Jared and Gianluca try something new on this episode! We read passages from Robert Pirsig’s wonderful novel Zen and the Art of Motorcycle Maintenance, reacting and discussing as we go! Along the way, we explored the limits of conceptual understanding (a.k.a. Shut up and taste the wine!), how the words we use to describe reality also end up defining it, limiting it or expanding it, and why cliches are so easy to dismiss and when they shouldn’t be (hint: your gran was right - there’s nothing a good night’s sleep won’t solve). We also discuss what it means to truly understand something, and how our intuitive sense of what is excellent can guide us to cook great food, write beautiful code, and be delightful people!
As a bonus, we drop some hints about an exciting upcoming episode, and at the end we each share the advice we’ve heard that has the highest impact with the fewest words!
Listener feedback can be recorded here: https://www.speakpipe.com/podtangent
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Shownotes:
Zen and the Art of Motorcycle Maintenance by Robert Pirsig: https://www.goodreads.com/book/show/629.Zen_and_the_Art_of_Motorcycle_Maintenance
The Stranger by Albert Camus: https://www.goodreads.com/book/show/49552.The_Stranger
Atlas Shrugged by Ayn Rand: https://www.goodreads.com/book/show/662.Atlas_Shrugged
Fountainhead by Ayn Rand: https://www.goodreads.com/book/show/2122.The_Fountainhead
The Philosopher’s Toolkit by Julian Baggini: https://www.goodreads.com/book/show/192414.The_Philosophers_Toolkit
Fermat’s Enigma by Simon Singh: https://www.goodreads.com/book/show/38412.Fermat_s_Enigma
The Cook & The Chef - Elon Musk’s Secret Sauce by Tim Urban: https://waitbutwhy.com/2015/11/the-cook-and-the-chef-musks-secret-sauce.html
How To Win Friends & Influence People by Dale Carnegie: https://www.goodreads.com/book/show/4865.How_to_Win_Friends_and_Influence_People
Michael Nielsen’s personal blog: http://michaelnielsen.org/
Venture Stories podcast with Michael Nielsen: https://podcasts.apple.com/us/podcast/what-michael-nielsen-thinks-about-basically-everything/id1316769266?i=1000436484320
Tyler Cowen on The high-return activity of raising others’ aspirations: https://marginalrevolution.com/marginalrevolution/2018/10/high-return-activity-raising-others-aspirations.html
031 | Kat Woods — Effective Altruism, Infohazards, and Brain Hacks
030 | Predictive Processing 3: Neurobiology, Prediction, and Computational Psychiatry
029 | Predictive Processing 2: Where The Action Is
028 | Predictive Processing 1: The World You Thought You Knew
027 | 7 Practices to Survive the 2020 Apocalypse
026 | Drink and be Rational
025 | Self-Supervised Machine Learning: Introduction, Intuitions, and Use-Cases
024 | Replacing Guilt
023 | Are Brains Just Neural Nets?
022 | 6 Books You Need to Read in 2020… and 1 You Probably Shouldn’t
021 | The Top 19 Ideas from 2019
020 | Mental Models 3: Fantastic Biases and Where To Find Them
019 | Mental Models 2: How To Think Like A Bayesian, Avoid Black Swans, & Know The Value of Your Decisions
018 | Mental Models 1: How To Have Better Ideas and Improve Your Thinking
017 | Bronwyn Williams: Universal Basic Income & Individual Sovereignty
016 | Free Will, Compassion, and Reinforcement Learning
015 | You have no Choice in the Matter
013 | How To Learn Anything!
012 | How Deep Learning Does Magic
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