Advice on choosing between two difficult choices, from Overcoming Bias.
Well… if you can’t decide between them, they must be around equally appealing, right? Equally balanced pros and cons? So the choice must matter very little - you may as well flip a coin. The alternative is that the pros and cons aren’t equally balanced, in which case the decision should be simple.
This is a bit of a tongue-in-cheek suggestion, obviously - more appropriate for choosing from a restaurant menu than choosing a major in college.
This is the principal quote:
I do think there’s something to be said for agonizing over important decisions, but only so long as the agonization process is currently going somewhere, not stuck.
Scott Adams—the author famous for his Dilbert comic—has an interesting take on ambition:
I think ambition is a genetic defect. You can’t have ambition unless you think there is something wrong with the way you are. Ambition is a state of feeling perpetually flawed.
Every year The Philosopher’s Annual attempts to pick the ten best philosophy articles of the year. This year’s results are now out and I’ll soon be delving into the archives to peruse the previous 26 volumes.
via Mind Hacks
I’ve just discovered Seed Magazine’s Seed Salon and am enthralled.
Each ‘episode’ is a short, ten-minute conversation between a scientist and an artist or humanist. It’s like a conversational TED Talk.
via Kottke
Playboy’s 1964 Ayn Rand interview in full; a deep and prophetic discussion.
PLAYBOY: Has no religion, in your estimation, ever offered anything of constructive value to human life?
RAND: Qua religion, no — in the sense of blind belief, belief unsupported by, or contrary to, the facts of reality and the conclusions of reason. Faith, as such, is extremely detrimental to human life: it is the negation of reason. But you must remember that religion is an early form of philosophy, that the first attempts to explain the universe, to give a coherent frame of reference to man’s life and a code of moral values, were made by religion, before men graduated or developed enough to have philosophy. And, as philosophies, some religions have very valuable moral points. They may have a good influence or proper principles to inculcate, but in a very contradictory context and, on a very — how should I say it? — dangerous or malevolent base: on the ground of faith.
via Kottke