> As long as there is the desire to gain, to achieve, to become, at whatever level, there is inevitably anxiety, sorrow, fear. The ambition to be rich, to be this or that, drops away only when we see the rottenness, the corruptive nature of ambition itself. The moment we see that the desire for power in any form — for the power of a prime minister, of a judge, of a priest, of a guru — is fundamentally evil, we no longer have the desire to be powerful. But we don't see that ambition is corrupting, that the desire for power is evil; on the contrary, we say that we shall use power for good — which is all nonsense. A wrong means can never be used towards a right end. If the means is evil, the end will also be evil. Good is not the opposite of evil; it comes into being only when that which is evil has utterly ceased.
>
> So, if we don't understand the whole significance of desire, with its results, its by-products, merely to try to get rid of desire has no meaning.
> If, however, prose is LLM-generated, this social contract becomes ripped up: a reader cannot assume that the writer understands their ideas because they might not so much have read the product of the LLM that they tasked to write it. If one is lucky, these are LLM hallucinations: obviously wrong and quickly discarded. If one is unlucky, however, it will be a kind of LLM-induced cognitive dissonance: a puzzle in which pieces don’t fit because there is in fact no puzzle at all. This can leave a reader frustrated: why should they spend more time reading prose than the writer spent writing it?
> This can be navigated, of course, but it is truly perilous: our writing is an important vessel for building trust — and that trust can be quickly eroded if we are not speaking with our own voice.
Go a bit further and use pencil or charcoal so you can smell the wood and lead and feel the texture of the drawing surface, helping your brain make more connections.
It also allows you to make more mistakes, which can lead to surprising directions.
And the team who makes the most mistakes usually *wins*!
See also:
The Hand - How Its Use Shapes the Brain, Language, and Human Culture
By Frank R. Wilson
Drawing on the Right Side of The Brain by Betty Edwards
Wooden: A Lifetime of Observations and Reflections On and Off the Court by John Wood
You Matter More Than You Think by Karen O’Brien with illustrations by Tone Bjordam
Love reading and writing on paper, but do read and write quite a bit on computer screens, too. Phone screens are too small and uncomfortable for me.
No TV at home, either. And even videogames, which I love, have held less and less interest unless they have good coop modes, an unusual mechanic, or excellent sound and story.
Leaning more and more towards playing music, which has felt like a present from the gods.
Having read McLuhan — https://archive.org/details/bwb_P8-ASW-848 — and Lanier (You Are Not A Gadget), I worry about the future, but am hopeful young people will indeed rebel.
Making a strict hour and a half of no-interruption a day has worked well for me. Learned this from John Cleese (feel free to ignore the word “management” in the title of the video): https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=Pb5oIIPO62g
Still occasionally get interrupted because of life, of course, but marking off an hour and a half and closing a door and putting all chores/calls on silent during that time is very helpful. And I understand that for many it is simply not possible. Private space is a luxury in much of the world.
A sense of play and no obligation also helps. For more on this I recommend Rubin’s The Creative Act.
I use Macs for work and PC for games, and this little box seems a good opportunity to play The Legend of Linux on a desktop or a couch, and make it true.
The paper shows a dotted line dividing the triangles and showing the areas to be equal, which makes things clearer.