How Do I Get There From Heremen?

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A real adept ought to have strength, trained attention. No hack designer or advertiser should be able to lock them down in the tenth to ten second range. So stop blaming the medio platforms for your own wallowing in small minded twitter gossip about people. The only way you can do that is by becoming obsessed with the seed of creating something new and rescues people from this malas.

Writer and management consultant Venkatesh Rao talks about Waldenponding with EconTalk host Russ Roberts. Rao coined the term Waldenponding to describe various levels of retreating from technology akin to how Thoreau extolled the virtues of retreating from social contact and leading a quieter life at Walden Pond. Rao argues that the value of Waldenponding is overrated and that extreme Waldenponding is even somewhat immoral. Rao sees online intellectual life as a form of supercomputer, an intellectual ecosystem that produces new knowledge and intellectual discourse. He encourages all of us to contribute to that intellectual ecosystem even when it can mean losing credit for some of our ideas and potentially some of our uniqueness.