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En sen vändning mot Österrike räddade Sverige från fiasko i den andra matchen och hjälten blev Mika Zibanejad. Den före detta målvakten Henrik Karlsson tar plats i vår studio och ger sin syn på de svenska prestationerna hittills, men också galna historier från sin tid i Kazakstan. Vad tror han om Sveriges fortsatta VM får han också svara på. Finland väntar ikväll. Ett svagt Finland, eller? Vi känner oss segervissa men kanske kan ett gammalt, legendariskt, finskt gäng heja fram lejonen till seger här i Stockholm. Upp till bevis för Tre Kronor! Programledare: Tobias Dahlberg I studion: Johanna Lagus & Henrik Karlsson På länk: Jonathan Knekta
Tasshin talks with Henrik Karlsson (@phokarlsson) about poetry, writing, editing, his marriage, curiosity, self-knowledge, acts of life, and more.Henrik on XBlogYou can sign up for Tasshin's newsletter here.If you enjoyed this episode, consider supporting Tasshin and the Reach Truth Podcast on Patreon.
Human nature is not a machine to be built after a model, and set to do exactly the work prescribed for it, but a tree, which requires to grow and develop itself on all sides, according to the tendency of the inward forces which make it a living thing. - John Stuart MillThe resource from Henrik Karlsson: https://www.henrikkarlsson.xyz/p/unfoldingPart 2: “Becoming perceptive”Part 3: “Rationality is an underrated way to be authentic”Donate to the Palestinian Children's Relief Fund: www.pcrf.netGET AN OCCASIONAL PERSONAL EMAIL FROM ME: www.makeyourdamnbedpodcast.comTUNE IN ON INSTAGRAM FOR COOL CONTENT: www.instagram.com/mydbpodcastOR BE A REAL GEM + TUNE IN ON PATREON: www.patreon.com/MYDBpodcastOR WATCH ON YOUTUBE: www.youtube.com/juliemerica The opinions expressed by Julie Merica and Make Your Damn Bed Podcast are intended for entertainment purposes only. Make Your Damn Bed podcast is not intended or implied to be a substitute for professional medical advice, diagnosis or treatment. Get bonus content on PatreonSupport this show http://supporter.acast.com/make-your-damn-bed. Hosted on Acast. See acast.com/privacy for more information.
He's a polymath who cares deeply about the world, tries to understand it, and straddles many fields. He's played a key role over the last few decades in India's journey towards development. Ajay Shah joins Amit Varma in episode 402 of The Seen and the Unseen to talk about his life and times. (FOR FULL LINKED SHOW NOTES, GO TO SEENUNSEEN.IN.) Also check out: 1. Ajay Shah on Twitter and Substack. 2. Everything is Everything -- Ajay Shah's YouTube show with Amit Varma. 3. Life Lessons -- A course taught by Ajay Shah and Amit Varma. 4. In Service of the Republic: The Art and Science of Economic Policy — Vijay Kelkar and Ajay Shah. 5. XKDR Forum. 6. The LEAP blog. 7. Previous episodes of The Seen and the Unseen with Ajay Shah: 1, 2, 3, 4, 5, 6, 7, 8, 9, 10, 11, 12, 13. 8. The Surface Area of Serendipity -- Episode 39 of Everything is Everything. 9. The Economic Lives of the Poor -- Abhijit Banerjee and Esther Duflo. 10. The Universe of Chuck Gopal — Episode 258 of The Seen and the Unseen. 11. The Hiking Episode -- Episode 35 of Everything is Everything. 12. Declutter -- Episode 30 of Everything is Everything. 13. The Life and Times of Mrinal Pande — Episode 263 of The Seen and the Unseen. 14. Pushpesh Pant Feasts on the Buffet of Life — Episode 326 of The Seen and the Unseen. 15. The Life and Times of Ira Pande -- Episode 369 of The Seen and the Unseen. 16. A Meditation on Form -- Amit Varma. 17. A Passion for Cycling -- Episode 53 of Everything is Everything. 18. Il Lombardia: Tadej Pogačar delivers historical fourth consecutive victory. 19. Centre for Monitoring Indian Economy. 20. Seven Stories That Should Be Films -- Episode 23 of Everything is Everything (including Ajay's retelling, 'The Fat Frogs of Tatsinskaya'). 21. India's Greatest Civil Servant — Episode 167 of The Seen and the Unseen (w Narayani Basu, on VP Menon). 22. VP Menon: The Unsung Architect of Modern India — Narayani Basu. 23. Five Epic Stories That Must Be Films -- Episode 29 of Everything is Everything (including Amit's retelling of VP Menon's story). 24. Postwar: A History of Europe Since 1945 — Tony Judt. 25. The God That Failed -- Edited by Richard Crossman. 26. One Day in the Life of Ivan Denisovich -- Aleksandr Solzhenitsyn. 27. Free to Choose -- Milton Friedman and Rose Friedman. 28. Both Sides Now -- Joni Mitchell. 29. How to Write a Paper -- Episode 62 of Everything is Everything. 30. Jim Corbett on Wikipedia and Amazon. 31. Trek The Sahyadris -- Harish Kapadia. 32. Inflation Targeting Rocks! -- Episode 68 of The Seen and the Unseen. 33. The Heckman Equation. 34. A Deep Dive Into Education -- Episode 54 of Everything is Everything. 35. The Two Cultures -- CP Snow. 36. Shivaji and His Times -- Jadunath Sarkar. 37. Suyash Rai Embraces India's Complexity — Episode 307 of The Seen and the Unseen. 38. Seeing Like a State — James C Scott. 39. The Tyranny of Experts — William Easterly. 40. Are You Just One Version of Yourself? -- Episode 3 of Everything is Everything. 41. Episodes of The Seen and the Unseen with Ramachandra Guha: 1, 2, 3, 4, 5, 6. 42. The Life and Times of KP Krishnan — Episode 355 of The Seen and the Unseen. 43. Our Population Is Our Greatest Asset -- Episode 20 of Everything if Everything. 44. Population Is Not a Problem, but Our Greatest Strength -- Amit Varma. 45. Plato (or Why Philosophy Matters) — Episode 109 of The Seen and the Unseen (w Rebecca Goldstein). 46. How to Do Development -- Episode 57 of Everything is Everything. 47. Lant Pritchett Is on Team Prosperity — Episode 379 of The Seen and the Unseen. 48. The Life and Times of Chess -- Episode 52 of Everything is Everything. 49. Fixing the Knowledge Society -- Episode 24 of Everything is Everything. 50. The Importance of the 1991 Reforms — Episode 237 of The Seen and the Unseen (w Shruti Rajagopalan and Ajay Shah). 51. The Reformers -- Episode 28 of Everything is Everything. 52. The Beauty of Finance -- Episode 21 of Everything is Everything. 53. What's Wrong With Indian Agriculture? -- Episode 18 of Everything is Everything. 54. The Life and Times of Montek Singh Ahluwalia — Episode 285 of The Seen and the Unseen. 55. The Importance of Finance — Episode 125 of The Seen and the Unseen (w Ajay Shah). 56. India in Transition: Freeing the Economy -- Jagdish Bhagwati. 57. The UNIX Episode -- Episode 32 of Everything is Everything. 58. Don't Mess With the Price System -- Episode 66 of Everything is Everything. 59. Four Papers That Changed the World -- Episode 41 of Everything is Everything. 60. The Ghost and the Darkness -- Stephen Hopkins. 61. India's Massive Pensions Crisis — Episode 347 of The Seen and the Unseen (w Ajay Shah & Renuka Sane). 62. Understanding India's Pensions Disaster -- Episode 65 of Everything is Everything. 63. What Bruce Springsteen Means to Us -- Episode 13 of Everything is Everything. 64. Distance From Delhi -- The Takshashila Institution. 65. Beyond A Boundary -- CLR James. 66. Letters for a Nation: From Jawaharlal Nehru to His Chief Ministers 1947-1963 -- Jawaharlal Nehru. 67. Yes Minister and Yes Prime Minister — Jonathan Lynn and Antony Jay. 68. The Long Road to Change -- Episode 36 of Everything is Everything. 69. The Tragedy of Our Farm Bills — Episode 211 of The Seen and the Unseen (w Ajay Shah). 70. Government's End: Why Washington Stopped Working -- Jonathan Rauch. 71. Understanding deviations from the fiscal responsibility law in India -- Pratik Datta, Radhika Pandey, Ila Patnaik and Ajay Shah. 72. Who Lends to the Indian State? -- Aneesha Chitgupi, Ajay Shah, Manish Singh, Susan Thomas and Harsh Vardhan. 73. The Percy Mistry report. 74. Bare Acts. 75. Subhashish Bhadra on Our Dysfunctional State — Episode 333 of The Seen and the Unseen. 76. Shruti Rajagopalan on our constitutional amendments. 77. The First Assault on Our Constitution — Episode 194 of The Seen and the Unseen (w Tripurdaman Singh). 78. Sixteen Stormy Days — Tripurdaman Singh. 79. Caged Tiger: How Too Much Government Is Holding Indians Back — Subhashish Bhadra. 80. Subhashish Bhadra on Our Dysfunctional State — Episode 333 of The Seen and the Unseen. 81. The Matrix -- Lana Wachowski & Lilly Wachowski. 82. How Family Firms Evolve -- Episode 34 of Everything is Everything. 83. From Imperial to Adaptive Firms -- Episode 37 of Everything is Everything. 84. Graduating to Globalisation -- Episode 48 of Everything is Everything. 85. Jeff Bezos on The Lex Fridman Podcast. 86. Born to Run -- Bruce Springsteen. 87. Go to the root cause (2007) -- Ajay Shah. 88. Bhargavi Zaveri-Shah Will Not Wear a Blue Tie to Work — Episode 389 of The Seen and the Unseen. 89. Understanding the State -- Episode 25 of Everything is Everything. 90. Every Act of Government Is an Act of Violence -- Amit Varma. 91. When Should the State Act? -- Episode 26 of Everything is Everything. 92. Public Choice Theory Explains SO MUCH -- Episode 33 of Everything is Everything. 93. Public Choice – A Primer -- Eamonn Butler. 94. The Journey of Indian Finance -- Ajay Shah. 95. Amrita Agarwal Wants to Solve Healthcare -- Episode 393 of The Seen and the Unseen. 96. Fortress and Frontier in American Health Care -- Robert Graboyes. 97. We Love Vaccines! We Love Freedom! -- Episode 27 of Everything is Everything. 98. The Art and Science of Economic Policy — Episode 154 of The Seen and the Unseen (w Vijay Kelkar & Ajay Shah). 99. Pranay Kotasthane on Amazon. 100. A blog post is a very long and complex search query to find fascinating people and make them route interesting stuff to your inbox -- Henrik Karlsson. 101. For Whom the Bell Tolls -- Ernest Hemingway. 102. Essays in Persuasion -- John Maynard Keynes. 103. The Ascent Of Man -- Jacob Bronowski. 104. How to Modernise the Working of Courts and Tribunals in India -- Many authors including Ajay Shah. 105. How to Modernise the Working of Courts and Tribunals in India -- Ajay Shah. 106. The lowest hanging fruit on the coconut tree — Akshay Jaitly and Ajay Shah. 107. Climate Change and Our Power Sector — Episode 278 of The Seen and the Unseen (w Akshay Jaitley and Ajay Shah). 108. The Brave New Future of Electricity -- Episode 40 of Everything is Everything. 109. False Alarm: How Climate Change Panic Costs Us Trillions, Hurts the Poor, and Fails to Fix the Planet -- Bjorn Lomborg. 110. Stay Away From Luxury Beliefs -- Episode 46 of Everything is Everything. 111. Nuclear Power Can Save the World -- Joshua S Goldstein, Staffan A Qvist & Steven Pinker. 112. But Clouds Got In My Way -- Ayush Patnaik, Ajay Shah, Anshul Tayal and Susan Thomas. 113. Everybody Lies — Seth Stephens-Davidowitz. 114. The Truth About Ourselves — Amit Varma. 115. Capitalism and Freedom -- Milton Friedman. 116. Against the Grain -- James C Scott. 117. The Beatles, Dire Straits, Pink Floyd, Led Zeppelin and Bruce Springsteen on Spotify. Amit Varma and Ajay Shah have launched a new course called Life Lessons, which aims to be a launchpad towards learning essential life skills all of you need. For more details, and to sign up, click here. Amit and Ajay also bring out a weekly YouTube show, Everything is Everything. Have you watched it yet? You must! And have you read Amit's newsletter? Subscribe right away to The India Uncut Newsletter! It's free! Also check out Amit's online course, The Art of Clear Writing. Episode art: ‘Dreaming' by Simahina.
