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Topsy Gift

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“In fact quite generally, commercial advertising is fundamentally an effort to undermine markets. We should recognize that. If you’ve taken an economics course, you know that markets are supposed to be based on informed consumers making rational choices. You take a look at the first ad you see on television and ask yourself … is that it’s purpose? No it’s not. It’s to create uninformed consumers making irrational choices. And these same institutions run political campaigns. It’s pretty much the same: you have to undermine democracy by trying to get uninformed people to make irrational choices.”

PoliticsAdvertisingPropagandaRationalityMarketsIrrationalityBehavioral EconomicsInformed Decisions
Book:The Kind of Anarchism I Believe in, and What's Wrong with Libertarians
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“The uncomfortable, as well as the miraculous, fact about the human mind is how it varies from individual to individual. The process of treatment can therefore be long and complicated. Finding the right balance of drugs, whether lithium salts, anti-psychotics, SSRIs or other kinds of treatment can be a very hit or miss heuristic process requiring great patience and classy, caring doctoring. Some patients would rather reject the chemical path and look for ways of using diet, exercise and talk-therapy. For some the condition is so bad that ECT is indicated. One of my best friends regularly goes to a clinic for doses of electroconvulsive therapy, a treatment looked on by many as a kind of horrific torture that isn’t even understood by those who administer it. This friend of mine is just about one of the most intelligent people I have ever met and she says, “I know. It ought to be wrong. But it works. It makes me feel better. I sometimes forget my own name, but it makes me happier. It’s the only thing that works.” For her. Lord knows, I’m not a doctor, and I don’t understand the brain or the mind anything like enough to presume to judge or know better than any other semi-informed individual, but if it works for her…. well then, it works for her. Which is not to say that it will work for you, for me or for others.”

Mental HealthMental IllnessHuman MindPsychiatryRespecting OthersBipolarHuman BrainMental Health StigmaMental DisorderBipolar DisorderLithiumJudgemental PeopleInformed ConsentInformed DecisionsPsychiatric DrugsEct
Author:Stephen Fry
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“If you're anything like me, you don't make up your mind about important issues by doing original research, pounding over primary sources and coming to your own conclusions; you listen to people who claim to know what they're talking about - "experts" - and try to determine which of them is more credible. You do your best to gauge who's authentically well-informed and unbiased, who has an agenda and what it is - who's a corporate flack, a partisan hack, or a wacko. I believe that global warming is real and anthropogenic not because I've personally studied Antarctic ice core samples or run my own computer climate models, but because all the people who support the theory are climatologists with no evident investment in the issue, and all the people who dismiss it as alarmist claptrap are shills of the petro-chemical industry or just seem to like debunking things, from the Holocaust to the moon landing. We put our trust - our votes, our money, sometimes our lives - in someone else's authority. In other words, most of us decide not what to believe but whom to believe. And I say believe because for most people, such decisions are matters of faith rather than reason.”

RationalityInformed DecisionsRational Choice Theory
Book:We Learn Nothing
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“The inner teachings of the East ask us to become good householders, in the Buddhist sense: tenders of space and the people who visit that space. Rather than always seeing we can "get, get, get" or extract what we want from life, we begin to ask a new question: How can I become the offering?”

SpiritualityCelticShamanismDruidry
Book:The Celtic Way of Seeing: Meditations on the Irish Spirit Wheel
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“The beauty of evidence-based discipleship is that it allows us to measure progress and make informed decisions about how best to invest our time, energy, and resources.”

ProgressInvestmentDiscipleDiscipleshipInformed DecisionsEvidence Based
Book:The Art and Science of Discipleship: Evidence-Based Strategies to Empowering Leaders for Sustainable Ministry
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