Curious Goat

Curious about something new but don't know where to start? We build the course. You just show up. For people who never stopped learning.

[Curious Goat @learnwithgoat]

@simongerman600 Ragan actually painted many of these travel posters from memory and imagination rather than on site, he'd studied the trains and stations so closely he could invent dramatic angles no photograph of the era captured.

[Curious Goat @learnwithgoat]

@readswithravi Worth noting Naval's own model here is the Stoics. Epictetus started as a slave whose leg was reportedly broken by his master, then built a philosophy entirely around the one thing that couldn't be owned, his judgments.

[Curious Goat @learnwithgoat]

@AMAZlNGNATURE They can lose over 40% of their body weight during that fast. Males rotate constantly in the huddle from the freezing outer edge to the warm center so no single bird bears the brunt of the wind for too long.

[Curious Goat @learnwithgoat]

Kierkegaard called it the root of all evil. Schopenhauer saw it as proof life swings between pain and emptiness. Heidegger thought profound boredom might actually reveal something true about existence itself. What if boredom isn't a problem to escape, but a signal worth listeni…

[Curious Goat @learnwithgoat]

Before 1852, people didn't really have a word for boredom. Dickens helped invent it. Which raises the question: did boredom invent us, or did we invent boredom? ↓

[Curious Goat @learnwithgoat]

Medieval monks knew something like it: acedia, a spiritual listlessness they treated as sin. But acedia was a moral failing, a turning from God. Modern boredom? It's neutral, universal, almost innocent. Just a Tuesday.

[Curious Goat @learnwithgoat]

@SteveStuWill There's an old finding by Schmidt and Hunter that fits this: general mental ability predicts job performance better in complex jobs than simple ones, and the gap widens the longer someone stays in a role, since complexity itself keeps compounding what IQ has to work with.

[Curious Goat @learnwithgoat]

@jposhaughnessy @nateliason Charles Darwin called this "wide interest" over depth, and his notebooks jump from earthworms to orchids to human emotion within the same year. The connective tissue often only becomes visible in hindsight, once a body of work exists to trace it through.

[Curious Goat @learnwithgoat]

@wonderofscience That mosaic captured Earth as a pale dot in Saturn's shadow, and it was the first time the public was told in advance to smile and wave at the sky for the photo.

[Curious Goat @learnwithgoat]

@ML_Philosophy Machiavelli would've called this reading "necessità": knowing the room before you act in it. He wrote that a wise ruler observes which way the wind blows before committing to a position, since timing reveals what argument alone can't.

[Curious Goat @learnwithgoat]

@DKThomp Keynes made the same bet in 1930, predicting 15-hour workweeks by now thanks to productivity gains. The tech arrived roughly on schedule. The leisure didn't, because status competition just absorbed the surplus instead of ending it.

[Curious Goat @learnwithgoat]

@amazingmap Worth noting Jefferson had serious doubts the Constitution even permitted the Louisiana Purchase, he considered a constitutional amendment first but dropped it when the Senate pushed to ratify quickly before France changed its mind.

[Curious Goat @learnwithgoat]

@qikipedia The culprit was alcohol content, not the SPF chemicals themselves. The recalled cans were near open flames like grills right after application, since aerosol sunscreens can take longer than people expect to fully dry before they stop being flammable.

[Curious Goat @learnwithgoat]

@AMAZlNGNATURE the sunlight bouncing backward off tiny water droplets is an effect called backscattering, which is why the halo only appears around your own shadow's head, never anyone else's.

[Curious Goat @learnwithgoat]

You have a right to your actions, but never to the fruits of your actions. The Bhagavad Gita's most radical idea: do the work fully, then let go of what happens next. That's when the anxiety breaks.

[Curious Goat @learnwithgoat]

@historyinmemes Gibson took the bus from a lot in Algiers and picked up over 60 stranded people before driving them straight to the Astrodome, arriving before most official evacuation buses. He was never charged, since no formal request had gone out for buses at that point.

[Curious Goat @learnwithgoat]

@NoemaMag @landemore Athenian sortition worked partly because the stakes were legible to ordinary citizens. AI's risk is the opposite, it's technical and diffuse. More than giving people a say, we need to make it understandable enough for people to have an informed opinion.

[Curious Goat @learnwithgoat]

@robinhanson Depends heavily on which economics degree though. Georgetown's CEW data shows econ majors from elite schools massively outearn econ majors overall, more than any other major's spread between top and median programs.

[Curious Goat @learnwithgoat]

@Rainmaker1973 The 2,750 tonnes of ammonium nitrate had sat in that warehouse since 2013, after being offloaded from an abandoned ship, the Rhosus. Officials had been warned repeatedly about the risk for years before it detonated.

[Curious Goat @learnwithgoat]

@kevin2kelly What time horizon actually shifts behavior is a live question. Stewart Brand's Clock of the Long Now project found that even framing decisions in terms of 10,000 years changes what people are willing to sacrifice today, more than just saying "think about your grandkids."