Travel News Business Forum: Henrik Karlsson, Client Relationship Manager Benchmarking Alliance Hosted on Acast. See acast.com/privacy for more information.
Niklaus Wirth makes his plea for lean software, PocketBase puts your entire backend in 1 file, Vanna is a Python RAG framework for accurate text-to-SQL generation, Henrik Karlsson wants you to think more about what to focus on & Calvin Wankhede shares how he built a fully offline smart home (and you should too).
Niklaus Wirth makes his plea for lean software, PocketBase puts your entire backend in 1 file, Vanna is a Python RAG framework for accurate text-to-SQL generation, Henrik Karlsson wants you to think more about what to focus on & Calvin Wankhede shares how he built a fully offline smart home (and you should too).
Niklaus Wirth makes his plea for lean software, PocketBase puts your entire backend in 1 file, Vanna is a Python RAG framework for accurate text-to-SQL generation, Henrik Karlsson wants you to think more about what to focus on & Calvin Wankhede shares how he built a fully offline smart home (and you should too).
Welcome to The Nonlinear Library, where we use Text-to-Speech software to convert the best writing from the Rationalist and EA communities into audio. This is: Almost everyone I've met would be well-served thinking more about what to focus on, published by Henrik Karlsson on January 6, 2024 on LessWrong. Almost everyone I've ever met would be well-served by spending more time thinking about what to focus on. - Sam Altman In May 2020, we parked two moving trucks in the harbor and carried everything we owned from one to the other. Johanna, Maud, and I were leaving Sweden, and Covid restrictions meant we were forbidden from returning once we boarded the ferry. Hence the second truck, which we had gotten a stranger to ferry from the island to us: the Swedish truck had to stay in Sweden. The motivation to leave was that we wanted to homeschool Maud, who was 3. In Sweden, this is illegal, so most Swedish homeschoolers end up on one of two islands in the Baltic Sea. On our island, we knew no one. We had no jobs awaiting. We were leaving something, more than going somewhere. The life we had grown piecemeal over 30 years disappeared overnight. We had to figure out what to replace it with. Life is a multi-armed bandit The moldy apartment we rented as we looked for a house has a view of the sea. Every day, deep into winter, I'd walk down to the water and dive from the cliffs. Swimming in the channels between the rocks, I realized I could model our situation using a concept from probability theory. It was a multi-armed bandit problem. This problem, which, under a different name, had first been studied by the biologist William R. Thompson in 1933, centers on a rather surreal thought experiment. A gambler faces a slot machine ("a one-armed bandit"), except this machine doesn't have one arm - following some twisted dream logic, it has k arms, arms sticking out in every direction. Some of these arms have a high probability of paying out the jackpot, others are worse. But the gambler does not know which is which. The problem is pulling the arms in an order that maximizes the expected total gains. ("Gains" could be anything. Early on, the problem was used to design drug trials. There, the jackpot was defined as finding a successful treatment. If you are looking for a partner, talking to people is how you pull the multi-armed bandit and the resonance (or lack thereof) is the payoff.) The gambler needs to learn new knowledge about the machines and simultaneously use what they have already learned to optimize their decisions. In the literature, these two activities are referred to as exploring and exploiting. You can't do both things at the same time. When you explore, you are pulling new arms on the bandit trying to figure out their expected payout. When you exploit, you pull the best arm you've found. You need to find the right balance. If you spend too little time exploring, you get stuck playing a machine with a low expected payoff. But if you spend too much time exploring, you will earn less than you would if you played the best arm. This is the explore/exploit trade-off. People tend to gravitate to different sides of the explore/exploit spectrum. If you are high on openness, like I am, exploring comes easy. But it is harder to make a commitment and exploit what you've learned about yourself and the world. Other people are more committed, but risk being too conventional in their choices. They miss better avenues for their effort. Most, however, tend to do less than optimal of both - not exploring, not exploiting; but doing things out of blind habit, and half-heartedly. First, I'll say a few words about exploration and exploitation in real life. Then I'll return to the question of how to navigate the tradeoff between them. Explore: doggedly looking for what makes you feel alive There are two kinds of people. Those who do not understand how complex the world is, and those who know that they do not understand how complex the world is. To navi...
Link to original articleWelcome to The Nonlinear Library, where we use Text-to-Speech software to convert the best writing from the Rationalist and EA communities into audio. This is: Almost everyone I've met would be well-served thinking more about what to focus on, published by Henrik Karlsson on January 6, 2024 on LessWrong. Almost everyone I've ever met would be well-served by spending more time thinking about what to focus on. - Sam Altman In May 2020, we parked two moving trucks in the harbor and carried everything we owned from one to the other. Johanna, Maud, and I were leaving Sweden, and Covid restrictions meant we were forbidden from returning once we boarded the ferry. Hence the second truck, which we had gotten a stranger to ferry from the island to us: the Swedish truck had to stay in Sweden. The motivation to leave was that we wanted to homeschool Maud, who was 3. In Sweden, this is illegal, so most Swedish homeschoolers end up on one of two islands in the Baltic Sea. On our island, we knew no one. We had no jobs awaiting. We were leaving something, more than going somewhere. The life we had grown piecemeal over 30 years disappeared overnight. We had to figure out what to replace it with. Life is a multi-armed bandit The moldy apartment we rented as we looked for a house has a view of the sea. Every day, deep into winter, I'd walk down to the water and dive from the cliffs. Swimming in the channels between the rocks, I realized I could model our situation using a concept from probability theory. It was a multi-armed bandit problem. This problem, which, under a different name, had first been studied by the biologist William R. Thompson in 1933, centers on a rather surreal thought experiment. A gambler faces a slot machine ("a one-armed bandit"), except this machine doesn't have one arm - following some twisted dream logic, it has k arms, arms sticking out in every direction. Some of these arms have a high probability of paying out the jackpot, others are worse. But the gambler does not know which is which. The problem is pulling the arms in an order that maximizes the expected total gains. ("Gains" could be anything. Early on, the problem was used to design drug trials. There, the jackpot was defined as finding a successful treatment. If you are looking for a partner, talking to people is how you pull the multi-armed bandit and the resonance (or lack thereof) is the payoff.) The gambler needs to learn new knowledge about the machines and simultaneously use what they have already learned to optimize their decisions. In the literature, these two activities are referred to as exploring and exploiting. You can't do both things at the same time. When you explore, you are pulling new arms on the bandit trying to figure out their expected payout. When you exploit, you pull the best arm you've found. You need to find the right balance. If you spend too little time exploring, you get stuck playing a machine with a low expected payoff. But if you spend too much time exploring, you will earn less than you would if you played the best arm. This is the explore/exploit trade-off. People tend to gravitate to different sides of the explore/exploit spectrum. If you are high on openness, like I am, exploring comes easy. But it is harder to make a commitment and exploit what you've learned about yourself and the world. Other people are more committed, but risk being too conventional in their choices. They miss better avenues for their effort. Most, however, tend to do less than optimal of both - not exploring, not exploiting; but doing things out of blind habit, and half-heartedly. First, I'll say a few words about exploration and exploitation in real life. Then I'll return to the question of how to navigate the tradeoff between them. Explore: doggedly looking for what makes you feel alive There are two kinds of people. Those who do not understand how complex the world is, and those who know that they do not understand how complex the world is. To navi...
Predikoserie om bön, del 3. OM ATT BARA VARA MED GUD. Vi har lätt att tänka oss bönen som något vi gör eller presterar. Men många har upptäckt gåvan i den tysta bönen, där vi bara kan få vara med och inför Gud. Lyssna på låten som nämns i predikan här. Henrik Karlsson, Vineyard, predikar. Kören Con Spirito, från Andreaskyrkan i Stockholm, sjunger. --- Send in a voice message: https://podcasters.spotify.com/pod/show/olivehallkyrkan/message
In the early 2010s, a popular idea was to provide coworking spaces and shared living to people who were building startups. That way the founders would have a thriving social scene of peers to percolate ideas with as they figured out how to build and scale a venture. This was attempted thousands of times by different startup incubators. There are no famous success stories.In 2015, Sam Altman, who was at the time the president of Y Combinator, a startup accelerator that has helped scale startups collectively worth $600 billion, tweeted in reaction that “not [providing coworking spaces] is part of what makes YC work.” Later, in a 2019 interview with Tyler Cowen, Altman was asked to explain why.Source:https://www.lesswrong.com/posts/R5yL6oZxqJfmqnuje/cultivating-a-state-of-mind-where-new-ideas-are-bornNarrated for LessWrong by TYPE III AUDIO.Share feedback on this narration.[Curated] ✓
Welcome to The Nonlinear Library, where we use Text-to-Speech software to convert the best writing from the Rationalist and EA communities into audio. This is: Cultivating a state of mind where new ideas are born, published by Henrik Karlsson on July 27, 2023 on LessWrong. In the early 2010s, a popular idea was to provide coworking spaces and shared living to people who were building startups. That way the founders would have a thriving social scene of peers to percolate ideas with as they figured out how to build and scale a venture. This was attempted thousands of times by different startup incubators. There are no famous success stories. In 2015, Sam Altman, who was at the time the president of Y Combinator, a startup accelerator that has helped scale startups collectively worth $600 billion, tweeted in reaction that "not [providing coworking spaces] is part of what makes YC work." Later, in a 2019 interview with Tyler Cowen, Altman was asked to explain why. SAM ALTMAN: Good ideas - actually, no, great ideas are fragile. Great ideas are easy to kill. An idea in its larval stage - all the best ideas when I first heard them sound bad. And all of us, myself included, are much more affected by what other people think of us and our ideas than we like to admit. If you are just four people in your own door, and you have an idea that sounds bad but is great, you can keep that self-delusion going. If you're in a coworking space, people laugh at you, and no one wants to be the kid picked last at recess. So you change your idea to something that sounds plausible but is never going to matter. It's true that coworking spaces do kill off the very worst ideas, but a band-pass filter for startups is a terrible thing because they kill off the best ideas, too. This is an insight that has been repeated by artists, too. Pablo Picasso: "Without great solitude, no serious work is possible." James Baldwin: "Perhaps the primary distinction of the artist is that he must actively cultivate that state which most men, necessarily, must avoid: the state of being alone." Bob Dylan: "To be creative you've got to be unsociable and tight-assed." When expressed in aphorisms like this, you almost get the impression that creativity simply requires that you sit down in a room of your own. In practice, however, what they are referring to as solitude is rather something like "a state of mind." They are putting themselves in a state where the opinions of others do not bother them and where they reach a heightened sensitivity for the larval ideas and vague questions that arise within them. To get a more visceral and nuanced understanding of this state, I've been reading the working notes of several highly creative individuals. These notes, written not for publication but as an aid in the process of discovery, are, in a way, partial windows into minds who inhabit the solitary creative space which the quotes above point to. In particular, I've found the notes of the mathematician Alexander Grothendieck and the film director Ingmar Bergman revealing. They both kept detailed track of their thoughts as they attempted to reach out toward new ideas. Or rather, invited them in. In the notes, they also repeatedly turned their probing thoughts onto themselves, trying to uncover the process that brings the new into the world. This essay is not a definite description of this creative state, which takes on many shapes; my aim is rather to give a portrait of a few approaches, to point out possibilities. Part 1: Alexander Grothendieck It is as if there existed, for what seems like millennia, tracing back to the very origins of mathematics and of other arts and sciences, a sort of "conspiracy of silence" surrounding [the] "unspeakable labors" which precede the birth of each new idea, both big and small[.] Alexander Grothendieck, Récoltes et Semailles In June 1983, Alexander Grothendieck sits down to write the preface to a mathematical manuscript called Pursuing Stacks. He is c...
