Pete Michaud

How to Draw

The Last Psychiatrist just released an article that beautifully articulates a point I’ve made weakly several times in my writing. The point is essentially that we project so much of our own meaning onto the world that we forget to see what’s actually there. … Edwards calls this the...

TV Creates Cowards

This is the first episode of a British show called How TV Ruined Your Life. I’m sharing it because it drives home the point that the influences we subject ourselves to deeply influence our perception of the world. TV is the pet example here, but remember that it’s one of many....

9 Ways to Change For Good

Achieving freedom means changing the way we interact with and experience the world. You don’t think yourself into freedom, only actions can take you there. You may think I’m telling you something you already know, but are you sure you know how to truly change your behaviors in the long term? Most people...

Akrasia, or How to Stop Checking E-mail

My calendar says I should write today from 8:00am until noon. I began thinking about possibly writing at 9:28, and I’ve been glancing back and forth between potential titles, hacker news, and my e-mail since then. It’s 10:31. I like writing. I want to write. The moment I get stuck on a word or...

Loss Aversion Bias

Numerous studies have shown that people feel losses more deeply than gains of the same value (Kahneman and Tversky 1979, Tversky and Kahneman 1991). Goldberg and von Nitzsch (1999) pages 97-98 A friend of mine, we’ll call him Joe so I can feel free to ridicule him publicly, complained to me the other...

Sunk Cost Fallacy

Sunk Costs are costs which have already been incurred and cannot be recovered. The Sunk Cost Fallacy is a mistake in reasoning in which you consider the sunk costs of an activity (instead of the future costs) when you decide whether you should continue the activity or not. “I’ve put everything I...

The Bomb and the Bystander

I read an article by Erin Pavlina about taking command and cultivating leadership, in which we recounts an event in which she took control of a situation despite her misgivings about taking point. I was reminded of a Mexican restaurant my wife and I ate at some years back, just a little while after...