My favorite book of last year was Dan Sperber and Hugo Mercier’s The Enigma of Reason. I covered it in my book club as a podcast, but the ideas are so interesting that I wanted to take a second chance to explain them. The basic puzzle is this: If reason is so useful, why do […]

Luck is obviously an important consideration if you’re aiming to be successful at anything. But what does it mean for someone successful to be lucky? I can think of three main ways. The first is when the element of chance occurs before that person comes into the world. This kind of luck is pervasive and […]

Should you pay more attention to wisdom, when it comes from an ancient source? Or should you stick to advice that heeds closer to the scientific principles and moral scruples of our current time? Some argue that ancient wisdom is definitively better. There are some good reasons for this. First, there’s probably a filtering effect […]

Where should you go to school? What should you study? Whom should you marry? Should you have kids? Where should you live? These are all hard decisions. In particular, they’re hard for a few reasons: There’s more than one (socially) acceptable answer. Our cultures often nudge us to make hard decisions by making one answer […]