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stevegrossi

Hi 👋🏻, I’m Steve. I built note.garden to help me connect concepts and ideas on the things I’m interested in, mainly programming, philosophy, and systems thinking, especially related to how to behave ethically within unethical systems. When parenting leaves me time, I’m enjoying learning to play the tin whistle. This is the temple of my adult aloneness.

343 Notes

  1. Imperial boomerang

    The idea that repressive techniques of control developed abroad are eventually used against a government’s own citizens:

  2. Abstraction

    I like [Noel Rappin's definition](https://noelrappin.com/blog/2021/07/an-object-oriented-example) that "an abstraction is a structure that represents a concept and hides internal details such that the rest of the code can interact with concept via the abstraction without having to worry about the implementation details." Abstractions are the solution to the problem that our software keeps growing but the capacity of our working memory remains more-or-less fixed.

  3. concern trolling

    [Concern trolling](https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Internet_troll#Concern_troll) is a recent coinage of [[bad faith]] behavior in which someone claims to be part of a group and share the group's goals, while actually belonging to an opposition group and working to undermine those goals by sharing "concerns" about said goals or methods to achieve them.

  4. bad faith

    A form of deception in which one's true motives are not what they claim.

  5. Shifting the Burden

    A [[systems traps|systems archetype]] describing when a systemic problem is "solved" by addressing a symptom, diverting attention from the root cause and ultimately leading to unsustainable reliance on the symptomatic "solution" while the underlying problem gets worse.

  6. the one you feed

    There's [an old story](https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Two_Wolves) in which a grandfather tells his grandchild that there are two wolves inside each of us that are constantly fighting.

  7. permission to rest

    A [[book]] by Ashley Neese I read in 2024 on the biology and importance of [[rest]] and [[mindfulness]].

  8. mindfulness

    The practice of observing one's mind.

  9. willpower

    Willpower is conventionally considered to be control over one's behavior, though if [[there is no such thing as free will]] then willpower may not exist either, at least not in the way we imagine it.

  10. Buddhism

    An axial age religion begun by Siddhartha Gautama in the 6th century BCE.