Prelude: this is about leadership (of others and yourself) Yesterday I outlined an essay on the counterproductivity of deciding right and wrong for people who disagree with you. Today I’m fleshing out the essay. The point of this blog is to help people lead — to influence others, to work with them in teams, to negotiate with them, and so on — even when you disagree. So I’ll leave deciding[…] Keep reading →

What a coincidence. The day after my long post on the counterproductivity of moralizing for leading people, using the example of deciding for others whether they should eat meat or not, the New York Times published the results of a contest to do exactly what I described as counterproductive. No contradiction here — the New York Times’s goal is not to lead people, but to sell newspapers and what works[…] Keep reading →

I’ve written about the Do The Math blog, which looks at the numbers underlying how our economy works, particularly the energy part, which is to say, what drives it. If you think something else drives it, do the math! I think you’ll see otherwise. Incidentally, analysis like his is one of the reasons I studied physics (if you didn’t know, I got a PhD in the subject) — to understand[…] Keep reading →

Another perspective on truth and its subjectivity came from my musician friend. He described to me the concept of truth in music, which at first didn’t make sense to me. Since music doesn’t make verifiable or falsifiable statements it wasn’t obvious to me how it could be “true”? He described music being true by how it made you feel. He’s a composer and he described how when you write a[…] Keep reading →

People imply by the concept “truth” something objective. They’d like it to mean they know something that could never be false, I don’t think it means what they think it does. I’ve come to believe the concept of truth describes a feeling attached to believing you know something. That is, the difference between saying “The sky is blue” and “It’s true that the sky is blue” is in your feeling,[…] Keep reading →

Following yesterday’s post on a the blog — Do the Math — that covers the economy, environment, and ecology the best I know, along with Limits to Growth, I found another blog that covers a perspective on economics I haven’t seen, but consider important. We rely on an economics system based on growth but we live on a finite planet. We will one day reach an equilibrium with our environment.[…] Keep reading →

Once I was waiting for a bus in Queens. I had work to do, but no way to do it while waiting, and I didn’t know how long I’d have to wait. People typically feel frustrated or bored in situations like that. I did. But I noticed people on vacation sit around doing nothing too. So I thought to myself “what’s the difference between doing nothing while waiting for a[…] Keep reading →