Squibs

Life goes well (only?) when reason and passion are unified toward the same goal.

The role of reason is seeking that which we want to find ourselves committed to. Reason does not change habits; reason just tells you in what direction you want your habits to be changed.

We like stories because they depict the sort of things that we would like in real life, and we get pleasure from them because of "alief" -- our inability to distinguish imagination from reality.

What matters is not the experience but the representation of the experience. What matters is not the argument but the terms in which the argument is framed.

The biggest problem with the theory of evolution is that it does not give us comfort about death.

Market research is too blunt to pick up the difference between bad and different.

We do not have access to the Why's of our beliefs. When we explain our beliefs, we start with the end in mind and then search backwards for a plausible-sounding story for how we arrived at that end. This would not be such a problem if it weren't for the fact that when you say you believe something for reasons X, Y, and Z, your mind immediately takes a defensive position against any contradictory evidence. My solution: I try to stray from saying anything more than what I believe, and I note that why I believe it is inaccessible.

I heard somewhere that there exists a critical period in which people become religious (i.e. holding belief in a deity) and that if you don't become religious during that window then you are unlikely to ever become religious (not unlike the critical period for language). It might seem like a minor factoid, but if that's true, that seems like pretty convincing evidence that religion is a purely biological phenomenon and not some transcendental journey to find a creator and/or savior.

From an evolutionary perspective, something as costly as religion (doing all your religious rituals when you could be finding food or making babies or preparing your military) would certainly be selected against if it were not useful.

The world rewards signs of merit rather than merit itself. A subtle but important distinction.