Turn Toward What is Hard, Not Away From It—Ryan Holiday
“One way to go through life is to turn away from the things that are hard. You can close your eyes and ears to what is unpleasant. You can take the easy way, forgoing difficulty whenever possible. The other way is the Stoic way—to see hardship as an opportunity, as a test not an obstacle, a chance to use all that stands in your path as fuel to make you brighter and better.”
Are We Happy Yet?—Jessica Grose →
h/t Lukas Bolte
How Cults Use Language to Control—Otherwords
h/t Joseph Kimball
The Fastest Path to African Prosperity: Charter Cities, Startup Cities and Special Economic Zones—Magatte Wade →
The link on the title leads to the substack article on the path to African prosperity. Also, don’t miss Maggate Wade’s TED Talk: “Why it's too hard to start a business in Africa -- and how to change it”.
A Nonsupernaturalist Creed
“There is one miracle for all time: the existence of the universe — including the existence of consciousness. Every birth is a celebration of that miracle, and all our fear of death is worship of that miracle.”
Related Posts:
Miles’s Unitaritan-Universalist sermons:
Sharing Epiphanies (including the video)
The Message of Mormonism for Atheists Who Want to Stay Atheists (video here)
Other related posts:
Being Less Controlling by Softening Attachment (included here mainly for the sake the links at the bottom of the post)
From Happiness Data to Economic Conclusions—Dan Benjamin, Kristen Cooper, Ori Heffetz and Miles Kimball →
This paper gives our team’s overall take on the economics of happiness literature, and our recommendations for those interested in research in this area.
A Snail's Pace
It has been 12 years since my first blog post: What is a Supply-Side Liberal? I have written an anniversary post every year since:
Because our research team trying to bring about national well-being indexes that can stand as coequals with GDP has been at a critical and highly engrossing stage now for several years, I have tended to think of this blog as on hiatus. But as I look more closely, I see that my blog output is not zero; it is simply advancing at a snail’s pace.
In my own view, my most important post in the past year is “A Tweetstorm on Imperfect Information Processing.” Then there are several important pieces in video form:
There is one bit of PR for our work on well-being indexes:
Then I learn something about myself from what I ended up writing about. Though I am in a period of reevaluation of what I believe, I continue to be very interested in diet and health. After all, I at least have to figure out what to do myself, and might as well keep some record of things I learn and think about here on this blog. Here is what I have written in the past year on diet and health:
I teach about statistical identification in my “Ethics, Happiness and Choice” class at the University of Colorado Boulder. (You can see links to all of my course websites if you click the “Resources” button at the top of the page.) So I am always on the lookout for good examples to use. Here is one I found this past year:
For my classes generally, I have a bibiographic post under construction: “Posts Useful for Teaching.” You might see something there.
I continue to be very interested in US Supreme Court decisions, in part because I come from a family of lawyers. (My Dad, my uncle Spencer Levan Kimball and my brother Chris were all law professors.) The current revolution in constitutional and statutory interpretation is fascinating to me. Here are two posts I wrote:
It is good to be fortified by stories of how good ideas often meet initial resistance. So I wanted to keep hold of this story:
And there are many other useful things I wanted to keep track of; I used link posts as some of our forebears used commonplace books. You can page down to see those linkposts. I won’t try to repeat them here.
