Category: personal AnGoL

“(He) spread his influence across the country and around the world through a combination of religious conviction, commanding stage presence and shrewd use of radio, television and advanced communication technologies.” This could have been written about Jordan Peterson. The language echoes the tens of thousands, perhaps hundreds of thousands of words, that have been devoted to the man — ranging from fawning adoration to critical dismissals — since his rise to public prominence starting in 2016 when he decla

Source: I was Jordan Peterson’s strongest supporter. Now I think he’s dangerous | The Star

If history is any guide, a dominant Netflix doesn’t automatically equal a TV landscape devoid of choice, for either makers or consumers of television. When NBC was at its Must-See TV peak in the 1980s and ’90s, the network crushed its rivals in the ratings and had its pick of top talent, all of whom wanted to be on the same channel as Cheers, Seinfeld, L.A. Law, and ER. But the other networks still managed to launch hits and make plenty of money even as NBC thrived. While Netflix has one advantage NBC never had — unlimited shelf space, since there are no time slots in streaming — even it can’t afford to hire every good development executive or do a deal with every smart writer with a good idea. Scale makes sense for Netflix, but there’s no reason to think a more boutique approach can’t continue to work for established brands such as FX and HBO — particularly since both of those networks are part of giant conglomerates.

Source: The Netflix Binge Factory

When genius is considered circumstantial, it becomes contingent — precarious, rare, and magical. Nothing becomes predictable: genius is a river, and to ride it, we must build a vessel specific to the circumstances we find it in. For me, this means I will not know if the conditions for Lohengrin truly came together until the production opens this coming summer. All I can do is endeavor to use everything I’ve learned and experienced to perceive how the circumstances are speaking, and to make the passage as fa

Source: Genius as Circumstance – Los Angeles Review of Books

We started by writing down values that we and our readers try to incorporate into our own lives and our own learning. In no time, we had several dozen listed in our notebook: “Live a meaningful life,” “make constant progress,” ”be open to change,” and “understand reality” were just a few. Next, we grouped together values that had a similar thread. Some fit together nicely, others could belong to multiple groups, and some stood alone. After some lively debate and deliberation, we narrowed them all down to f

Source: Farnam Street Principles

Over many extended field visits, Hawkes and her colleagues kept track of how much food a wide sample of Hadza community members were bringing home. She says that when they tracked the success rates of individual men, “they almost always failed to get a big animal.” They found that the average hunter went out pretty much every day and was successful on exactly 3.4 percent of those excursions. That meant that, in this society at least, the hunting hypothesis seemed way off the mark. If people here were depend
Over many extended field visits, Hawkes and her colleagues kept track of how much food a wide sample of Hadza community members were bringing home. She says that when they tracked the success rates of individual men, “they almost always failed to get a big animal.” They found that the average hunter went out pretty much every day and was successful on exactly 3.4 percent of those excursions. That meant that, in this society at least, the hunting hypothesis seemed way off the mark. If people here were depending on wild meat to survive, they would starve.
So if dad wasn’t bringing home the bacon, who was? After spending a lot of time with the women on their daily foraging trips, the researchers were surprised to discover that the women, both young and old, were providing the majority of calories to their families and group-mates.
Mostly, they were digging tubers, which are deeply buried and hard to extract. The success of a mother at gathering these tubers correlated with the growth of her child. But something else surprising happened once mom had a second baby: That original relationship went away and a new correlation emerged with the amount of food their grandmother was gathering.

Source: For Human Evolution, Root-Gathering Grandmas May Have Been More Important Than Man The Hunter : Goats and Soda : NPR

And maybe most uncomfortably, the film surfaces why. There’s a clip near the end of the film in which a talking head on Fox News decries Rogers and the “narcissistic society he gave birth to.” I briefly expected the audience at my screening to riot, because it was such a plainly stupid response to what we’d just seen. Fred Rogers believed in radical kindness. Focus Features But it’s also a good example of the confusion that marks public discourse today, in which kindness far too often is decried as weakness

Source: Won’t You Be My Neighbor review: a subversive Fred Rogers documentary – Vox

So the main goal of Won’t You Be My Neighbor is to convince us that while kindness and empathy are in short supply today, it need not be that way. Through interviews with Rogers’s close collaborators and friends (his wife, several performers, and the head of the Fred Rogers Center), archival footage (some of it rare), and interstitial animated segments, the film builds out a portrait of a man who saw in the new technology of television an opportunity to communicate with a generation of children and tell the

Source: Won’t You Be My Neighbor review: a subversive Fred Rogers documentary – Vox

The Pygmalion effect is a psychological phenomenon wherein high expectations lead to improved performance in a given area. Its name comes from the story of Pygmalion, a mythical Greek sculptor. Pygmalion carved a statue of a woman and then became enamored with it. Unable to love a human, Pygmalion appealed to Aphrodite, the goddess of love. She took pity and brought the statue to life. The couple married and went on to have a daughter, Paphos.

Source: The Pygmalion Effect: Proving Them Right

The Snowball Principle And How To Have It All The Snowball Principle is the idea that we can have it all if we’re willing to:

1. Get the fundamentals right FIRST and make them non-negotiable.
2. Have Big, Hairy, Audacious Goals (BHAGS), but be patient with them.
3. Replace all-or-nothing sprints with a marathon mentality.

Source: An Ambitious Person’s Brutally Honest Take On Work-Life Balance

Thanks to new text-mining techniques, this has now been done. Researchers at the University of Vermont’s Computational Story Lab have analysed over 1,700 English novels to reveal six basic story types – you could call them archetypes – that form the building blocks for more complex stories. They are:
1. Rags to riches – a steady rise from bad to good fortune
2. Riches to rags – a fall from good to bad, a tragedy
3. Icarus – a rise then a fall in fortune
4. Oedipus – a fall, a rise then a fall again
5. Cinderella – rise, fall, rise
6. Man in a hole – fall, rise

Source: BBC – Culture – Every story in the world has one of these six basic plots