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Sloww Sunday Newsletter 088 (Dec 12, 2021) — Top Books of the Year, Meta-Learning, Evolution Myth-Busting, & 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. 🙏
🌀 Sloww Stuff
My Five Favorite Books of the Year:
- “How to Read a Book” by Mortimer Adler: Book Summary + 🔒Premium Summary
- “Early Retirement Extreme” by Jacob Lund Fisker: Book Summary + 🔒Premium Synthesis
- “How to Live” by Derek Sivers: Book Summary + 🔒Premium Summary
- “Yes to Life” by Viktor Frankl: Book Summary + 🔒Premium Summary
- “Being Myself” by Rupert Spira: Book Summary + 🔒Premium Summary
🧠 Modern Knowledge
Evolution isn’t the “March of Progress”
Twitter
Have you seen the famous “March of Progress” photo that shows humans evolving from apes in a few short steps? Unfortunately, that doesn’t accurately depict how evolution actually works. The link above shares a few photos to correct the myth.
“If you had to express it visually, the human story would probably look more like an incredibly complex tree or fractal.” — SciShow
☯️ Timeless Wisdom
The Wisdom of David Bohm
Variety of Lengths | YouTube
I could spend all day on these videos and audio recordings from theoretical physicist David Bohm—not to mention Bohm’s conversations with Jiddu Krishnamurti (YouTube Playlist). We need more modern dialogues where science meets spirituality.
A few favorite quotes from David Bohm:
- “We haven’t really paid much attention to thought as a process. We have engaged in thoughts, but we have only paid attention to the content, not to the process.”
- “The source of intelligence is not necessarily in the brain. The ultimate source of intelligence is much more enfolded into the whole.”
- “The individual is universal and the universal is the individual. The word ‘individual’ means undivided, so we could say that very few individuals have ever existed. We could call them dividuals. Individuality is only possible if it unfolds from wholeness.”
“I don’t think that we live in an enlightened era. We live in what David Bohm called an ‘endarkened era’ in which what we think is enlightening us is in fact inducing misery.” — Iain McGilchrist
🤯 Mind Expanding
Neurons in Action
Twitter
My mind is still exploding from these neuron videos: here, here, here, and here.
💡 New Learning
Meta-Learning
Wikipedia
- A branch of metacognition concerned with learning about one’s own learning and learning processes.
- An awareness and understanding of the phenomenon of learning itself (as opposed to subject knowledge).
More New Learnings: Wikipedia Wednesday Twitter thread
💭 Deep Thought
How much of humanity do you think you’ll interact with in your lifetime? 1 percent? 10 percent? More?
Apparently, you’ll only interact with .001 percent of humanity during your entire lifespan! Here’s the math: the average person interacts with 20,000-80,000 humans during a lifetime (out of 8,000,000,000 humans currently alive).
Guess how long it would take you to count every living human (1 per second)? Answer: about 240 years! That’s a lot of humans.
To make all this even more fun, Robin Dunbar (famous for the “Dunbar number”) says you spend about 75% of all your social time with less than 15 people.
Remember: We only interact with the tiniest portion of humans, yet we all think we know what’s going on with humanity. Don’t confuse your worldview with the world!
💬 Wise Words
“We are drowning in information, while starving for wisdom. The world henceforth will be run by synthesizers, people able to put together the right information at the right time, think critically about it, and make important choices wisely.” — E. O. Wilson
PS: 🧠 My Synthesizer course is in the works! It will include everything I’ve learned about the art of synthesis, how to cultivate a synthesizing mind, how I synthesize for Sloww, and more. Click here to be notified when it’s live.
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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 a wise week!
Kyle Kowalski
Synthesizer & Solopreneur, Sloww
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