Welcome to The Nonlinear Library, where we use Text-to-Speech software to convert the best writing from the Rationalist and EA communities into audio. This is: Cultivating a state of mind where new ideas are born, published by Henrik Karlsson on July 27, 2023 on LessWrong. In the early 2010s, a popular idea was to provide coworking spaces and shared living to people who were building startups. That way the founders would have a thriving social scene of peers to percolate ideas with as they figured out how to build and scale a venture. This was attempted thousands of times by different startup incubators. There are no famous success stories. In 2015, Sam Altman, who was at the time the president of Y Combinator, a startup accelerator that has helped scale startups collectively worth $600 billion, tweeted in reaction that "not [providing coworking spaces] is part of what makes YC work." Later, in a 2019 interview with Tyler Cowen, Altman was asked to explain why. SAM ALTMAN: Good ideas - actually, no, great ideas are fragile. Great ideas are easy to kill. An idea in its larval stage - all the best ideas when I first heard them sound bad. And all of us, myself included, are much more affected by what other people think of us and our ideas than we like to admit. If you are just four people in your own door, and you have an idea that sounds bad but is great, you can keep that self-delusion going. If you're in a coworking space, people laugh at you, and no one wants to be the kid picked last at recess. So you change your idea to something that sounds plausible but is never going to matter. It's true that coworking spaces do kill off the very worst ideas, but a band-pass filter for startups is a terrible thing because they kill off the best ideas, too. This is an insight that has been repeated by artists, too. Pablo Picasso: "Without great solitude, no serious work is possible." James Baldwin: "Perhaps the primary distinction of the artist is that he must actively cultivate that state which most men, necessarily, must avoid: the state of being alone." Bob Dylan: "To be creative you've got to be unsociable and tight-assed." When expressed in aphorisms like this, you almost get the impression that creativity simply requires that you sit down in a room of your own. In practice, however, what they are referring to as solitude is rather something like "a state of mind." They are putting themselves in a state where the opinions of others do not bother them and where they reach a heightened sensitivity for the larval ideas and vague questions that arise within them. To get a more visceral and nuanced understanding of this state, I've been reading the working notes of several highly creative individuals. These notes, written not for publication but as an aid in the process of discovery, are, in a way, partial windows into minds who inhabit the solitary creative space which the quotes above point to. In particular, I've found the notes of the mathematician Alexander Grothendieck and the film director Ingmar Bergman revealing. They both kept detailed track of their thoughts as they attempted to reach out toward new ideas. Or rather, invited them in. In the notes, they also repeatedly turned their probing thoughts onto themselves, trying to uncover the process that brings the new into the world. This essay is not a definite description of this creative state, which takes on many shapes; my aim is rather to give a portrait of a few approaches, to point out possibilities. Part 1: Alexander Grothendieck It is as if there existed, for what seems like millennia, tracing back to the very origins of mathematics and of other arts and sciences, a sort of "conspiracy of silence" surrounding [the] "unspeakable labors" which precede the birth of each new idea, both big and small[.] Alexander Grothendieck, Récoltes et Semailles In June 1983, Alexander Grothendieck sits down to write the preface to a mathematical manuscript called Pursuing Stacks. He is c...
Link to original articleWelcome to The Nonlinear Library, where we use Text-to-Speech software to convert the best writing from the Rationalist and EA communities into audio. This is: Cultivating a state of mind where new ideas are born, published by Henrik Karlsson on July 27, 2023 on LessWrong. In the early 2010s, a popular idea was to provide coworking spaces and shared living to people who were building startups. That way the founders would have a thriving social scene of peers to percolate ideas with as they figured out how to build and scale a venture. This was attempted thousands of times by different startup incubators. There are no famous success stories. In 2015, Sam Altman, who was at the time the president of Y Combinator, a startup accelerator that has helped scale startups collectively worth $600 billion, tweeted in reaction that "not [providing coworking spaces] is part of what makes YC work." Later, in a 2019 interview with Tyler Cowen, Altman was asked to explain why. SAM ALTMAN: Good ideas - actually, no, great ideas are fragile. Great ideas are easy to kill. An idea in its larval stage - all the best ideas when I first heard them sound bad. And all of us, myself included, are much more affected by what other people think of us and our ideas than we like to admit. If you are just four people in your own door, and you have an idea that sounds bad but is great, you can keep that self-delusion going. If you're in a coworking space, people laugh at you, and no one wants to be the kid picked last at recess. So you change your idea to something that sounds plausible but is never going to matter. It's true that coworking spaces do kill off the very worst ideas, but a band-pass filter for startups is a terrible thing because they kill off the best ideas, too. This is an insight that has been repeated by artists, too. Pablo Picasso: "Without great solitude, no serious work is possible." James Baldwin: "Perhaps the primary distinction of the artist is that he must actively cultivate that state which most men, necessarily, must avoid: the state of being alone." Bob Dylan: "To be creative you've got to be unsociable and tight-assed." When expressed in aphorisms like this, you almost get the impression that creativity simply requires that you sit down in a room of your own. In practice, however, what they are referring to as solitude is rather something like "a state of mind." They are putting themselves in a state where the opinions of others do not bother them and where they reach a heightened sensitivity for the larval ideas and vague questions that arise within them. To get a more visceral and nuanced understanding of this state, I've been reading the working notes of several highly creative individuals. These notes, written not for publication but as an aid in the process of discovery, are, in a way, partial windows into minds who inhabit the solitary creative space which the quotes above point to. In particular, I've found the notes of the mathematician Alexander Grothendieck and the film director Ingmar Bergman revealing. They both kept detailed track of their thoughts as they attempted to reach out toward new ideas. Or rather, invited them in. In the notes, they also repeatedly turned their probing thoughts onto themselves, trying to uncover the process that brings the new into the world. This essay is not a definite description of this creative state, which takes on many shapes; my aim is rather to give a portrait of a few approaches, to point out possibilities. Part 1: Alexander Grothendieck It is as if there existed, for what seems like millennia, tracing back to the very origins of mathematics and of other arts and sciences, a sort of "conspiracy of silence" surrounding [the] "unspeakable labors" which precede the birth of each new idea, both big and small[.] Alexander Grothendieck, Récoltes et Semailles In June 1983, Alexander Grothendieck sits down to write the preface to a mathematical manuscript called Pursuing Stacks. He is c...
Link to original articleWelcome to The Nonlinear Library, where we use Text-to-Speech software to convert the best writing from the Rationalist and EA communities into audio. This is: Cultivating a state of mind where new ideas are born, published by Henrik Karlsson on July 27, 2023 on LessWrong. In the early 2010s, a popular idea was to provide coworking spaces and shared living to people who were building startups. That way the founders would have a thriving social scene of peers to percolate ideas with as they figured out how to build and scale a venture. This was attempted thousands of times by different startup incubators. There are no famous success stories. In 2015, Sam Altman, who was at the time the president of Y Combinator, a startup accelerator that has helped scale startups collectively worth $600 billion, tweeted in reaction that "not [providing coworking spaces] is part of what makes YC work." Later, in a 2019 interview with Tyler Cowen, Altman was asked to explain why. SAM ALTMAN: Good ideas - actually, no, great ideas are fragile. Great ideas are easy to kill. An idea in its larval stage - all the best ideas when I first heard them sound bad. And all of us, myself included, are much more affected by what other people think of us and our ideas than we like to admit. If you are just four people in your own door, and you have an idea that sounds bad but is great, you can keep that self-delusion going. If you're in a coworking space, people laugh at you, and no one wants to be the kid picked last at recess. So you change your idea to something that sounds plausible but is never going to matter. It's true that coworking spaces do kill off the very worst ideas, but a band-pass filter for startups is a terrible thing because they kill off the best ideas, too. This is an insight that has been repeated by artists, too. Pablo Picasso: "Without great solitude, no serious work is possible." James Baldwin: "Perhaps the primary distinction of the artist is that he must actively cultivate that state which most men, necessarily, must avoid: the state of being alone." Bob Dylan: "To be creative you've got to be unsociable and tight-assed." When expressed in aphorisms like this, you almost get the impression that creativity simply requires that you sit down in a room of your own. In practice, however, what they are referring to as solitude is rather something like "a state of mind." They are putting themselves in a state where the opinions of others do not bother them and where they reach a heightened sensitivity for the larval ideas and vague questions that arise within them. To get a more visceral and nuanced understanding of this state, I've been reading the working notes of several highly creative individuals. These notes, written not for publication but as an aid in the process of discovery, are, in a way, partial windows into minds who inhabit the solitary creative space which the quotes above point to. In particular, I've found the notes of the mathematician Alexander Grothendieck and the film director Ingmar Bergman revealing. They both kept detailed track of their thoughts as they attempted to reach out toward new ideas. Or rather, invited them in. In the notes, they also repeatedly turned their probing thoughts onto themselves, trying to uncover the process that brings the new into the world. This essay is not a definite description of this creative state, which takes on many shapes; my aim is rather to give a portrait of a few approaches, to point out possibilities. Part 1: Alexander Grothendieck It is as if there existed, for what seems like millennia, tracing back to the very origins of mathematics and of other arts and sciences, a sort of "conspiracy of silence" surrounding [the] "unspeakable labors" which precede the birth of each new idea, both big and small[.] Alexander Grothendieck, Récoltes et Semailles In June 1983, Alexander Grothendieck sits down to write the preface to a mathematical manuscript called Pursuing Stacks. He is c...
