The Complete Guide to Effective Reading

Learning is a heavily misunderstood concept. As a paradigm example of deep work, we understand that, when reading, directing your full attention to the material at hand is essential. Graspingcomplex information is hard. But this is only half the battle. After some string of words hits your retina and has made its way to your brain, you’re not done. In a cruel irony, these hours […]

How Wrong Ideas about Knowledge Can Ruin Decisions

Let’s do a quiz! What do these things have in common? My happiness level; The job performance of a knowledge worker; The societal engagement of young people; How democratic a country is. Well? ‘Things’ like happiness, job performance, democracy, and societal engagement don’t exist in a concrete sense. You can’t see or touch a happiness-particle or a democracy-atom. The things […]

Schools Don’t Support Personal Development, They Distort It

After they get their first job, many people go, “Finally, I can stop reading. I can stop learning.” In our society, it’s a truism everyone first needs years of schooling before they can start contributing to society. When we’ve reached this performance-phase, we quit learning. Your diploma was an entry ticket to the real world. It signals that you’re […]

Bankrupt

I’ve been home twelve days now and people keep asking what it’s like to be back. All this pondering on life at this side of the iron curtain brought me two realizations: Stuff needs to happen, and stuff is happening. This week, as far as non-English articles can do so, a Dutch article went sort-of […]

I Thought I Knew What I Wanted. I Was Wrong. This Is What I Learned

Fuck. Waking up, I was happy and found myself eagerly thinking about the super interesting amazing blog that I would write later today. I got out of bed and walked to the kitchen. While making my morning coffee, I realized something. I couldn’t spend any time on writing cool stuff today because I had a deadline for […]

In Defense of Philosophy

Philosophy is under attack. While universities are shutting down their humanities faculties, the profession of philosophy is taking hits all over the place. For example, here on Medium, Rachel Anne Williams (here), Mr Nemo (here), Secular Stoic (here) and Martin Rezny (here) have written forceful critiques of the enterprise. Evidently, something is going on. It would be interesting to know what exactly. Academic philosophy’s wrong turn […]

The Problems of Science: What We Do to Things When We Study Them

ver the last two centuries, science has become more modest in its epistemological presumptions. After the failure of logical positivism, cracks appearing in the analytic project, and relatively recent discoveries such as the theory-ladenness of human perception, its original aim of mapping reality as it is independent of human cognizers seems to be as elusive as […]

Studying History Is More Important Than Ever

“We’re entering a revolution of ideas while producing a generation that wants instructions instead.” — Seth Godin Albert Einstein is supposed to have said: “Never memorize what you can look up in a book”. In Einstein’s days, books were unequaled as source of information. We, on the other hand, live in an age where nearly everything can be accessed through […]