Tag: life

  • Our Self-Centered ‘Default’ Worldview: DFW’s Commencement Address

    Recent talk of the correspondence bias (here) reminded me of possibly the best commencement speech that I’ve not yet written about (and I’ve written about quite a few): David Foster Wallace’s commencement address to the graduates of Kenyon College in 2005. The speech, often cited as Wallace’s only public talk concerning his worldview, was adapted following…

  • Vonnegut: Narrative Arcs and Why We Love Drama

    For millennia we have told and absorbed fantastic stories with simple yet strong narrative structures, and the structure of these stories is in contrast to the much less erratic “plots” of our own lives. This discrepancy between the dramas present in our stories and our real lives causes many of us to create unnecessary and…

  • Advice from Economists

    Jim Rogers—co-founder of the Quantum Fund (with George Soros), economic commentator, guest professor of finance at Columbia University and author of A Gift to My Children—provided a short interview with the FT discussing his thoughts on making that first million, on travelling, and some general advice to the next generation. What is the secret of your success? As…

  • Life Advice

    Not from a life coach, personal development guru, or some other self-professed expert on life, but from those whose advice I think it’s actually worth paying attention to: those older than you. First is Life Advice From Old People (via Kottke)–a video blog containing nothing but interviews with a wide range of ‘old’ people, including…

  • Debating Cryonics

    Cryonics: the low-temperature preservation of humans and animals that can no longer be sustained by contemporary medicine until resuscitation may be possible in the future. When one discusses cryonics, topics as diverse as futurology, medicine, technology and philosophy are debated. A few weeks ago a number of high–profile bloggers, headed by the excellent Overcoming Bias, have been…