Good Marketing, Bad Marketing
Why not use marketing principles to keep people happy? Why not use them to empower everyone to behave in ways that will improve the lives of themselves and others? Much like a knife can be used to wound or simply cut vegetables, marketing is ultimately a tool that can be used for good or for ill....
Taking Children Seriously II
Taking Children Seriously (TCS) is simply the philosophy that it is both possible and desirable to raise a child without coercion. That's it....
An Internet that Sparks Joy
What if we designed it to maximise the happiness of its users, rather than the time spent on the platform? What if the efforts of our software engineers helped us reflect on our day as time well spent?...
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Nothing prevents the amoral process of natural selection from evolving a brain with genuine big-hearted emotions.Steven Pinker
Until we meet again
Hello everyone, As always, I hope you are all doing well. In this letter, I would like to say goodbye. Well, at least for the time being. Tomorrow I will be leaving for a five-week-long meditation retreat and will not be in touch with anyone. So this will be the...
A Beatific Vision
Hello everyone, I hope you are all doing well. I have made some technical updates to the website in the past week, I made what are called embed cards which allow me to style embedded content so that it is more streamlined with the rest of my website. You can...
The Evidence for Goodness
Hello everyone, I hope you have all been doing well. That's the goal of this enterprise of life, after all, a world in which all of us are doing well. What more is there to achieve than this? An attitude that many of us hold that never ceases to bother...
Insert Label Here
“A rose by any other name would smell as sweet.” When we are born, we are given a name. We walk through life with a strong attachment to it, as if something about those syllables revealed who we really are. We pick up many more names on the way. I...
The Tragedy of Ignorance
Hello everyone, I hope you are all doing very well. It strikes me that this is a formal way of me say I want you to be happy. If you remember last week's email, I talked about a lot of the stories we frame our existence around and how they...
The Arbitrariness of it all
Hello everyone, I hope you have all been doing well and that my letters are making a humble contribution to this. Aside from well-being and our ability to enhance it in others, I see no real basis for meaning in this life. Fortunately, this is more than enough. "Happiness is...
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Book Recommendation
How to cut through suffering
Hello everyone, I start these emails the same way every time, but I do hope you are doing well. I was wondering, have you ever heard the term avidya? It means ignorance in Sanskrit. In Buddhist traditions it is believed that ignorance is the root of all suffering. That is;...
The Tragic and Utopian Visions of Human Nature
The Blank Slate is a book about the question of whether we are nature or nurture. Are we born like blank slates to be written on by our life experience or do we have an innate nature that remains consistent through our lives?...
Book Recommendation
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In many surveys it turns out that every student, questioned privately, thinks that binge drinking is a terrible idea, but each is convinced that his peers think it's cool.Steven Pinker
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Pain and humiliation distract children from pondering what they did wrong.Steven Pinker
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In 1987 only half of Americans thought it was always wrong for a man to strike his wife with a belt or stick.Steven Pinker
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The evolutionary biologist J.B.S. Haldane, when asked whether he would lay down his life for his brother, replied, 'No, but for two brothers or eight cousins.'Steven Pinker
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If men were angels, no government would be necessary. If angels were to govern men, neither external nor internal controls on government would be necessary.James Madison