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"Human beings, who are almost unique in having the ability to learn from the experience of others, are also remarkable for their apparent disinclination to do so."

"Time is an illusion. Lunchtime doubly so."
“A common mistake that people make when trying to design something completely foolproof is to underestimate the ingenuity of complete fools.”

“I may not have gone where I intended to go, but I think I have ended up where I needed to be.”
“Let's think the unthinkable, let's do the undoable. Let us prepare to grapple with the ineffable itself, and see if we may not eff it after all.”

“I'd take the awe of understanding over the awe of ignorance any day.”
"To summarize: it is a well-known fact that those people who must want to rule people are, ipso facto, those least suited to do it.
To summarize the summary: anyone who is capable of getting themselves made President should on no account be allowed to do the job.”

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More from @jposhaughnessy

Jan 17
1/ Our team at @InfiniteL88ps wanted to experiment with the NFT marketplace in order to get a better understanding of how it worked and see if the online auction pace was similar to what we see offline.

We commissioned the artist @cernicageanina to produce the artwork 👇🏻
2/ Our hypothesis was that an NFT that "unlocked" a benefit would be more highly valued than one that didn't, so we included the opportunity to either co-host an @InfiniteL88ps with me or choose a guest.

As far as the behaviour of the auction, we found it *did* mimic that of
3/ auctions conducted IRL. The price stayed pretty stable until the last half hour, when @vtslkshk watched as the price screamed higher, with the winning bidder @dineshraju paying WETH 9.0 or approximately $36,543.78 $USD at the time of the sale.
Read 25 tweets
Jan 15
1/ “A good magic trick forces the spectator to tell a story that arrives at an impossible conclusion, and the clearer the story is, the better.”
~@DerrenBrown
The first job I ever got paid to do was that of a professional magician. I’d loved magic since my early childhood
2/ and badgered my mother to take me to the Eagle Magic Store in Minneapolis almost every Saturday, where I would linger for hours and bug adult magicians to teach me some of the tricks of the trade. Unlike many of my friends who had posters of their favorite bands or
3/ Farrah Fawcett on their walls, I had Harry Houdini. I was fascinated with the ability to create illusions that made people gasp in delight. I started using two books that my dad had given me (which I think my grandfather gave to *him*) and learned as many effects with cards
Read 19 tweets
Jan 14
1/ Recorded a great conversation with @RickDoblin, the Founder and Executive Director of @MAPS, the Multidisciplinary Association for Psychedelic Studies. We were joined by Amy Emerson, the CEO of the MAPS Public Benefit Corporation (MAPS PBC), a wholly-owned subsidiary of @MAPS
2/ We had a broad ranging discussion about the potential benefits of psychedelics in treating PTSD; depression; alcoholism and many other conditions that have challenged doctors and have been notoriously difficult for therapists to help patients find lasting recoveries.
3/ We also discussed the history of why governments and other authorities vilified psychedelics through a sustained propaganda effort that still has effects on people's attitudes to this very day. There are major breakthroughs occurring regularly in research trials conducted
Read 5 tweets
Jan 1
“The ordinary man places his life's happiness in things external to him, in property, rank, wife and children, friends, society, and the like, so that when he loses them or finds them disappointing, the foundation of his happiness is destroyed.”
~Arthur Schopenhauer
In his book "Happy: Why More or Less Everything is Absolutely Fine," @DerrenBrown writes "The vital changes to our happiness do not come from outside circumstances, however appealing they might seem." and our failure to understand this leads many to mount the hedonic treadmill.
He illustrates how many of our desires--things we think will make us happy--are actually chased in order to impress other people, thinking that the approval of these 'other people,' many of whom we don't even know, will lead to happiness for ourselves.
Read 24 tweets
Dec 18, 2021
1/ A fun look at the power of placebos

Perhaps we just keep rediscovering ancient truths, these two quotes come from the Bhagavad Gita

“You are what you believe in. You become that which you believe you can become”

“Man is made by his belief. As he believes, so he is”
2/ The Bhagavad Gita was written circa 150 B.C.E. (much like "The Tao Te Ching, we really don't know much about when or who actually wrote it) and flash forward to today, here's a quote from @DerrenBrown's book "Happy: Why More or Less Everything is Absolutely Fine"
3/ "We are, each of us, a product of the stories we tell ourselves."

And these stories can be manipulated, either consciously or unconsciously, by both ourselves AND others. I think one of the reasons why placebos and propaganda work is because of this universal feature
Read 4 tweets
Dec 9, 2021
1/ On stories: This painting, along with my explanation of it and the artist who painted it was the genesis of @trengriffin's idea to do a story and their lessons episode of @InfiniteL88ps with the 2 of us. Tren's stories were so good, we never got to this one, so here it is:
2/ Should come as no surprise that first @trengriffin but then @rorysutherland as well wanted to know about this painting, so I told them the story of how we came to buy it:
There's also a story that goes with the painting. We met Anne through artists friends here in NYC.
3/ When we visited her studio, she was quite ill with pancreatic cancer and broke. She begged us to buy a work and this was the painting she had just finished working on. I said "how about that one?" She replied that it might be her last work and she wanted to live with it for
Read 23 tweets

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