Isaac Asimov on upgrading our realities, The secret to modern friendship and more
4 new ideas on smarter living
Hello everyone,
Postanly Weekly is a reader-supported smarter living newsletter. To support my work, you can upgrade to a paid subscription for $7 per month or $40 for an entire year. With a modest yearly contribution you’re not only helping keep Postanly Weekly going, you also get free access to Thinking Toolbox (mental models for life) and Mental Wealth Toolbox (practical concepts for smarter decisions).
Help me choose a topic for a new book
I want to turn some of my best posts (at least 100) into chapters of a book you can take with you. I will be expanding them and adding some new insights and research.
Help me choose a topic that appeals to you. Your choice determines the book I will be launching in a few weeks. Thank you.
Isaac Asimov on upgrading our realities and the risk of ignorance
When you think about the meaning of life, you probably don’t think about Isaac Asimov. But this famous scientist had a lot to say about life and its meaning.
In a book proposal for The Meaning of Life edited by Hugh S. Moorhead, 1989, Asimov said, “If all of life were suddenly to disappear from earth and anywhere else it may exist, or if none had ever formed in the first place, I think the Universe would continue to exist without perceptible change. However, it is always possible for an individual to invest his own life with meaning that he can find significant. He can so order his life that he may find as much beauty and wisdom in it as he can, and spread as much of that to others as possible.”
Asimov’s views were shaped by his experiences growing up in Soviet Russia, which was a time of famine, terror, and extreme anti-religious sentiment. Perhaps best known as a science fiction author, Isaac Asimov was also an essayist, biographer, and professor of biochemistry.
With more than 400 million copies of his books in circulation, he is one of the most widely read authors of the 20th century. In addition to writing about why we must make love, not war, and how nothing will end war but education, Asimov wrote about life’s meaning in several different essays.
Asimov is best known for his Robot Series and The Foundation Trilogy. These works helped to shape the way we see artificial intelligence today, with many of them continuing to be influential even 30 years after they were published.
Collective wisdom is not the whole truth
Isaac Asimov thought, “The saddest aspect of life right now is that science gathers knowledge faster than society gathers wisdom.”
He couldn’t be more right. Science, the study of how things work, has made incredible progress over the last few centuries. The rate at which new discoveries are being made today is staggering.
There’s no question that science is a powerful tool for understanding the world around us. However, as science gathers knowledge at an ever-increasing rate, it’s becoming clear that society is not keeping pace.
It takes time for society to absorb scientific knowledge and incorporate it into its collective wisdom. We are slow to upgrade our assumptions and perceptions. We hardly change our subjective beliefs about life and living.
When you think about it, there is no reason for things to be the way they are. Science gathers knowledge at an ever-increasing rate, yet we seem to be no closer to solving major world problems than we were 50 years ago.
It doesn’t take a genius to figure out why this is the case: humanity’s collective wisdom has not kept pace with scientific discoveries. This seems like a problem that should be easy to solve. After all, if knowledge were to become more widely distributed, society would grow wiser.
One way to overcome Asimov’s concern is by challenging our assumptions and thinking critically about what we know and don’t know.
Through this process, we can develop a deeper understanding of how things work and make more informed decisions about our future.
Beware of your window to the world
“Your assumptions are your windows on the world. Scrub them off every once in a while, or the light won’t come in,” Asimov said.
Assumptions are an essential part of any decision-making process. They help us to make sense of the world around us and help us to form a coherent picture of our surroundings.
They are an important tool in our quest for truth and knowledge.
In many cases, however, they can also lead us astray. They are necessarily limited in scope because they are based on our personal experiences.
As such, they may not be able to account for all of the factors at play in a given situation. As a result, we may not see things as they are.
There are two main types of assumptions: implicit and explicit.
Implicit assumptions are unconscious and may not even be recognized by the person making them.
Explicit assumptions, on the other hand, are conscious and can be either negative or positive. The key is to recognize when you’re assuming to adjust your thinking accordingly.
Questions your beliefs, worldviews, perceptions and thinking patterns often. Are they highly subjective or rational? Are they still serving you?
Your assumptions are your windows to the world.
They are the filters you use to perceive and interpret everything you experience. It’s important to realize that your first assumptions about people and situations are not always accurate.
So upgrade them by exposing yourself to new and improved knowledge. Embrace lifelong learning. Be intentional about your self-learning.
“Self-education is, I firmly believe, the only kind of education there is,” says Isaac Asimov.
“My real education, the superstructure, the details, the true architecture, I got out of the public library,” he once said in I. Asimov: A Memoir.
It’s important to keep an open mind when you meet new people and evaluate their actions based on what they say and do and how they look.
To better understand others, it’s helpful to reflect on your own history, values, experiences, and interests. This will help you form more accurate interpretations of them and put yourself in a position to see things from other perspectives.
By being mindful of your perspectives and biases, you can better understand the world and make more informed decisions.
