Philosophy, like all other studies, aims primarily at knowledge. (…)

If you ask a mathematician, a mineralogist, a historian, or any other man of learning, what definite body of truths has been ascertained by his science, his answer will last as long as you are willing to listen. But if you put the same question to a philosopher, he will, if he is candid, have to confess that his study has not achieved positive results such as have been achieved by other sciences. (…)

The value of philosophy is, in fact, to be sought largely in its very uncertainty. The man who has no tincture of philosophy goes through life imprisoned in the prejudices derived from common sense, from the habitual beliefs of his age or his nation, and from convictions which have grown up in his mind without the co-operation or consent of his deliberate reason. To such a man the world tends to become definite, finite, obvious; common objects rouse no questions, and unfamiliar possibilities are contemptuously rejected. As soon as we begin to philosophize, on the contrary, we find that even the most everyday things lead to problems to which only very incomplete answers can be given.

{ Bertrand Russel, The Value of Philosophy, 1912 | Continue reading }

photo { Richard Avedon }

If you ask doctors what is the worst part of their jobs, what do you think they say? Carrying out difficult, painful procedures? Telling people they’ve only got months to live? No, it’s something that might seem much less stressful: administration.

We tend to downplay day-to-day irritations, thinking we’ve got bigger fish to fry. But actually people’s job satisfaction is surprisingly sensitive to daily hassles. It might not seem like much but when it happens almost every day and it’s beyond our control, it hits job satisfaction hard.

{ 10 Psychological Keys to Job Satisfaction | PsyBlog | Continue reading }

artwork { Christian Schad, Operation, 1929 }

For someone who remembers the old days, the food is the most startling thing about modern England. English food used to be deservedly famous for its awfulness–greasy fish and chips, gelatinous pork pies, and dishwater coffee. Now it is not only easy to do much better, but traditionally terrible English meals have even become hard to find. What happened?

Maybe the first question is how English cooking got to be so bad in the first place. A good guess is that the country’s early industrialization and urbanization was the culprit. Millions of people moved rapidly off the land and away from access to traditional ingredients. Worse, they did so at a time when the technology of urban food supply was still primitive: Victorian London already had well over a million people, but most of its food came in by horse-drawn barge. And so ordinary people, and even the middle classes, were forced into a cuisine based on canned goods (mushy peas), preserved meats (hence those pies), and root vegetables that didn’t need refrigeration (e.g. potatoes, which explain the chips).

But why did the food stay so bad after refrigerated railroad cars and ships, frozen foods (better than canned, anyway), and eventually air-freight deliveries of fresh fish and vegetables had become available? Now we’re talking about economics–and about the limits of conventional economic theory. For the answer is surely that by the time it became possible for urban Britons to eat decently, they no longer knew the difference. The appreciation of good food is, quite literally, an acquired taste–but because your typical Englishman, circa, say, 1975, had never had a really good meal, he didn’t demand one.

{ Paul Krugman | Continue reading }

Falsifiability or refutability is the logical possibility that an assertion can be contradicted by an observation or the outcome of a physical experiment. That something is “falsifiable” does not mean it is false; rather, that if it is false, then some observation or experiment will produce a reproducible result that is in conflict with it.

For example, the claim “atoms do exist” is unfalsifiable: Even if all observations made so far did not produce an atom, it is still possible that the next observation does. In the same way, “all men are mortal” is unfalsifiable: even if someone is observed who has not died so far, he could still die.

By contrast, “all men are immortal,” is falsifiable by the presentation of just one dead man. Not all statements that are falsifiable in principle are falsifiable in practice. For example, “it will be raining here in one million years” is theoretically falsifiable, but not practically so.

The concept was made popular by Karl Popper, who, in his philosophical criticism of the popular positivist view of the scientific method, concluded that a hypothesis, proposition, or theory talks about the observable only if it is falsifiable. Popper however stressed that unfalsifiable statements are still important in science, and are often implied by falsifiable theories. For example, while “all men are mortal” is unfalsifiable, it is a logical consequence of the falsifiable theory that “every man dies before he reaches the age of 150 years.”

{ Wikipedia | Continue reading }

Traditionally, nostalgia has been conceptualized as a medical disease and a psychiatric disorder. Instead, we argue that nostalgia is a predominantly positive, self-relevant, and social emotion serving key psychological functions. Nostalgic narratives reflect more positive than negative affect, feature the self as the protagonist, and are embedded in a social context. Nostalgia is triggered by dysphoric states such as negative mood and loneliness. Finally, nostalgia generates positive affect, increases self-esteem, fosters social connectedness, and alleviates existential threat.

