Thoughts on Psychology
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Free Will
Far from being essential to our humanity, the belief in free will holds us back from being more humane and pragmatic.
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Deep Work
The ability to sustain deep focus on our most important work is growing rarer at the same time it’s becoming more essential.
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Man’s Search for Meaning
Meaning is found not in what we expect from the world, but what the world expects from us.
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The Moral Foundations of Violence
Violence does not stem from a psychopathic lack of morality. Quite the reverse: it comes from the exercise of perceived moral rights and obligations.
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The Righteous Mind
Morality is more than just right and wrong: its the evolutionary result of a range of competing moral intuitions. The failure to appreciate this is a major cause of political partisanship and deadlock.
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The Drunkard’s Walk
We’re naturally poor judges of probability. Correcting our flawed intuitions about chance would leave us feeling less guilty, more grateful, and generally happier.
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Stalker
We might so want to live in a just world, a world in which bad things never happen to good people, that we try to blame those good people (even when it's ourselves) for the bad things that happen to them.
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Bad Thoughts for a Better Life
Three techniques for harnessing bad thoughts into the service of better emotional hygiene
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When Nietzsche Wept
Obsession is never about the thing you're obsessed with.
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The Persistence of Poverty
Traditional thinking about what motivates the poor is precisely backwards.
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How We Decide
The brain is an argument.