Henrik Karlsson is a Swedish entrepreneur, poet, programmer, anthropologist, art curator, and most notably, writer of the blog, Escaping Flatland. We talk about writing, creating your milieu, apprenticeships, learning, networks, parenting, and more. — (01:53) How he got started writing (03:23) His “aha moment” writing on the internet (06:57) Wh more people don't publish (08:57) Helping creators & thinkers get early traction (11:50) Showing the inside of your head (16:33) How to combine the work of masters & your own voice (20:22) Why he left Sweden to homeschool his daughters (24:21) The learning environment he's trying to create for his daughters (28:22) Have we lost the apprenticeship model? (31:40) Online apprenticeships (37:23) Role of AI in apprenticeships (39:29) What do the next 6 months and 10 years look like for Escaping Flatland? (46:09) One question for listeners — Spencer's Twitter: https://twitter.com/sp1ns1r Spencer's blog: https://spencerkier.substack.com/ Henrik's Twitter: https://twitter.com/phokarlsson Henrik's blog: https://t.co/lw4NzQnt6t
https://www.lesswrong.com/posts/CYN7swrefEss4e3Qe/childhoods-of-exceptional-peopleThis is a linkpost for https://escapingflatland.substack.com/p/childhoodsLet's start with one of those insights that are as obvious as they are easy to forget: if you want to master something, you should study the highest achievements of your field. If you want to learn writing, read great writers, etc.But this is not what parents usually do when they think about how to educate their kids. The default for a parent is rather to imitate their peers and outsource the big decisions to bureaucracies. But what would we learn if we studied the highest achievements? Thinking about this question, I wrote down a list of twenty names—von Neumann, Tolstoy, Curie, Pascal, etc—selected on the highly scientific criteria “a random Swedish person can recall their name and think, Sounds like a genius to me”. That list is to me a good first approximation of what an exceptional result in the field of child-rearing looks like. I ordered a few piles of biographies, read, and took notes. Trying to be a little less biased in my sample, I asked myself if I could recall anyone exceptional that did not fit the patterns I saw in the biographies, which I could, and so I ordered a few more biographies.This kept going for an unhealthy amount of time.I sampled writers (Virginia Woolf, Lev Tolstoy), mathematicians (John von Neumann, Blaise Pascal, Alan Turing), philosophers (Bertrand Russell, René Descartes), and composers (Mozart, Bach), trying to get a diverse sample. In this essay, I am going to detail a few of the patterns that have struck me after having skimmed 42 biographies. I will sort the claims so that I start with more universal patterns and end with patterns that are less common.
Welcome to The Nonlinear Library, where we use Text-to-Speech software to convert the best writing from the Rationalist and EA communities into audio. This is: EigenKarma: trust at scale, published by Henrik Karlsson on February 8, 2023 on The Effective Altruism Forum. Upvotes or likes have become a standard way to filter information online. The quality of this filter is determined by the users handing out the upvotes. For this reason, the archetypal pattern of online communities is one of gradual decay. People are more likely to join communities where users are more skilled than they are. As communities grow, the skill of the median user goes down. The capacity to filter for quality deteriorates. Simpler, more memetic content drives out more complex thinking. Malicious actors manipulate the rankings through fake votes and the like. This is a problem that will get increasingly pressing as powerful AI models start coming online. To ensure our capacity to make intellectual progress under those conditions, we should take measures to future-proof our public communication channels. One solution is redesigning the karma system in such a way that you can decide whose upvotes you see. In this post, I'm going to detail a prototype of this type of karma system, which has been built by volunteers in Alignment Ecosystem Development. EigenKarma allows each user to define a personal trust graph based on their upvote history. EigenKarma At first glance, EigenKarma behaves like normal karma. If you like something, you upvote it. The key difference is that in EigenKarma, every user has a personal trust graph. If you look at my profile, you will see the karma assigned to me by the people in your trust network. There is no global karma score. If we imagine this trust graph powering a feed, and I have gamed the algorithm and gotten a million upvotes, that doesn't matter; my blog post won't filter through to you anyway, since you do not put any weight on the judgment of the anonymous masses. If you upvote someone you don't know, they are attached to your trust graph. This can be interpreted as a tiny signal that you trust them: That trust will also spread to the users they trust in turn. If they trust user X, for example, you too trust X—a little: This is how we intuitively reason about trust when thinking about our friends and the friends of our friends. Only EigenKarma being a database, it can remember and compile more data than you, so it can keep track of more than a Dunbar's number of relationships. It scales trust. Karma propagates outward through the network from trusted node to trusted node. Once you've given out a few upvotes, you can look up people you have never interacted with, like K., and see if people you “trust” think highly of them. If several people you “trust” have upvoted K., the karma they have given to K. is compiled together. The more you “trust” someone, the more karma they will be able to confer: I have written about trust networks and scaling them before, and there's been plenty of research suggesting that this type of “transitivity of trust” is a highly desired property of a trust metric. But until now, we haven't seen a serious attempt to build such a system. It is interesting to see it put to use in the wild. Currently, you access EigenKarma through a Discord bot or the website. But the underlying trust graph is platform-independent. You can connect the API (which you can find here) to any platform and bring your trust graph with you. Now, what does a design like this allow us to do? EigenKarma is a primitive EigenKarma is a primitive. It can be inserted into other tools. Once you start to curate a personal trust graph, it can be used to improve the quality of filtering in many contexts. It can, as mentioned, be used to evaluate content. This lets you curate better personal feeds. It can also be used as a forum moderation tool. What should be shown? Work that is trusted by the core team, perhaps, or work trusted by ...
Welcome to The Nonlinear Library, where we use Text-to-Speech software to convert the best writing from the Rationalist and EA communities into audio. This is: EigenKarma: trust at scale, published by Henrik Karlsson on February 8, 2023 on LessWrong. Upvotes or likes have become a standard way to filter information online. The quality of this filter is determined by the users handing out the upvotes. For this reason, the archetypal pattern of online communities is one of gradual decay. People are more likely to join communities where users are more skilled than they are. As communities grow, the skill of the median user goes down. The capacity to filter for quality deteriorates. Simpler, more memetic content drives out more complex thinking. Malicious actors manipulate the rankings through fake votes and the like. This is a problem that will get increasingly pressing as powerful AI models start coming online. To ensure our capacity to make intellectual progress under those conditions, we should take measures to future-proof our public communication channels. One solution is redesigning the karma system in such a way that you can decide whose upvotes you see. In this post, I'm going to detail a prototype of this type of karma system, which has been built by volunteers in Alignment Ecosystem Development. EigenKarma allows each user to define a personal trust graph based on their upvote history. EigenKarma At first glance, EigenKarma behaves like normal karma. If you like something, you upvote it. The key difference is that in EigenKarma, every user has a personal trust graph. If you look at my profile, you will see the karma assigned to me by the people in your trust network. There is no global karma score. If we imagine this trust graph powering a feed, and I have gamed the algorithm and gotten a million upvotes, that doesn't matter; my blog post won't filter through to you anyway, since you do not put any weight on the judgment of the anonymous masses. If you upvote someone you don't know, they are attached to your trust graph. This can be interpreted as a tiny signal that you trust them: That trust will also spread to the users they trust in turn. If they trust user X, for example, you too trust X—a little: This is how we intuitively reason about trust when thinking about our friends and the friends of our friends. Only EigenKarma being a database, it can remember and compile more data than you, so it can keep track of more than a Dunbar's number of relationships. It scales trust. Karma propagates outward through the network from trusted node to trusted node. Once you've given out a few upvotes, you can look up people you have never interacted with, like K., and see if people you “trust” think highly of them. If several people you “trust” have upvoted K., the karma they have given to K. is compiled together. The more you “trust” someone, the more karma they will be able to confer: I have written about trust networks and scaling them before, and there's been plenty of research suggesting that this type of “transitivity of trust” is a highly desired property of a trust metric. But until now, we haven't seen a serious attempt to build such a system. It is interesting to see it put to use in the wild. Currently, you access EigenKarma through a Discord bot or the website. But the underlying trust graph is platform-independent. You can connect the API (which you can find here) to any platform and bring your trust graph with you. Now, what does a design like this allow us to do? EigenKarma is a primitive EigenKarma is a primitive. It can be inserted into other tools. Once you start to curate a personal trust graph, it can be used to improve the quality of filtering in many contexts. It can, as mentioned, be used to evaluate content. This lets you curate better personal feeds. It can also be used as a forum moderation tool. What should be shown? Work that is trusted by the core team, perhaps, or work trusted by the user accessing ...
Welcome to The Nonlinear Library, where we use Text-to-Speech software to convert the best writing from the Rationalist and EA communities into audio. This is: Childhoods of exceptional people, published by Henrik Karlsson on February 6, 2023 on LessWrong. Let's start with one of those insights that are as obvious as they are easy to forget: if you want to master something, you should study the highest achievements of your field. If you want to learn writing, read great writers, etc. But this is not what parents usually do when they think about how to educate their kids. The default for a parent is rather to imitate their peers and outsource the big decisions to bureaucracies. But what would we learn if we studied the highest achievements? Thinking about this question, I wrote down a list of twenty names—von Neumann, Tolstoy, Curie, Pascal, etc—selected on the highly scientific criteria “a random Swedish person can recall their name and think, Sounds like a genius to me”. That list is to me a good first approximation of what an exceptional result in the field of child-rearing looks like. I ordered a few piles of biographies, read, and took notes. Trying to be a little less biased in my sample, I asked myself if I could recall anyone exceptional that did not fit the patterns I saw in the biographies, which I could, and so I ordered a few more biographies. This kept going for an unhealthy amount of time. I sampled writers (Virginia Woolf, Lev Tolstoy), mathematicians (John von Neumann, Blaise Pascal, Alan Turing), philosophers (Bertrand Russell, René Descartes), and composers (Mozart, Bach), trying to get a diverse sample. In this essay, I am going to detail a few of the patterns that have struck me after having skimmed 42 biographies. I will sort the claims so that I start with more universal patterns and end with patterns that are less common. Exceptional people grow up in exceptional milieus This seems to be true for >95 percent of the people I looked at. These naked apes, the humans, are intensely social animals. They obsessively internalize values, ideas, skills, and desires from the people who surround them. It is therefore not surprising that those who grow up to be exceptional tend to have spent their formative years surrounded by adults who were exceptional. Virginia Woolf never attended school. Her father, Leslie Stephen, who, along with their tutors, educated Virginia and her sister, was an editor, critic, and biographer “complicatedly hated” by his daughter and of such standing that he could invite Henry James, Thomas Hardy, and Alfred Lord Tennyson to dine and converse with his children. Leslie Stephen described his circle, in which Virginia grew up, as “most of the literary people of mark . . . clever young writers and barristers, chiefly of the radical persuasion . . . we used to meet on Wednesday and Sunday evenings, to smoke and drink and discuss the universe and the reform movement.” When they went to the Hebrides in the summers, Leslie brought along painters and philosophers, who would hang out and work in their summer house while the children played. This parental obsession with curating a rich intellectual milieu comes through in nearly all of the biographies. As I wrote in First we shape our social graph; then it shapes us: Michel Montaigne's father employed only servants who were fluent in Latin, curating a classical culture, so Montaigne would learn Latin as his mother tongue. J.S. Mill spent his childhood at his father's desk, helping his father write a treatise on economics, running over to Jeremy Bentham's house to borrow books and discuss ideas. Blaise Pascal, too, was homeschooled by his father. His father chose not to teach him math. (The father, Etienne, had a passion for mathematics that he felt was slightly unhealthy. He feared mathematics would distract Pascal from less intrinsically rewarding pursuits, such as literature, much like modern parents fear TikTok.) Pascal had to teach himself. Wh...
