Farnam Street
Mastering the best of what other people have already figured out
Daniel Solove, author of Nothing to Hide: The False Tradeoff between Privacy and Security, argues that privacy matters even if you have nothing to hide. The nothing-to-hide argument pervades discussions about privacy. The data-security …
Author Toni Morrison illuminates concepts of virtue, and its opposite: “Expressions of goodness are never trivial in my work, are never incidental in my writing. In fact, I want them to have life-changing properties and illuminate …
Nate Silver elaborates on the difference between risk and uncertainty in The Signal and the Noise: Risk, as first articulated by the economist Frank H. Knight in 1921, is something that you can put a price on. Say that you’ll win a poker …
“What we suffer from today,” GK Chesterton once wrote, “is humility in the wrong place. … A man was meant to be doubtful about himself, but undoubting about the truth; this has been exactly reversed. … The old …
Born as a slave in a wealthy household nearly 2,000 years ago in Hierapolis, Epictetus caught a lucky break when his “owner” Epaphroditus, let him study liberal arts. Through the Stoic philosopher Musonius Rufus, Epictetus …
“Being defeated is hateful, and besting one’s boss is either foolish or fatal. Most people do not mind being surpassed in good fortune, character, or temperament, but no one, especially not a sovereign, likes to be surpassed in …
Neil deGrasse Tyson explains why words, names, and labels matter. The lesson? Choose your words carefully. The universe is hard enough. The last thing the universe needs is a complex lexicon laid down between the communicator and the …
Robert Gula in Nonsense: A Handbook of Logical Fallacies: Let’s not call them laws; and, since they’re not particularly original, I won’t attach my name to them. They are merely a description of patterns that seem to …
David Foster Wallace (1962–2008) remains one of the most revered authors of our time. His timeless collection of wisdom includes everything from his famous commencement speech This is Water to his profound thoughts on the relationship …
For those who didn’t follow him, Jonah Lehrer has a gift for turning science into a great story. His beautiful writing made it hard to resist the narrative fallacy. The recent news about him fabricating quotes and generally offering a …
Michael Lewis, author of The Big Short, Boomerang, and Liar’s Poker, gives a commencement speech on the role of luck. Thank you. President Tilghman. Trustees and Friends. Parents of the Class of 2012. Above all, Members of the …
David Foster Wallace‘s 2005 commencement speech to the graduating class at Kenyon College is a timeless trove of wisdom — right up there with Hunter Thompson on finding your purpose. The speech was made into a thin book …
“If we take man as he is, we make him worse, but if we take him as he should be, we make him capable of becoming what he can be.” *** In this rare clip from 1972, legendary psychiatrist and Holocaust-survivor Viktor Frankl …
In this beautiful video, Richard Feynman on the nature of why questions and how they help us understand the world. Interviewer: If you get hold of two magnets, and you push them, you can feel this pushing between them. Turn them around the …
Herbert Simon, Nobel Prize laureate and polymath, offered many contributions to the world in fields such as computer science/artificial intelligence, cognitive psychology, economics, and management. This brief excerpt, taken from his …
Susanna Braund‘s translation of Seneca’s De Clementia, is well worth the read. Seneca addresses De Clementia to the young Roman emperor Nero, with the aim of depicting the ideal ruler. Braund goes to great lengths to establish …
“The decision to reject one paradigm is always simultaneously the decision to accept another, and the judgment leading to that decision involves the comparison of both paradigms with nature and with each other.” The progress of …
When we want to improve a situation, our first instinct is often to change something. Try something new. Make adjustments. Anything other than what we’re already doing. But this approach is frequently misguided. Sometimes doing nothing at …
An interesting excerpt from Donald Norman’s book The Design of Everyday Things on two types of knowledge. People function through their use of two kinds of knowledge: knowledge of and knowledge how. …Knowledge how [is] what …
In 1637 René Descartes changed the course of science forever with the publication of Discourse on the Method of Rightly Conducting One’s Reason and of Seeking Truth in the Sciences. That work lays the foundation to modern science by putting …
I must admit that I have Derek Parfit‘s long-awaited book On What Matters sitting on my nightstand at the moment. I’m aided in my procrastination by its daunting length—over 1400 pages in two volumes. Most of us might come to …
Nicolas Carr with some interesting thoughts: Situational overload is not the problem. When we complain about information overload, what we’re usually complaining about is ambient overload. This is an altogether different beast. …
Clayton M. Christensen, author of The Innovator’s Dilemma, teaches Strategy at HBS. On the last day of class, he asks his students to turn theoretical lenses on themselves, to find cogent answers to three questions: First, how can I …