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Jay Gidwitz

Artist / Photographer

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Balaji Srinivasan

January 25, 2022 By Jay Gidwitz

What’s on the Other Side of a Black Hole?

April 20, 2020 By Jay Gidwitz

An Unordered Collection of Talks by Rogue & Contrarian Thinkers

July 28, 2018 By Jay Gidwitz

Some Contrarian Thinkers to Make You Question Everything (and Turn Your World Upside Down).

A collection of videos, interviews, and talks by rogue scientists, philosophers, artists, geniuses, and titans-of-industry to make you see the world with new eyes.

Naval Ravikant

More: https://medium.com/@noahmadden/navalism-quotes-perceptions-by-naval-ravikant-a5fd60ac5788

Yuval Noah Harari

More: Sapiens

Homo Deus

21 Lessons for the 21st Century

Derek Sivers

https://sivers.org/file/2015-12-DerekSivers-TimFerriss.mp3

More: Anything You Want

Chris Sacca

Silicon Valley has an empathy problem.

https://rss.art19.com/episodes/8a26b2f5-7db0-403c-ad49-b15b5c312adc.mp3

(via https://tim.blog/2015/05/30/chris-sacca/)

Chris Sacca Book Recommendations

Nassim Nicholas Taleb

More: Anti-Fragile

Alexis Ohanian

More: Without Their Permission

John Taylor Gatto

Philip K. Dick

More: Books

Movies

Chris Voss

More: Never Split the Difference

Jordan Peterson


More: 12 Rules for Life: An Antidote to Chaos

Robert Anton Wilson

More: Prometheus Rising

& More: Robert Anton Wilson Explains Everything (or Old Bob Exposes His Ignorance)

Niel Gaiman

Daniel Kahneman

More: Thinking Fast, and Slow

Invisibilia

Scott Adams

Don’t Follow Your Passion:

http://blog.dilbert.com/2013/02/21/follow-your-passion/

Scott Adams

How to Learn

Josh Waitzkin

https://rss.art19.com/episodes/f4ed4dad-2631-4a72-888c-7daac8cfe7fa.mp3

https://rss.art19.com/episodes/cf652463-9388-413e-a278-a108b29b8e2b.mp3

Josh Waitzkin, The Prodigy Returns

More: The Art of Learning

The Titans

Peter Thiel

More: Zero to One

Marc Andreessen

More: Marc Andreessen Book Recommendations

Ben Horowitz

More: The Hard Thing About Hard Things

Charlie Munger

More: Poor Charlie’s Almanack

Ray Dalio

More: Principles

How to Live Without Irony

November 30, 2012 By Jay Gidwitz

I, too, exhibit ironic tendencies. For example, I find it difficult to give sincere gifts. Instead, I often give what in the past would have been accepted only at a White Elephant gift exchange: a kitschy painting from a thrift store, a coffee mug with flashy images of “Texas, the Lone Star State,” plastic Mexican wrestler figures. Good for a chuckle in the moment, but worth little in the long term. Something about the responsibility of choosing a personal, meaningful gift for a friend feels too intimate, too momentous. I somehow cannot bear the thought of a friend disliking a gift I’d chosen with sincerity. The simple act of noticing my self-defensive behavior has made me think deeply about how potentially toxic ironic posturing could be.

First, it signals a deep aversion to risk. As a function of fear and pre-emptive shame, ironic living bespeaks cultural numbness, resignation and defeat. If life has become merely a clutter of kitsch objects, an endless series of sarcastic jokes and pop references, a competition to see who can care the least (or, at minimum, a performance of such a competition), it seems we’ve made a collective misstep. Could this be the cause of our emptiness and existential malaise? Or a symptom?

Throughout history, irony has served useful purposes, like providing a rhetorical outlet for unspoken societal tensions. But our contemporary ironic mode is somehow deeper; it has leaked from the realm of rhetoric into life itself. This ironic ethos can lead to a vacuity and vapidity of the individual and collective psyche. Historically, vacuums eventually have been filled by something — more often than not, a hazardous something. Fundamentalists are never ironists; dictators are never ironists; people who move things in the political landscape, regardless of the sides they choose, are never ironists.

Where can we find other examples of nonironic living? What does it look like? Nonironic models include very young children, elderly people, deeply religious people, people with severe mental or physical disabilities, people who have suffered, and those from economically or politically challenged places where seriousness is the governing state of mind. My friend Robert Pogue Harrison put it this way in a recent conversation: “Wherever the real imposes itself, it tends to dissipate the fogs of irony.”

Observe a 4-year-old child going through her daily life. You will not find the slightest bit of irony in her behavior. She has not, so to speak, taken on the veil of irony. She likes what she likes and declares it without dissimulation. She is not particularly conscious of the scrutiny of others. She does not hide behind indirect language. The most pure nonironic models in life, however, are to be found in nature: animals and plants are exempt from irony, which exists only where the human dwells.

http://opinionator.blogs.nytimes.com/2012/11/17/how-to-live-without-irony/

Judicial Surrealism

July 9, 2011 By Jay Gidwitz Leave a Comment

Awesome. The surreality of the judicial branch.
This is why it’s better to have people as judges rather than, say, purple-assed baboons with a psychic interpreting to rulings. Otherwise it would be weird. Right? Right?

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All images Copyright © 2023 Jay Gidwitz Art. All rights reserved. Site design by Studio Issa.

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