Resonant Thoughts
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Resonant Thoughts: Paul Graham On The Rhythm Of Writing
“When writing sounds good, it’s mostly because it has good rhythm. But the rhythm of good writing is not the rhythm of music, or the meter of verse. It’s not so regular. If it were, it wouldn’t be good, because the rhythm of good writing has to match the ideas in it, and ideas have Continue reading
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Resonant Thoughts: Jordan Mechner’s “The Making of Prince of Persia” (2011)
“I’m having trouble preserving that fluidity and realism when I clean it up and stylize the figures” (33). “The unlimited potential has been replaced by the concretereality of what I programmed today” (103). “Level design is a creative process, like screenwriting: you can’t just sit down and put in ten hours at a stretch, you Continue reading
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Resonant Thoughts: Alex Hutchinson’s “The Explorer’s Gene” (2025)
“It turns out that minimizing surprise is equivalent to minimizing entropy, which in turn is equivalent to minimizing another mathematical quantity (borrowed from physics) called free energy. In this way, the goal of minimizing surprise explains both perception and action. We act […] in order to ensure that our predictions become self-fulfilling prophecies” (58). “The Continue reading
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Karl Ove Knausgaard’s “So Much Longing in So Little Space: The Art of Edvard Munch” (2019)
“intuitive knowledge exists, silent wisdom exists, instinctive insight exists, and I believe this unarticulated understanding of the world comprises a much larger part of our self than we usually imagine” (42). “No art is free of morals, for the simple reason that all art entails a set of assessments of reality, and they are always Continue reading
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Resonant Thoughts: Dwarkesh Patel’s “The Scaling Era: An Oral History of AI, 2019–2025” (2025)
“To get real creativity, you need to search through spaces of possibilities and find these hidden gems. That’s what creativity is. Current language models don’t really do that. They’re mimicking the data. They’re mimicking all the human ingenuity they’ve seen from all these internet data, which are originally derived from humans” (29). – Shane Legg, Continue reading
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Resonant Thoughts: Christopher Alexander’s “The Nature of Order” (2002)
“What is order? We know that everything in the world around us is covered by an immense orderliness. We experience order every time we take a walk. The grass, the sky, the leaves on the trees, the flowing water in the river, the windows in the houses along the street–all of it is immensely orderly. Continue reading
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Resonant Thoughts: Anna Wiener’s “Uncanny Valley” (2020)
“Listening to EDM while I worked gave me delusions of grandeur, but it kept me in a rhythm. It was the genre of my generation: the music of video games and computer effects, the music of the twenty-four-hour hustle, the music of proudly selling out. It was decadent and cheaply made, the music of ahistory, Continue reading
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Resonant Thoughts: Nicholas Carr’s “Superbloom” (2025)
“The way we see the social and political environment, the way we create a picture of reality through the welter of messages furnished by our ever more encompassing media, is and always will be refracted by scanty attention, by the poverty of language, by distraction, by unconscious constellations of feeling, by wear and tear, violence, Continue reading
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Resonant Thoughts: Pico Iyer’s “Aflame: Learning from Silence” (2025)
“The point of being here is not to get anything done; only to see what might be worth doing” (16). “There’s no such thing as dead time when everything is alive with possibility” (24). “It’s never possibility that’s not present; only me” (27). “When one keeps quiet, the situation becomes clear” (62). “Leisure is where Continue reading
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Resonant Thoughts: Kathy Willis’s “Good Nature” (2024)
“Our eyes also appear to seek out patterns with a mid-level of fractal complexity .22 Why is this significant? Because evidence suggests that when we view silhouette outlines of natural scenes with this fractal dimension, it triggers greater levels of calming and attention restoration than when we look at the outline shape of other landscape Continue reading
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