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Truth, no matter how inconvenient, is more beautiful than fiction. An Echo Chamber is a community based around a subjective set of assumptions, which never questions those assumptions, and twists everything into supporting those assumptions. It can be useful and profitable to spend some time in such a community, because of the unique lens they [...]

Isaac Newton famously attributed his success to standing on the shoulders of giants. Here are some tips how you can do that too. Before you know it, you’ll be wearing a huge British wig and inventing new branches of math and science. Work your way up. Before you stand on the shoulders of giants, you’ll [...]

Whether he holds great power or is just a figurehead, the ultimate measure of a king’s success is whether he continues his line. He might conquer the whole world by force and brilliant strategy, but if he has no heir, his accomplishment will be completely unwoven by the competing warlords in the vacuum of power. [...]

History has been full of arbitrary kings, temporary monarchies built in the sand, artificial and forced. But there is an intrinsic and natural monarchy, a hidden and subtle monarchy with no explicit decrees or crowns or throne rooms, but in the long run this monarchy has absolute authority over all mankind. This is Mathematical Royalty, [...]

The core of leadership is decision making, unfortunately that includes times when you honestly don’t care. Sometimes a leader has to make decisions even though he doesn’t feel passionately about any particular option. In these cases, there’s nothing to do but lead arbitrarily. Make a choice randomly if there’s no better way to make it. [...]

Idle hands, it’s said, are the Devil’s workshop. Let me say, though, if the Devil is still relying on human handwork, then he’s extremely behind on technology! Someone should tell him we’ve invented computers and robotics, and he can start shutting down some of those idle hand workshops and laying off the workers. A Work [...]

In the cult classic “Fight Club”, Brad Pitt plays as Tyler Durden, a charismatic anarcho-primitivist who frees lots of men from the lethargic oppression of consumer society. Encouraging men to pick fights with one another, Tyler dismantles deep-held patterns of social interaction, short-circuiting the autopilot mechanisms by which those men used to lead their lives. [...]

My biggest problem making conversation was I’d run out of things to say. And then, to make matters worse, I’d consciously try to come up with something. The universal law of conversation is spontaneity: if you think about what you’re gonna say before the words come out of your mouth, they’re guaranteed to sound awkward. [...]

It has been said that our entire lives are just preparation for the few brief moments that really matter. Aside from those precious fleeting moments, the rest is autopilot. Days slip through our fingers like grains of sand while we act out scripts. Nor are these the scripts of an exciting play; it would be [...]

In civilized society, we go to any extreme to avoid fighting. Long gone are the duels of the past, long outgrown is the namecalling of grade school. And yet, cruelty continues to manifest itself in our actions, sneaking in as passive aggressiveness. We give the “cold shoulder” to our most dearly loved ones, even though [...]