Farnam Street
Mastering the best of what other people have already figured out
“Just how charitable are you supposed to be when criticizing the views of an opponent?” *** Philosopher Daniel Dennett’s book, Intuition Pumps And Other Tools for Thinking, already gave us how to use your mistakes. Now it offers up …
Brainpickings put me onto this timeless wisdom from famous eccentric James T. Mangan’s 1936 book You Can Do Anything! PRACTICE Consider the knowledge you already have — the things you really know you can do. They are the things you …
The real cost of an opinion isn’t having it—it’s doing the work required to earn it. This work is what most people avoid. I never allow myself to have an opinion on anything that I don’t know the other side’s …
When it comes to using our minds, we all want to learn how to think like Sherlock Holmes. This isn’t just a way of solving a crime. It’s a way of thinking. Maria Konnikova’s book, Mastermind: How To Think Like Sherlock …
If workplaces had nap rooms, multitasking was frowned upon, and meetings were held during walks, we’d be vastly more productive. These are just some of the things we know about how to optimize our brain use. Below find 12 rules we …
Brainstorming – getting a group of people together to come up with as many new ideas or solutions to a problem as possible – is a common fixture in many organizations. Generally brainstorming is inefficient and ineffective. The …
Susan Sontag (1933-2004) spent a lifetime on writing, art, and the commodification of wisdom. Her moving work, Against Interpretation, is regarded as a quintessential text from the 60s. In it, she addresses both the advantages and the …
“All models are wrong, but some are useful” — George Box *** If you think of the complicated world we live in you quickly realize that we need to sort the inessential from the essential and then reduce complexity into something …
In this clip from a documentary film shot in Yorkshire in 1973, physicist and philosopher Richard Feynman (1918-1988) talks with Fred Hoyle, an accomplished astronomer from the United Kingdom. Feynman poses the question: “What, today, do we …
Once you’ve formed a belief, adding exceptions and justifications becomes easier than updating it. Ryan Holiday writes about this in Trust Me, I’m Lying: Once the mind has accepted a plausible explanation for something, it …
“Men of learning are those who have read the contents of books. Thinkers, geniuses, and those who have enlightened the world and furthered the race of men, are those who have made direct use of the book of the world.” — Arthur …
“Critical thinking has to include assessing one’s own thinking.” — Daniel Kahneman *** In this extraordinary talk at the National Academy of Sciences, Nobel Prize winner Daniel Kahneman discusses how the mind filters and shapes …
I made it through Susan Sontag’s recently released notebooks: As Consciousness Is Harnessed to Flesh: Journals and Notebooks, 1964-1980. “As Consciousness” is the second of three projected volumes. The first, …
“The test of a first-rate intelligence is the ability to hold two opposing ideas in mind at the same time and still retain the ability to function.” — F. Scott Fitzgerald *** John Kay, with an insightful piece in the Financial …
A brilliant post from brain pickings drawing our attention to Susan Sontag and the commodification of wisdom. As the interconnectedness and velocity of information continue to grow, these passages from Sontang’s As Consciousness Is …
Calling to mind Daniel Dennett’s advice on how to compose a successful critical commentary, Susan Sontag offers three steps to refuting any argument, from the newly released As Consciousness Is Harnessed to Flesh: Journals and …
Nassim Taleb elaborates on the Copernican Principle, a concept first introduced on Farnam Street in How To Predict Everything. For the perishable, every additional day in its life translates into a shorter additional life expectancy. For …
In a SPIEGEL interview, Nobel Prize-winning psychologist Daniel Kahneman discusses the innate weakness of human thought, deceptive memories and the misleading power of intuition. By studying human intuition, or System 1, you seem to have …
Lance Workman interviews Daniel Kahneman, Nobel laureate, co-creator of behavioral economics, and author of Thinking, Fast and Slow. Among other things Kahneman discusses the definition of rationality, the dual process of thought, the …
While Daniel Kahneman’s book, Thinking Fast, Thinking Slow, gets all the attention, he’s also written a few articles that might catch your interest on thinking better. Optimistic Bias: In terms of its consequences for decisions, …
“Investing is not a game where the guy with the 160 IQ beats the guy with the 130 IQ. Once you have ordinary intelligence, what you need is the temperament to control the urges that get other people into trouble in investing.” —Warren …
James Gleick, author of The Information: A History, A Theory, A Flood, says: We’re in the habit of associating value with scarcity, but the digital world unlinks them. You can be the sole owner of a Jackson Pollock or a Blue Mauritius but …
Kathryn Schulz, the illuminating author of Being Wrong: Adventures in the Margin of Error, gave an excellent talk at TED talk on being wrong. There is a moment in her talk when she summarizes what we do when someone disagrees with us that …
Of course you can do more than one thing at once. The catch is you can’t do more more than one thing at once that requires concentration. You can walk and chew gum, but you can’t write an email and a report at the same time. …