Welcome to The Nonlinear Library, where we use Text-to-Speech software to convert the best writing from the Rationalist and EA communities into audio. This is: Conversational canyons, published by Henrik Karlsson on January 4, 2023 on LessWrong. Conversations are streams: they pass by without leaving much behind. But if you add a notebook—if you write down short summaries of what you talk about so you can return to it in later conversations and expand—then you have a landscape for the conversation to flow through, and this changes it in interesting ways. When I started writing summaries, I thought it would be a small change. I already kept a detailed journal—I could just as well keep one for conversations, too. I could jot down a few notes about the key ideas, turning a two-hour conversation into 400 words or so. After a few months, however, it became clear that these notes were in fact not a small change. The notebook had entirely altered the shape of my conversations. Because I had the notes, I would review them if I was to speak with the same person again, adding comments about thoughts I'd had in the interim, rank ordering which topics I wanted to revisit, and so on. This way good ideas and topics would not be dropped but revisited and expanded. They would be connected to new insights, merged, and refined. Through this, the conversations became richer. They became more useful and interesting. The conversational stream was flowing through a landscape. On its banks ideas would wash up. Gradually, the banks would move, too—the landscape is shaped by the flow of words into a canyon. A canyon that shapes the stream of words in turn. I don't write down the conversations I have with most people. But there are a few who I keep coming back to—friends with minds that are forever churning, minds like mysterious machines I can never fully grasp but am continually delighted by. When we talk they all take me to different places; when I add a notebook they all go deep. The first conversation I wrote down was with Torbjörn, a software engineer who has an uncanny ability to guess my thoughts. When he gets excited he SPEAKS IN ALL CAPS, and he gets excited about everything. At the time, we talked on the phone once a week for about two hours. I would set off from my house toward the ocean and cross into the nature reserve. Walking along the ravine and the cliffs for a few hours, I would talk to Torbjörn about open research questions and software projects we were involved with. He would ask me for strategic advice about his consultancy. We also talked about our relationships, aliens, the ravings of the world around us, mopeds. While talking, we would take turns jotting down keywords to aid our memory, and then, when I got home, I would add what we had said to my note-taking system. I revised old notes in light of how our thinking had evolved, adding new links between different ideas, and so on. (For this particular conversation, I used Obsidian. But the tools are not important. And I roughly follow the note-taking strategy that Andy Matuschak outlines here. But that is not important either.) If Torbjörn wanted some of the notes, I would email edited excerpts to him, so I didn't have to format my notebook in a way that makes sense for him to read. First, I mixed the conversational notes in with my other thoughts. But I've since found that keeping the conversational notes separate from other notes is better—it creates a stronger sense of place. Now, I enter the Torbjörn notes, and all past conversations flow up. Mixed in with the other notes, they were diluted. (I do interlink it heavily with other notes, though.) During the week or so until we talked again, I would occasionally revisit the notes and add a thought or two. It kept the conversation alive in my mind. I'd update a list of topics I wanted to cover next time, shuffling their relative importance. This priority list, which was added to deal with the mess the notes became after a few...
Link to original articleWelcome to The Nonlinear Library, where we use Text-to-Speech software to convert the best writing from the Rationalist and EA communities into audio. This is: Conversational canyons, published by Henrik Karlsson on January 4, 2023 on LessWrong. Conversations are streams: they pass by without leaving much behind. But if you add a notebook—if you write down short summaries of what you talk about so you can return to it in later conversations and expand—then you have a landscape for the conversation to flow through, and this changes it in interesting ways. When I started writing summaries, I thought it would be a small change. I already kept a detailed journal—I could just as well keep one for conversations, too. I could jot down a few notes about the key ideas, turning a two-hour conversation into 400 words or so. After a few months, however, it became clear that these notes were in fact not a small change. The notebook had entirely altered the shape of my conversations. Because I had the notes, I would review them if I was to speak with the same person again, adding comments about thoughts I'd had in the interim, rank ordering which topics I wanted to revisit, and so on. This way good ideas and topics would not be dropped but revisited and expanded. They would be connected to new insights, merged, and refined. Through this, the conversations became richer. They became more useful and interesting. The conversational stream was flowing through a landscape. On its banks ideas would wash up. Gradually, the banks would move, too—the landscape is shaped by the flow of words into a canyon. A canyon that shapes the stream of words in turn. I don't write down the conversations I have with most people. But there are a few who I keep coming back to—friends with minds that are forever churning, minds like mysterious machines I can never fully grasp but am continually delighted by. When we talk they all take me to different places; when I add a notebook they all go deep. The first conversation I wrote down was with Torbjörn, a software engineer who has an uncanny ability to guess my thoughts. When he gets excited he SPEAKS IN ALL CAPS, and he gets excited about everything. At the time, we talked on the phone once a week for about two hours. I would set off from my house toward the ocean and cross into the nature reserve. Walking along the ravine and the cliffs for a few hours, I would talk to Torbjörn about open research questions and software projects we were involved with. He would ask me for strategic advice about his consultancy. We also talked about our relationships, aliens, the ravings of the world around us, mopeds. While talking, we would take turns jotting down keywords to aid our memory, and then, when I got home, I would add what we had said to my note-taking system. I revised old notes in light of how our thinking had evolved, adding new links between different ideas, and so on. (For this particular conversation, I used Obsidian. But the tools are not important. And I roughly follow the note-taking strategy that Andy Matuschak outlines here. But that is not important either.) If Torbjörn wanted some of the notes, I would email edited excerpts to him, so I didn't have to format my notebook in a way that makes sense for him to read. First, I mixed the conversational notes in with my other thoughts. But I've since found that keeping the conversational notes separate from other notes is better—it creates a stronger sense of place. Now, I enter the Torbjörn notes, and all past conversations flow up. Mixed in with the other notes, they were diluted. (I do interlink it heavily with other notes, though.) During the week or so until we talked again, I would occasionally revisit the notes and add a thought or two. It kept the conversation alive in my mind. I'd update a list of topics I wanted to cover next time, shuffling their relative importance. This priority list, which was added to deal with the mess the notes became after a few...
Welcome to The Nonlinear Library, where we use Text-to-Speech software to convert the best writing from the Rationalist and EA communities into audio. This is: A blog post is a very long and complex search query to find fascinating people and make them route interesting stuff to your inbox, published by Henrik Karlsson on October 5, 2022 on LessWrong. I was born in July 1989, which means I am of the last generation who will remember the time before the internet. The cables and data centers and hyperlinks grew up around me; they grew with me. I find it hard to disentangle the evolution of my psyche from that of the internet. Explaining it to my daughter, who was born in 2017, a year when the world's largest economy had begun tearing itself apart from the tension of this ever-evolving network, I tell her that the internet is like an alien intelligence. We don't know exactly what it is; it has just landed, and only the first ship. We are trying to figure out how to talk to it. The first generation of explorers have noted that by making certain finger motions you can make the aliens show you images of cats and clothes, or tell you all the ways the world is falling apart. For a long time, I thought this was all there was to it. I could tap the keyboard in a particular way and the screen would show me the weather, or tell me which translation of the Iliad to read and then make someone jump in a truck and drive it to our house. I preferred the Iliad to the screen. But then, late 2021, after I had been making intricate finger movements again, I woke up in our guesthouse before sunrise and noticed that something had changed. During the night, the internet had been set in motion. Tossing hither and thither in silence—as the fields lay frozen and waiting and the hedgehog slept in its pile of leaves—the internet had rearranged itself around me. I had written an essay about Ivan Illich and systems thinking, a topic I had never found anyone else intrigued by, and which magazines thought below a rejection letter—and the internet had suddenly reshaped itself so that my keyboard hooked up to the screens of a bunch of people who wanted to talk about these topics, and a little later, their keyboards hooked up to mine. I had written for 15 years, but never before had this happened. I had conjured a minor conference! And I hadn't even known that you could do that. This gave me a first glimpse of the social mechanics of the internet. Looking at the traffic data, and talking to readers, I could retrace how my words had traveled through the network, and I got a sense of why. I didn't fully understand it; I don't think anyone does. But like a scientist who's got hold of an alien artifact, I proceeded by gleefully and semi-randomly pushing every button I could find to see what happened. I would think of a series of funny finger movements and then I'd say to myself, LOL I wonder what this combination does? And then I'd try. The way the machine seemed to work was: The more precise and niche the words I input, the better the internet would match me with people I could forge meaningful relationships with. This precision was hard for me, partly because my sense for how communication is supposed to work is shaped by reading mass media. Writing for a general public, you need to be broad and a bit bland. I didn't want a general public. I wanted a specific set of people, the people who could help me along as a human being obsessed with certain intellectual problems. I didn't know who these people were. I only knew that they existed. Hence my writing was a search query. It needed to be phrased in such a way that it found these people and, if necessary, filtered others. The pleasant parts of the internet seemed to be curated by human beings, not algorithms. For my writing to find its way in this netherworld, I needed to have a rough sense of how information flowed down there. The pattern was this: words flowed from the periphery to the centers. This was a surp...
Link to original articleWelcome to The Nonlinear Library, where we use Text-to-Speech software to convert the best writing from the Rationalist and EA communities into audio. This is: A blog post is a very long and complex search query to find fascinating people and make them route interesting stuff to your inbox, published by Henrik Karlsson on October 5, 2022 on LessWrong. I was born in July 1989, which means I am of the last generation who will remember the time before the internet. The cables and data centers and hyperlinks grew up around me; they grew with me. I find it hard to disentangle the evolution of my psyche from that of the internet. Explaining it to my daughter, who was born in 2017, a year when the world's largest economy had begun tearing itself apart from the tension of this ever-evolving network, I tell her that the internet is like an alien intelligence. We don't know exactly what it is; it has just landed, and only the first ship. We are trying to figure out how to talk to it. The first generation of explorers have noted that by making certain finger motions you can make the aliens show you images of cats and clothes, or tell you all the ways the world is falling apart. For a long time, I thought this was all there was to it. I could tap the keyboard in a particular way and the screen would show me the weather, or tell me which translation of the Iliad to read and then make someone jump in a truck and drive it to our house. I preferred the Iliad to the screen. But then, late 2021, after I had been making intricate finger movements again, I woke up in our guesthouse before sunrise and noticed that something had changed. During the night, the internet had been set in motion. Tossing hither and thither in silence—as the fields lay frozen and waiting and the hedgehog slept in its pile of leaves—the internet had rearranged itself around me. I had written an essay about Ivan Illich and systems thinking, a topic I had never found anyone else intrigued by, and which magazines thought below a rejection letter—and the internet had suddenly reshaped itself so that my keyboard hooked up to the screens of a bunch of people who wanted to talk about these topics, and a little later, their keyboards hooked up to mine. I had written for 15 years, but never before had this happened. I had conjured a minor conference! And I hadn't even known that you could do that. This gave me a first glimpse of the social mechanics of the internet. Looking at the traffic data, and talking to readers, I could retrace how my words had traveled through the network, and I got a sense of why. I didn't fully understand it; I don't think anyone does. But like a scientist who's got hold of an alien artifact, I proceeded by gleefully and semi-randomly pushing every button I could find to see what happened. I would think of a series of funny finger movements and then I'd say to myself, LOL I wonder what this combination does? And then I'd try. The way the machine seemed to work was: The more precise and niche the words I input, the better the internet would match me with people I could forge meaningful relationships with. This precision was hard for me, partly because my sense for how communication is supposed to work is shaped by reading mass media. Writing for a general public, you need to be broad and a bit bland. I didn't want a general public. I wanted a specific set of people, the people who could help me along as a human being obsessed with certain intellectual problems. I didn't know who these people were. I only knew that they existed. Hence my writing was a search query. It needed to be phrased in such a way that it found these people and, if necessary, filtered others. The pleasant parts of the internet seemed to be curated by human beings, not algorithms. For my writing to find its way in this netherworld, I needed to have a rough sense of how information flowed down there. The pattern was this: words flowed from the periphery to the centers. This was a surp...
