By Spencer Greenberg and Amber Dawn Ace
This piece first appeared on ClearerThinking.org on February 28, 2024, was edited on February 29, 2024, and appeared here with minor edits on March 27, 2024.
Does money buy happiness? Intuitively, the answer is yes: common sense tells us that poverty and hardship make people unhappy. We can use money to buy a lot of things that might make us happier – things like a nicer home, fancier vacations, education for our children, or just the oppor...
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Four reasons art is made – and how they shape the art world
There is something very strange about the art world, which, I think, has to do with art stemming from four different motivations that often come into tension with each other.
More specifically, I suspect that art is created mainly for four reasons:
1) Urge: many artists seem to have a compulsion to create (sometimes, to create oddly specific things). They make art to satisfy this urge. In this category, I would also include art that is mainly motivated by helping the artist ach...
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You can’t buy back time once you’ve spent it
There's a deep and surprising sense in which money can't be "wasted" from a bird's eye perspective - only resources and people's time can be wasted.
If someone "wastes" $100, someone else now has $100 extra to spend. Even burning bills deflates the currency, making other bills more valuable.
But people's time genuinely can be wasted. The tragedy of someone spending hundreds of millions of dollars building a yacht is not the dollars spent but the enormous quantity of people's time and all ...
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Our Human Games: games are everywhere, and they matter more than most people think
Games reflect an important part of human psychology. One broad way to think about "games" is that they are any situation that has:
(a) a set of rules (explicit or implicit) that are made up by humans,
(b) a scoring system (explicit or implicit) for determining how players are doing or for deciding who wins,
(c) participants who are trying to increase their "score," and
(d) a game context (outside of which the game rules stop applying).
So, by this definition, games include ch...
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Thoughts on Common Political Perspectives
Personal freedom (often part of liberal and libertarian perspectives):
(1) People seem better at understanding what is good for them, as individuals, than regulators are at figuring out what those same people need, so I think personal freedom to do what you like should be the default position unless there is a good reason to deviate from it.
(2) I think it makes our society better, on average, when any person who is critical of government or authority can publicly state their criticism wi...
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20 Super-Helpful Life Hacks
Part 1: LEARNING HACKS
1. Crowdsource improvements to ideas: when you come up with a new idea or are mulling over a complex idea and still find yourself uncertain or confused about it, post to Facebook explaining the idea, and explain that you're curious to hear what other people think about it, or whether they agree or disagree and why, or what their own theories about it are. Crowdsourcing the perspectives of others can be a fantastic way to improve your own understanding and to ge...
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Viewing Your Time As Money
Should I wait in line to get this free mug? Should I walk to dinner rather than taking a taxi? Should I drive an extra fifteen minutes to go to the cheaper grocery store? Should I keep reading reviews for another twenty minutes to make sure I've really found the best hot water bottle that $10 can buy? These questions can be quite difficult to answer without a framework for valuing our time, especially since considerations of this sort tend to trigger cognitive biases.
To figure out how much w...
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