Bertrand Russell: Love is Wise, Hatred is Foolish
“Love is wise, hatred is foolish.” — Bertrand Russell *** The British philosopher Bertrand Russell (1872-1970) gave us some of the more enduring developments in 20th-century philosophy. …
Philosophy
The Optimism Bias: Imagining A Positive Future
In The Optimism Bias: A Tour of the Irrationally Positive Brain, Tali Sharot argues that we have a neurobiological basis for imagining a positive future. “Humans,” she writes, “do …
26 Musings from Kierkegaard on What It Means to be A Human Being
I read the The Quotable Kierkegaard at the same time as Mike Tyson. Yes that Mike Tyson1. Apparently he loves the political incorrectness of philosophy. “I don’t really do any light …
The Human Search for Meaning
“He who has a Why to live for can bear almost any How.” — Nietzsche Holocaust survivor Viktor Frankl (1905-1997) is best known for his 1946 memoir Man’s Search for Meaning. The book sheds light …
11 Rules for Critical Thinking
A fantastic list of 11 rules from some of history’s greatest minds. These are Prospero’s Precepts and they are found in AKA Shakespeare: A Scientific Approach to the Authorship Question: All beliefs …
A Wonderfully Simple Heuristic to Recognize Charlatans
While we can learn a lot from what successful people do in the mornings, as Nassim Taleb points out, we can learn a lot from what failed people do before breakfast too. Inversion is actually one of …
What Jefferson Read, Ike Watched, and Obama Tweeted: 200 Years of Popular Culture in the White House
In the era of Kindles, tweets, Facebook and instant celebrity how should presidents act? “Are we really better off with a president who knows who Snooki is?”, asks Tevi Troy in his …
On Listening
Immediately to lash out in retaliation, however, and neither to listen nor be listened to, but to speak while being spoken to, is scandalous; on the other hand anyone who has acquired the ability to …
Are Our Opinions Really Our Own?
Here’s something worth reflecting upon: We take other men’s knowledge and opinions upon trust; which is an idle and superficial learning. We must make them our own. We are just like a man …
Antigone: Better Decisions Through Literature
I recently picked up Sophocles’s Antigone. Sophocles wrote more than 100 plays in his lifetime, but only seven complete tragedies remain. In Antigone, Polynices, son of Oedipus, went to war with …
The Economic Inefficiency of Gift Giving: Why You Shouldn’t Buy Presents for the Holidays
From Michael Sandel’s What Money Can’t Buy: The Moral Limits of Markets. Joel Waldfogel, an economist at the University of Pennsylvania (now at Minnesota’s Carlson School of …
Seven Books Everyone Should Read
Little differences over a long lifetime create big disparities. Making decisions slightly better than your cohort translates into a big difference over a long life. This is the nature of compounding. …
The Three Disciplines of Stoicism: Life Lessons from a Roman Emperor
The stoics used their understanding of perception, action, and will to create an operating system for life. The Three Disciplines A common thread central to the philosophy of the meditations and …
Reason is the Enemy of Greatness
“There can be no great genius without a touch of madness.” — Seneca This is a beautiful passage from Giacomo Leopardi’s Zibaldone on the conflict between reason and nature. Reason is the …
Zibaldone
I picked up a copy of the first complete English edition of Giacomo Leopardi‘s Zibaldone. Giacomo Leopardi is the most radical and channelling of nineteenth-century poets and thinkers, yet the …
The Great Books
We all want to read more. If reading older books is exponentially more beneficial for acquiring knowledge than reading newer things, then reading the great books is a good place to start. These books …