How Golden Is Silence, Actually?

(newyorker.com)

26 points | by tintinnabula 3 days ago

4 comments

  • jordwest 13 minutes ago
    I’ve been on several silent retreats now and one of the most surprising discoveries was just how much speaking is unnecessary.

    Without the pressure to speak amongst others, it became clear that I often said things out of anxiety - fear of looking weird or of making the other person uncomfortable.

    Nowadays I rarely speak when I feel that pressure and paradoxically it has led to far deeper relationships and more interesting conversations.

    It seems that the topics that come up when theres a pressure to fill the silence are the most mundane. Deeper connection seems to happen in the silences, or rather mutual comfort with silence.

    Another way I could describe it is it feels almost as if there’s a fear of really being seen in silence that the surface level conversation manages to keep at bay.

  • herodoturtle 2 hours ago
    Article is behind a paywall for me.

    Odd that it’s on HN front page :-/

    • EGreg 2 hours ago
      That’s how much their silence was able to accomplish!
    • pmontra 2 hours ago
      Reader mode bypasses it. It's only a JS layer on top of content that's already inside the HTML doc.

      Disabling first party JS works too, using umatrix or similar tools. The site works perfectly without JS.

      Edit: because of all of that, of course view source bypasses the paywall too and reveals tons of inlined CSS.

    • sltkr 1 hour ago
      https://archive.is/8GB36

      I agree with you though, it's obnoxious to share paywalled articles on Hacker News.

      • tomhow 19 minutes ago
        Please don't post snarky comments like this on HN. We've wrestled with this for a long time and have settled on the least worst solution: paywalled articles are only allowable if there's an easy workaround that everyone access, like Archive.is, which you've helpfully shared. It's annoying that we have to deal with this issue but we're still better off with the articles than not.

        We can do without mean words like “obnoxious” for people contributing interesting articles for the community to read.

        https://news.ycombinator.com/newsguidelines.html

    • moritzwarhier 2 hours ago
      It annoys me too, but is not unusual for journalism submissions here.

      HN sometimes likes to discuss texts that weren't published as a free contribution on some blog by a dev with lots of time on their hand.

      It's not forbidden to post paywalled links on HN, AFAIK.

      I also struggle to see an alternative when it comes to professional journalism.

      Maybe a kind soul will be able to share a gift link.

      • tomhow 18 minutes ago
        I've added the archive.is link to the thread header.

        > It's not forbidden to post paywalled links on HN, AFAIK.

        The FAQ states that it's fine to post paywalled links as long as there is a workaround that everyone can easily access.

  • TormentNexusAI 2 hours ago
    The biggest win for AI dev efficiency is cutting down what gets loaded into context. Semantically matching tasks to the top tools helps a lot.