If your tendency is to bottle everything up inside and struggle with shame, this post isn’t for you. Find someone you trust and get it out. But if you find yourself immediately looking for a place to share every trial and triumph, learn to process first.
Category: Education Through Entrepreneurship
The Importance of Platforms (or Why I Hate YouTube and Love Podcasts)
I know a good many serious people who love to consume ideas via YouTube. I don’t know how. I hate YouTube as a way to consume ideas, unless they are ideas which can only be conveyed using video. But lectures, monologues, interviews, books, soundbites, or podcasts…why would you ever go to YouTube for those?
The Guilt Lurking Behind ‘Work-Life Balance’ Questions
I don’t like dividing up my life into work/family/fun etc. I prefer to think of my overarching purpose or goal in life as the thing I’m always up to. For me, it’s to live as free as possible, help others do the same, and enjoy the process. Then I consider all my activities in light of how they help do this.
Incentives, not Motives or Training
I saw an infuriating video of police arresting a nurse who refused to draw a patients blood at their request. Comments on Twitter included a lot of, “Why are police so nasty and brutish?”, and most responses were, “They need better training and to be nicer.” Nope.
When Does Tradition Become Tyranny?
Traditions emerge for a reason. Society is impossible without them. Traditions provide lenses, rules, norms, and expectations that help make sense of the world, harmonize competing aims and interests, provide stability, and enable long-term planning. But tradition can be tyrannical. Traditions can oppress, restrict, stagnate, and destroy individuals and society. So where’s the line? When does tradition become tyranny?
“But There Are Limits!”
If you advocate free speech, free movement, freedom in exchange, and freedom to engage in any peaceful activity an individual desires, you will hear this objection.
Incentives or Imposed Instruction?
On the one hand, you believe it’s not from the benevolence of the butcher that we get our meat, but by his regard to his self-interest in a market context. On the other hand, you believe that children have no regard for their self-interest and do not respond to market incentives so must be forced and directed to do what’s good for them and by extension society.
Simple Assumptions with Massive Results
Great leaps in understanding human behavior when economists asked, “What if we assumed individuals in the market were rationally self-interested actors?”
The Learner Precedes the Teacher
The learner comes first. Their desire to learn a fact or method or subject is – must be – the first mover in order for genuine education to occur. If that desire prompts them to seek formal or informal teachers, the teaching is valuable. If teaching is imposed on unwilling learners, it’s the opposite of valuable. It does violence to education.
Collectivism is a Mind Killer
When people appeal to group identity, the problem is not that they’re trying to frame their group as too different and unique from all the rest. The problem is that they’re not going far enough in that direction.