{ IngentaConnect }

Preface to Kant’s Critique of Pure Reason, written by J. M. D. Meiklejohn, the translator:

A previous translation of the Kritik exists, which, had it been satisfactory, would have dispensed with the present. But the translator had, evidently, no very extensive acquaintance with the German language, and still less with his subject. A translator ought to be an interpreting intellect between the author and the reader; but, in the present case, the only interpreting medium has been the dictionary.

Indeed, Kant’s fate in this country has been a very hard one. Misunderstood by the ablest philosophers of the time, illustrated, explained, or translated by the most incompetent,— it has been his lot to be either unappreciated, misapprehended, or entirely neglected.

{ via Jeremy Stangroom | Continue reading }

photo { Aaron Wojack }

Ron Jude: emmett is a book that brings form to a selection of my old, random photographs. (…) The heart of the project has to do with ideas about existence and the past. It’s structured to echo how we try to piece together coherent narratives through fragments of memory. (…)

Ed Panar: To me Same Difference is sort of an anti-project. I wanted to see what happened if you forgot about the rules, or never knew them in the first place. When you start noticing your own ‘rules’ or, habits of working, things start to become ambiguous pretty quickly. Why do we prefer doing things one way to another? What if we were to discover the basis for our strategies was arbitrary? If these pictures aren’t connected, can that be a point of connection? Photographs are so insanely open anyway. Even in the most constrained situations they will always be about more than the author was aware of in the moment.

{ Conversation between Ed Panar and Ron Jude | Ahorn |Continue reading }

photo { Ron Jude }

A few weeks ago, a woman asked me for advice about her teenage daughter. “She wants to be a writer,” the mother said. “What should we be doing?” (…)

First of all, let her be bored. Let her have long afternoons with absolutely nothing to do. (…)

Let her be lonely. Let her believe that no one in the world truly understands her. Give her the freedom to fall in love with the wrong person, to lose her heart, to have it smashed and abused and broken.

{ Molly Backes | Continue reading }

related { Weird Writing Habits of Famous Authors. }

photo { Thatcher Keats }

More than a billion people cannot count on meeting their basic needs for food, sanitation, and clean water. Their children die from simple, preventable diseases. They lack a minimally decent quality of life.

At the same time, more than a billion people live at a hitherto unknown level of affluence. They think nothing of spending more to go out to dinner than the other billion have to live on for a month. Do they therefore have a high quality of life? Being able to meet one’s basic needs for food, water, and reasonable health is a necessary condition for having an adequate quality of life, but not a sufficient one.

In the past, we spent much of our day ensuring we would have enough to eat. Then we would relax and socialize. Now, for the affluent, it is so easy to meet our basic needs that we lack purpose in our daily activities—leading us to consume more, and thus to feel we do not earn enough for all that we “need.”

{ What does quality of life mean? And how should we measure it? Our panel of global experts weighs in. | World Policy Institute | Continue reading }

Here is an obvious truth overlooked by too many: Almost all companies die. They have a theoretically infinite lifespan, but eventually, their day in the sun passes, their parts are sold off for scrap, they fade into the dim dusty pages of history. Sure, Europe has centuries old breweries and specialty foods companies, but they are notable because they are exceptions.

Think back to the original Dow Jones Industrials, filled as it was with Steam and Leather Belt companies, all gone bankrupt nearly a century ago. How many of the original companies in the DJIA are still even in existence?

Microsoft was once technology’s behemoth, the 800 pound gorilla, an unstoppable anti-competitive monopolist. And today? It was a great 20 year run, but it’s mostly over. They still have the cash horde and engineering chops to create a smash hit like the Kinect, and they are a cash cow, but the odds are, their glory days are behind them.

While some companies manage to have a second act — Apple and IBM are notable examples — they too, remain the exception.

Today, tech companies’ lifespans are measured in internet years. Any firms dominance of any given space is likely to cover a much smaller period — way less than a decade in real time. The obvious poster child for this syndrome? MySpace. Even mighty Google is seeing market share growth in search slip as competitors nip at its heels.

All of which leads me to the question of the day: Has Facebook missed its IPO window? (…)

There are signs that Google Plus is a worthy competitor: They quickly amassed 10 million users, and that is while they are in Beta.

