Writing the Future
Tiago Forte, writing in Building a Second Brain, has a nifty name for individual pieces of your work: intermediate packets. The idea here has two parts. One is that you can break down a large project into smaller, more manageable chunks. Writing a 50,000 word book might sound daunting. Writing 50 pieces of 1000 words …
A term I hadn’t heard of before: agnotology. Coined in 1992 by Stanford University professor Robert N. Proctor and linguist Iain Boal, is the study of culturally induced ignorance or doubt, often used to sell products, influence opinion, or win favour. This field examines how ignorance is manufactured and maintained, particularly through the dissemination of …
In an article about Gregory Bateson entitled Communication is Sacred, Nora Bateson discusses the concept of “schismogenesis.” She describes it as a technique for exaggerating and omitting information to distort communication, the effect of which is to destroy trust and relationships. Gregory Bateson used it in the WWII fight against fascism, but as Nora points …
Andrew Chen, a partner at Andreessen Horowitz, once said something to the effect that “writing is the most scalable networking activity.” The phrasing stuck with me because I think it might be uniquely true of writing over other forms of expression. Writing can be shared across both time and space. It is the easiest form …
The Zeigarnik effect, named after psychologist Bluma Zeigarnik, describes the phenomenon where people remember unfinished or interrupted tasks better than completed ones. This effect, observed by Zeigarnik in 1927, suggests that incomplete tasks create a cognitive tension that interferes with memory retention until the task is completed. In other words, your to do list takes …