Henrik Karlsson @phokarlsson Twitter profile

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Henrik Karlsson

1 year

I don’t know anything about dating, have barely ever done it. But I am married to the coolest person I’ve ever met. So some friends asked for advice on finding someone like that, and I said, LOL why not. An essay

Looking for Alice

Not dating

www.henrikkarlsson.xyz

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Henrik Karlsson

@phokarlsson

4 months

Graph of decision quality among professional Go players. A sudden increase after AlphaGo. It is not only because they are learning from the AI. Players are suddenly inventing new moves at a faster rate too!

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Henrik Karlsson

@phokarlsson

11 days

the world is fractal and gets richer the deeper you pay attention

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Henrik Karlsson

@phokarlsson

1 year

If you want to master something, you should study the highest achievements of you field. What if we take this approach to raising and educating children? An essay

Childhoods of exceptional people

Let's do more of those

www.henrikkarlsson.xyz

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Henrik Karlsson

@phokarlsson

22 days

on having more interesting ideas

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Henrik Karlsson

@phokarlsson

4 months

If a single status game becomes dominant, it breeds violence. Social fragmentation is a release valve.

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Henrik Karlsson

@phokarlsson

19 days

on writing and love as craft

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Henrik Karlsson

@phokarlsson

5 months

You are not the only person who has no one to talk to about the things you get obsessed by.

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Henrik Karlsson

@phokarlsson

21 days

I can't strongly enough recommend setting off 20 hours a week to work on a project that forces you to learn and grow. It is not that hard to find 20 hours--you are awake some 110 hours a week!--but it adds up in a surprising way if you keep at it for 3 years.

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Henrik Karlsson

@phokarlsson

15 days

It is tempting to think that so many people read books back in the day, but whenever I look up a great book that was "a sensation" when it came out in 1834, or something, it is always like "it sold 2000 copies!!"

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Henrik Karlsson

@phokarlsson

2 years

A blog post is a very long and complex search query to find fascinating people and make them to route interesting stuff to your DMs.

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Henrik Karlsson

@phokarlsson

20 days

on originality

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Henrik Karlsson

@phokarlsson

17 days

The internet makes me blind to the scale of things. If I write a blog post that is read by 2000 people that feels like crickets. But last night we had 200 people come to the opening of a new exhibition at the gallery. It was overwhelming.

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Henrik Karlsson

@phokarlsson

4 months

Ok, so this is interesting: it seems maybe the quality improved not after AlphaGo, but after the release of open source versions. Because they allowed players to look under the hood and understand the strategy. Just seeing the AI moves was not enough.

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Henrik Karlsson

@phokarlsson

6 months

Interestingly, my life feels richer when I do less. When I cut down my priorities, when I travel less, when I read more slowly.

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Henrik Karlsson

@phokarlsson

19 days

An essay is not a vehicle of knowledge transmission. It is a landscape to think in, and a path to get there.

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Henrik Karlsson

@phokarlsson

2 years

~150 years ago Swedish workers and farmers got really into teaching themselves new stuff. They ended up building the world's most comprehensive system of non-compulsory education, an important factor behind the success of Scandinavia. New essay

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Henrik Karlsson

@phokarlsson

11 days

there's this feeling which is the opposite of audience capture - this feeling when you find a group of people who give you permission to be more and more illegible and spontaneous i love that feeling

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Henrik Karlsson

@phokarlsson

1 month

What is a good book about agency? Or that makes you feel agentic

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Henrik Karlsson

@phokarlsson

1 year

This is a good prompt to find people to learn from in your craft: "Create a recursive list of influences starting from [insert person]."

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Henrik Karlsson

@phokarlsson

1 year

Also, I managed to sneak in that you start a blog. You should always start a blog.

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Henrik Karlsson

@phokarlsson

12 days

It is hard to describe how moving it is that there are people who want to support my writing financially. 355 subscribers to be precise. If ~100 more were to pay, I could quit my job and write full-time. That is crazy. I will at some point support my family by writing!

