mins | YouTube)
This presentation is guaranteed to reset your perspective. Wade Davis seems to do a bit of everything—ethnographer, photographer, filmmaker, professor of anthropology, and author of 20+ books. He has been described as “a rare combination of scientist, scholar, poet and passionate defender of all of life’s diversity.”
“Every culture is a unique answer to a fundamental question. What does it mean to be human and alive? And when the peoples of the world answer that question, they do so in the 7,000 voices (languages) of humanity. Those answers collectively become our human repertoire for dealing with all of the challenges that will confront us as a species in the coming centuries. Every culture has something to say. Each deserves to be heard.” — Wade Davis
🤯 Mind Expanding
A Blind Person Describes What the World Looks Like
(11 mins | YouTube)
This video wasn’t what I expected going in, but it was a pleasant surprise!
“If there’s any kind of spiritual experience, or whatever you want to call it, it’s not when you look in to find yourself, but when you look out to lose yourself.” — Pursuit of Wonder
💡 New Learning
Informavore
(Wikipedia)
- An organism that consumes information.
- A description of human behavior in a modern information society, in comparison to “omnivore” as a description of humans consuming food.
“Just as the body survives by ingesting negative entropy, so the mind survives by ingesting information … All higher organisms are informavores.” — George A. Miller
All New Learnings: Wikipedia Wednesday Twitter thread
💭 Deep Thought
Try on different life philosophies like articles of clothing to see how they fit.
But remember, just because something fits today doesn’t mean it will fit tomorrow. And, something that doesn’t fit now may fit in the future.
💬 Wise Words
“Everything is simpler than we can imagine, at the same time more complex and intertwined than can be comprehended.” — Johann Wolfgang von Goethe
Sharing: If you enjoyed this issue, please help grow Sloww by sending the email version of this issue to some friends and family. It’s free and easy for anyone to subscribe here.
Support: Sloww is a one-human labor of love. If you’re interested in supporting me, there are several financial and non-financial ways to support.
Feedback: Have something you want to say, or just want to say hi? It’s always much appreciated. Just send me an email or reach out socially.
Have an awe-inspiring week!
Kyle Kowalski
Synthesizer & Solopreneur, Sloww
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