038 The Human Condition
Hello!
Here's the weekly "Amazing Things & Ideas Newsletter" which aims at making the reader a more rational thinker. As always, find one original idea from my side followed by the List.
And if you like reading this edition, let the world hear it!
The Human Condition
Reason lies in listening to those who question your worldview or your ideas and provide helpful criticisms to them. Why listen? So that you can detach from your misconceptions and have a better, truer and more rational account of reality in your head.
But our human self clings to ideas as beliefs. And we naturally feel threatened when someone questions our beliefs, so we tend to block their perspective and stay with our precious view of the world instead (which could be false and the person you get defensive upon is trying to convey exactly that onto you).
The human condition is a hard-to-describe one.
We are this sort of creature where sometimes what makes most sense to us people through reason, actually is something very insensible for our humanly instinctual self. Precisely, that "humanly instinctual self" of feeling.
And vice-versa (what makes sense to our helpless emotions is completely irrational when reasoned out).
Simply put: sometimes feelings are stronger than reason. And at times it's the other way around.
But there's beauty in understanding this human condition. Understanding that we can't escape feeling (at least as of yet) so we must reason with feeling.
The Amazing Things & Ideas List
The 150th blog post on my blog:
“Under a different light & magnitude”
My own blog post made it to the Amazing Things & Ideas List this week!
This is my 150th (!) blog post I've written on the blog and it is on a very intriguing phenomena:
The same things (oddly) change when looked at under a "new light" or viewed under different magnitudes of size and "zoom" (broadening our vision or niching it down).
Then lastly I reflect on the 150 posts published on the blog.
Read it here.
Mysterious rocks that "move on their own":
99 Years Later... We Solved It — Physics Girl
There's these rocks that move on their own. We just say they move on their own because that's what we see until we figure out a cause for what's doing that to them (a mystical force, in a sense — that was until we did not know what made it move).
But now we know what makes them move. This video is about that fascinating phenomena.
Watch the video here.
Karl Popper on founding a school:
“If I thought of a future, I dreamt of one day founding a school in which young people could learn without boredom, and would be stimulated to pose problems and discuss them; a school in which no unwanted answers to unasked questions would have to be listened to; in which one did not study for the sake of passing examinations.”
Steven Pinker's book on rationality:
Rationality: What It Is, Why It Seems Scarce, Why It Matters
This book is a joy to read for me because the contents in it are all something I really enjoy thinking about. Nevertheless, it does contain fascinating new insights (for me) around the broad subject of rationality.
This book grew out of a course professor Pinker taught at Harvard "exploring the nature of rationality and the puzzle of why it seems to be so scarce." I'd recommend giving it a read, it's a great book so far I've read!
Thank you for reading.
Onward,
Arjun
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