Isabella Grandic

@izzygrandic

12 days

Escaping Flatland is such a joy to read. It's the first newsletter I've been a premium subscriber to. "You just have to grab hold of what awakens a sense of loving curiosity within you" - on having ideas Thank you! @phokarlsson

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Henrik Karlsson

@phokarlsson

5 months

In 2023, I published 37 essays. These were the 5 most popular.

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Henrik Karlsson

@phokarlsson

1 year

Is listening to smart people have long-form conversations on podcasts changing how people speak and/or think?

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Henrik Karlsson

@phokarlsson

4 months

There is a parallel here to cognitive apprenticeship theory, ie the idea that the reason cognitive skills are hard to learn is that we can't see them so you should externalize them for students. For humans to learn from AIs, perhaps making reasoning explicit is needed.

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Henrik Karlsson

@phokarlsson

4 months

I decided to be way more ambitious as a writer and dad a while back and it is remarkable how much clear things get.

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Henrik Karlsson

@phokarlsson

1 year

Reading Tarkovsky's diaries and it fascinates me that he is focused on making more money - it is not something that bleeds through in his films. While working on Solaris: "Now I must earn as much as possible so that we can finish the house by the autumn."

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Henrik Karlsson

@phokarlsson

4 months

Writing the blog has made me much more agentic and changed my life in many ways. I felt afraid this would put me out of sync with my old friends (and it did to some extent) so I invested myself in making them more agentic, too, and it worked!

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Henrik Karlsson

@phokarlsson

4 months

I saw the graph here, which links to original study:

Machine Culture

The ability of humans to create and disseminate culture is often credited as the single most important factor of our success as a species. In this Perspective, we explore the notion of machine...

arxiv.org

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Henrik Karlsson

@phokarlsson

3 months

Leave decisions to your future self

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Henrik Karlsson

@phokarlsson

4 months

The significant improvements seems to have come not after May 2016 when AlphaGo was released but after October 2017 when Leela Zero was open sourced.

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Henrik Karlsson

@phokarlsson

4 months

Been thinking about how I get good blog ideas. Short answer: a lot of input, tons of notes, then I look at the mess and ask what is most surprising and useful to me? then I unpack that. then I ask the question again. and prune. and then again. an example —

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Henrik Karlsson

@phokarlsson

5 months

The 2-year-old gets really upset if don't read to her for hours each night but she doesn't really understand the stories so when my wife and I want to talk we hold books in front of our faces and speak. in. that. weird. book. voice.

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Henrik Karlsson

@phokarlsson

3 months

When I write, I often worry that I'm not getting my points across, or that things will be misread—but the most pleasant outcomes are when readers find things in the essays that I didn't put there. Essays as a space to think in, rather than a knowledge transfer. Giving up control.

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Henrik Karlsson

@phokarlsson

4 months

I'm looking for examples of: small communities that were formative for multiple people who went on to do extraordinary work *and* was designed with this in mind. The Apostles at Cambridge fits the bills. What else?

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Henrik Karlsson

@phokarlsson

21 days

Schopenhauer on what makes for good writing resonates with my experience

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Henrik Karlsson

@phokarlsson

11 days

Knausgaard on Ingmar Bergman's notetaking practice

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Henrik Karlsson

@phokarlsson

1 year

Editorial meeting with my wife. Discussing a 6000-word essay draft. She: "I don't care for this. Why should I?" I give pompous reasons. "No. Tell me why you care." Less pompous. "Try again." Has cathartic personal insight. "Good. Throw this out and write that instead."

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Henrik Karlsson

@phokarlsson

1 year

So who is this Alice, in the title, who are we looking for?

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Henrik Karlsson

@phokarlsson

1 year

Can anyone pinpoint when my wife started editing my essays?

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Henrik Karlsson

@phokarlsson

1 year

We should provide more children with childhoods like these.

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Henrik Karlsson

@phokarlsson

1 year

1. First, adults put a lot of effort into curating an exceptional milieu for them. The children had access to highly skilled adults, whom they could observe and talk to. They were taken seriously. They had massive libraries. Etc.

