Societies function optimally when the behavior of their citizens can be predicted and manipulated. This allows for long-term planning and large scale efficiencies. Because of this, it is beneficial for societies to create a mechanism that encourages you to derive a big part of your … Continue readingYou Are Not Your Job
The world is the best that it has ever been, but the average person wouldn’t know it. This is partly due to us all getting fed a steady diet of fear and negativity from almost all of our media outlets. Regardless of political affiliation, your … Continue readingPathological Scarcity of Gratitude
Controlling, structuring, organizing. We spend a great deal of time and energy trying to convert the world into a predictable and reliable machine. But in the end, chaos is the driving force for most events; the innumerable variables that work tirelessly outside of our conscious … Continue readingCHAOS
Efficiency is building one road from place A to place B. Why spend extra money to build two or three roads to the same destination? Building one road saves money and time (in the short term). This is the logic of short-sighted individuals: politicians, bureaucrats, … Continue readingEfficiency
Even in a fully deterministic dynamic system, if you have enough variables that are irreducible, you will be unable to predict future states of the system because the rate of change of the system will outpace the rate of computation/modeling of that system. Therefore, you … Continue readingComputational Irreducibility
Anyone can buy things. All you need is some money. But you can’t buy a skill. You have to develop skills over time through hard work. One might say, “but you need skills to make money in the first place.” That’s often true but doesn’t … Continue readingTrue Wealth
Just because your opinion or view is in the minority, doesn’t mean it’s wrong. In fact, most people have no opinions or views of their own. They simply regurgitate what their respective authorities have indoctrinated into them. They have outsourced the process of thinking to … Continue readingMinority Opinion
The reason that many wealthy people become miserable over time is because their money allows them to access scarce resources at a high frequency. Special occasions become frequent occasions, and what was once novel and exciting, becomes regular and average. What’s worse, what was once … Continue readingHedonic Adaptation
The whole of objective reality can never be fully measured, perceived, or understood by any single person at any specific moment in time. Reality is too vast, too layered, and too dynamic to be grasped all at once. What we experience is always a fraction … Continue readingObjective Reality
Staring at screens all day long. Is this what we’ve all been working towards? Is this the height of human civilization and our technological sophistication? From your phone screen to the television screen, to the computer screen at work, to the movie screen on a … Continue readingThe Downside of Technology