psteitz

The study does not appear to be longitudinal, so what it is showing is association, not causality. It could actually be foreboding a kind of "rich get richer, poor get poorer" spiral as the "cognitively advantaged" offload less, dampening the (undemonstrated) impact on their critical thinking skills.

Beautiful post, which I had not seen. Many thanks for (re-)posting. I often use the "seems critical now" vs "will be important in the future" test and marvel at how crazy different these are. As I get older, I seem to be getting better at telling the difference. The consequence of this attitude is that you have to get used to taking a lot of immediate flack for ignoring transitory bullshit.

I love the reference to children and their helpfulness in bullshit-shedding. I am reminded of one of my favorite quotes, from a somewhat sick bird who nonetheless really got the value of both time with children and avoiding bullshit:

"A man's maturity consists in his finding, once again, the seriousness that he had as a child at play" -Friedrich Nietzsche

Somewhat comical that the post is basically an ad.

I use Feedly, which is more a scraper, but can be pointed at RSS sources.

+1 And even today, regardless of software stack, tooling, etc the problem of silo-ed development and limited understanding of the big picture in large systems is still very much alive. Getting shared understanding of the ideas embodied in complex systems with lots of little teams is still a challenge and always will be.

Exactly. The key is focus which is not the same thing as organization or just "having one conversation."

I agree with the main point here, but one thing that has always puzzled me is how to think about what might be called deep collaborative work. Most meetings, especially the status-y kind, are manifestly not "deep" but some of the most intense work that I have ever done has been with one or a small handful of collaborators.

This is a hard. Books that made me a better thinker have to be the hard ones / ones that made me change. Top two would be

Prolegomena to Any Future Metaphysics, Immanuel Kant. Supposedly more accessible version of Critique of Pure Reason but still very hard and mind-bending for me at least. Not just philosophy was easier after wrestling with this content.

The Structure of Scientific Revolutions, Tomas Kuhn. Made me self-aware about what scientific thinking actually is.