Welcome to The Nonlinear Library, where we use Text-to-Speech software to convert the best writing from the Rationalist and EA communities into audio. This is: Scraping training data for your mind, published by Henrik Karlsson on September 21, 2022 on LessWrong. 2432 pages into Karl Ove Knausgaard's autobiographical My Struggle comes a pivotal plot point: the publication of a new Proust translation in Norwegian. Knausgaard at this point, in his mid-twenties, has spent nearly ten years learning to write. Without success, to put it mildly. His best friend, Tore Renberg, having read the results, in one scene comes over to Knausgaard's flat, looking a little as if he has been drinking before he arrived to work up his nerve. “But Karl Ove”, Renberg says about his writing, “there is. nothing there”. This isn't the first time we've seen how people react to Knausgaard's prose. Earlier in the book, when he is working as a teacher in a remote fishing village in northern Norway, Knausgaard comes home to find his colleagues laughing while reading a sex scene he's written. Knausgaard—still a virgin—walks straight through the kitchen into his study, where he downs a full bottle of wine in one go and proceeds to throw up all over the bookcase. But Renberg's criticism cuts deeper. Renberg, who is younger than Knausgaard, has already become an accomplished writer and knows what he's talking about. There really is nothing there. So Knausgaard stops writing. When the new translation of Prouts's In Search of Lost Time is published he has not written for two years. In the spring light, he reads Proust's memoirs, all seven of them, in one big gulp like “drinking a glass of water”. He has said it was like “visiting a wood you have been in before, a long time ago . . . and when you start walking, the memories start coming back”. After that epiphany . . . he spends another two years not writing. That is about 200 pages of his autobiography. Then, for inexplicable reasons, an editor at Tiden, a subsidiary of Norway's biggest publishing house, an editor who, like everyone else, is unconvinced by Knausgaard's writing, decides that, well, why not give him a book deal anyway. Knausgaard abandons everything, moves back to his mother's town, Arendal, and sets out to write a debut novel. He doesn't know what to write about. He overhears a conversation in the library, writes it down, and then wings it from there. The novel turns into a story about a 26-year-old teacher, Henrik Vankel. Like many debuts, it is hard to not read as autobiographical—which becomes all the tenser as the plot centers on the sexual relationship Vankel has with his 13-year-old pupil Miriam in a small fishing village identical to the one where Knausgaard taught in northern Norway. The book was an immediate critical and financial success. One reason for the success was that the writing is pure Proust. Coursing through every sentence of Ude af verden, like a virus, is the Proustian sensibility, the obsession with time and memory, the rich and clear language. Knausgaard claims he wasn't aware of the influence at the time—but something about The Search for Lost Time had worked itself into him, rearranging his sensibilities. Over the two years when he did not write, his writing had transformed. This is quite common for writers. Reading something powerful, the voice infects them. Sometimes this is a weakness, if the influence has not been transformed into something personal. But there is also no way around it: finding good influences is a prerequisite for writing well. Some writers do this very deliberately. Werner Herzog will spend days reading the Poetic Edda and listening to classical music at full volume to get himself into what he calls an “ecstasy of language” before writing a script. John Frusciante, as we discussed in the last part of this series, does something similar when writing songs. Let's call this scraping good training data for your mind. It is an important skill. Too often...
Link to original articleWelcome to The Nonlinear Library, where we use Text-to-Speech software to convert the best writing from the Rationalist and EA communities into audio. This is: Scraping training data for your mind, published by Henrik Karlsson on September 21, 2022 on LessWrong. 2432 pages into Karl Ove Knausgaard's autobiographical My Struggle comes a pivotal plot point: the publication of a new Proust translation in Norwegian. Knausgaard at this point, in his mid-twenties, has spent nearly ten years learning to write. Without success, to put it mildly. His best friend, Tore Renberg, having read the results, in one scene comes over to Knausgaard's flat, looking a little as if he has been drinking before he arrived to work up his nerve. “But Karl Ove”, Renberg says about his writing, “there is. nothing there”. This isn't the first time we've seen how people react to Knausgaard's prose. Earlier in the book, when he is working as a teacher in a remote fishing village in northern Norway, Knausgaard comes home to find his colleagues laughing while reading a sex scene he's written. Knausgaard—still a virgin—walks straight through the kitchen into his study, where he downs a full bottle of wine in one go and proceeds to throw up all over the bookcase. But Renberg's criticism cuts deeper. Renberg, who is younger than Knausgaard, has already become an accomplished writer and knows what he's talking about. There really is nothing there. So Knausgaard stops writing. When the new translation of Prouts's In Search of Lost Time is published he has not written for two years. In the spring light, he reads Proust's memoirs, all seven of them, in one big gulp like “drinking a glass of water”. He has said it was like “visiting a wood you have been in before, a long time ago . . . and when you start walking, the memories start coming back”. After that epiphany . . . he spends another two years not writing. That is about 200 pages of his autobiography. Then, for inexplicable reasons, an editor at Tiden, a subsidiary of Norway's biggest publishing house, an editor who, like everyone else, is unconvinced by Knausgaard's writing, decides that, well, why not give him a book deal anyway. Knausgaard abandons everything, moves back to his mother's town, Arendal, and sets out to write a debut novel. He doesn't know what to write about. He overhears a conversation in the library, writes it down, and then wings it from there. The novel turns into a story about a 26-year-old teacher, Henrik Vankel. Like many debuts, it is hard to not read as autobiographical—which becomes all the tenser as the plot centers on the sexual relationship Vankel has with his 13-year-old pupil Miriam in a small fishing village identical to the one where Knausgaard taught in northern Norway. The book was an immediate critical and financial success. One reason for the success was that the writing is pure Proust. Coursing through every sentence of Ude af verden, like a virus, is the Proustian sensibility, the obsession with time and memory, the rich and clear language. Knausgaard claims he wasn't aware of the influence at the time—but something about The Search for Lost Time had worked itself into him, rearranging his sensibilities. Over the two years when he did not write, his writing had transformed. This is quite common for writers. Reading something powerful, the voice infects them. Sometimes this is a weakness, if the influence has not been transformed into something personal. But there is also no way around it: finding good influences is a prerequisite for writing well. Some writers do this very deliberately. Werner Herzog will spend days reading the Poetic Edda and listening to classical music at full volume to get himself into what he calls an “ecstasy of language” before writing a script. John Frusciante, as we discussed in the last part of this series, does something similar when writing songs. Let's call this scraping good training data for your mind. It is an important skill. Too often...
Welcome to The Nonlinear Library, where we use Text-to-Speech software to convert the best writing from the Rationalist and EA communities into audio. This is: First we shape our social graph; then it shapes us, published by Henrik Karlsson on September 7, 2022 on LessWrong. The inside of a womb looks as it did 70,000 years ago, but the world outside has changed. In July 2021, when our daughter was born, the night sky didn't light up with stars; it was lit up by the warm afterglow of sodium street lamps. Green-clad women carried the baby away, pumping oxygen into her mouth. It was like something out of a sci-fi: she had woken up, without a memory, in an alien world. Smeared in white-yellow fat, she didn't know who she was nor what she was doing here. The only thing she knew, genetically, was that she needed to figure this out fast or die. How do we ever do this? Chimpanzees, who are born into the habitat their genes expect, get by largely on instinct. We cannot. We have to rely on what anthropologists call cultural learning. We have to observe the people that surround us; we have to figure out who among them navigate our local culture best and then extract the mental models that allow them to do so. This is a wicked problem. But we solve it instinctively. It is the main thing that sets us apart from chimpanzees. As I wrote in Apprenticeship Online: If you measure two-and-a-half-year-old children against [same-aged] chimpanzees and orangutans, they are about even in their capacity to handle tools and solve problems on their own. Only when it comes to observing others and repeating their actions is there a noticeable difference. Two-and-a-half-year-olds can extract knowledge from people just by watching them move about a room. They start to desire what those around them desire. They pick up tacit knowledge. They change their dialect to match their peer groups. And after a handful of years of hanging about with people more skilled than themselves, our babies—these tiny, soft-skulled creatures—can out-compete chimpanzees in all but close combat. This ability is not something you can turn on and off. You are always internalizing the culture around you. Even when you wish you didn't. So you better surround yourself with something you want inside—curate a culture. Your culture shapes who you become How do you summon an interesting set of friends to bounce your ideas off? Where do you look to find good influences? Which types of output should you produce if you want people to route useful ideas your way? This essay is the first in a series about culture curation. In later parts, I will go into detail about how to do this. But here I want to give a high-level view of why it makes sense to think about the world in this manner—as a graph you can restructure to change yourself. Why should you put effort into shaping your culture, rather than something else? Here is a reason. Over the last few months, since May, I've helped Erik Hoel comb through the literature on the upbringings of historical geniuses. We've found a lot of interesting things, which Erik will cover in an upcoming post on his Substack. But what has struck me, more than anything else, is the insane quality of the cultures they internalized. The pedagogies their guardians employed differed radically; they had differing temperaments; they mastered different disciplines, but they all had this in common: they spent their days around highly competent people. Most who grew up to become geniuses, pre-1900, were kept apart from same age peers and raised at home, by tutors or parents. Michel Montaigne's father employed only servants who were fluent in Latin, curating a classical culture, so Montaigne would learn Latin as his mother tongue. J.S. Mill spent his childhood at his father's desk, helping his father write a treatise on economics, running over to Jeremy Bentham's house to borrow books and discuss ideas. Blaise Pascal, too, was homeschooled by his father. His father choose...
Link to original articleWelcome to The Nonlinear Library, where we use Text-to-Speech software to convert the best writing from the Rationalist and EA communities into audio. This is: First we shape our social graph; then it shapes us, published by Henrik Karlsson on September 7, 2022 on LessWrong. The inside of a womb looks as it did 70,000 years ago, but the world outside has changed. In July 2021, when our daughter was born, the night sky didn't light up with stars; it was lit up by the warm afterglow of sodium street lamps. Green-clad women carried the baby away, pumping oxygen into her mouth. It was like something out of a sci-fi: she had woken up, without a memory, in an alien world. Smeared in white-yellow fat, she didn't know who she was nor what she was doing here. The only thing she knew, genetically, was that she needed to figure this out fast or die. How do we ever do this? Chimpanzees, who are born into the habitat their genes expect, get by largely on instinct. We cannot. We have to rely on what anthropologists call cultural learning. We have to observe the people that surround us; we have to figure out who among them navigate our local culture best and then extract the mental models that allow them to do so. This is a wicked problem. But we solve it instinctively. It is the main thing that sets us apart from chimpanzees. As I wrote in Apprenticeship Online: If you measure two-and-a-half-year-old children against [same-aged] chimpanzees and orangutans, they are about even in their capacity to handle tools and solve problems on their own. Only when it comes to observing others and repeating their actions is there a noticeable difference. Two-and-a-half-year-olds can extract knowledge from people just by watching them move about a room. They start to desire what those around them desire. They pick up tacit knowledge. They change their dialect to match their peer groups. And after a handful of years of hanging about with people more skilled than themselves, our babies—these tiny, soft-skulled creatures—can out-compete chimpanzees in all but close combat. This ability is not something you can turn on and off. You are always internalizing the culture around you. Even when you wish you didn't. So you better surround yourself with something you want inside—curate a culture. Your culture shapes who you become How do you summon an interesting set of friends to bounce your ideas off? Where do you look to find good influences? Which types of output should you produce if you want people to route useful ideas your way? This essay is the first in a series about culture curation. In later parts, I will go into detail about how to do this. But here I want to give a high-level view of why it makes sense to think about the world in this manner—as a graph you can restructure to change yourself. Why should you put effort into shaping your culture, rather than something else? Here is a reason. Over the last few months, since May, I've helped Erik Hoel comb through the literature on the upbringings of historical geniuses. We've found a lot of interesting things, which Erik will cover in an upcoming post on his Substack. But what has struck me, more than anything else, is the insane quality of the cultures they internalized. The pedagogies their guardians employed differed radically; they had differing temperaments; they mastered different disciplines, but they all had this in common: they spent their days around highly competent people. Most who grew up to become geniuses, pre-1900, were kept apart from same age peers and raised at home, by tutors or parents. Michel Montaigne's father employed only servants who were fluent in Latin, curating a classical culture, so Montaigne would learn Latin as his mother tongue. J.S. Mill spent his childhood at his father's desk, helping his father write a treatise on economics, running over to Jeremy Bentham's house to borrow books and discuss ideas. Blaise Pascal, too, was homeschooled by his father. His father choose...
