It is only through a vast amount of experience and a lengthy and successful maturation that we gain the capacity to see the world and our place in it realistically, and thus are enabled to realistically assess our responsibility for ourselves and the world. There is...
We cannot solve life's problems except by solving them. This statement may seem idiotically tautological or self-evident, yet it is seemingly beyond the comprehension of much of the human race. This is because we must accept responsibility for a problem before we can solve it....
The hedgehog's dilemma, or sometimes the porcupine dilemma, is a metaphor about the challenges of human intimacy. It describes a situation in which a group of hedgehogs all seek to become close to one another in order to share heat during cold weather. They must...
One of the aspects of dependency is that it is unconcerned with spiritual growth. Dependent people are interested in their own nourishment, but no more; they desire filling, they desire to be happy; they don't desire to grow, nor are they willing to tolerate the...
I define dependency as the inability to experience wholeness or to function adequately without the certainty that one is being actively cared for by another. Dependency in physical healthy adults is pathological-it is sick, always a manifestation of a mental illness or defect. It is...
Illusion or not, what explains the fact that for us time ‘runs’, ‘flows’, ‘passes’? The passage of time is obvious to us all: our thoughts and our speech exist in time; the very structure of our language requires time – a thing ‘is’ or ‘was’...
At first glance, the idea that our ignorance implies something about the behaviour of the world seems irrational: the cold teaspoon heats up in hot tea and the balloon flies about when it is released regardless of what I know or don’t know. What does...
‘What is heat?’ Until the mid-nineteenth century, physicists attempted to understand heat by thinking of it as a kind of fluid, called ‘caloric’; or two fluids, one hot and one cold. The idea turned out to be wrong. Eventually James Maxwell and the Austrian physicist Ludwig...
We can already see how these biases and errors in thinking affect the way that people make financial decisions. When a large number of people and businesses are making these mistakes there is clearly the potential for these to impact on the wider economy and...
‘Economists think about what people ought to do. Psychologists watch what they actually do.’ Daniel Kahneman Kahneman won the Nobel Prize for economic sciences in 2002. Kahneman’s citation was for ‘integrating insights from psychological research into economic science, especially concerning human judgment and decision-making under uncertainty...