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Henrik Karlsson

@phokarlsson

19 days

my favorite new tech is that I can now read 17th century essayists and whenever I feel confused and upload a picture of the page to Claude and ask, "What means??" and I never have put the books down from cognitive overload again

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Henrik Karlsson

@phokarlsson

18 days

Talked to someone who hadn't read the user manual for Twitter, so here's the TL;DR: you use it as your notetaking app, saving thoughts you like reply to ppl who's thoughts you resonate when you've replied to each other a bit: go to dms after some dms: do a call be friends

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Henrik Karlsson

@phokarlsson

1 year

@nabeelqu But imagine the transition when normal parents have to raise kids that sleep like that. The horror.

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Henrik Karlsson

@phokarlsson

5 months

Half an hour to midnight, the 6-year-old realized she couldn't read, which she had decided to learn in 2023. She refused to go to bed until she had finished a book. We made it at 3 in the morning. And now, 2024.

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Henrik Karlsson

@phokarlsson

18 days

been on reading binge of great essayists recently and have two take aways, 1) they used to write some great essays back in the day, 2) i think we will write even better in my lifetime

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Henrik Karlsson

@phokarlsson

1 year

@visakanv You're entirely right that it is a good idea to just get on with it as soon as possible. (You have no idea how hard it will be. But you are absolutely right about how it will unleash you.)

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Henrik Karlsson

@phokarlsson

11 days

Sorry, we're sold out. Escaping Flatland has 10k subscribers. There is no more hipster cred to be had.

Henrik Karlsson

@phokarlsson

12 days

I have 4 spots left for those who want to be able to say, "Oh, yeah, Henrik, I read him when he had less than 10k subscribers."

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Henrik Karlsson

@phokarlsson

6 months

Sometimes it takes time to figure out the full gravity of a person. I had known my best friend for >15 years before we became close. Misread him.

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Henrik Karlsson

@phokarlsson

2 months

To prove she wasn't joking, my wife makes her second blog post go to the front page of hackernews.

Henrik Karlsson

@phokarlsson

10 months

To prove her point to me, my wife makes her first-ever blog post go to the top of hackernews.

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Henrik Karlsson

@phokarlsson

5 months

When you write close to home it is usually close to a lot of homes.

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Henrik Karlsson

@phokarlsson

4 months

This might be me being privileged but I've learned: make it easy for others to understand what you need to keep growing as a person and you often get it. "I want to do *this* but I'm blocked on *this*." There are people for whom helping you aligns with their needs.

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Henrik Karlsson

@phokarlsson

3 months

Unless you measure it, you are probably way off about what you spend your time on.

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Henrik Karlsson

@phokarlsson

1 year

2. Another nearly universal pattern is that they had a lot of time on their own. Time to be bored. Time to explore their own interests. Time to figure out what excited them.

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Henrik Karlsson

@phokarlsson

10 days

on curiosity and shame (from an email)

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Henrik Karlsson

@phokarlsson

4 months

oh lol now I've pushed my craft obsession so far that Cal Newport use me as an anecdote

On Slow Writing - Cal Newport

Someone recently forwarded me an essay from a blogger named Henrik Karlsson. It opens with an admission: “When I started writing online, the advice I ... Read more

calnewport.com

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Henrik Karlsson

@phokarlsson

2 years

@Altimor That's a fascinating usecase. I did a piece about using GPT-3 like this, and in other related ways, a while back.

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Henrik Karlsson

@phokarlsson

12 days

Also, imagine the patience of my wife, Johanna. We have two kids and can't afford a car etc. But last year I was offered $200k/year to write for a startup and when I told Johanna, she said, "Why on earth would you accept that? You wouldn't have time to write."

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Henrik Karlsson

@phokarlsson

4 months

"we estimated the time trends of decision quality only for the decisions that differed from the optimal AI decisions." which I take to mean that the graph above shows only the improved decision quality of moves that are not direct memorizations of moves done by AIs?

