Technology Review: “In every moment, as you see, think, feel, and navigate the world around you, your perception of these things is built from three ingredients. One is the signals we receive from the outside world, called sense data. Light waves enter your retinas to be experienced as blooming gardens and starry skies…A second ingredient of your experience is sense data from events inside your body, like the blood rushing through your veins and arteries, your lungs expanding and contracting, and your stomach gurgling…Finally, a third ingredient is past experience. Without this, the sense data around and inside you would be meaningless noise…[A] human mind is constructed by a brain in constant conversation, moment by unique moment, with a body and the outside world.”
Gurwinder explains 40 concepts people should know. One of them: “The Curse of Knowledge: The more familiar you become with an idea the worse you become at explaining it to others, because you forget what it’s like to not know it, and therefore what needs to be explained to understand it.”
WSJ (US context): “Twenty-five years ago, that understanding of liberalism was almost unquestionable. Not anymore. On the left, markets generate inequality, democracy works only when it achieves the right outcomes, individual freedom is uninteresting unless it involves sexual innovation or abortion, the state is everything, and religion doesn’t deserve neutrality. On the right—or anyway the intellectual/populist right—markets destroy traditional moral conventions, democracy is mostly a sham, individual freedom encourages behavioral deviancies, state power is a force for good, and the First Amendment’s ban on the establishment of religion was likely a bad idea.”
