Descartes was wrong: ‘a person is a person through other persons’

“Nothing simply is itself, outside the matrix of relationships in which it appears. Instead, being is an act or event that must happen in the space between the self and the world.” Abeba Birhane does not simply regard human beings as either self-contained or self-sufficient. But can relational and autonomous accounts of the self be reconciled?

aeon.co

With thanks to @chinicuil.

Why smart people are stupid

“When people face an uncertain situation, they don’t carefully evaluate the information or look up relevant statistics. Instead, their decisions depend on a long list of mental shortcuts, which often lead them to make foolish decisions. These shortcuts aren’t a faster way of doing the math; they’re a way of skipping the math altogether.” Jonah Lehrer contemplates the size of your bias blind spot.

www.newyorker.com

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