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Category Archives: Thought
Paul Graham, Wealth, and Skin in the Game
I was re-reading Paul Graham’s Wealth essay today when I realized that he’s talking about Nassim Taleb’s idea of “skin in the game”: I think everyone who gets rich by their own efforts will be found to be in a situation with measurement and leverage. Everyone I can think of does: CEOs, movie stars, hedge […]
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How do you respond when told something is impossible?
From Ryan Holiday’s new book Conspiracy: It is always revealing to see how a person responds to those situations where he’s told: “There’s nothing you can do about it. This is the way of the world.” Peter Thiel’s friend, the mathematician and economist Eric Weinstein, has a category of individual he defines as a “high-agency […]
The wound consists precisely in claiming to… –
The wound consists precisely in claiming to discover and to master meaning, in claiming to suture or to saturate, to fill this emptiness, to close the mouth. Imagine that someone claimed to have said everything that needed to be said on the subject of this poem or that line of Celan, that someone claimed to […]
Scott Alexander on Postmodernism
Slate Star Codex discusses postmodernism. I think Scott actually does a good job explaining some of these concepts. The metaphor at the end is a bit iffy, but overall a nice example of the Principle of Charity. At the end of the day, the best way to learn postmoderism is to read the postmodernists: Foucault, […]
Plays and movies
It took me a while to get into The Castle by Kafka. It can definitely be a boring book, but it doesn’t have to be. What finally got me into the book was this: I stopped imagining the scenery of the story as if it were a movie or a television show: an entire world […]
The Principle of Charity
First off, there is really only one thing to keep in mind when reading a philosophical text, and it’s the thing that seems to be the most lacking in new readers: The Principle of Charity. It asks that you read a text in the strongest, most persuasive way possible, regardless of whether you agree with […]
Michael Pollan Debunks Food Myths
Novelty in biology is guilty until proven innocent. Michael Pollan
Michael Pollan Debunks Food Myths
Michael Pollan Debunks Food Myths