Wayne

Seeking the right questions 🤔 Data @Google

[Gokul Rajaram @gokulr]

The power of agency

Brilliant article on the stable marriage problem. It concludes that, like most other things in life, the optimal solution "rewards agency and punishes passivity, to an astonishingly strong degree".

conclusion: "If you only ever pick from offers you get, you never try anything unless someone out there already knew you and liked you enough that they took the trouble of coming to you. If you ask for stuff, you get to pick from among the entire universe of potential options theoretically available to you — and who knows, it might work out."

(link in comments)

[Aakash Gupta @aakashgupta]

My favorite takeaways from this episode:

1. Your future self is neurologically a stranger. The person who makes a commitment at 9am and the person who has to execute it at 9pm are running different neurochemistry. The brain uses the same circuits for remembering the past and imagining the future, which means "future you" is a memory-based projection, not the actual person who shows up. Binding yourself with environmental constraints (deleting apps, prepaying, announcing publicly) works because you're building architecture your depleted future self has to navigate around. Willpower isn't weak. It's just the wrong tool for the job.

2. Dreams are a screensaver, not a therapist. The visual cortex is prime neural real estate, and during darkness, it's vulnerable to being colonized by other senses. This is exactly what happens in blind people, whose visual cortex gets rewired for touch and hearing. REM sleep generates bursts of activity specifically to defend that territory. The imagery we experience as dreams is a byproduct of maintenance cycles preventing hostile takeover. There's a direct correlation across species: the more an animal depends on vision, the more REM sleep it requires.

3. Fear doesn't slow time. It densifies memory. You can't actually perceive faster during terrifying moments. Time doesn't slow down. But your brain lays down significantly more memory per second than normal. When you scan through richer footage in retrospect, it takes longer, so the event feels elongated. The practical inverse: routine compresses perceived lifespan. Novel experiences expand it. You won't live more days, but you'll remember more of them.

4. The internet broke the specialization vs diversification trade-off. Early specialization forecloses cognitive flexibility because cortical tissue gets committed to specific functions. But the old constraint was physical access to diverse experiences. Now curiosity can branch infinitely online. The problem shifted: shallow broad exposure doesn't deliver the same plasticity benefits as deep practice. Neither extreme wins. The well-rounded brain needs diversification for flexibility and focused repetition for actual skill acquisition.

5. Expand your spatial attention to expand your time horizon. The brain processes space and time together. Shifting visual focus from your breath to the room to the building to the city to Earth from space lengthens your sense of time at each step. People trapped in close-focus attention (phone addiction, anxiety spirals) struggle with long-term planning because their spatial attention anchors their time perception to the immediate. Zooming out spatially forces temporal zooming.

6. Your senses are just default input ports. The cortex doesn't care what port data arrives through. It extracts structure from any consistent input stream. Deaf users of sensory substitution devices don't report "feeling words" after enough exposure. They report actually hearing through their skin. You're born with general-purpose cortical tissue that specializes based on available inputs. Sensory addition (infrared, magnetic fields, stock prices fed directly to the brain) is now an engineering problem, not a biological limitation.

7. Every recall rewrites the memory. Memories aren't files you retrieve. They're reconstructions you rebuild from fragments each time you access them. Each reconstruction introduces subtle changes. Eyewitness testimony is dangerous because repeatedly testifying modifies the memory while increasing confidence. Photos make it worse: your memory of an event starts incorporating the photograph itself. The original experience gets overwritten by the documentation of it.

8. Polarization is a dopamine game, not a facts game. Seeing your team win triggers dopamine. Seeing your team lose triggers cortisol. The brain optimizes for tribal affiliation, not accuracy, because for most of human evolution, tribal affiliation determined survival. Propaganda exploits this by simplifying complex situations into clear team narratives. Nuance requires metabolic effort. Simple stories win because they're cognitively cheaper. The intervention is forcing engagement with actual complexity, which decreases certainty and increases empathy.

9. Novelty is the only reliable plasticity trigger in adults. Children's brains change constantly because everything is novel. Adult brains require deliberate novelty and challenge to trigger the same neuromodulator release that enables rewiring. Comfort and routine are plasticity killers. The practical move is engineering regular encounters with situations where you don't know what you're doing. Frustration and confusion aren't obstacles to learning. They're the signals that learning is possible.