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Henrik Karlsson

@phokarlsson

1 year

We married in the bookstore where we met. It was the last day before they closed it for good, so we had to hurry. We had no witnesses.

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Henrik Karlsson

@phokarlsson

1 year

Also, I highly recommend @erikphoel 's piece "How geniuses used to be raised", which is a sibling to this one. (I did some of the research for that piece, and working with Erik had a big impact on how I think about these topics.)

How geniuses used to be raised

Aristocratic tutoring III: The day-to-day practices

www.theintrinsicperspective.com

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Henrik Karlsson

@phokarlsson

1 year

The interests where they would grow up to excel were usually first encountered during these hours of solitude. Their passions arose like a wild hallucination induced by overdosing on boredom.

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Henrik Karlsson

@phokarlsson

3 months

Dan Luu on where he gets ideas for blog posts

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Henrik Karlsson

@phokarlsson

2 years

A blog post is a very long and complex search query to find fascinating people and make them route interesting stuff to your inbox new blog post

A blog post is a very long and complex search query to find fascinating people and make them route...

When writing in public, there is a common idea that you should make it accessible. This is a left over from mass media.

www.henrikkarlsson.xyz

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Henrik Karlsson

@phokarlsson

1 month

this is what essays feel like to me to. it is like I have a bunch of rooms that I go to and think in. and then, after a few months they either collapse or I get bored and publish them. ideally someone else can move in for a bit, like a hermit crab

Michael Nielsen

@michael_nielsen

1 month

An idea I've been finding very helpful: my draft essays are *places I go to think*. In particular, they create a context for me to think better thoughts. A coevolution goes on, between the quality of the ideas I can have, and the context provided by the essay Something

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Henrik Karlsson

@phokarlsson

1 year

And those who did not have parents capable of doing this, like Michael Faraday, set out to curate exceptional milieus themselves.

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Henrik Karlsson

@phokarlsson

4 months

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Henrik Karlsson

@phokarlsson

5 months

Have you ever noticed this when interacting with someone who has a less accurate model than you: that it’s like they have a VR headset on and are fighting against monsters you know are not there?

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Henrik Karlsson

@phokarlsson

1 year

3. Another pattern, slightly less universal, is that they were tutored one-on-one. Usually at home. When you tailor your instruction to a specific individual, you can progress much much faster than in schools.

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Henrik Karlsson

@phokarlsson

4 months

I was talking to a friend who loves to learn and wants to write but who prefers to keep it private out of impostor syndrome. "You should learn in public," I said and made a list of arguments: 1. If you want to find work doing things that fascinate you, it is much better to

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Henrik Karlsson

@phokarlsson

1 year

The title of the essay (Looking for Alice) is a reference to Gertrude Stein, who refused to label herself lesbian, saying she just liked Alice. People get a bit annoyed at her for saying that, but it is great advice: don’t assume you know what you are looking for. You don't.

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Henrik Karlsson

@phokarlsson

1 year

Over the last decade, more than 10% of all top ten hit songs in the US were written by Swedish songwriters. Which is pretty impressive for a country the size of North Carolina. Where did all that talent come from? An essay

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Henrik Karlsson

@phokarlsson

3 months

growing by saying no

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Henrik Karlsson

@phokarlsson

10 months

To prove her point to me, my wife makes her first-ever blog post go to the top of hackernews.

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Henrik Karlsson

@phokarlsson

2 years

@visakanv I pretend my ribcase is a cat and then I pet it.

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Henrik Karlsson

@phokarlsson

1 year

You can read the full piece here.

Childhoods of exceptional people

Let's do more of those

www.henrikkarlsson.xyz

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Henrik Karlsson

@phokarlsson

1 year

write up

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Henrik Karlsson

@phokarlsson

18 days

It is striking when I reread old essays that I used to be subconsciously afraid of being myself and it held the writing back

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Henrik Karlsson

@phokarlsson

1 year

Over the last year, I read an unhealthy amount of biographies of people that to me are exceptional. I took notes about their childhoods. von Neumann, Pascal, Woolf, Wagner, Curie - and about 30 more. What are the patterns in how they were raised?

