Raghav Agrawal

@impactology
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Former Diamond Dealer | Turning research on learning, cognition, and systems into interfaces that reduce confusion, cost and decision stress.

RE: https://mastodon.social/@impactology/116285694499766684

This reminds me, its important to have few true friends and a time and space with them where you can just...BE, especially as for adult men I think.

Where you don't feel status anxiety, of being perceived as less than when I enter a room, in social gatherings, get-togethers

Very gifted writer

I think this is best example of what good writing is, it's not the grammar but rendering and naming an experience we all feel but miss out on framing it precisely

Something that's invisibly but regularly felt and when a writer describes that in simple words, that's good writing.

Also this is the kind of writing that stays on your mind because the perspective it offers is so transformative for living daily, it lingers on your mind longer.

Most beautiful essay I've read so far

https://yearlyblues.substack.com/p/everything-is-a-win-when-the-goal

"Everything is a win when the goal is to experience"

This entire essay reads like an anti-linkedin

That we are so addicted to collecting evidence of our justification to exist, that every experience and emotion felt is judged for it's future importance for us

One takeaway from the essay, you'll start feeling alive (even if temporarily) once you stop comparing and measuring yourself, you'll feel things more deeply

Fixing Language: An Essay on Conceptual Engineering by Herman Cappelen

https://academic.oup.com/book/25598

NDPR review https://ndpr.nd.edu/reviews/fixing-language-an-essay-on-conceptual-engineering/

“Our conceptual repertoire determines not only what beliefs we can have but also what hypotheses we can entertain, what desires we can form, what plans we can make on the basis of such mental states, and accordingly constrains what we can hope to accomplish in the world.”

Fixing Language: An Essay on Conceptual Engineering

Abstract. Fixing Language is a book about ways in which language (and other representational devices) can be defective and improved. In all parts of philosophy

OUP Academic
Visual thinking (atleast the way Stephen describes it for sensemaking) is the act of forcing concepts to reveal and then correcting the boundaries that define them.

So for example In a 2×2:

You must define axes as boundary conditions

Each claim must occupy a region. If it doesn’t fit, contradiction becomes visible

So when you choose a primitive, you are saying: I believe this is the structure of reality for this concept.

You use visual primitives to find where a concept's boundaries are wrong, and redraw them so the concept actually holds what it claims to hold.

So the visual primitive is essentially a boundary-testing instrument. Each primitive proposes a different boundary condition.

2×2 grid : Concept depends on 2 independent dimensions

Spectrum : Concept varies by degree

Venn : Concept is about overlap/intersection

Tree : Concept has hierarchical decomposition

Triangle : Concept has exactly 3 interacting forces

Network : Concept is relational, not categorical

You're redrawing where the concept stops. What gets included shifts. What gets excluded shifts. The relationships to neighboring concepts shift. The whole neighborhood of concepts reorganizes.

Visual Sensemaking is basically about repackaging meaning of words via visuals.

The boundary is the meaning. Where a concept ends is what defines what it is.

Its the boundaries of the containers that give the word its meaning, so repackaging it is no small feat.

Competition means something specific because it excludes things : cooperation, self-improvement, play. Change the boundary and you've changed the concept, not just the label.