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Surprise meUnfolding RealmSnackables

🧠 Why Aren't Smart People Happier?

Don't be misled by the title — intelligent readers will already sense it's the wrong question to ask. Instead, strap in for a wide-ranging, well-read essay that's basically an attack on the concept of intelligence itself, which the author sees as a category error: we equate intelligence wi

16 September 2022 · 1 minute

Why aren't smart people happier?

experimental-history.com

Don't be misled by the title — intelligent readers will already sense it's the wrong question to ask. Instead, strap in for a wide-ranging, well-read essay that's basically an attack on the concept of intelligence itself, which the author sees as a category error: we equate intelligence with solving tightly-specified problems, and that's the wrong way to think about it. By the end I wanted to give him a hug.

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Replies from signed-in readers. They open in their own space, so you can sit with the piece first.

Keep reading

Nearby on the shelf.

Surprise meWild Margin

🗞️ The Myth of the Informed Citizen

Nicholas Carr traces a recurring fantasy of modern life: that each new communication technology, from the telegraph to the internet, would produce wiser citizens and healthier democracies — and how each expansion of information instead bred new forms of confusion and overload. At its centr

Grokkist Press · 1 min

GroundedSoma Isles

🎨 Sculpting with Tree Sap and Time

A 15-minute documentary following Kyoto artist Mine Tanigawa as she creates sculptures from urushi lacquer, a material used in Japan for over 7,000 years. Less a 'making of' than a portrait of attention: raw tree sap transformed through layer upon layer of colour, polishing and curing, eac

Grokkist Press · 1 min

GroundedEntangled Vale

👁️ Iris Murdoch and Love as a Way of Seeing

Matthew Crawford revisits Iris Murdoch as a philosopher pushing back against thin, hyper-rational models of human life. For Murdoch, morality isn't mainly abstract reasoning but attention — the difficult practice of seeing the world, other people and oneself more clearly. Her radical claim

Grokkist Press · 1 min