“A man sits in his office deciding what stocks to buy. He imagines, not doubt, that he is planning his purchases according to his own judgment. In actual fact his judgment is a mélange of impressions stamped on his mind by outside influences which unconsciously control his thought.”
22 Dec 2024 at 7:56 pm
Propaganda
Edward Bernays
“In theory, every citizen makes up his mind on public questions and matters of private conduct. In practice, if all men had to study for themselves the abstruse economic, political, and ethical data involved in every question, they would find it impossible to come to a conclusion without anything. We have voluntarily agreed to let an invisible government sift the data and high-spot the outstanding issue so that our field of choice shall be narrowed to practical proportions. From our leaders and the media they use to reach the public, we accept the evidence and the demarcation of issues bearing upon public question; from some ethical teacher, be it a minister, a favorite essayist, or merely prevailing opinion, we accept a standardized code of social conduct to which we conform most of the time.”
10 Nov 2024 at 9:44 PM
Propaganda
Edward Bernays
“Always thinking far ahead, his aim was not to urge the buyer to demand the product now, but to transform the buyer’s very world, so that the product must appear to be desirable as if without the prod of salesmanship.”
10 Nov 2024 at 9:26 PM
Propaganda
Edward Bernays
“What impresses is the form of the argument. For Thoreau’s obsession with calculation runs deep. . . . He says: keep calculating, keep weighing. What exactly do I gain, or lose?”
28 Aug 2024 at 9:38 PM
Digital Minimalism
Cal Newport
“UPF is not food, like a banana or a piece of chicken, but rather a separate category of addictive edible substance.”
18 Aug 2024 at 10:00 PM
Ultra-Processed People
Chris van Tulleken
“We should all take responsibility for our diets, but overeating isn’t simply a failure of willpower or discipline. It’s much more insidious than that. Our brains regulate intake subconsciously, using ancient, evolved systems to manage metabolic rate, hunger, and satiety. The energy we pour into producing and processing our food transforms it from a source of nourishment to something more akin to a drug. The highly processed, flavor-engineered foods that dominate our supermarket shelves and commercials easily overwhelm our brain’s capacity to regulate energy balance.”
15 Jul 2024 at 9:37 PM
Burn
Herman Pontzer PhD
“Starting from the principle that the brain must infer the hidden causes of its sensory inputs, we’ve reached a new understanding of why and how our inner universe is populated with everything from coffee cups to colours to causality-ness – things that seem to be properties of an external objective reality, where this seeming-to-be is itself a property of perceptual inference.”
8 Jul 2024 at 9:05 PM
Being You : A New Science of Consciousness
Seth, Anil
“Advertisers don’t like the public sphere, where audiences are relatively small, upsetting controversy takes place, and the settings are not ideal for selling goods. Their preference for entertainment underlies the gradual erosion of the public sphere under systems of commercial media”
8 Jul 2024 at 6:36 PM
Manufacturing Consent
Edward S. Herman
“This was extraordinary. Morita deeply mistrusted customer surveys, and Sony prided itself on never consulting consumers in developing new products. “The public does not know what is possible,” he wrote in his memoirs. “We do.”
30 Apr 2024 at 9:24 PM
Pure Invention
Matt Alt
“How many hours of our youths—and adulthoods—were spent plugged in to various iterations of karaoke machines, Walkmans, and Game Boys? These things were more than the fads of a global consumer society. They had a strange ability to nourish our dreams as they entertained, to deliver and cultivate new fantasies in us.”
16 Apr 2024 at 7:32 AM
Pure Invention
Matt Alt
“But if you make your best effort just to continue your practice with your whole mind and body, without gaining ideas, then whatever you do will be true practice. Just to continue should be your purpose. When you do something, just to do it should be your purpose.”
16 Mar 2024 at 9:56 PM
Zen mind, beginner's mind
Shunryū Suzuki
“Everything is sales. This is usually framed as career advice—no matter what your role in a company is, your ultimate job is to help sales. But it applies to so many things. Everything is sales also means that everyone is trying to craft an image of who they are. The image helps them sell themselves to others. Some are more aggressive than others, but everyone plays the image game, even if only subconsciously. Since they’re crafting the image, it’s not a complete view. There’s a filter. Skills are advertised, flaws are hidden.”
21 Jan 2024 at 9:14 pm
Same as Ever
Morgan Housel
“(Best story wins) … Author Bill Bryson is the same. His books fly off the shelves, which can drive the little-known academics who uncovered the things he writes about crazy. One of his books—The Body: A Guide for Occupants—is basically an anatomy textbook. It has no new information, no discoveries. But it’s so well written—he tells such a good story—that it became an instant New York Times bestseller and The Washington Post’s Book of the Year.”
2 Jan 2024 at 9:12 pm
Same as Ever
Morgan Housel
“the constant reminder that wealth and happiness is a two-part equation: what you have and what you expect\/need. When you realize that each part is equally important, you see that the overwhelming attention we pay to getting more and the negligible attention we put on managing expectations makes little sense, especially because the expectations side can be so much more in your control.”
1 Jan 2024 at 8:17 pm
Same as Ever
Morgan Housel
“Helping these clients required a skill that came easily to me: writing the way I talked, instead of the way we were taught to write in school—and helping them write the way they talked, too. Most people have a problem breaking rules; it happens to be where I soar.”
19 Dec 2023 at 9:43 pm
Tough Titties
Laura Belgray