Your fixed notion about the world may be sabotaging your progress. Make mindset upgrade a way of life.
“They won’t listen. Do you know why? Because they have certain fixed notions about the past. Any change would be blasphemy in their eyes, even if it were the truth. They don’t want the truth; they want their traditions,” Asimov said about people with fixed mindsets.
Assumptions are those unspoken rules we make about the world that shape how we react to new experiences and decisions. They’re often invisible, hard to change and can lead us down paths that aren’t necessarily in our best interest.
To become a more intelligent version of yourself, embrace the growth mindset. For a better life, put your assumptions to the test: question almost every decision-making process. Your first thought is usually an assumption.For better life-changing decisions, think beyond first thoughts.
Food for thought
The secret to modern friendship, according to real friends [Vox]
“We had a really clear reason for getting together from the jump: We’re writers, we’re in Philly, we live near each other, and we had flexible schedules so that we could carve out time to see each other. We had a lot of factors setting us up for success. But other than that, our values are aligned. Being a good friend is important to us. I know that you’ve managed to maintain longstanding friendships and I have too. So we both know the value of friendships. But we didn’t set out to become friends. We set out to write together and see where it goes. What I learned writing this book is every friendship needs an “about,” and our “about” was so clear and so compelling from the jump.”
The Importance of Developing and Maintaining Your Social Fitness [The Art of Manliness]
“To assess the state of your social fitness, ask yourself how much you agree with statements like:
I don’t often feel lonely.
I’m happy with my number of friends.
If I had an emergency, there’s someone I could call for help.
If I had a bad day, there’s someone I could talk to about it.
I feel like I can be honest in most of my relationships.
I feel generally supported and loved.
If I need advice on a practical matter, there’s someone I could talk to.
There is at least one person in my life who challenges me and encourages me to grow.
There is at least one person in my life who makes me laugh and helps me have fun.
I’m happy and fulfilled in my romantic relationship.
There is at least one person in my life who knows nearly everything about me.”
What makes people annoying? [The Guardian]
“Annoyance is probably the most widely experienced and least studied of all human emotions,” wrote Joe Palca and Flora Lichtman in their 2010 book, Annoying: The Science of What Bugs Us. “There is no Department of Annoying Studies or annoyingologists.” Many psychologists consider it a subset of anger, rather than a pure emotion in itself, and thus harder to study. “Emotions are sometimes plotted on a chart,” Palca and Lichtman write, “with positive/negative on one axis and arousal/calm on the other.” This method of charting emotions is often called the valence-arousal model.”
4 ideas on smarter living
Renown Silicon Valley VC, Ben Horowitz, on the friends you need to succeed:
“No matter who you are, you need two kinds of friends in your life. The first kind is one you can call when something good happens, and you need someone who will be excited for you. Not a fake excitement veiling envy, but a real excitement. You need someone who will actually be more excited for you than he would be if it had happened to him. The second kind of friend is somebody you can call when things go horribly wrong—when your life is on the line and you only have one phone call.”— The Hard Thing About Hard Things
Thinking habits worth doing:
Thinking for yourself is life’s greatest competitive advantage—you see opportunities others don’t.
Read books you normally ignore
Ask, “Is it objective or subjective truth?”
Meet people with different perspectives in life
Be more aware of conventional beliefs and question them
Cultivate independent-minded friends
Kevin Simler on crony beliefs:
“If we want to be right in the long run, we have to accept that we’ll often be wrong in the short run, and be willing to do the needful thing, i.e., discard questionable beliefs. This may sound vaguely heroic or psychologically difficult, somehow, but it’s not. A meritocracy experiences no anguish in letting go of a misbelief and adopting a better one, even its opposite. ... Crony beliefs, on the other hand, get an entirely different treatment. Since we mostly don’t care whether they’re making accurate predictions, we have little need to seek out criticism for them.”
Tool for life/career
Meco — Read all your awesome newsletters on a single app. Meco is a distraction-free space for reading and discovering newsletters, separate from the inbox. Add your newsletters in seconds and liberate your inbox. Move your newsletters to a space built for reading and declutter your inbox in seconds. Enjoy newsletters in a space designed for reading. Learn More
Work with Postanly. Partner with us here.
Thanks for reading!
Until next week,
Thomas
Medium | Thinking Toolbox | The Write Life | How to Live: Lessons in Stoicism
Postanly Weekly is now a reader-supported publication. To support my work, you can upgrade to a paid subscription for $7 per month or $40 for an entire year. With a modest yearly contribution you’re not only helping keep Postanly Weekly going, you also get free access to Thinking Toolbox (mental models for life) and Mental Wealth Toolbox (practical concepts for smarter decisions).
Re-upping my subscription when it is due next month. Always good stuff . Thanks
I am so delighted to read an essay on Isaac Asimov, my favorite author and one of my heroes! But I was a little disconcerted to read that he was a professor of biology. He was actually a professor of biochemistry, a very different field. I hope you can correct this.