Little Book of Lessons

Lessons are affordance-shaped ideas. They’re ideas which help us to understand and utilize the affordances in our lives. See My Principles, Good Ideas.

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• Everything is made better with collaborators (re: collaborative circles)

• Some things are not well suited to book-learning, especially things related to the mind

  “But if a teacher were to go back to the whole group and report all the advice dispensed in a day’s worth of interviews, the students would most likely become quite confused and probably think the teacher had become unhinged. Advice given to one student is exactly contrary to what another student needs to do, and the sum of all the advice would be a conflicting mishmash of confusion. This is why I say that the jhanas don’t really lend themselves to book learning.” — Leigh Brasington, Right Concentration

• Classrooms should be playgrounds

• By correcting a child, you stifle their ability to correct themselves through observation

• In life, conclusion is failure. You shouldn’t bring things to their logical conclusion. You should continue playing. Any conclusion should support an existing living system which does not conclude.

• Don’t ever speak on anyone’s behalf, ever.

• The papaya rule. If any conflict ever escalates over text, yell PAPAYA, and phone call.

• The high return activity of raising other’s aspirations — https://marginalrevolution.com/marginalrevolution/2018/10/high-return-activity-raising-others-aspirations.html

• The best ideas only need the minimum amount of execution to succeed.

On Institutions

• Institutions of tolerance form where people are almost FORCED to be tolerant by strong incentives. The institutions then embed that tolerance within, as they seek to justify their own actions within institutional frameworks.

“So, where do institutions of tolerance emerge? Combining the historical accounts, the fieldwork, and the data, it became clear that such institutions develop in very specific places, where two conditions were satisfied. First, Hindus and Muslims needed to have incentives to work together: for example, engaging in business relationships that complemented each other, rather than competed against one another. Second, this complementarity had to be robust: it had to be difficult for one group to replicate or simply steal the source of the others’ complementarity.

One important set of examples of these were ports — like Mahatma Gandhi’s own hometown, Porbandar — that had traded to the distant Middle East during the medieval period. For one month a year, for close to a thousand years, Mecca had been one of the largest markets in the world during the Hajj — and one had to be Muslim to go to Mecca. This gave Muslims in ports — in India, but also on the African coasts, the Malay peninsula, and beyond — a strong advantage in overseas trade and shipping. And, yet, this advantage nonetheless benefited the communities they connected by sail.

Ports emerged at natural harbors along India’s medieval coasts to accommodate these trading relationships. These ports also witnessed not just the emergence of rules but also beliefs and organizations that supported trade, inter-group trust, and religious tolerance. So much so, that even three centuries later — after Muslim trade advantages had ended due to European colonial interventions, and many of the ports themselves had silted up and become inaccessible to trade — this legacy of beliefs, norms, and organizations continued to shape the way people interacted with one another. The institutions of peace and tolerance outlived the economic incentives that had once sustained them.”

On Guilt

https://replacingguilt.com/toc/

On Good Argumentation + Good Replies + Good Faith Conversation

https://twitter.com/irondavy/status/1474164914847510542?s=20

• Morality is a reflex, not a set of abstractions.

• You should only be working for people you admire.

On Letters of Recommendation

See Nailing Your Letters of Recommendation — full thread by Dr. Arianna Long on how to make your LORs dramatically more impactful.

Next Steps

• Expand this into a publishable essay — what are lessons? Why do they matter?
• Add more lessons as they surface from other notes
• Connect: lessons are affordance-shaped ideas — thread this into My Principles