How reasoning affects taste in art
YouTube: Under Pressure (A-Capella) – Only Vocals
Blog: Marginal Revolution: How to kill bedbugs, 1777
Poverty and Opportunity Cost
From Dan Ariely’s Coursera course on Behavioral Economics:
Poverty increases opportunity cost to every decision. When you are poor, every decision you make is a tradeoff between what you decide to do, and what you could have done instead. If you do X, you can’t afford to do Y.
That makes sense, but every rational decision carries a cognitive load. Rationality tires our brains out, and when you have too many rational decisions to make, you cognitive load overflows, and you don’t have the mental energy to make a rational (System 2) decision. So you let the default (System 1) system make the decision instead, and bad things happen. You fall for immediate temptations instead of planning for the future.
Blog: Adventures in Capitalism: The Four Types of Story
Why Finnish babies sleep in cardboard boxes
First Rule about God is Don’t Talk about God
Nature, she felt, was evidence of the unity and goodness of created things. The knowledge of nature was the beginning of the knowledge of God. To walk in nature was to walk in God’s creation. But Batterham felt differently: “He loved nature with a sensuous passion, and he loved birds and beasts and children because they were not men.” Nature, pure, lawful, impersonal, was a refuge from society and a reproach to humanity and its ideas, especially its ideas about God.
Interesting idea: that God created a world where the best way to get in touch with Him is to remove yourself from your conceptual frameworks of Him.
Why Can’t America Be Sweden?
“Daron Acemoglu, an eminent economist at M.I.T., has ignited a firestorm by arguing that contemporary forces of globalization bar the United States from adopting the liberal social welfare policies of Scandinavian countries.”
Blog: Marginal Revolution: The world’s longest interview
Blog: Baseball Prospectus: Baseball Therapy: Why Sabermetricians Should Watch Their Language by Russell A. Carleton
YouTube: Stravinsky, The Rite of Spring, Part 2: The Exalted Sacrifice
College in Sweden is free but students still have a ton of debt.
Students in Sweden are viewed as full adults, responsible for their own finances.
Blog: The Dish: Living Without A Brain
P.J. O’Rourke Quotes
“Everybody wants to save the world but nobody wants to help mom with the dishes.”
Inside Pixar’s Leadership
“It’s better to fix problems than to prevent them. And the natural tendency for managers is to try and prevent error and over plan things.”