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Sloww Sunday Newsletter 108 (Jun 19, 2022) — Second Brain, Eternal Principle, False Reality, & 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. 🙏
🌀 Sloww Stuff
🆕 Digital Notetaking: “Building a Second Brain” by Tiago Forte (Book Summary)
Sometimes Sloww is fast! This book was published on 6/14, and I read and summarized it in two days. If you want to visualize the Second Brain concept, here’s a Twitter thread of visuals.
“It is much easier to gather and synthesize the thoughts of others than to come up with an endless series of brilliant thoughts on your own … Begin to see yourself as the curator of the collective thinking of your network, rather than the sole originator of ideas.” — Tiago Forte
Pair with:
- “How to Take Smart Notes” by Sönke Ahrens: Book Summary + 🔒Premium Summary
- Zettelkasten 101: An Intro to the Smart Note-Taking System of Niklas Luhmann
🧠 Modern Knowledge
Reality is an Illusion: How Evolution Hid the Truth
3 hrs | Lex Fridman (YouTube)
I got completely sucked into this new podcast between Donald Hoffman and Lex Fridman (especially the last 1.5 hours). This wide-ranging conversation covers: science, spirituality, consciousness, meditation, truth, love, reality, simulations, evolution, natural selection, meaning of life, and so much more.
I first featured Donald Hoffman all the way back in Sloww Sunday #14. Donald Hoffman’s convergence of science and spirituality reminds me of a modern day David Bohm.
“What the spiritual traditions have been saying for a long, long time gets cashed out in mathematically precise science.” — Donald Hoffman
Pair with:
- The Scientist’s Guide to Spirituality: “Thought as a System” by David Bohm (Book Summary)
- Science + Spirituality: Is Matter to Space what Thought is to Consciousness? (David Bohm Short Excerpt)
☯️ Timeless Wisdom
The Eternal Principle
5 mins | Joseph Campbell (YouTube)
Joseph Campbell is such a joy:
“Now, there’s a wonderful work of Schopenhauer’s. He says when you reach a certain age and look back over your life it seems to have had an order—it seems to have been composed by someone—and those events that when they occurred seemed merely accidental and occasional and just something that happened, turn out to be the main elements in a consistent plot. So, he says, who composed this plot? And, he said, just as your dreams are composed by an aspect of yourself of which your consciousness is unaware, so your whole life has been composed by the will within you. Then, he says, just as those people who you met by chance became effective agents in the structuring of your life, so you have been an agent in the structuring of other lives, and the whole thing gears together like one big symphony—everything influencing and structuring everything else. And, he said, it’s as though our lives were the dream of a single dreamer in which all the dream characters are dreaming too—and so everything links to everything else moved out of the will in nature. It’s a beautiful idea.” — Joseph Campbell
🤯 Mind Expanding
Universe 25 Utopia Experiments
8 mins | YouTube
John B. Calhoun was an American ethologist and behavioral researcher noted for his studies of population density and its effects on behavior. He claimed that the bleak effects of overpopulation on rodents were a grim model for the future of the human race.
“Behavioral sink” is a term coined by Calhoun to describe a collapse in behavior which can result from overcrowding. Calhoun’s work became used as an animal model of societal collapse. Check out the short video linked above and this longer video if you want to see more source footage of Calhoun.
“The need for challenge and exploration arises mostly out of the blockage of fulfillment of lower level needs, giving rise to a pervading restlessness. Out of this restlessness there arises much pathology as searchers collide with established structuring and functioning of the environment. Out of this restlessness there also arises a small cadre of creative deviants whose insights and inventions have provided the leverage which has enabled man to increase his standard of living and his compassionate concern for his fellows. Our success in being human has so far derived from our honoring deviance more than tradition. Template changing has always gained a slight, though often tenuous, lead over template obeying. Now we must search diligently for those creative deviants from whom alone will come the conceptualizations of an evolutionary designing process which can assure us an open-ended future—toward whose realization we can all participate.” — John B. Calhoun
💭 Deep Thought
How would you design society if you had no idea who you would be in that society?
Let’s say you’re on board with the realization of the lottery of birth (or ovarian lottery). Then the next step is to think about the “original position” (or “veil of ignorance”) thought experiment.
Here’s the idea: citizens making choices about their society are asked to make them from an “original position” of equality (left) behind a “veil of ignorance” (wall, center), without knowing what gender, race, abilities, tastes, wealth, or position in society they will have (right). How would you design society if you had to randomly choose 1 of ~8,000,000,000 human lottery balls?
“A just society is based on principles everyone would agree to if impartial and if starting from an original position behind a ‘veil of ignorance’ — not knowing who they would be or which side of an argument they would be on.” — Eric Rosenbaum paraphrasing John Rawls and Warren Buffett
💬 Wise Words
If I am, then death is not. If death is, then I am not. Why should I fear that which can only exist when I do not?
— Epicurus
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Have an alive week!
Kyle Kowalski
Founder, Sloww
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