Leverage: Gaining Disproportionate Strength
“It is easier to conquer than to administer. With enough leverage, a finger could overturn the world; but to support the world, one must have the shoulders of Hercules.” — Jean-Jacques …
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Understanding the Limitations of Maps
Maps are flawed but useful. For instance, we can leverage the experiences of others to help us navigate through territories that are, to us, new and unknown. We just have to understand and respect the …
Proximate vs Root Causes: Keep Digging to Find the Answer
“Anything perceived has a cause. All conclusions have premises. All effects have causes. All actions have motives.” — Arthur Schopenhauer *** The Basics One of the first principles we learn as babies …
Confirmation Bias And the Power of Disconfirming Evidence
Confirmation bias is our tendency to cherry-pick information that confirms our existing beliefs or ideas. Confirmation bias explains why two people with opposing views on a topic can see the same …
Galilean Relativity and the Invasion of Scotland
A few centuries ago, when Galileo (1564-1642) was trying to make a couple of points about how our world really works, one of the arguments that frequently came up in response to his ‘the earth orbits …
Simone de Beauvoir on The Ethics of Freedom
Simone de Beauvoir (1908-1986) wrote The Ethics of Ambiguity in 1948. In many ways, it can be read as a reaction to World War 2, an attempt to make sense of all that war entailed, and therefore teach …
Cleopatra and Self-Preservation
“For the last time in two thousand years Cleopatra VII stands offstage. In a matter of days she will launch herself into history, which is to say that faced with the inevitable, she will counter with …
Emergence and Power — Four 13th-Century Sisters Who Became Queens
“[S]ome systems … are very sensitive to their starting conditions, so that a tiny difference in the initial push you give them causes a big difference in where they end up, and there is …
Alexander von Humboldt and the Invention of Nature: Creating a Holistic View of the World Through A Web of Interdisciplinary Knowledge
In his piece in 2014’s Edge collection This Idea Must Die: Scientific Theories That Are Blocking Progress, dinosaur paleontologist Scott Sampson writes that science needs to “subjectify” …
Hanlon’s Razor: Not Everyone is Out to Get You
* Hanlon’s razor is a mental safeguard against the temptation to label behavior as malicious when incompetence is the most common response. It reminds us that people are not out to get us, and it’s …
Philosopher Kahlil Gibran on The Tension Between Reason and the Silence Required for Thinking
Kahlil Gibran (1883–1931) published his masterpiece, The Prophet, in 1923. The work endures as a timeless meditation on the art of living. Gibran’s thoughts on love and giving offer a glimpse …
General James Mattis: Arm Yourself With Books
How many situations will you face that have not already been experienced by someone else? Billions of people, thousands of years … probably not too many. It’s been done. Luckily, sometimes those …
Warnings From Sleep: Nightmares and Protecting The Self
“All of this is evidence that the mind, although asleep, is constantly concerned about the safety and integrity of the self.” *** Rosalind Cartwright — also known as the Queen of Dreams — …
What We Can Learn From The Laboratory of Literature: Two Great Thinkers
We all have a feeling that literature is important. And yet many of us avoid the category altogether, feeling it’s a waste of time to pick up literature when we can learn so much more from …
Get Smart: Three Ways of Thinking to Make Better Decisions and Achieve Results
“Give me six hours to chop down a tree and I will spend the first four sharpening the axe.” — Abraham Lincoln *** Your ability to think clearly determines the decisions you make and the …
Seduced by Logic: Émilie du Châtelet and the Struggles to create the Newtonian Revolution
Against great odds, Émilie du Châtelet (1706–1749) taught herself mathematics and became a world authority on Newtonian mathematical physics. I say against great odds because being a woman at the time …