Tags / philosophy
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Competition Is for Losers
Peter Thiel's sharpest insight: competition is not for the strong. It's for the weak and uncreative.
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Convergence
Old wisdom and new science keep arriving at the same place from different directions. This is not coincidence.
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Descriptions
We do not have direct access to reality. What we have is descriptions — and the gap between pursuing truth and pursuing accurate descriptions is large enough to fall into.
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Doing Good
Peter Singer's thought experiment: you would save the drowning child. You make the opposite decision almost every day.
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Knowledge and Perception
We can only perceive what we have the conceptual tools to see. The doors of perception are built from acquired concepts.
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Mental Health
Popular mental health advice and professional practice diverge in ways worth paying attention to. The difference is incentives.
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Scarcity
The psychology of not having enough follows the same patterns regardless of what you lack. The resource changes; the cognitive signature does not.
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Science & Art
Science and art are not opposites. Strip away the lab coats and what remains is the same underlying process.
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Science and Society
The pushback against science is some of the most misguided disagreement in modern society — and the most damaging.
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Spirituality
Dismissing spirituality throws the baby out with the bathwater. Think of it as a complex molecule — identify which components actually contribute to wellbeing.
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The Brain Is Not a Spectator
The boundary between self and environment is porous, possibly illusory. You are not a mind looking out at reality from behind glass.
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The First Stitch
Identity politics is a disease. The people infected are patients. The distinction between the pathogen and its carrier matters.
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The Mind Projection Fallacy
The mistake of treating your representation of the world as a property of the world itself — projecting the map onto the territory.
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The Typical Mind Fallacy
Assuming other people's minds work more like yours than they actually do. One of the most consistent errors in human reasoning.
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Tides and Waves
Worry less about each wave, and more about which direction the tide is going.
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Tribalism
The problem is not that we disagree. It's how we disagree — and how tribal instincts corrupt the mechanisms that should resolve disagreement.
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Truth
To deny truth is to make a claim you treat as true. The self-refuting quality of thoroughgoing subjectivism — and why truth matters.