Last week in “Stop before you ruin it: Math that improves your life,” I posted about not confusing behavior like this: with this: I gave examples of saturation: money and happiness, material stuff and happiness, nutrients and health, exercise and fitness, and time together and enjoyment. A reader wrote in a few more examples. She specified the x-axis but not the y-axis, though I think you can figure out the[…] Keep reading →

Do you hate doing things that take effort and get you no results? You’re probably doing it a lot without realizing it, especially if you don’t understand this simple concept I’ll illustrate below. If you’d like to stop wasting your time, energy, and other resources on things that don’t help your life, read on. Some things work like this: If the temperature goes up in Fahrenheit, it also goes up[…] Keep reading →

No politician or nation, no matter how belligerent, considers itself the attacker—not the most authoritarian dictator any more than the most democratically elected leader. One simple statement, used by nearly every one, summarizes the trick: We will not attack first, but if attacked, we will defend ourselves. Every leader says it their own way. Once the population believes it, they can feel justified in attacking, feeling and claiming innocence. Neither[…] Keep reading →

Many people look to technology to solve problems. Technology has solved many problems. It helps us travel around the world, communicate with people anywhere instantly, makes amazing special effects in movies, and all that stuff that dazzles us. I think a lot of people see technology as something that sprouts out of laboratories or the minds of people so unlike them they call them geniuses and consider them superhuman. I[…] Keep reading →

Here are the results of doing the exercise from this post, “An exercise in knowing your beliefs; so you can change them.” for a week. I wrote beliefs down each day, then put them on a file on my computer. I didn’t keep track of what order I wrote them in, so the numbers don’t mean anything. I just use them for reference. I’m including my word-for-word results to show[…] Keep reading →

Politicians tell you America is “losing ground” to other countries all the time. A search on “America is losing ground to China India” returns tons of results, many fear-mongering. This language comes from a misguided belief that business and trade are zero-sum competitions, that if someone elsewhere gets a deal then you lost it. If you want votes and don’t mind sowing fear, anxiety, and xenophobia, great. But people succeeding[…] Keep reading →

As a kid I learned that the early European settlers whose communities played large roles in founding this country left Europe to escape religious persecution in favor of religious freedom here. I rarely thought about it since but looking at a lot of religious views particular to the U.S., I wonder if these settlers weren’t more religiously intolerant and therefore had trouble staying in Europe. I’m not a historian. For[…] Keep reading →

You’re born liking fruit. Even if you liked candy more than fruit as a kid like I did, you still like it. If someone gives you a mango, you’d rather eat it than not. You aren’t born liking vegetables. At least I wasn’t. Until adulthood, if someone gave me a cauliflower, I’d rather not eat it, no matter how healthy they told me it was. The problem is that you[…] Keep reading →

You have two options in life. Option 1 is to try, meaning actively trying at things that matter to you. If you try, things won’t always work as you want and you will sometimes feel bad. Not bad like your fell and scraped your knee. Bad like what’s-the-point?-Every-time-I-try-I-fail-so-why-keep-trying?-Why-bother-going-on-at-all?-I’m-a-failure-and-always-will-be bad. As far as I know, feeling that way is inevitable if you try. Option 2 is to eat cookies and ice[…] Keep reading →