Category: Commonplace

Quotes, art, questions, videos, podcasts, music, and whatever else inspires.

How Description Leads to Understanding

Describing something with accuracy forces you to learn more about it. In this way, description can be a tool for learning.

Accurate description requires the following:

  1. Observation
  2. Curiosity about what you are witnessing
  3. Suspending assumptions about cause and effect

It can be difficult to stick with describing something completely and accurately. It’s hard to overcome the tendency to draw conclusions based on partial information or to leave assumptions unexplored.

— How Description Leads to Understanding // Farnam Street

Runaway Self-Hatred

“A degree of regret may sometimes be helpful: it can help us to take stock of errors and avoid the worst of the pitfalls next time. But runaway self-hatred serves no useful purpose whatsoever; it is, in its masochistic way, an indulgence we can’t afford.

We may be foolish, but this doesn’t single us out as particularly awful or unusual, it only confirms that we belong to the human race, a fact for which we deserve limitless sympathy and compassion.”