Listen to virtually any song or artist and you will inevitably find that for the most part they’re all about one thing. Love. And this isn’t over generalizing. If we group sex into love, the number grows even more. Practically all songs are about sex, being in love, losing love, or wanting love. There’s seems to be little to no data on the percentage of songs that are about love, aside from people on Yahoo answers and Quora asking why all songs are about love. This is probably good because ... Read more
Philosophy
Why Self-Help Is Better Than Philosophy
I think Self-help is to Philosophy as Engineering is to Physics. Both the engineer and the self-help “practitioner” take what has been developed through careful thought and research and apply that knowledge in a concretely practical way (barring the bad self help books of course). Knowledge is only useful if it is applied. I will admit I’ve never finished The Five Habits of Highly Effective People, that quintessential self-help book that is apparently the most sold book in California ... Read more
FOMO, or the Fear Of Missing Out
Recently while listening to music, I was interrupted by a Twitter ad that went something like this, “Do you have FOMO, or Fear Of Missing Out? With Twitter you can be a part of the action always and always stay up to date, so you never have to worry about FOMO again.” This initially struck me as a ridiculous ad. Not that I thought it wasn’t effective - I for a quick second felt a strange urge to check my virtually non-existent twitter feed after hearing it, but because it’s a bit like giving an ... Read more
On the Human Capacity for “Us vs. Them”
It’s just another day and down the hall I can hear a bit of the usual one-sided political debate going on. The type of back and forth that consists of multiple people with similar views getting angry, or at least highly antagonistic, at hypothetical people of a certain belief system, for whom they create responses. “Can you believe the [insert politically-affiliated-group]'s actually say that? They actually think [blank] isn’t racist. But if you flip it around, if we had a [blank] that would be ... Read more
The No Good “Bad God, No God” Hypothesis
I'd like to address what I call the “Bad God, No God” hypothesis argued by Sarah Silverman (briefly in A Speck of Dust), people on YouTube, and Roger Waters (in his live performances), among others. The hypothesis goes something like this: “If God existed, then he wouldn’t allow pain and suffering to exist in the world. Nevertheless, pain and suffering do exist on Earth, therefore God does not.” This post is an attempt expose the weakness of the thought process behind this hypothesis, and it ... Read more
Sam
Trader Joe