This piece was coauthored with Travis Manuel. This is a cross-post from the Clearer Thinking blog.
According to YouGov polling, 41% of people in the United States think that it is the greatest country in the world. Others see the U.S. as a place full of arrogance, violence, and inequality. So, what's the truth?
The truth is that there isn't a single notion of what makes something the "best." To explore how great (or not) America is, we'll start by looking at the question from mu...
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wealth
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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How do we predict high levels of success?
Below, I outline 13 approaches to predicting high levels of success with differing levels of complexity, including my own mega model at the bottom.
Note: here, I use the term "success" merely in terms of achievement, career success, or high levels of expertise, NOT in terms of happiness, living a good life, morality, having strong social bonds, etc. There is nothing wrong with not wanting to be successful in the way this post focuses on. But if you DO want "success" in the sense in...
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