De problemen van fotografie

Ik vond een krabbel in een van mijn notitieboekjes van 2019:

De problemen van fotografie:

  • Het is te gemakkelijk om een foto te maken.
  • Er zijn te veel foto’s.

Wat vind ik een goede foto:

Een stilstaand moment, uit zijn verband gehaald. Goede foto’s laten veel ruimte voor interpretatie. Daarom denk ik dat het niet nodig is om datum en locatie toe te voegen aan een foto. Ik hou van afbeeldingen voor het beeld, niet voor documentatie.

Instagram laat geen tijd over voor interpretatie. Volgende foto …

Urgent over difficult

How interesting and urgent doing the dishes becomes when you are about to start a creative activity. My mind is highly creative in inventing urgent things before difficult things.

I guess it’s that thing called Resistance.

How often can you hesitate posting something? One other such thing. Good enough is good enough. And here it is.

The joy of reading old books

We are tempted to only read new books. Books on the NY Times best seller list, if you are American.

But consider reading old books. Books that have been around for some time. That have proven their value and are still being recommended.

Not necessarily Greek Philosophers, but also books like Moby Dick (from 1851), One Hundred years of Solitude (1967), Catcher in the Rye (1945), Catch-22 (1961), Alice in Wonderland (1862), The Electric Kool-Aid Acid Test (1968), Meditations (ok that’s old – 170-180 AD), Gödel, Escher, Bach (1979), On Writing (2000), Maus (written 1980-1991), Antifragile (2012).

On Antifragile, the approach to read old books probably much aligns with Nassim Taleb’s conviction to prefer grandmother’s wisdom over the opinions of self-appointed intelligentia. And also take the Lindy effect into account, and you are ensured you can enjoy the read much longer.

Thought of humility for modern day “geniuses” (video)

… genius isn’t the result of the great men that Carlyle proposed. Instead, the genius stands atop the shoulders of those that came before, whose small incremental advances led to the genius’ breakthrough.

…

It’s not brilliance, it’s simply progress “obtained naturally and cumulatively as a consequence of hard work, directed by intuition, literature, and a bit of luck.”

Thought of humility for modern day “geniuses”

… genius isn’t the result of the great men that Carlyle proposed. Instead, the genius stands atop the shoulders of those that came before, whose small incremental advances led to the genius’ breakthrough.

…

It’s not brilliance, it’s simply progress “obtained naturally and cumulatively as a consequence of hard work, directed by intuition, literature, and a bit of luck.”

Taylor Pearson’s illegible margin

Taylor Pearson wrote a great article on the limits and dangers of rationalizing complex phenomena, and the opportunities of illegible ‘fat tail’ margins.

Some other gold nuggets in the article:

  • The joy of reading (and logic of preferring) old books.
  • Follow fingerspitzelgefühl – grandmother’s wisdom, Nassim Taleb, would say instead of modernist rationalizations.
  • A tinkering budget (low downside, high upside) for the things we are exploring that are hard to see.

Push

Reminder to self. Push this one thing, every day. At least once every day. Do this year after year. Long form, short form, that does not matter. It is the consistency that builds the thing.

Pronoia

Pronoia, just learned about this word.

… a person suffering from paranoia feels that persons or entities are conspiring against them, a person experiencing pronoia feels that the world around them conspires to do them good.

Happy suffering.