cool links VI: moral optimization, design principles, childhood, and more
What I recently read worth sharing:
You can't optimize yourself into being a good person by Sigal Samuel. I have also talked about the obsession to track and optimize yourself on this blog before, and I am also an Effective Altruism hater, so this is right up my alley. This one is critical about moral optimization and trying to maximize the good you can do.
Quote: "Nowadays, whenever I feel scared in the face of a decision and yearn for the safety of an optimizing formula, I try to remind myself that there’s another way of feeling safe. It’s not about perfection, about invulnerability, about control. It’s about leaning into the fact that we are imperfect and vulnerable creatures and that even when we’re trying our hardest there will be some things that are beyond our control — and, exactly for that reason, we deserve compassion."Bring Back Idiomatic Design by John Loeber. Made me notice and think differently about some design choices, engaging more critically with it. It doesn't mean literally anyone has to conform to this - my own website, blog and terminal portion of it go against this - but it would nice if important software, websites and services had a more uniform design consensus on how to handle data entry and choices.
a decade in reflection: the childhood hobby that brought me joy by Nikki. It was nostalgic to read, because I used to do something similar: I made "books" by drawing whatever would happen on each page and writing a little underneath when I was a kid, and then stapling them together. I had several of them and loved to read through them again and again, even though it was made by me and I knew how it would end. I had so much fun making that but forgot until I read this post.
Anarchism as I understand it by starbreaker. I feel very similarly. I couldn't just copy one part out of it as a tease, so I guess you'll have to find out.
Re: loneliness and meaningful work by Protesilaos Stavrou. A really enlightening read for me that features an exchange between a younger, more inexperienced perspective and an older, more mature one. I don't always get the nuances of social interaction right, and I recognize myself in some of the things the correspondent says, so I try to grow past that.
Quote: "Rather than refashion everyone in my image, I try to do my part as a member of society. To put it simply, someone will have to be the philosopher, so that others can be who they are. We all stand to gain something if we acknowledge how diverse we are and how this is the natural order. Instead of arguing with nature and judging its facts, superimposing our biases to its realities, we learn to understand phenomena without wishing for them to be something else. Only then can we free ourselves from false wants and the troubling thoughts they engender."Everyone is numbing out by Catherine Shannon. I am not agreeing on all fronts, and I think parts of it might be a bubble-problem, but I appreciate nonetheless and I can understand where the author is coming from.
Quote: "Being ironically detached from life is endlessly glamorized in our culture. There’s a certain status in pretending nothing affects you and you don’t care. Taking the ironic detachment route is also easy. It’s easy to laugh at other people, mock them, throw your head back, be a critic. Standing for nothing has the obvious appeal of making you impossible to pin down."
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