Ross • 19th Mar 2010 • Living, Thinking • beliefs, ideology, markets, morality, outlook, rand, Thinking
Is it worthwhile to try and summarise your beliefs as concisely as you can summarise a career? It is certainly difficult. Here is my latest attempt, for my About Me page:
Philosophically I am highly individualist, objective and rational. I apply rationality to my primary aim, the pursuit of happiness, although I have an unusually low discount rate. In others, I value honesty and candour. I despise collectivism, due to the contraints it puts on human thought and its tendency towards generating tribal conflict. I doubt the sincerity of those who act against their apparent incentives, which I treat as an indication of undisclosed incentives rather than virtue. For these reasons, I value the entry of market-based systems in most areas of life and society.
This does not capture everything, but it does catch what Rand might have called my ‘predicates’.
Ross • 1st Feb 2010 • Thinking • economics, government debt, politics, public finances, spending, Thinking, usa
Sometimes you read something that makes you challenge your opinions, in a positive way. Steve Landsburg’s piece on government spending vs government debt did that for me today. His argument: it’s not government debt that is problematic, but government spending.
Ross • 9th Nov 2009 • Living • commuting, getting things done, reading, Thinking, work
Ben Casnocha blogs about the need for building thinking time into the daily routine. He suggests ensuring that you schedule in time for reading, driving and similarl activities where thinking can happen unprompted. I agree and it is for this reason that I lengthened my morning commute. I now take a less quick but less packed train to work. I have just the right amount of time to sit, read and think about the day ahead, and I still arrive on time. I lose only some fairly unproductive time between 08:20 and 08:50, when previously I would do a sift on the overnight emails to warm me up for the day.
