September 2020 Favorites

By Stefan Imhoff
12 min read

Darkness cannot drive out darkness; only light can do that. Hate cannot drive out hate; only love can do that.

—Dr. Martin Luther King, Jr.

Videos

Science & Knowledge

Productivity

History & Culture

Cinema & Film

Philosophy

Politics & Political Theory

Humor

TV Shows

  • The Boys 2 P
  • Lucifer 5 P
  • iZombie 3 4 N
  • Cobra Kai 1 2 N – This was the best TV Show I’ve seen in a long time. Continuing the story of the movie The Karate Kid 34 years later the now much older protagonists meet again. A funny, interesting Drama with a lot of nuance and deep characters. The actors are the original actors from 1984! I can’t wait for season 3.

Movies

Music

Podcasts

Books

Articles

Inspiration

Stuff & Things

  • Obsidian 0.9.1 – A new graph view which is fantastic. It allows seeing notes, tags, files, connections, and more.
  • NeuraCache – A cool software to learn Flashcards imported from a lot of systems with the Spaced Repetition method.
  • Airr – Highlight podcasts – An app to highlight, add notes, or quote a Podcast.
  • OwlTail – A cool Podcast Player that allows following specific people and find interviews with them or finding related people.
  • RemNote – Another nice note-taking app, including spaced-repetition learning.
  • Ancient Earth – Enter a city name and view its position on the globe over the last few hundred million years.

People

  • Ayishat Akanbi – Nigerian-British fashion stylist, author, cultural commentator, and photographer. Her Tweets are like poetry, but each a truth bomb.
  • Sönke Ahrens – Author of the book How to Take Smart Notes. He is Professor and works at the University of Hamburg
  • Konstantin Kisin – Russian-British comedian. He is constantly pushing back against “woke” culture and co-presenter of the show TRIGGERnometry, a YouTube Channel and Podcast.

Quotes

This life’s hard, but it’s harder if you’re stupid.

—George V. Higgins, The Friends of Eddie Coyle

We have spent $15 trillion fighting poverty since 1965, and we are currently spending $1 trillion a year—an amount equal to about $22,000 per poor person or $88,000 for a family of four. Yet our poverty rate today (nearly 16 percent) is higher than it was in 1965 (14 percent)! If there has been a war on poverty, poverty won. These programs are destroying the culture of the recipient communities. They are replacing a culture of self-reliance and self-help with a culture of dependency. To put it bluntly, we are paying young women to have children out of wedlock. We are paying them to be unemployed. And we are paying them to remain poor. What is more, the welfare state appeals especially to those in near-poverty, promising a wide range of non-cash benefits it’s in exchange for only one thing: a low income.

—John Goodman, The War on Poverty at 50, 01.08.2014

If you’re not actively against murder, starvation, and rape it doesn’t mean you support them. So the idea that “not being racist”, instead of anti-racist is akin to racism—is a self-indulgent attack on reason.

You can’t think clearly if you are imprisoned by the fear of who might agree with you.

I’ve never needed to agree with all of someone’s positions to like them. At this point, I can respect anyone who is at least thinking instead of regurgitating.

If one were to attempt to identify a single problematic aspect of human reasoning that deserves attention above all others, the confirmation bias would have to be among the candidates for consideration.

—Raymond S. Nickerson, ConfirmationBias: A Ubiquitous Phenomenon in Many Guises (1998), 175-220

What man really fears is not so much extinction, but extinction with insignificance.

—Ernest Becker

Creativity is just connecting things. When you ask creative people how they did something, they feel a little guilty because they didn’t really do it, they just saw something.

—Steve Jobs

The one who does the work does the learning.

—Terry Doyle, Helping Students Learn in a Learner-Centered Environment

People tend to assess the relative importance of issues by ease with which they are retrieved from memory, is largely determined by the extent of coverage in the media.

—Daniel Kahneman, Thinking, Fast and Slow

Almost every activist I have ever met, whether deliberately or, more likely, unknowingly, exaggerates the problem to which they have dedicated themselves.

—Hans Rosling, Factfulness

Activism is a way for useless people to feel important, even if the consequences of their activism are counterproductive for those they claim to be helping and damaging to the fabric of society as a whole.

—Thomas Sowell