October 11, 2009 We don't know how long we'll live, but we do know our time is limited, and life could be thought of as our endeavor to optimize the economics of our time. Yet, much like the current financial debacle, often the attempt to optimize ends poorly.
September 5, 2008 After reading George Lakoff's Don't Think of an Elephant I spent a long time trying to apply his idea of framing to my own life. One deeply rooted but flawed mental model that kept occurring to me was that of "businesses as assembly lines." Beyond the dubious morality of treating workers as cogs, this assembly line frame also encourages excess production as Good, and profit as God. Worse yet, the model erroneously conflates profit with utility, and leaves us all worse off for it.