Alma och Fanny träffar Henrik Karlsson, grundare och VD, och Johanna Kristensson, logoped och skriv- och läsutvecklare, för Oribi. Henrik och Johanna berättar om bakgrunden till Stava Rex och SpellRight, två program som hjälper elever med stavningen både i svenska- och engelskundervisningen.
I avsnitt 56 Alma och Fanny träffar Henrik Karlsson, grundare och VD, och Johanna Kristensson, logoped och skriv- och läsutvecklare, för Oribi.
Welcome to The Nonlinear Library, where we use Text-to-Speech software to convert the best writing from the Rationalist and EA communities into audio. This is: Popular education in Sweden: much more than you wanted to know, published by Henrik Karlsson on May 17, 2022 on LessWrong. Growing up on the Swedish seaside, I had a five-minute walk to four open learning facilities – not counting the library and the youth center. It was very Christopher Alexander. One of the premises was an abandoned church that my friends and I used as a recording studio; we'd renovated it ourselves with funding from a study association. There we played distorted pop. In another, I learned French from an émigré of Montpellier. We arranged public lectures – once, to our great surprise, we even managed to book then general secretary of the United Nations Ban-Ki Moon for a lecture in Uppsala. I analyzed Soviet cinema with a group of whom an unsettling number sang Sång för Stalin before the screenings. Since leaving Sweden, I have realized that not everyone grows up like this. And I miss it. In fact, if the whole of Sweden was about to burn down and I could only save one thing, I might grab just folkbildningsrörelsen. Folkbildningsrörelsen: that is the name we have for this movement of self-organized study groups, resource centers, maker spaces, public lectures, and free retreats for personal development. These types of things exist in other countries too – but not at the same scale. Or even close. To get a sense of how comprehensive folkbildningsrörelsen is, it helps to remember that Sweden has a population roughly comparable to New York City. If NYC had as many free resource centers per inhabitant as the municipality where I grew up, Manhattan would look like this: I was going to do all of New York but my hand started hurting from making all these dots, so I only managed the tip of Manhattan. At every other intersection, there would be a few rooms where you could go in and get some money to buy literature or access tools you needed. (In practice, the resource centers in cities tend to be lumped together in larger units, but the map still captures a lived reality for the 7.5 percent of Sweden's population who regularly take part in study associations.) Experientially, the spaces I have been part of have felt more like niche internet forums than schools. There were plenty of trolls, witches, and freaks – but we were also able to sustain a depth of conversation which was out of scope at school. When I entered university, seminars often felt like play-acting in comparison. In our often quite dilapidated buildings (as in internet communities), we hadn't thought about what we were doing as learning. We were just obsessing about things. How did this all come about? In the 19th century, when these houses and the financing that enables them began to be built out, the main impetus came from the German Bildung tradition. Bildung etymologically refers to shaping yourself in the image (das Bild) of God. God in this context should be imagined as a highly self-possessed spectral being – in control of its emotions, with mind and heart in harmony, and willing to take individual moral responsibility. Think Bertrand Russell but less atheist, and sitting on a cloud. This is the look. In its original formulation, Bildung had a somewhat bourgeois flavor. It smelled of tweed and leather elbow patches. But in the early 1800s, thinkers such as Johann Heinrich Pestalozzi, N.F.S. Grundtvig, and Johann Friedrich Herbart figured out how to sell Bildung to farmers and day laborers – a folk Bildung, or folkbildning in Swedish. This was the tradition that took root in Sweden: the popular movement to shape yourself in the image of Bertrand Russell. The English language version of folkbildning's Wikipedia page refers to it as popular education. This translation is not entirely correct. The term "popular education" has a strong political connotation – the Wikipedia page talks about "c...
Link to original articleWelcome to The Nonlinear Library, where we use Text-to-Speech software to convert the best writing from the Rationalist and EA communities into audio. This is: Popular education in Sweden: much more than you wanted to know, published by Henrik Karlsson on May 17, 2022 on LessWrong. Growing up on the Swedish seaside, I had a five-minute walk to four open learning facilities – not counting the library and the youth center. It was very Christopher Alexander. One of the premises was an abandoned church that my friends and I used as a recording studio; we'd renovated it ourselves with funding from a study association. There we played distorted pop. In another, I learned French from an émigré of Montpellier. We arranged public lectures – once, to our great surprise, we even managed to book then general secretary of the United Nations Ban-Ki Moon for a lecture in Uppsala. I analyzed Soviet cinema with a group of whom an unsettling number sang Sång för Stalin before the screenings. Since leaving Sweden, I have realized that not everyone grows up like this. And I miss it. In fact, if the whole of Sweden was about to burn down and I could only save one thing, I might grab just folkbildningsrörelsen. Folkbildningsrörelsen: that is the name we have for this movement of self-organized study groups, resource centers, maker spaces, public lectures, and free retreats for personal development. These types of things exist in other countries too – but not at the same scale. Or even close. To get a sense of how comprehensive folkbildningsrörelsen is, it helps to remember that Sweden has a population roughly comparable to New York City. If NYC had as many free resource centers per inhabitant as the municipality where I grew up, Manhattan would look like this: I was going to do all of New York but my hand started hurting from making all these dots, so I only managed the tip of Manhattan. At every other intersection, there would be a few rooms where you could go in and get some money to buy literature or access tools you needed. (In practice, the resource centers in cities tend to be lumped together in larger units, but the map still captures a lived reality for the 7.5 percent of Sweden's population who regularly take part in study associations.) Experientially, the spaces I have been part of have felt more like niche internet forums than schools. There were plenty of trolls, witches, and freaks – but we were also able to sustain a depth of conversation which was out of scope at school. When I entered university, seminars often felt like play-acting in comparison. In our often quite dilapidated buildings (as in internet communities), we hadn't thought about what we were doing as learning. We were just obsessing about things. How did this all come about? In the 19th century, when these houses and the financing that enables them began to be built out, the main impetus came from the German Bildung tradition. Bildung etymologically refers to shaping yourself in the image (das Bild) of God. God in this context should be imagined as a highly self-possessed spectral being – in control of its emotions, with mind and heart in harmony, and willing to take individual moral responsibility. Think Bertrand Russell but less atheist, and sitting on a cloud. This is the look. In its original formulation, Bildung had a somewhat bourgeois flavor. It smelled of tweed and leather elbow patches. But in the early 1800s, thinkers such as Johann Heinrich Pestalozzi, N.F.S. Grundtvig, and Johann Friedrich Herbart figured out how to sell Bildung to farmers and day laborers – a folk Bildung, or folkbildning in Swedish. This was the tradition that took root in Sweden: the popular movement to shape yourself in the image of Bertrand Russell. The English language version of folkbildning's Wikipedia page refers to it as popular education. This translation is not entirely correct. The term "popular education" has a strong political connotation – the Wikipedia page talks about "c...
Link to original articleWelcome to The Nonlinear Library, where we use Text-to-Speech software to convert the best writing from the Rationalist and EA communities into audio. This is: Popular education in Sweden: much more than you wanted to know, published by Henrik Karlsson on May 17, 2022 on LessWrong. Growing up on the Swedish seaside, I had a five-minute walk to four open learning facilities – not counting the library and the youth center. It was very Christopher Alexander. One of the premises was an abandoned church that my friends and I used as a recording studio; we'd renovated it ourselves with funding from a study association. There we played distorted pop. In another, I learned French from an émigré of Montpellier. We arranged public lectures – once, to our great surprise, we even managed to book then general secretary of the United Nations Ban-Ki Moon for a lecture in Uppsala. I analyzed Soviet cinema with a group of whom an unsettling number sang Sång för Stalin before the screenings. Since leaving Sweden, I have realized that not everyone grows up like this. And I miss it. In fact, if the whole of Sweden was about to burn down and I could only save one thing, I might grab just folkbildningsrörelsen. Folkbildningsrörelsen: that is the name we have for this movement of self-organized study groups, resource centers, maker spaces, public lectures, and free retreats for personal development. These types of things exist in other countries too – but not at the same scale. Or even close. To get a sense of how comprehensive folkbildningsrörelsen is, it helps to remember that Sweden has a population roughly comparable to New York City. If NYC had as many free resource centers per inhabitant as the municipality where I grew up, Manhattan would look like this: I was going to do all of New York but my hand started hurting from making all these dots, so I only managed the tip of Manhattan. At every other intersection, there would be a few rooms where you could go in and get some money to buy literature or access tools you needed. (In practice, the resource centers in cities tend to be lumped together in larger units, but the map still captures a lived reality for the 7.5 percent of Sweden's population who regularly take part in study associations.) Experientially, the spaces I have been part of have felt more like niche internet forums than schools. There were plenty of trolls, witches, and freaks – but we were also able to sustain a depth of conversation which was out of scope at school. When I entered university, seminars often felt like play-acting in comparison. In our often quite dilapidated buildings (as in internet communities), we hadn't thought about what we were doing as learning. We were just obsessing about things. How did this all come about? In the 19th century, when these houses and the financing that enables them began to be built out, the main impetus came from the German Bildung tradition. Bildung etymologically refers to shaping yourself in the image (das Bild) of God. God in this context should be imagined as a highly self-possessed spectral being – in control of its emotions, with mind and heart in harmony, and willing to take individual moral responsibility. Think Bertrand Russell but less atheist, and sitting on a cloud. This is the look. In its original formulation, Bildung had a somewhat bourgeois flavor. It smelled of tweed and leather elbow patches. But in the early 1800s, thinkers such as Johann Heinrich Pestalozzi, N.F.S. Grundtvig, and Johann Friedrich Herbart figured out how to sell Bildung to farmers and day laborers – a folk Bildung, or folkbildning in Swedish. This was the tradition that took root in Sweden: the popular movement to shape yourself in the image of Bertrand Russell. The English language version of folkbildning's Wikipedia page refers to it as popular education. This translation is not entirely correct. The term "popular education" has a strong political connotation – the Wikipedia page talks about "c...
