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psychologia

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Psychologia

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Stress isn’t poorly calibrated to modern life. It’s the energising force that allows us to perform. Optimal performance requires optimal stress. The difference between eustress and distress isn’t biological—it’s psychological. Controllability matters more than the stressor itself.

Stress is Good

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Everyone’s convinced stress is this outdated evolutionary technology—poorly calibrated to modern life, something to avoid at all costs. The story goes that it evolved to help us run from tigers, but now it’s just triggered by email notifications. This is nonsense. Stress is the only thing that gets us to perform at all. It’s the most valuable biological technology we have. This lecture walks through the Yerkes-Dodson Law—a simple, 100-year-old model that explains how stress actually works, why we need it, and how to use it well.

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betterment gratification on-(un)happiness on-being-fruitful on-thinking-and-reasoning somatic-architecture

article

Memory takes the form of neural maps in the brain, tying our experiences and perceptions together. These maps are the same maps we use to process the world, and imagine the future. Mapping memories to old memories is the way to think about it, not storing memories in a bank.

Memory and imagination both use the same architecture

article

Memory, like many things in the brain, is a bit of a mysterious function, but it’s also one of the first cognitive functions people think might be worth improving. However, the way we typically think about memory makes that quite difficult. Memory seems like it can be broken into some number of different kinds, but this ‘multi-storage’ model misses important things. Instead, the architecture of the brain gives us a clue as to the way memory works that lets us get a handle on it.

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betterment on-being-fruitful on-thinking-and-reasoning somatic-architecture

article

Pop-psych theories on stress often use complex jargon to describe fundamentally simple concepts. They act less to inform, and more to reassure us, fascinate us, and absolve us of responsibility.

Overengineering 'calm down'

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I’m often struck by just how much of the pop-psych/neuroscience advice one sees for the average working person boils down to little more than “just cool the fuck out, and you’ll be better at stuff”. I guess, more to the point, I’m often left wondering why we feel the need to over-engineer this kind of thing so egregiously, particularly when most of these theories seem to produce as much bad advice as good advice. I have some thoughts, but let me show you what I mean, and maybe we’ll work out what’s so attractive about it along the way.

Pop-psych theories on stress often use complex jargon to describe fundamentally simple concepts. They act less to inform, and more to reassure us, fascinate us, and absolve us of responsibility.

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betterment on-(un)happiness on-being-fruitful somatic-architecture wealth-architecture

article

Active listening isn’t about ticking boxes in conversation; it’s about diving into emotions to transform surface-level chit-chat into deep, collaborative dialogue. Forget models, focus on feelings.

Active listening is misleading

article

LinkedIn invited me to contribute to a bunch of articles on active listening recently, and while I was thinking about whether I should bother answering, it actually is kind of an interesting topic. My point is not that it isn’t reasonable. My point isn’t even that people should be able to intuit this sort of thing, because although the principles are simple, it’s not always easy to take an empathetic stance during a fundamentally individualistic life. My point is that having a model for active listening almost defeats the purpose of the exercise.

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betterment collective-architecture connection on-(un)happiness on-being-fruitful on-leadership somatic-architecture wealth-architecture

article

The obsession over objectivity is a confusion of two things. There’s rationality, the desire to be less biased. Then there’s truth which is going to be necessarily biased toward whatever aspect of the world we’re trying to understand. In both cases objectivity is irrelevant.

The Trouble With Objectivity

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I reckon that in most cases we never really have access to the truth. We only have access to the stuff our bodies allow us to perceive. Instead, what we do is we map what we do know about the world based on what we need to achieve in the world. Facts are not really truths, but reflections of our worldly needs. Not everyone agrees with me though. In fact, there’s a lot of people who are rather obsessed with getting at the objective truth. I think that, for the most part, these people are confused about what they’re doing. Let me tell you why.

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betterment collective-architecture connection gratification on-(un)happiness on-ethics on-the-nature-of-things on-thinking-and-reasoning somatic-architecture thought-architecture

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