{ Barry Ritholtz | Continue reading }

drawings { Wes Lang }

We don’t name babies to honor people any more. (…)


The 2008 election saw the historic election of America’s first black president. As you might expect, this event was commemorated in names. Approximately 60 more babies were named Barack or Obama than the year before. How big a deal was that? Well, it means hero naming for the new president accounted for .00001 percent of babies born, or one in every 71,000. Neither Barack nor Obama ranked among America’s top 2,000 names for boys. In other words, the effect was so trivially small that you would never notice it unless you went searching for it. Recent presidents with more familiar names, like Clinton, fared even worse on the name charts.



Now roll back the clock to the presidential election of 1896. Democrat William Jennings Bryan inspired a dramatic jump in the names Jennings and Bryan. Those jumps accounted for one in every 2,400 babies born  — an effect 30 times bigger than Obama’s. It was enough to rank both names in the top 300 for the year. And in case your American history is a little shaky: Bryan lost the election.


{ The Baby Name Wizard | Continue reading }

photo { Mustafah Abdulaziz }

Inferno (Italian for “Hell”) is the first part of Dante’s 14th-century epic poem Divine Comedy. It is followed by Purgatorio and Paradiso. It is an allegory telling of the journey of Dante through what is largely the medieval concept of Hell.

Hell is depicted as nine circles of suffering located within the Earth.

First Circle: Limbo

Second Circle: Lust

Third Circle: Gluttony

Fourth Circle: Greed

Fifth Circle: Anger

Sixth Circle: Heresy

Seventh Circle: Violence

Eighth Circle: Fraud

Ninth Circle: Treachery

{ Wikipedia | Continue reading }

Exaggeration means to make something seem larger, better, worse, etc than it really is. It is beyond limits of truth that creates doubt. It is a negative factor. So everybody is afraid of it. But nobody can avoid it. It causes irritation. It causes annoyance. Thus exaggerated remarks ultimately aggravate the target person. A fool or a wicked person exaggerates. A wise person neither fabricates the fact nor manufactures a new one. Similarly an innocent soul describes a fact unchanged and states it as it is.

Human nature is to exaggerate to gain something. This gain may either be classical or commercial or both simultaneously. Everybody tries to magnify his good traits and minimize his faults thus to win both ways. Emotion makes one blind. It kills clarity of thought. It escorts a lover in the kingdom of romance, far from the madding crowd. Emotion of the lover exaggerates the good traits of his fiancée hundred times and allures to love her. Later on when emotion is replaced by reality then faults of fiancée are exaggerated thousand times automatically and compel him to depart her mercilessly. Both of these events are striking examples of exaggeration and happen at the beckon of emotion. Exaggeration when is rendered for mere enjoyment, there lies no problem. At that jovial moment fact is fabricated and colored as per the sweet will of the narrators. Each of the narrators joins the competition of exaggeration. Since, they have no base and no brake at all, they stretch the truth with immense power of imagination. But it is too bad if this is used as a weapon to defame or harm to others.

Man beats his own drum with much intensity to gain name, fame and win the game. Due to exaggeration original story remains a mystery. As such they say, in history the names are real but the fact is either full of intentional exaggeration or suppression or both. So it is the topic of research to the scholars to find out the truth. Problem arises if a single topic is exaggerated differently by different scholars.

{ Dibakar Pal, Of Exaggeration, 2011 | SSRN | Continue reading }

The Misconception: When your beliefs are challenged with facts, you alter your opinions and incorporate the new information into your thinking.

The Truth: When your deepest convictions are challenged by contradictory evidence, your beliefs get stronger.

{ You are not so smart | Continue reading }

photo { Robert Frank }

Assuming that we are uniformly rational and concerned only with advancing our material interests provided good enough predictions about our behavior—or so we thought—and convinced us that we are best off designing systems as though we are selfish creatures. Moreover, people who don’t cooperate can ruin things for everyone, so to save ourselves from freeloaders we built systems by assuming the worst of everyone. (…)

The widespread conviction about the power of self-interest is based on two long-standing, partly erroneous, and opposing assumptions about getting people to cooperate. One of them inspired the philosopher Thomas Hobbes’s Leviathan in 1651: Humans are fundamentally and universally selfish, and governments must control them so that they don’t destroy one another in the shortsighted pursuit of self-interest. The second is Adam Smith’s alternative solution: the invisible hand. Smith’s 1776 book, The Wealth of Nations, argued that because humans are self-interested and their decision making is driven by the rational weighing of costs and benefits, their actions in a free market tend to serve the common good. Though their prescriptions are very different, both the Leviathan and the invisible hand have the same starting point: a belief in humankind’s selfishness.