Välkommen till den digitala versionen av vår palmsöndagsgudstjänst! Agneta Richloow leder, Peter Richloow spelar orgel och flygel. Paul Kas Elias ger en hälsning från kyrkan i Syrien och Henrik Karlsson från Vineyard Strängnäs predikar och leder oss i lovsång. Vill du komma i kontakt med oss är du varmt välkommen att höra av dig till info@olivehallkyrkan.se --- Send in a voice message: https://anchor.fm/olivehallkyrkan/message
Welcome to The Nonlinear Library, where we use Text-to-Speech software to convert the best writing from the Rationalist and EA communities into audio. This is: Christopher Alexander's architecture for learning, published by Henrik Karlsson on March 24, 2022 on LessWrong. On the 17th of March 2022, Christopher Alexander, the architect and mathematician, passed away. Alexander, whose intellectual influence extended far beyond architecture and urban planning, gave the impetus to several central ideas in modern software development, such as wikis, agile, and object-oriented programming. But his main contribution was in vernacular architecture – that is architecture without architects – where houses are built gradually by the people who live in them. To honor his memory, I would like to take this moment to reflect on some of his ideas in the area where he has influenced me the most: on how architecture can unlock learning in society. How can we best make sure that the knowledge we need is sustained over generations? For knowledge to pass from one generation to the next we fundamentally need three things. Firstly, we need ways for the young to access the environments they are to master so they can learn through imitation. Secondly: for skills that are hard to learn through imitation, we need deliberate instruction. And finally, for emotional support, we need houses where children can seek refuge from their families or get support when their parents are busy. These points are not original on their own; schools try to do at least the last two. What is more interesting is how thoroughly Alexander went about solving it. He proposed not a new type of school but a series of architectural patterns that would weave the functions into the very fabric of society. Access to environments, deliberate instruction, and safe homes would be a seamless part of everything – an "educational system so radically decentralized” that it “becomes congruent with the urban structure itself." At the heart of this was a pattern he called network of learning. Network of learning The book where Alexander most clearly lays out his ideas about learning is in his 1977 cult classic A Pattern Language: Towns, Buildings, Construction, which he co-wrote with Sara Ishikawa and Murray Silverstein. It is a peculiar tome: a choose your own adventure for how to build a modern medieval city-state. It is quite dizzying in scope and detail. Together with its companion pieces, The Timeless Way of Building and The Oregon Experiment, the book spans 1912 pages and contains 253 architectural ”patterns”. Each pattern describes “a problem that occurs over and over again in our environment, and then describes the core of the solution to that problem, in a way that you can use this solution a million times, without ever doing it the same way twice”. These patterns range from the world defining to the mundane – from how to beak up the countries in the world into city-states and incorporate them in a world federation to how to keep weeds from stone walls and what colors to use to make a room homely (red, yellow, and brown!). The patterns are mostly derived from close observation of places from the past that not only function well but are full of life – Alexander and his students were practicing a sort of ethnography of vernacular architecture. The most fundamental educational pattern in the book (18: NETWORK OF LEARNING) is derived from Ivan Illich, the catholic priest and historian famous for his critique of institutionalized care. Illich had purposed turning schools – the epitome of institutionalized care and its ills – inside out and bringing forth instead learning webs. Alexander took this idea and turned it into a design pattern. The way he did this is akin to how an object is created from a class in object-oriented programming: he created an instance of the Illichian idea, by pasting several page long quotes, and then he set about modifying it. I will return to how he modified it...
Link to original articleWelcome to The Nonlinear Library, where we use Text-to-Speech software to convert the best writing from the Rationalist and EA communities into audio. This is: Christopher Alexander's architecture for learning, published by Henrik Karlsson on March 24, 2022 on LessWrong. On the 17th of March 2022, Christopher Alexander, the architect and mathematician, passed away. Alexander, whose intellectual influence extended far beyond architecture and urban planning, gave the impetus to several central ideas in modern software development, such as wikis, agile, and object-oriented programming. But his main contribution was in vernacular architecture – that is architecture without architects – where houses are built gradually by the people who live in them. To honor his memory, I would like to take this moment to reflect on some of his ideas in the area where he has influenced me the most: on how architecture can unlock learning in society. How can we best make sure that the knowledge we need is sustained over generations? For knowledge to pass from one generation to the next we fundamentally need three things. Firstly, we need ways for the young to access the environments they are to master so they can learn through imitation. Secondly: for skills that are hard to learn through imitation, we need deliberate instruction. And finally, for emotional support, we need houses where children can seek refuge from their families or get support when their parents are busy. These points are not original on their own; schools try to do at least the last two. What is more interesting is how thoroughly Alexander went about solving it. He proposed not a new type of school but a series of architectural patterns that would weave the functions into the very fabric of society. Access to environments, deliberate instruction, and safe homes would be a seamless part of everything – an "educational system so radically decentralized” that it “becomes congruent with the urban structure itself." At the heart of this was a pattern he called network of learning. Network of learning The book where Alexander most clearly lays out his ideas about learning is in his 1977 cult classic A Pattern Language: Towns, Buildings, Construction, which he co-wrote with Sara Ishikawa and Murray Silverstein. It is a peculiar tome: a choose your own adventure for how to build a modern medieval city-state. It is quite dizzying in scope and detail. Together with its companion pieces, The Timeless Way of Building and The Oregon Experiment, the book spans 1912 pages and contains 253 architectural ”patterns”. Each pattern describes “a problem that occurs over and over again in our environment, and then describes the core of the solution to that problem, in a way that you can use this solution a million times, without ever doing it the same way twice”. These patterns range from the world defining to the mundane – from how to beak up the countries in the world into city-states and incorporate them in a world federation to how to keep weeds from stone walls and what colors to use to make a room homely (red, yellow, and brown!). The patterns are mostly derived from close observation of places from the past that not only function well but are full of life – Alexander and his students were practicing a sort of ethnography of vernacular architecture. The most fundamental educational pattern in the book (18: NETWORK OF LEARNING) is derived from Ivan Illich, the catholic priest and historian famous for his critique of institutionalized care. Illich had purposed turning schools – the epitome of institutionalized care and its ills – inside out and bringing forth instead learning webs. Alexander took this idea and turned it into a design pattern. The way he did this is akin to how an object is created from a class in object-oriented programming: he created an instance of the Illichian idea, by pasting several page long quotes, and then he set about modifying it. I will return to how he modified it...
Hi, welcome to one of our Coffee Time chats, a kicked back, feet up, type of discussion. Today we are joined by:
Uppsnack inför valet. Hur ska vänstern bli av med sin irriterande självgodhet? En lösning presenteras. Eventuellt fungerar den både i USA och Sverige. Dessutom: Henrik har varit på racial sensitivity training. Åsa förklarar varför alla egentligen vill bo i en småstad. Washington ringer Nora görs av Åsa Sandell, författare och boxare, och Henrik Karlsson, lektor vid musikinstitutionen på Howard University. Kontakt: washingtonringernora@gmail.com
Black Lives Matter i Washington, svenska demonstranter som leker USA, amerikaners intresse för Carl von Linnés rasbiologiska teorier samt rasismens historia inom boxningen. Washington ringer Nora görs av Åsa Sandell, författare och boxare, och Henrik Karlsson, lektor vid musikinstitutionen på Howard University. Kontakt: Washingtonringernora@gmail.com Musik: Ainae https://open.spotify.com/artist/1hiGhCia7QbixRI7xjDJN0?si=2cxJGuyGQiSMVMn3AONJCw
USA:s millenniumgeneration upplever sin andra finanskris. Blir det revolution? En ny undersökning visar att älskvärda människor röstar på vad vi brukade kalla Folkpartiet. Dessutom: hur påverkar Corona-isoleringen våra tankar? I frågeleken Udda eller Buddha visar det sig att en av poddarna kanske har blivit lite dum i huvudet. Washington ringer Nora görs av Åsa Sandell och Henrik Karlsson. washingtonringernora@gmail.com
Gäst Henrik Karlsson. Jag är så glad att ni ska få höra en bit av Henriks historia. Hör hur killen som samhället inte ville se längre blev sedd när han kom in i kyrkan. Love this! Som min mamma skulle ha sagt "Det finns inga hopplösa fall"!
In this podcast we talk with Pontus Berner from berner+becker, Niki van den Broeck from Get Into MoRe and Henrik Karlsson from Benchmarking Alliance about MICE Revenue Management, what are the challenges and why should it be a much higher profile for hotels with meeting and event space.
Washington ringer Nora är tillbaka. Och det med råge. I avsnitt tolv granskas några av vår tids malligaste överklassbeteenden. Man hittar dem i Hollywood och i den amerikanska politiken men också i det svenska kulturlivet. Den nya spännande kategorin ”jagets överklass” lanseras. Dessutom: Boxares drivkrafter. Varför vill man upp i ringen och slåss? Vid mikrofonerna sitter som vanligt Åsa Sandell, boxare och författare hemmahörande i Nora, samt Henrik Karlsson, lektor i musikterapi vid Howard University i Washington, D.C. Kontakt: washingtonringernora@gmail.com
Vad ligger bakom ett korruptionsbeteende? Vad är korruption egentligen? Vad kan offentliga myndigheter och företag göra för att motverka korruption? I panelen deltar Tomas Brytting, forskare inom organisationsetik, Mattias Hedberg, Chief Compliance Officer på Atea och Fredrik Rogö, upphandlingsjurist på Inköp och upphandling. Samtalet leds av Henrik Karlsson, förvaltningsdirektör på Inköp och upphandling.
Varför ska vi göra en leverantörsmätning? Hur gör vi den på bästa sätt? Och vad använder vi resultaten till? Premiäravsnittet av Inköpsresan gästas av Åsa Rönnbäck, forskare inom kvalitetsutveckling och Lina Haglund som är förbundsdirektör på Inköp Gävleborg. Annelie Gärdmark är projektledare för införandet av leverantörsmätningar i Göteborg. Tillsammans med Henrik Karlsson diskuteras syfte, lärdomar och för- och nackdelar med olika mätningsmetoder.
När förläggarna är borta dansar Nina och Johanna på bordet! Först träffar vi författarduon Henrik Karlsson och Tiina Nevala som skrivit relationsromanen ”Såna som oss” som utspelar sig i den svenska förlagsvärlden. Och så träffar vi Stina Jackson, som skrivit spänningsromanen Silvervägen, uppe på Albert Bonniers förlag. I avsnittet hörs även: 9 to 5 med … Fortsätt läsa "#24 Råttorna på bordet"
Vi tar oss an musikkritikern vars penna fruktades mer än någon annans, men vars dräpande sarkasmer också lockade till läsning. Och som dessutom komponerade egen musik. Telefongäst: Henrik Karlsson. Med Mattias Lundberg och Esmeralda Moberg. Avsnittets spellista på Spotify: https://open.spotify.com/user/1126630471/playlist/6wUVfrmPnEeaZsZYeWGbtW Kontakta oss på dsm@sverigesradio.se Ljudtekniker: Samuel Lindberg Producent: David Rune Den svenska musikhistorien görs av produktionsbolaget Munck.
Sveriges viktigaste missionärer är alla föräldrar. Personligt och nära berättar Carl-Henrik Karlsson om familjens och det vardagligas betydelse.
Lyssna på Henrik Karlsson och Anki Mattson när de diskuterar teknisk information och språkvård på Scania.
Stefan Ladhe och Thomas Magnusson samtalar om målvaktsspel i ishockey. I veckans avsnitt pratar de om Tre Kronor som är i Sotji för spel i Channel One Cup. Stefan pratar med Tre Kronors målvakter Henrik Karlsson och Linus Ullmark. Thomas har varit på damsymposium i Örebro och sett Damkronorna spela. Han pratar med Erika Holst som är utvecklingsansvarig för Damhockey på Svenska Ishockeyförbundet. Det blir tips och en hel del annat i sista avsnittet före jul och nyår! Välkommen!
Stefan Ladhe och Thomas Magnusson samtalar om målvaktsspel i ishockey. I veckans avsnitt pratar de om Tre Kronor som är i Sotji för spel i Channel One Cup. Stefan pratar med Tre Kronors målvakter Henrik Karlsson och Linus Ullmark. Thomas har varit på damsymposium i Örebro och sett Damkronorna spela. Han pratar med Erika Holst som är utvecklingsansvarig för Damhockey på Svenska Ishockeyförbundet. Det blir tips och en hel del annat i sista avsnittet före jul och nyår! Välkommen!
Stefan Ladhe och Thomas Magnusson samtalar om målvaktsspel i ishockey. I veckans avsnitt pratar de om TV-pucken och med Henrik Karlsson, målvakt i Tre Kronor och Skellefteå. Men också veckans tips såklart! Välkommen!
Guest : Henrik Karlsson, Biorecro This week’s episode of Think Globally Radio features an in-depth discussion with Henrik Karlsson, CEO and co-founder of Biorecro, a Stockholm startup company in the renewable energy field. Biorecro creates negative emissions through the implementation of projects that utilize BECCS – bio-energy with carbon capture … more >>
with Henrik Karlsson, President and CEO of Biorecro AB Too much of the climate debate has focused on the politics of emission reduction targets, while the science is telling us that CO2 emissions need to be capped and restored to safe levels. What if we could literally extract CO2 from … more >>