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Sloww Sunday Newsletter 099 (Mar 20, 2022) — Cognitive Immunity, Everything Flows, Ways to Live, & 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
In case you missed it, I recently launched a side project: MetaCrisis.org (and if you’re wondering what the meta-crisis is, start here). Over the last few weeks, I’ve added more meta-crisis people, projects, and resource pages for: hashtags, maps & syntheses, YouTube channels, Reddit subreddits, and a Twitter list. More resource pages are coming soon for meta-crisis podcasts, communities, and more.
50+ Eponymous Laws, Principles, & Effects to Think and Live Better
I guarantee you’ll learn something new from this Twitter thread. For Sloww Premium members, all of these concepts have also been added here: 🔒Mental Mastery Cheatsheet: 500+ Cognitive Concepts Curated.
🧠 Modern Knowledge
Building a Cognitive Immune System
3 mins | Institute for the Future (YouTube)
Just like our bodies have biological immune systems, we can think about our minds as having psychological immune systems. Over the last couple years, we’ve all become very familiar with a physical pandemic—but what about all the cognitive contagions that now exist as well? The short video above and this 6-page PDF (including visual map) outline the concept of “cognitive immunity.”
As a side note, I also saw there’s a book called Mental Immunity by Andy Norman, PhD. And, last but certainly not least, Daniel Schmachtenberger of The Consilience Project describes it as a “memetic (or epistemic) immune system”—a mind that suffers less memetic hijacking and supports more mental-emotional sovereignty:
“One of the things that happens as people start to get the aspect of media literacy is that they get a memetic immune system—they see that the thing that’s being called ‘news’ and even a lot of what’s being called ‘communication of science’ is actually narrative and information warfare for specific economic or political agendas. And, they start to recognize the tools of that like cherry-picking of data, or decontextualization of a fact, or Lakoff framing the fact—all that will make it through a fact checker and you can still lie with that stuff.” — Daniel Schmachtenberger
☯️ Timeless Wisdom
Panta rhei (“everything flows” or “everything is in flux”)
On the philosophy of Heraclitus and Plato:
“Fire burns continuously and without interruption. It is therefore always consuming fuel and always liberating smoke. Everything is either mounting upwards to serve as fuel, or sinking downwards after having nourished the flame. It follows that the whole of reality is like an ever-flowing stream, and that nothing is ever at rest for a moment. The substance of the things we see is therefore in constant change. Even as we look at them, some of the matter of which they are composed has already passed into something else, while fresh matter has come into them from another source. This theory is usually summed up, appropriately enough, in the phrase ‘All things are flowing’ … ‘Nothing ever is, everything is becoming’; ‘All things are in motion like streams’; ‘All things are passing, and nothing abides.'” — John Burnet (1892)
🤯 Mind Expanding
100+ billion humans have ever lived
I’ve been fascinated by this since my existential crisis in 2015. It’s estimated that 108,000,000,000+ humans have ever lived on Earth. You are 1. It’s also estimated that recorded human history dates back ~5,400 years. Your average lifespan is ~80 years. You get 1 percent. You are 1 human with 1 percent of history.
For me, this has always been a paradoxical perspective reset. On one hand, it makes me feel insignificant. On the other hand, this feeling of insignificance provides freedom from fear to do something significant. What will you do with your 1 percent?
“The dead outnumber the living 14 to 1, and we ignore the accumulated experience of such a huge majority of mankind at our peril.” — Niall Ferguson
💡 New Learning
Hysteresis
Wikipedia
· A system’s current state can be dependent on its history (what happened previously can impact what will happen next).
· Derived from Ancient Greek meaning “deficiency” or “lagging behind.”
· Hysteresis can be found in physics, chemistry, engineering, biology, and economics.
From “Super Thinking”: Book Summary + 🔒Premium Summary
💭 Deep Thought
There is no one right way to live.
Derek Sivers’ book “How to Live: 27 Conflicting Answers and One Weird Conclusion” was one of my favorite reads last year (Book Summary + 🔒Premium Summary). It makes it blatantly obvious that there’s no one right way to live. Derek edited a 1300-page first draft down to 112-page final book. Those 112 succinct pages should be required reading for humanity today:
“Each chapter disagrees with the rest. But in this case, they’re all true, so how can you reconcile it? You’ll see.” — Derek Sivers
💬 Wise Words
Do not spoil what you have by desiring what you have not; remember that what you now have was once among the things you only hoped for.
— Epicurus
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Have a fulfilled week!
Kyle Kowalski
Synthesizer & Solopreneur, Sloww
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