If you have to do tedious work If you have to stand somewhere doing tedious work, at least make it interesting. Bill Mollison, Introduction to Permaculture Useless work on useful things beautyworkboredom
The Great Blight of Dullness Jane Jacobs, The Death and Life of Great American Cities Why Do All Websites Look the Same?Scenes of thoroughgoing sameness euphonyboredom
Abstruse dullness Consider, from the Service's perspective, the advantages of the dull, the arcane, the mind-numbingly complex. The IRS was one of the very first government agencies to learn that such qualities help insulate them against public protest and political opposition, and that abstruse dullness is actually a much more effective shield than is secrecy. For the great disadvantage of secrecy is that it's interesting. David Foster Wallace, The Pale King boredominterest
Distraction To me, at least in retrospect, the really interesting question is why dullness proves to be such a powerful impediment to attention. Why we recoil from the dull. Maybe it's because dullness is intrinsically painful; maybe that's where phrases like 'deadly dull' or 'excruciatingly dull' come from. But there might be more to it. Maybe dullness is associated with psychic pain because something that's dull or opaque fails to provide enough stimulation to distract people from some other, deeper type of pain that is always there, if only in an ambient, low-level way, and which most of us spend nearly all our time and energy trying to distract ourselves from feeling, or at least from feeling directly or with our full attention. David Foster Wallace, The Pale King boredommelancholyanxietyattentionpain
What hell is He felt in a position to say he knew now that hell had nothing to do with fires or frozen troops. Lock a fellow in a windowless room to perform rote tasks just tricky enough to make him have to think, but still rote, tasks involving numbers connected to nothing he'd ever see or care about, a stack of tasks that never went down, and nail a clock to the wall where he can see it, and just leave the man there to his mind's own devices. David Foster Wallace, The Pale King boredom
Unborable The underlying bureaucratic key is the ability to deal with boredom. To function effectively in an environment that precludes everything vital and human. To breathe, so to speak, without air. The key is the ability, whether innate or conditioned, to find the other side of the rote, the picayune, the meaningless, the repetitive, the pointlessly complex. To be, in a word, unborable. I met, in the years 1984 and '85, two such men. It is the key to modern life. If you are immune to boredom, there is literally nothing you cannot accomplish. David Foster Wallace, The Pale King successboredombureaucracy
The Pale King A Novel by David Foster Wallace www.goodreads.com We change them and are changedDisplacementWhat's wrong?Narrative codesAn enormous machine+21 More boredombureaucracy
Why Do All Websites Look the Same? An Article by Boris Müller modus.medium.com On the visual weariness of the web. The Great Blight of DullnessWhat On Earth is a Brutalist Website?All Social Networks Look The Same NowAll websites are just digital movie theaters now wwwboredominterfaces
Don't Write the Tedious Thing An Article by Maud Newton maudnewton.medium.com Ugh, now I have to write this boring part, I would think. I would spend a few days in active rebellion against this directive that I imagined the book was imposing. Then I would realize: this is my book! There are no rules! I can write it however I want! Also, I would think, if I’m bored by something that I believe I need to write, the reader undoubtedly will be too, if not because the subject is inherently boring, then because I myself find it so unbearably tedious to imagine discussing it for five pages. Often as not, I would remember some aspect of the subject that deeply interested me, something a little outside the way it’s usually perceived or written about. Then I would meditate on that, and soon I would be scribbling notes from an increasingly excited place until I found a way forward. A form of beginner’s mind. Zen Mind, Beginner's Mind boredomwritinginterest
Rationality: From AI to Zombies A Book by Eliezer Yudkowsky www.readthesequences.com The Tao of rationalityEveryone sees themselves as behaving normallyArgue against the bestLet the meaning choose the wordPeople can stand for what is true, for they are already enduring it+11 More Do not propose solutionsOne brickYour intention to cut rationalitythinkingconsciousness
The Tao of rationality If you would learn to think like reality, then here is the Tao: Since the beginning not one unusual thing has ever happened. Mystery exists in the mind realityrationality
Everyone sees themselves as behaving normally To understand why people act the way they do, we must first realize that everyone sees themselves as behaving normally. behavior
Argue against the best To argue against an idea honestly, you should argue against the best arguments of the strongest advocates. It’s all too easy to argue that someone is exhibiting Bias #182 in your repertoire of fully generic accusations, but you can’t settle a factual issue without closer evidence. If there are biased reasons to say the sun is shining, that doesn’t make it dark out. argumentideas
Let the meaning choose the word What is above all needed is to let the meaning choose the word, and not the other way around. Probably it is better to put off using words as long as possible and get one’s meaning as clear as one can through pictures and sensations. meaningwords
