Dreams
Have you ever woken up from an amazing dream and thought “I should go back to sleep so I can get back to enjoying that dream.”? I said this to myself yesterday morning, but before I could get back to sleep, I had a sudden realization. I decided that this thought didn’t really make sense […]
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Aphorisms on Happiness
I have been studying the topic of happiness for some time now. After digging through many books and articles on Positive Psychology, Buddhism, and Epicureanism, I think I have found a set of core principles that underlay these works. Each principle is accompanied by a famous aphorism that illustrates the idea. “He who understands the […]
Read more from the Positive Psychology category. If you would like to leave a comment, click here: Comment. or stay up to date with this post via RSS from your site.
The Drive for Success
I’ve noticed an interesting psychological phenomenon with regard to people’s perceptions of their material desires. There seems to be a disconnect between the desire and the root motivation. People often feel that their desire is based on comfort or aesthetics, when really the primary motivation is social prestige. This is not too surprising from a […]
Read more from the How to Live category. If you would like to leave a comment, click here: Comment. or stay up to date with this post via RSS from your site.
Life Traps
One of the main reasons I end up planning and analyzing too much is to avoid falling into traps. There are many kinds of traps that you can fall into. The common property that they have is that a trap is difficult to get out of. For example, a famous historical trap is the serfdom […]
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Compatibilism
One of the biggest debates in philosophy is the free will vs. determinism debate. Determinists claim the world is predictable, so we should be able to predict all the actions of a person, at least in principle. Free will proponents claim that we have free will and see this as contrary to determinism. There is […]
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Freelancing
There are basically three ways to legally make money: you can be an employee, an entrepreneur, or a freelancer. From a moral point of view, these can be seen approximately as exploitee, exploiter, and the ideal worker (here I am using “entrepreneur” to mean someone who employs others). The concept of employment is inherently problematic. […]
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Choosing Your Battles
When you believe strongly in your principles, it becomes tempting to put up a fight whenever they are challenged. The problem with this is that fighting for your principles takes time and resources that will be quickly depleted if you take on every battle you come across. I still think it is good to fight […]
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Zen and Ego-persistence
To maximize expected subjective life quality, it is important to know what life is. We all have a notion of what our life is to us, but that notion may or may not be generally valid. In order to test the validity of our notions, we can apply them in the context of a thought […]
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The FDA: A case study for Paternalism
Apothecary Workbench Should the government protect us? Photo courtesy of cybjorg In a comment to the last post Dapper Dan raised the question of whether private enterprise could be an adequate substitute for America’s Food and Drug Administration. He presented an argument that threw doubt on the possibility that American citizens would produce demand for […]
Read more from the Political Philosophy category. If you would like to leave a comment, click here: 5 Comments. or stay up to date with this post via RSS from your site.
Anti-Libertarian Arguments
Fraser Delta Addressing anti-libertarian arguments. Photo courtesy of ecstaticist I would like to present the most popular arguments against libertarianism and show how my interpretation of geolibertarianism addresses them. The Paternalism Argument: People need to be protected from their own stupidity. A good example of this is the FDA. Most Americans seem to think that […]
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