There has been a shift in science towards thinking about healthspan–– instead of lifespan—extension. Healthspan extension is the idea of prolonging the number of years in which you’re not disabled, dependent, or seriously ill. I’d argue that’s an admirable goal to pursue, but there’s also something deeply unsettling about the transhumanists’... See more
To care about the etymologies of words is to care about the origins of the world’s story about itself. To broaden and deepen the meanings of words, to celebrate — as David Whyte did — “their beautiful hidden and beckoning uncertainty,” is to broaden and deepen life itself. It is of words that we build the two great pylons propping up our sense of... See more
I felt an urgent demand in the blood. I could hear its call. Its whistling disturbed me by day and its howl woke me in the night. I heard the drum of the sun. Every path was a calling cadence, the flight of every bird a beckoning, the color of ice an invitation: come. The forest was a fiddler, wickedly good, eyes intense and shining with a fast... See more
Each word is a portable cathedral in which we clarify and sanctify our experience, a reliquary and a laboratory, holding the history of our search for meaning and the pliancy of the possible future, of there being richer and deeper dimensions of experience than those we name in our surface impressions. In the roots of words we find a portal to the... See more
The idea of cognitive bias in psychology works in an analogous way. A cognitive bias is a systematic error in how we think, as opposed to a random error or one that’s merely caused by our ignorance. Whereas statistical bias skews a sample so that it less closely resembles a larger population, cognitive biases skew our thinking so that it less... See more