My nine-year old daughter started attending some once a week homeschool classes. After the first week, I asked how she liked it. She said, “It’s OK. It’s fun to see people and I like lunch and recess. But the rest is weird.”
Author: Isaac Morehouse
Isaac Morehouse is the founder and CEO of Praxis, an awesome startup apprenticeship program. He is dedicated to the relentless pursuit of freedom. He’s written some books, done some podcasting, and is always experimenting with self-directed living and learning. When he’s not with his wife and kids or building his company, he can be found smoking cigars, playing guitars, singing, reading, writing, getting angry watching sports teams from his home state of Michigan, or enjoying the beach.
Billionaires in a Free Market
Someone else having a billion dollars does no harm to you. Fight for freedom, not against others having arbitrary amounts of money.
All News is Fake News
There is infinite information in the universe. Any time you select a tiny slice of info and focus on it, you are creating a story that is different from reality itself. News is a specific view of reality. It’s always wrong.
Antagonism and Action
One of the most useful methods I’ve found to get closer to actionable truth is by creating (non-hostile) antagonism.
Thought Experiments
The claim I heard from some economists was that you can’t have trade without inequality. While I believe inequality is inescapable, natural, not undesirable, and an inevitable outcome of freedom and prosperity, I don’t think it is logically necessary in order for mutually beneficial trade to occur.
Stories Open Doors
When someone tells you, “I’m an engineer”, instead of filing this as a fact in your mental Rolodex, you immediately want to know the story. How did they end up an engineer? Is this the end of a long journey, the beginning of a new story, or the middle? Curiosity drives you to ask good questions, good questions make connections, and connections lead to opportunities.
Keeping Focus Without Retreatism
I wrote yesterday about the information war. We’re bombarded with so much information if we are tuned in it’s impossible to think. But I don’t think the long-term solution is total retreat from the world at large, or what Venkatesh Rao calls Waldenponding.
Information as Artillery
You can’t read, or write, or talk calmly, or think deeply, or experience silence. Even in gaps between the salvos, you’re too shell-shocked to be of much use. Every sensation sets you off. That is the environment in which we live. The trenches are anything connected to the internet or television or news of any kind. Information is the artillery. The good news is, you can leave.
Bullshit if True
Sometimes a spade is a spade, and info about where it came from, who put it there, or the odds of it showing up again are intellectual exercises not necessary to form a judgement and do what needs to be done.
Laughter Killed the Devil
Evil is self-serious. Oppressors and statists can only live by fear. Fear is the only thing they have. If they are not feared, they are nothing. They are a threat only to the extent people fear them as such. There is nothing – nothing – done by the state and the dictators who run it that can be done if people do not fear them.