A Curious Little Blog

I like reading books about mistakes people commonly make:  logical fallacies, bad mental shortcuts, tricks that advertisers use, and so forth.  It is obvious that our minds are not perfectly logical, and I like to be aware of my illogical inclinations so I can prepare for them.  Economists, psychologists, and mathematicians are among the people who write books on this sort of thing. The economic angle gets a lot of attention these days because of the work of Daniel Kahneman, Nobel-prize winning economist who studied ways that people behave irrationally, allegedly contrary to economic principles.  I say "allegedly" because I believe that consumers are not expected to behave rationally according to an absolute standard of maximizing utility, because consumers define utility by their choices.  If I buy a cheap product that falls apart in a year rather than a somewhat more expensive product that will last for ten years, it may appear irrational to a neutral obser...

I have written before about what it means to be "cool" (not from first hand experience, but from observation) but I think I overlooked one of the central aspects of coolness:  magnanimity.  "Magnanimous" literally means to have a "great soul," in the sense of a large soul.  A person with a great soul does not concern himself with trifles; hence, the common meaning of "magnanimous" as a person who overlooks insults because they are beneath him. Being magnanimous is not the same as being cool, but they are clearly related.  If you are cool, in the sense that you don't react strongly to events, it could be because you are magnanimous, i.e. you are focussed on things more important than particular events.  This is a central feature of the noble ethos in European history, and indeed, as far as I can tell, nobility from just about any society (I was inspired to write this after reading the sayings of Confucius).  A noble is only supposed to care...

I mean the title of this post to convey the idea that humans are never satisfied; each time one desire is quenched, another arises, so we are in a constant state of anticipation.  My thoughts came in direct response to what I read in Schopenhauer, and, by projection, to the general Buddhist approach to psychology.  I was surprised to find that a Google search on "human desire is never satisfied" actually brought back mainly Christian sites, chiefly in reference to Proverbs 27:20:  "Hell and destruction are never full; so the eyes of man are never satisfied" (KJV).  Not that it should be surprising that this subject is present in Christianity as in other religions and philosophies.  In fact, the nature of human longing is central to any study of man.  It is what I think of as the problem of motivation, which indicates that I approach it largely from the other direction:  how to convince myself or someone else to do something, not how to deal with the fa...

There is a staple of a certain kind of movie in which two people who are basically opposite of each other are forced to spend time together because of one circumstance or another.  They start off hating each other, but by the end of the movie they have become tolerant of one another, maybe even friends.  Does that happen in real life? I think it does.  Consider married couples, for instance.  Studies show that couples in arranged marriages are no less happy than those who chose their own spouse.  There could be several reasons for this phenomenon.  The fact that married couples go through so many shared experiences is certainly one of them.  "Shared experience" is a sort of psychological buzzword, but I have found that it is a powerful force in my own life.  It's something that you can look back on and talk about, and some time that you probably experienced similar emotions with another person.  I have even read that taking a date to a sca...

When I was in high school, an older student informed me that the goal of a prep was not to be "cool," but "smooth."  I'm not sure what he meant by that (and I doubt he totally was either), but smoothness makes me think of sprezzatura.  Sprezzatura was a concept invented by Baldasare Castiglione in his "Book of the Courtier" to describe doing something in an apparently effortless way.  It wasn't important that it actually be effortless; it just needed to appear that way. Castiglione's book was the most famous of many from the 16th century that offered advice to would-be courtiers.  In an age of absolutist rulers, the quickest way to advance was to be impress the ruler in person.  This was very different in substance from the ideas of ataraxia and patience that ancient authors had espoused; it wasn't a general approach to life, but rather a specific way of getting ahead.  Nevertheless, it wasn't entirely new (of course); there had alway...

When I was young, I was the opposite of cool, and I had a correspondingly low opinion of the concept.  Sure, I liked Fonzie, but when I thought of people being cool, I thought of classmates putting on airs to get attention. Now I'm much older.  I'm still not cool, but I have a much better appreciation of the concept.  "Cool," it turns out, was not invented in 1957 (pace Miles Davis's album "The Birth of Cool" from that year), and not even in the modern era.  The original cool goes back to the ancient Greeks and the Stoics' concept of "apatheia," or equanimity.  They aimed to free themselves from their passions to attain this state of calm, and what is a cool person but one who remains calm and collected in the face of upsetting circumstances?  The concept was adapted and extended by Epicurus, who used the term "ataraxia," or tranquility -- freedom from stress and worry. Another philosophical school that promoted a...

You may not think that psychology is likely to be of much use to conservatism as a movement, given that psychology is a soft science, and academics outside of the hard sciences are likely to espouse feel-good, politically correct ideas. I would have thought so myself, except that I accidentally stumbled upon the blogs at the Psychology Today site. I forget how I ended up there, but one of the first blogs I read was The Scientific Fundamentalist by Satoshi Kanazawa. I'm not a religious fundamentalist, but I can't help taking a title like "The Scientific Fundamentalist" as though the author had slapped me across the face with his gloves and dared me to a duel. Naturally, I couldn't resist reading some -- and I couldn't have been more surprised. In a blog post provocatively entitled " How to Be Happy ," Mr. Kanazawa offers this advice: "The best thing to do is to kill all the feminists and hippies and liberals." Why would this aid our ...