A long day of dealing with bullshit often leads to an evening of no-decision television ...
When a kid asks, But, why? she is rightfully bringing to the attention of the adult world that all this stuff is just made up and mostly arbitrary nonsense often clung to for some long-forgotten reaso...
The tendency to make poor decisions and ignore odds in favor of your gut feelings is called the affect heuristic.
Matter how good you’ve got it, you are no stranger to tears.
How do you separate fantasy from reality? How can you be sure the story of your life both from long ago and minute to minute is true? There is a pleasant vindication to be found when you accept that y...
Having a dissenting opinion on movies, music, or clothes, or owning clever or obscure possessions, is the way middle-class people fight one another for status. They can't out-consume one another becau...
Failing often is the only way to ever get the things you want out of life.
Psychologists call missing information in plain sight inattentional blindness. You believe with confidence your eyes capture everything before them and your memories are recorded versions of those cap...
Research by psychologist Steven Sloman and marketing expert Phil Fernbach shows that people who claim to understand complicated political topics such as cap and trade and flat taxes tend to reveal the...
Every day you feel like you can't control the forces affecting your fate-your job,the government,your addiction,your depression,your money. So you stage micro-revolts. You customise your ringtone,you...
Even as the brain is dying, it refuses to stop generating a narrative, the scaffolding upon which it weaves cause and effect, memory and experience, feeling and cognition. Narrative is so important to...
Education is as much about learning what you don’t know as it is about adding to what you do.
Whether it’s playing guitar or writing short stories or telling jokes or taking photos—whatever—amateurs are far more likely to think they are experts than actual experts are.
You are a liar by default, and you lie most to yourself. If you fail, you forget it. If you win, you tell everyone.
Do you vote? If not, is it because you think it doesn’t matter because things never change, or politicians are evil on both sides, or one vote in several million doesn’t count? Yeah, that’s learned he...
Did we really put a man on the moon? If you are looking for proof we didn’t, you can find it.
You might be a great judge of character, but you need to be a great judge of evidence to avoid delusion.
When the third person effect leads you to condone censorship, take a step back and imagine the sort of messages people on the other side might think are brainwashing you, and then ask yourself if thos...
You don’t believe you are an average person, but you do believe everyone else is. This tendency, which springs from self-serving bias, is called the illusory superiority effect.
Calling someone a bigot, or an idiot, or an asshole feels good, but it does not prove you right or that person wrong.
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