{ Yochai Benkler/Harvard Business Review | Continue reading }

photo { Rory Watson }

“Porn” stimulates strong sexual desire and satisfaction in ways detached from many of the contextual features that usually accompany such desire and satisfaction in real and praiseworthy sex. Critics complain that this detachment is often bad or unhealthy.

Metaphorical applications of this porn concept include food porn, gadget porn, shelter porn, and chart porn. “X porn” refers to stimuli that induce desires and/or satisfactions usually related to X, but detached in possibly unhealthy ways from context that ideally accompanies X. Food porn, for example, might entice you to eat foods with poor nutrition, or distract you from socializing while eating.

{ Overcoming Bias | Continue reading }

photo { Aaron Wojack }

Internet websites and print journals are always trotting out essays by writers and editors and agents and readers about how nobody reads any longer—the reason being, these essays declare, that publishing houses simply want to crank out the cheapest book they can get by with, preferably in e-book format. This is certainly true. Major publishing houses are, without a doubt, money-grubbing book factories so intent on repeating the same paperback thrillers penned by ghostwriters that they increasingly treat serious literary writers without respect, not only financially, but also personally and artistically. All of this is true. But implicit in this argument, is that the writer is doing nothing wrong—and, is in fact generating engaging, progressive, striking works of art, which are in turn, rejected and incinerated by the publishing houses. And this, unfortunately, is certainly false. American realist writers—the vast majority of them—are also to blame for the no-one-is-reading crisis, because they have essentially ceased corresponding with and affecting American society, and their works have in turn, grown boring.

{ Ben Clague/Ugarte | Continue reading }

photo { Mustafah Abdulaziz }

For many philosophers, the scholarly debate around holes began in earnest in 1970, with Lewis and Lewis’s now classic article “Holes” (Australasian Journal of Philosophy 48: 206–212.) The authors presented their paper in a highly unusual format – that of an imaginary discussion between two philosophers, called Argle and Bargle, who are pondering the holes in a piece of Gruyère cheese. Argle believes that every hole has a hole-lining, and therefore the hole-lining is the hole. On the other hand, Bargle points out that even if hole-linings surround holes, things don’t surround themselves. Since the 70’s the philosophical debate around holes has continued and expanded considerably, and has now been complemented with an article by Kristopher McDaniel, assistant professor in the department of philosophy at Syracuse University, NY. The professor outlines the possibilities for a new and more comprehensive category of entities which includes holes, and which he calls “Almost Nothings.”

{ Improbable Research | Continue reading | Stanford Encyclopedia of Philosophy }

photo { Chad Muthard }

A lipogram (from Greek lipagrammatos, “missing letter”) is a kind of constrained writing or word game consisting of writing paragraphs or longer works in which a particular letter or group of letters is avoided — usually a common vowel.

Writing a lipogram is a trivial task for uncommon letters like Z, J, or X, but it is much more difficult for common letters like E, T or A. Writing this way, the author must omit many ordinary words.

{ Wikipedia | Continue reading | Thanks Ryan! }

Perec is noted for his constrained writing: his 300-page novel La disparition (1969) is a lipogram, written without ever using the letter “e.”

It has been translated into English under the title A Void (1994).

The silent disappearance of the letter might be considered a metaphor for the Jewish experience during the Second World War. Both of Georges Perec’s parents perished in World War II. In French, the phrase “sans e” (”without e”) sounds like “sans eux” (”without them”).

{ Wikipedia | Continue reading }

photo { Todd Seelie }

I stand at the window and see a house, trees, sky.

Theoretically I might say there were 327 brightnesses and nuances of color. Do I have 327? No. I have sky, house, and trees. It is impossible to achieve 327 as such. And yet even though such droll calculation were possible and implied, say, for the house 120, the trees 90, the sky 117 — I should at least have this arrangement and division of the total, and not, say, 127 and 100 and 100; or 150 and 177. (…)

Or, I hear a melody (17 tones) with its accompaniment (32 tones). I hear the melody and accompaniment, not simply 49 and certainly not 20 plus 29. (…)

When we are presented with a number of stimuli we do not as a rule experience “a number” of individual things, this one and that and that. Instead larger wholes separated from and related to one another are given in experience; their arrangement and division are concrete and definite.

Do such arrangements and divisions follow definite principles?

{ Max Wertheimer, Laws of Organization in Perceptual Forms, 1923 | Continue reading }