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Business and the Cartesian Demon: How not to Study Business
2018-09-12
A few hundred years ago, Renè Descartes, the fella who brought us the Cartesian coordinate system 📉, isolated himself for a while to figure out (among other things) whether we can know anything for certain. The result of his retreat was his Meditations on First Philosophy, one of the most important philosophical texts of the modern era and one of my personal favorites. Early on in his Meditations, he decides that it’d be useful to engage in a thought experiment.…
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Cigarettes and Texts: Self-knowledge, Self-control, and Meditation
2018-09-05
A few months ago, I stumbled upon something I found hard to believe: Some people continue smoking cigarettes because they are unaware of how bad it tastes. Although it was counter-intuitive, I had pretty good reason to believe it, as it was suggested by Judson Brewer, a psychiatrist who developed a mindfulness-based smoking cessation program that’s supposedly superior to the standard one developed by the American Lung Association. 😮…
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From Panic Attacks to Yoga Mats: Startups, Leadership, and my first 1000 minutes Meditating
2018-03-09
About a year and a half ago, I was sitting in my Manhattan studio apartment trying to write an html lexer in python. I was about half way through my batch at the Recurse Center, and I was frustrated with my lack of progress towards my learning goals and intimidated by all of the absurdly smart people around me. While writing the lexer, I got hung up on an odd piece of python syntax.…