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Henrik Karlsson

@phokarlsson

16 days

I think of agency as a twin movement: inward to a deeper understanding of what makes you tick, outward to a more accurate map of the world that lets you chart a path toward the thing you want to manifest.

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Henrik Karlsson

@phokarlsson

4 months

I asked them what would be their dream life and then I pestered and gave advice until they did it. The guy who wanted to build stairs, now builds stairs full-time in his barn; the unemployed dad has raised a seed round for his startup; the musician has released his debut album.

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Henrik Karlsson

@phokarlsson

2 years

@sferik I used to work in a school and would ask all 6 year olds, who just started, to provide questions. Why is the sky blue? Why don't water fall of under the earth? Why does it become winter? Etc. The 7 year olds had no questions.

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Henrik Karlsson

@phokarlsson

1 year

So what I did was I wrote an essay about what I liked about our relationship, and asked her to proofread it aloud one day. And the end I snuck in a proposal, and when she read that part, I was like, yes, yes, sure I'll marry you.

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Henrik Karlsson

@phokarlsson

6 months

changed my profile pic as a reminder that having babies is fucking glorious

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Henrik Karlsson

@phokarlsson

4 months

Andrei Tarkovsky on feedback: "I am only interested in the views of two people: one is called Bresson and one called Bergman."

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Henrik Karlsson

@phokarlsson

5 months

Going into 2024, I’ve been thinking about priorities. My natural tendency is to do things halfheartedly and out of habit. I find I can do better when I approach it like this —

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Henrik Karlsson

@phokarlsson

1 month

how to think in writing essay in next tweet

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Henrik Karlsson

@phokarlsson

15 days

It is key to be both agentic and introspective to find a life that fits you and were you can be of use to others.

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Henrik Karlsson

@phokarlsson

4 months

I think this is the root source of the graph.

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Henrik Karlsson

@phokarlsson

1 year

so far there has been a pretty strong positive correlation between how uncomfortable i feel about publishing a piece and how much ppl like it

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Henrik Karlsson

@phokarlsson

1 year

4. Crucially, a lot of the learning was directed at meaningful work. They weren’t just learning from exceptional tutors - they were apprenticed to them. The apprentice-like nature of their learning becomes more pronounced as they enter their teenage years.

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Henrik Karlsson

@phokarlsson

1 year

There is something heroic about artists who navigate the incentive landscape around funding and money while remaining true to their art. It is easier to drop out and be "authentic," or sell out. But that narrow path: that is where you get Solaris.

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Henrik Karlsson

@phokarlsson

11 months

After my ten-week run of weekly essays, I can say this model remains correct. I get about four times as many new subscribers per essay when I do biweekly essays compared to weekly ones.

Henrik Karlsson

@phokarlsson

1 year

The return on a blog post follows a power law (how many interesting ppl it introduces you to, how many opportunities, how many subscribers). So it's better to do few but good pieces.

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Henrik Karlsson

@phokarlsson

1 year

Some thoughts on AI, education and intellectual milieus.

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Henrik Karlsson

@phokarlsson

1 year

Is listening to smart people have long-form conversations on podcasts changing how people speak and/or think? I have a new essay in WIRED.

Podcasts Could Unleash a New Age of Enlightenment

Access to intellectual conversations reshaped the early modern age. Today’s interview podcasts are expanding social learning at an unprecedented scale.

www.wired.com

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Henrik Karlsson

@phokarlsson

4 months

I highly recommend lifting your friends up.

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Henrik Karlsson

@phokarlsson

1 year

A thread of some of my better stuff. Mostly essays about learning, and building infrastrucutre that supports that. And some random stuff.

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Henrik Karlsson

@phokarlsson

5 months

Sometimes you need to do things without telling anyone to give yourself the space to reinvent.

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Henrik Karlsson

@phokarlsson

2 years

Looking for a job that better fits my skill set. I'm obscenely nerdy about learning and education, and a strong writer. Currently manages a museum. Do you know a remote position where I could provide value? Please DM me.

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