Knowing the design Knowing the design can tell you much about the designer; and knowing the designer can tell you much about the design. design
Cutting through to the truth The essential thing in the art of epistemic rationality is to understand how every rule is cutting through to the truth in the same movement. Your sword has no blade. It has only your intention. When that goes astray you have no weapon. Your intention to cut intent
Joy in the merely attainable But the really fundamental problem with desiring the unattainable is that as soon as you actually get it, it stops being unattainable. If we cannot take joy in the merely available, our lives will always be frustrated. happinessdesire
I have failed my art The novice goes astray and says, “The art has failed me.” The master goes astray and says, “I have failed my art." experiencewisdom
Taboo your words Albert says that people have “free will.” Barry says that people don’t have “free will.” Well, that will certainly generate an apparent conflict. Most philosophers would advise Albert and Barry to try to define exactly what they mean by “free will,” on which topic they will certainly be able to discourse at great length. I would advise Albert and Barry to describe what it is that they think people do, or do not have, without using the phrase “free will” at all. meaning
Your map of reality Reality is very large—just the part we can see is billions of lightyears across. But your map of reality is written on a few pounds of neurons, folded up to fit inside your skull. I don’t mean to be insulting, but your skull is tiny. Comparatively speaking. Inevitably, then, certain things that are distinct in reality, will be compressed into the same point on your map. But what this feels like from inside is not that you say, “Oh, look, I’m compressing two things into one point on my map.” What it feels like from inside is that there is just one thing, and you are seeing it. reality
What you're trying to swim There is an art to using words; even when definitions are not literally true or false, they are often wiser or more foolish. Dictionaries are mere histories of past usage; if you treat them as supreme arbiters of meaning, it binds you to the wisdom of the past, forbidding you to do better. Though do take care to ensure (if you must depart from the wisdom of the past) that people can figure out what you’re trying to swim. words
Applause lights Most applause lights are much more blatant, and can be detected by a simple reversal test. For example, suppose someone says: We need to balance the risks and opportunities of AI. If you reverse this statement, you get: We shouldn’t balance the risks and opportunities of AI. Since the reversal sounds abnormal, the unreversed statement is probably normal, implying it does not convey new information. There are plenty of legitimate reasons for uttering a sentence that would be uninformative in isolation. “We need to balance the risks and opportunities of AI” can introduce a discussion topic; it can emphasize the importance of a specific proposal for balancing; it can criticize an unbalanced proposal. Linking to a normal assertion can convey new information to a bounded rationalist—the link itself may not be obvious. But if no specifics follow, the sentence is probably an applause light. speech
Reality just seems to go on crunching I once met a fellow who thought that if you used General Relativity to compute a low-velocity problem, like an artillery shell, General Relativity would give you the wrong answer—not just a slow answer, but an experimentally wrong answer—because at low velocities, artillery shells are governed by Newtonian mechanics, not General Relativity. This is exactly how physics does not work. Reality just seems to go on crunching through General Relativity, even when it only makes a difference at the fourteenth decimal place, which a human would regard as a huge waste of computing power. Physics does it with brute force. No one has ever caught physics simplifying its calculations—or if someone did catch it, the Matrix Lords erased the memory afterward. physics
Mystery exists in the mind Mystery exists in the mind, not in reality. If I am ignorant about a phenomenon, that is a fact about my state of mind, not a fact about the phenomenon itself. All the more so if it seems like no possible answer can exist: Confusion exists in the map, not in the territory. Unanswerable questions do not mark places where magic enters the universe. They mark places where your mind runs skew to reality. The Tao of rationality mysteryconfusion
Lost purposes There’s chocolate at the supermarket, and you can get to the supermarket by driving, and driving requires that you be in the car, which means opening your car door, which needs keys. If you find there’s no chocolate at the supermarket, you won’t stand around opening and slamming your car door because the car door still needs opening. I rarely notice people losing track of plans they devised themselves. It’s another matter when incentives must flow through large organizations—or worse, many different organizations and interest groups, some of them governmental. Then you see behaviors that would mark literal insanity, if they were born from a single mind. Someone gets paid every time they open a car door, because that’s what’s measurable; and this person doesn’t care whether the driver ever gets paid for arriving at the supermarket, let alone whether the buyer purchases the chocolate, or whether the eater is happy or starving. So many tactics, so well entrenched metricsgoals