15 Comments
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Tyler Corderman's avatar

An excellent piece, thank you!

If we could all just cultivate a little more awareness of how we pay attention to this beautiful world.

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Trungphan2's avatar

Thank you for the note, Tyler! Totally agreed (and it is definitely easier said than done but am working on it).

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Adam Singer's avatar

Love this one Trung a lot of gems in here

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Trungphan2's avatar

Appreciate you Adam! C. Thi is such an interesting thinker. Gonna dig into his other work more.

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Gawain Kripke's avatar

Isn't most of this covered in black mirror already? Also - what we really need now is a good curriculum on how to assess happiness outside of values that are easy to measure and capture. Am I happy is a question I'm asking myself a lot. But there's no answer - because I think anyone who isn't in pain or material poverty can credibly be happy. So maybe happiness is relational and relative with no absolute way of measuring it.

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Trungphan2's avatar

Appreciate the read and note, Gawain!

Black Mirror definitely has episodes on this topic. I do find Nguyen's writing on it a better articulation (especially when he pulls in research from other fields).

Either way, I think multiple people presenting the idea in multiple mediums is fine. Each adds a different element or contour (on that note: Nguyen's full podcast interview with Ezra is very very good: https://podcasts.apple.com/us/podcast/a-philosophy-of-games-that-is-really-a-philosophy-of-life/id1548604447?i=1000552204773).

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Gawain Kripke's avatar

will definitely listen and thanks for exposing me to Nguyen - happy to find you as well.

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Gawain Kripke's avatar

thanks to tipping that podcast. I probably wouldn't have listened otherwise. Very thought provoking. Gives me some ideas.

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Jay F.'s avatar

Great piece Trung! Hopefully I'm giving you the external validation in the form of value that you need that aligns with your core curiosity lol.

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Trungphan2's avatar

Jay! Thanks for the note. This tipped me over!

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Feral Finster's avatar

Re: "Value capture"

TL:DR "When a measure becomes a target, it ceases to be a good measure." aka Goodhart's Law

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Trungphan2's avatar

I totally fumbled by not including this!

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Feral Finster's avatar

No worries.

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Gawain Kripke's avatar

I forgot to say: great post. Thanks.

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Trungphan2's avatar

Thank you! Replied to your post below 🙏

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