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Ben Davidow
Goodreads Author
Member Since
October 2012
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Uncaged: Top Activists Share Their Wisdom on Effective Farm Animal Advocacy
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published
2013
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* Note: these are all the books on Goodreads for this author. To add more, click here.
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“If the words 'life, liberty, and the pursuit of happiness' don't include the right to experiment with your own consciousness, then the Declaration of Independence isn't worth the hemp it was written on.”
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“The industrial revolution needed people who could predictably produce results in a standardized way, so the education system provided. Not so long ago, if you wanted to learn anything, you had to go find a building with good books and smart people willing to teach what was in those books. If you were allowed, you had better sit down and shut up and take it as it was in order to have a chance at a future. It was a great system at the time and it really brought us a lot, but the world has changed and now we’re stuck with a rigid and inflexible school system that produces more bricks for a wall that’s no longer being built. A giant amount of human potential is being wasted away in classrooms that are only helpful to those who happen to be the sit-down-take-notes kind of learners. Taking tests that test how good we are at taking tests. Preparing for life instead of living it. Sitting down for six to eight hours a day. Being judged on the ability to conform to a system. A disempowering system that teaches us to always strive for some future state or circumstance to validate our being.”
― MindLift: Mental Fitness for the Modern Mind
― MindLift: Mental Fitness for the Modern Mind
“Here we are today, and bitcoin is taking on the entire banking system, the most powerful industry in the world. Guess what? Bitcoin’s going to win. It’s going to win for a very simple reason. It’s not just going to win because it’s better. It’s not just going to win because the banking system is run by gangsters, crooks, and some of the most immoral empty suits in the world. It’s not just going to win because the banking system has spent the last 50 years delivering just two consumer innovations — ATMs and credit cards — and then spent the rest of the time trying to figure out how to fleece you. It’s going to win because it’s open. In a world of tinkers, of experimenters, of makers, open wins. The reason it wins is that it allows innovation to flourish at the edges.”
― The Internet of Money
― The Internet of Money
“IT WAS AT THIS POINT that the idea of “shaking the snow globe,” as one neuroscientist described the psychedelic experience, came to seem more attractive to me than frightening, though it was still that too. After more than half a century of its more or less constant companionship, one’s self—this ever-present voice in the head, this ceaselessly commenting, interpreting, labeling, defending I—becomes perhaps a little too familiar. I’m not talking about anything as deep as self-knowledge here. No, just about how, over time, we tend to optimize and conventionalize our responses to whatever life brings. Each of us develops our shorthand ways of slotting and processing everyday experiences and solving problems, and while this is no doubt adaptive—it helps us get the job done with a minimum of fuss—eventually it becomes rote. It dulls us. The muscles of attention atrophy.”
― How to Change Your Mind: What the New Science of Psychedelics Teaches Us About Consciousness, Dying, Addiction, Depression, and Transcendence
― How to Change Your Mind: What the New Science of Psychedelics Teaches Us About Consciousness, Dying, Addiction, Depression, and Transcendence
“Habits are undeniably useful tools, relieving us of the need to run a complex mental operation every time we’re confronted with a new task or situation. Yet they also relieve us of the need to stay awake to the world: to attend, feel, think, and then act in a deliberate manner. (That is, from freedom rather than compulsion.) If you need to be reminded how completely mental habit blinds us to experience, just take a trip to an unfamiliar country. Suddenly you wake up! And the algorithms of everyday life all but start over, as if from scratch. This is why the various travel metaphors for the psychedelic experience are so apt. The efficiencies of the adult mind, useful as they are, blind us to the present moment. We’re constantly jumping ahead to the next thing. We approach experience much as an artificial intelligence (AI) program does, with our brains continually translating the data of the present into the terms of the past, reaching back in time for the relevant experience, and then using that to make its best guess as to how to predict and navigate the future. One of the things that commends travel, art, nature, work, and certain drugs to us is the way these experiences, at their best, block every mental path forward and back, immersing us in the flow of a present that is literally wonderful—wonder being the by-product of precisely the kind of unencumbered first sight, or virginal noticing, to which the adult brain has closed itself. (It’s so inefficient!) Alas, most of the time I inhabit a near-future tense, my psychic thermostat set to a low simmer of anticipation and, too often, worry. The good thing is I’m seldom surprised. The bad thing is I’m seldom surprised.”
― How to Change Your Mind: What the New Science of Psychedelics Teaches Us About Consciousness, Dying, Addiction, Depression, and Transcendence
― How to Change Your Mind: What the New Science of Psychedelics Teaches Us About Consciousness, Dying, Addiction, Depression, and Transcendence
LessWrong
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Users of Less Wrong, a community blog dedicated to refining the art of human rationality.
End Suffering
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A group to read books focused on ending suffering and pain
Effective Altruists
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People interested in reading books relating to Effective Altruism.
Meat Market: Animals, Ethics, & Money
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— last activity Jul 05, 2015 01:45PM
Starting on December 1st and lasting through December 21st, Erik Marcus will lead a discussion of his book Meat Market: Animals, Ethics, & Money. We' ...more
