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Sloww Sunday Newsletter 091 (Jan 9, 2022) — Mental Mastery Cheatsheet, Lying (by Sam Harris), & 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. If you enjoy it, please take 5 seconds to forward the email version to some friends and family. 🙏
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🌀 Sloww Stuff
🆕 Truthful Takeaways from “Lying” by Sam Harris (Book Summary)
This is a short summary of a short book that covers white lies, big lies, secrets, faint praise, mental accounting, and more. It didn’t live up to the hype for me because it seemed like common sense. But, maybe that’s the scary reality—that it’s not common sense.
I’ve ventured deep into this subject lately. If you truly want to be an integrated, interdisciplinary thinker, you can’t just focus on adding concepts to your mind that make your thinking better (aiming to be “more right”). You must also focus on reducing errors in your thinking (aiming to be “less wrong”). This Premium post links to a Google Sheet with 350+ cognitive concepts I’ve curated and organized from a variety of sources (with more on the way). Enjoy!
🧠 Modern Knowledge
The News You Missed in 2021 from Every Country in the World
49 mins | Wendover Productions (YouTube)
I don’t watch the news, but this is a newsworthy idea I can get behind. This two-part video features 1 news story for each of the 196 countries in the world. The news stories are organized by each country’s Human Development Index (HDI) ranking which factors in: a long and happy life, accumulation of education, and earnings. If anything, the stories and visuals are a powerful reminder of the magnitude and diversity of humans on Earth.
🌌 Timeless Wisdom
The Thin Veneer
16 mins | Brett Hall (YouTube)
This short video from Brett Hall somehow covers everything from Joe Rogan to ancient spirituality to Hugh Everett’s “many-worlds interpretation” of quantum mechanics! If you aren’t familiar with Brett’s work, check him out on YouTube where he’s done a deep dive video series on The Beginning of Infinity by David Deutsch and other discussions with Naval Ravikant.
“It is entirely true to say that what we see, observe, and experience is but a tiny sliver—or the thinnest film—on the surface of the really existing multiverse … Reality is so much more than we observe, or even than we can observe.” — Brett Hall
🤯 Mind Expanding
Spurious Correlations
Tyler Vigen
Spurious Correlations shares fun visual charts to remind us all that correlation is not causation. Your won’t be able to forget these once you see them.
💡 New Learning
Mental Model
Wikipedia
· A mental model is an explanation of someone’s thought process about how something works in the real world—a kind of internal symbol or representation of external reality.
· Mental models play a role in cognition, reasoning, decision making, solving problems, and shaping behavior.
“The image of the world around us, which we carry in our head, is just a model. Nobody in his head imagines all the world, government or country. He has only selected concepts, and relationships between them, and uses those to represent the real system.” — Jay Wright Forrester (1971)
💭 Deep Thought
Everyone is doing their best at every moment—given their unique combination of nature, nurture, experiences, talents, traumas, miracles, gifts, shadows, skills, and luck (not to mention geographic location & time period). How can this realization lead to anything but compassion?
💬 Wise Words
The proper function of man is to live, not to exist. I shall not waste my days in trying to prolong them. I shall use my time.
— Jack London (1916)
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Have an alive week!
Kyle Kowalski
Synthesizer & Solopreneur, Sloww
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