Jisoo, Wookyoung Kim · September 4, 2025
Community, CT afferents, fillers, Limitless
Frank Stella (b. 1936), Harran II. You can see the work of Frank Stella, who evolved continuously over 60 years from paintings of only black stripes to vivid color and then three-dimensional sculpture, at the Leeum Museum of Art. Tribal network effects. Every great community becomes part of an individual's identity. Once a community becomes part of identity, members help one another, protect the community's reputation, and voluntarily invest in and grow it.
For example, university alumni help one another even decades later and try to protect the honor of their school. The same dynamic explains why founders from Y Combinator attach "YC" to product introductions or personal bios, binding themselves together and helping one another. In this way, a community becomes part of the individual, and the individual proves themselves through the community.
The author calls this phenomenon the "tribal network effect." Mechanisms such as entry criteria, rites of passage, roles, and badges make the shared identity even more durable.
What is interesting is that this effect appears most strongly when people have gone through shared hardship. Soldiers recognize and bond with one another through the hardship of training; students at elite universities do the same through the shared pain of entrance exams.
Humans Are Designed to Touch One Another
Human skin contains CT afferents, sensory nerves that respond emotionally to another person's gentle touch. These nerves strengthen relationships and a sense of belonging. Social distancing during COVID removed contact with others, which had visible negative effects on people's emotional and physical health.
What is interesting is that CT afferents are distributed across almost all skin except the palms and soles, and they respond most sensitively to warm, gentle touch at about 32 degrees Celsius. That means some of the effect can also be substituted by warm water or contact with pets.
Fillers Like "Um" and "Uh" Have Meaning Too
Linguist Julie Sedivy argues that seemingly meaningless fillers such as "um" and "uh" are not mistakes caused by getting stuck, but devices that buy the speaker time to complete a sentence and signal to the listener that something important is coming. In conversations containing these fillers, listeners were better at predicting the next word and recalling content, and the effect was especially strong when complex information was being conveyed.
Experts also use these fillers more often. Experienced doctors tend to use these seemingly meaningless fillers more frequently than residents, and experiments have shown that the higher the level of expertise, the more often speakers use them while selecting and explaining rich information.
What is interesting is that humans try to suppress these fillers, while AI developers working on voice deliberately try to insert "um" and "uh."
Why Whales Are Enormous
The blue whale is the largest creature in Earth's history. Even the largest dinosaurs weighed only dozens of tons, but blue whales easily exceed 100 tons. Stanford's Dr. William Gearty argues that the ocean creates powerful constraints, forcing marine animals to become large.
Constraints:
To prevent heat loss: water quickly steals body heat. Because a larger volume relative to surface area loses less heat, increasing body size is the simplest and most effective solution.
To secure enough food: as body size grows, energy consumption rises exponentially. Large body size can therefore be sustained only when food can be secured reliably and in large quantities.
Because these two conditions operate at the same time, marine mammals are clustered between a lower bound for maintaining body temperature and an upper bound allowed by food supply, a "golden zone" centered around roughly 500 kg. This is why seals, dolphins, whales, and other species all share enormous body sizes without exception.
What is interesting is that people often explain whale size by saying there is no gravity constraint. In fact, the opposite is true. Because constraints existed, whales had no choice but to become enormous.
Recommended Tool - Limitless
Limitless.ai is a voice-recording AI developed by Dan Siroker, the creator of Rewind.ai. If Rewind recorded your computer screen, Limitless focuses on voices in everyday life. Its Korean recognition is especially strong, showing accuracy comparable to existing tools such as Otter, HyperCLOVA, and Tiro.
What is interesting is that it sells a physical device called the Pendant.
You do not need to turn on a separate recording app before a meeting. Place the pendant on the table and talk, and it records everyone's voices.
If you say something like "I should do this," it remembers and turns it into a reminder. For example, even if you casually say, "I need to book a doctor's appointment at 2," it understands and reminds you.
The next morning, it summarizes areas for improvement based on the previous day's conversations. I often get feedback that I say we should do something and then do not actually follow through. That is accurate.
Thoughts
When you need help, you need to say directly, "I need help." Simply explaining the situation does not make the other person step forward voluntarily.
Make eye contact when talking. If note-taking makes that difficult, you should convey, even nonverbally, that you are writing things down because the other person's story is important.
Chinese companies gather data from the "real" world. In other words, they collect data on what people buy, when and where they make physical purchases, eat, put on makeup, and use transportation. Deep learning can optimize only what it has "seen," and China's technology ecosystem, grounded in the physical world, gives deep-learning algorithms many more eyes with which to see the details of our daily lives. - Kai-Fu Lee
I am more drawn to people who are the complete opposite of me, and I actually learn more from them.
The human brain inevitably chooses shortcuts, or biases.
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