This post was sparked by Jofish posting about some of the material he’s preparing for his A-exams. In particular, he’s researching the process of evaluating and measuring qualitative experiences. Examples he used to illustrate difficult-to-measure phenomena included MySpace and texting, where users are not necessarily using these technologies in any way that was originally anticipated […]
Category: people
Mysterious connections
Jofish was visiting last week and we had a fabulous time – at one point, we ended up at the screening of a short film that starred Jofish’s friend’s coworker’s sister. Afterwards, we went out with some of the folks that had worked on the film, and they were asking us what we do, and […]
Multiple social identities
Follow-up thoughts on identity inspired by Jofish’s comment that we each have a spectrum of identities ranging from multiple personal identities to multiple public personas, and an Economist review (subscriber-only unfortunately) of Identity and Violence: The Illusion of Destiny, by Amartya Sen (see the P.S. for a relevant quote from the review). I should have […]
Remixing the private into the social
I really like this concept of identity construction being balanced between our private conception of ourselves, and the public perception of who we are. There are a bunch of obvious consequences that fall out of that split. For instance, when one’s desire to be maintain a certain social identity is strong, it can overwhelm one’s […]
Identity Construction
I finally got around to reading Jofish’s CHI paper on archives a couple days ago, and an observation that really struck me was that one of the goals of archiving is identity construction. In other words, they observed that some people collected books and papers not to read them or use them, but merely to […]
The fundamental interconnectedness of all things
DocBug wrote up a great post, discussing how he has been trying to “translate” the spiritualistic beliefs of some of his friends “into a form that a philosophically-minded but skeptical materialist like myself can accept.” I think this is a fascinating topic, because I’ve been on a similar journey. The more I learn, the more […]
Humility
I have been extraordinarily fortunate in my life to have things generally go as I hope they will. I got to go to the schools I wanted to, I got the jobs I wanted to, I’ve done the activities I wanted to. Things just seem to fall into place for me. Part of it is […]
Living forever
One of the topics that came up in conversation last night with Wes’s crowd was whether people wanted to live forever. Opinions varied; some people felt that without the pressure of death, we would never get around to doing anything at all – procrastination would always win out. Others felt strongly that life was too […]
The Passionate Self
I’ve been thinking a lot about the idea of passion since my post about narcissism. It’s also come up in a variety of places, from conversations I’ve had with friends, to books I’m reading. I don’t know if this is one of those coincidental things, or because the universe is trying to tell me something, […]
Goals in life
I was talking to my friend Wes over the weekend, and he mentioned a talk he’d seen by Charlie Munger, right hand man of Warren Buffett. Munger apparently has a background in economics and law, and mentioned in his talk about how he had benefitted repeatedly from having a broader background than most in his […]