10. Social media addiction isn't about content. It's about variable reward. The slot machine mechanic (sometimes you get dopamine, sometimes you don't) is more addictive than consistent reward. Curiosity evolved to drive exploration in uncertain environments, and infinite scroll exploits that circuitry perfectly. The fix isn't willpower. It's understanding that you're not weak. You're running ancient software against adversarial modern engineering. Restructure the environment instead of fighting the urge.

[Kpaxs @Kpaxs]

Avoid what I call "Temporal Flatland": when you treat all your thoughts about the past and future as the same kind of thing.

If you find yourself lost in Temporal Flatland, ask yourself:

Is there a way to upgrade to Temporal High Agency? Is there a phone call or a plan that could collapse this entire recursive loop into a single, finite action?

[Jaynit @jaynitx]

Jeff Bezos dropped the billion-dollar truth about why the world will always try to make you average:

[Nicholas Fabiano, MD @NTFabiano]

You're not depressed, you just lost your quest.

[Prompter @PromptLLM]

The most magical thing you can do is reframe your experiences.

[Prompter @PromptLLM]

Life is just a resource management game

[Reads with Ravi @readswithravi]

James Clear on the antidote to anxiety:

[Essayful @SeeCathedrals]

Carl Jung on avoidance...

[Eddy Quan @waronweakness]

Always do what you're embarrassed to do

[Z Fellows @zfellows]

Peter Thiel on advice to his younger self:

“My advice for you — the advice I wish I could have given my younger self — is this: Before getting swept up in the competitions that define so much of life, ask yourself whether you even want the prize on offer.”

[Naval @naval]

Envy is a sign that you ought to be doing more with your life.

[Naval @naval]

Innovation is art - it can’t be scaled.

Scaling a team creates a hierarchy to reduce coordination costs.

Hierarchy introduces the Principal-Agent problem.

Agents optimize for status and cohesion over correctness.

Going from zero to one requires a founder-led flat team.

[Etheraider @etheraider]

"There's no question that the blockchain that we would start with our tokenization on would be Ethereum."

"And that's not just a Blackrock thing, that's anybody who would enter this space. That's the natural default answer."

- Head of Digital Assets, Blackrock

$ETH

[Neeraj K. Agrawal @NeerajKA]

We won

[Sahil Bloom @SahilBloom]

Everyone needs to hear this…

[Avichal Garg - Electric ϟ Capital @avichal]

Ironic that we got free AI from a hedge fund and $200/month AI from a nonprofit.

[Dr. Julie Gurner @drgurner]

Something easy to examine and hard to shift, are your beliefs.

What you believe sets the path of how you engage with the world around you, in every possible way.

Here are 5 core beliefs to review…

1. Beliefs around Capability. When it comes down to it, what do you really think you can do?

What can you learn, overcome, how much can you push through, and how determined do you see yourself?

What you believe you can tackle & do, sets the stage for everything else.

2. Beliefs around Money. Do you fear it, resent it, avoid it, see it as separate from you or limited?

Ex: If you resent wealth, you won't gravitate toward things you hate.

If you believe money is plentiful & available for the taking with a variety of paths? You’re in.

3. Beliefs around other People. Are they helpful, users, harmful, exciting or interesting?

What do you believe about certain positions, people, or professions?

What you believe here will pull you to networks or keep you distanced.

4. Beliefs around Relationships. Think all men suck or women are terrible?

Don’t expect wonderful partnerships if you see other people as enemies before you meet them.

The energy around your beliefs will determine how you approach others in dating & your personal life.

5. Beliefs around Success.

Who is it for? What are the requirements? What does it take? Is it possible?

If you're a true believer that it's possible, motivation soars.

As you're taking on the week - it’s an opportunity.

Examine *how* you think, the content of that, and whether it’s igniting or stifling your path ahead.

...And if you want to check yourself on a regular basis, check out the newsletter in my bio.

[Marques Brownlee @MKBHD]

The rumors are true - SORA, OpenAI's AI video generator, is launching for the public today...

I've been using it for about a week now, and have reviewed it: https://t.co/6cDqDQTK5g

THE BELOW VIDEO IS 100% AI GENERATED

I've learned a lot testing this, here are some new learnings. Thread 🧵

[Ankit @ankitkr0]

also, found this beautiful thing yesterday.