Latest blog posts:
There’s a weird kind of phenomenon that happens when people use easy-to-fake symbols to try to deceive each other: the symbols become cyclic in their meaning. They flip to mean the opposite of what they once meant, and then they flip back again. Continue reading
This post presents a model for understanding the different ways that people can relate to symbols and their substance. Back in Part 2, I mentioned that, apart from surrogating on symbols, we can use them as symbols, for the indirect benefits we’ll receive from our audience—this post speaks more to that idea. Continue reading
The concepts you most readily use to understand your experiences are determined by the language through which you learned them. And that language has been shaped arbitrarily by your own culture as well as cultures that came before it. Only by consciously avoiding those ready-made concepts can you actually notice the full spectrum of your experience. Continue reading
We need symbols because we need to break down our complex experiences into simple comprehensible parts—both for easy communication with others and for easy comprehension ourselves. Continue reading
Remember that language exists as a mechanism for conveying ideas. If the ideas themselves have been effectively shared, you have no honest reason to continue dwelling on the particular words. If you find yourself failing to share the ideas, you should try using different words. And finally, if you’re using words to cleverly obscure ideas in a way that feels advantageous to you, you’re committing deception and should be called out for it. Continue reading
You should stop committing surrogation whenever and wherever you notice it, but there’s more than one way to do this. Continue reading
(If you haven’t read the Introduction and are wondering what I mean by “symbols,” I recommend you read that first.) Part 1: Surrogation Because we deal in symbols every day, and the substances behind those symbols are often agreed upon … Continue reading
A human’s life is full of symbols. A red heart symbolizes love. A red octagon symbolizes the command to stop. A sideways triangle symbolizes the “play” function of a media device. But it’s not just combinations of colors and shapes … Continue reading
In Parts 1 and 2 of this series, I talked about how ads come with costs, are generally a burden on a happy lifestyle, and should be blocked where possible. I’m confident in the opinions I described there, but this … Continue reading
In my last post, I aimed to show that even if advertisements don’t cause us to spend excessively or unwisely, they are still costly in ways that we don’t often talk about. In this post, I’ll explain why targeted ads … Continue reading
I think about ads a lot. That may be because I work in consumer technology, the medium through which most advertisements are delivered nowadays. Or it may be because I have strong feelings about consumerism, which is really the spirit … Continue reading
The other day, at a conference for work, I overheard a conversation of a kind that I’d heard many times before. It involved three people: the main speaker (whom we’ll call Gossiper), an acquaintance (Listener) and a third person, not … Continue reading
Or, Why you’re not actually bad at remembering people’s names. For a long time I’ve been in the habit of avoiding using certain statements to describe myself, even if they’d have expressed something that I really felt at the time. … Continue reading
Living by myself, I have the opportunity to allocate just about every minute of my non-work time for whatever purpose I want, with very little interruption or distraction that I don’t seek out myself. This allows me to juggle a … Continue reading
In Part 1, I explained why I believe we can understand consumerism—habitual and ever-increasing consumption—more completely by looking at it in the general sense of value consumption rather than the specific sense of monetary spending. In this post, I’ll describe … Continue reading
