How to Evaluate Advice Before You Follow It
Before following advice, check its hidden assumptions, evidence, downside and fit. Use five questions and a worked example to test a confident-sounding rule.
The reading collection
Read.
Psychology, geopolitics, philosophy—and everything in between.
All reading
2,048 readings · 1–12
Filters
The Assumption Audit
Good advice is often a compressed answer to a particular problem. Before applying it to your own life, expand the sentence and inspect what had to be true for it to work.
What are Subpersonalities?
“Are people a means to an end or are they an end in themselves?” Other than being momentarily intellectually stimulating, the question – posed by a professor in a course about ethics – wasn’t very meaningful. But I…
Modern Man in Search of a Soul Summary (8/10)
Jung first describes the significance of the products of your subconscious. You consciously suppress the importance of your dreams, but they offer you different kinds of information that can be very powerful.
Motivation and Personality Summary (7/10)
The central project of Maslow in Motivation and Personality* is to study the psychology of healthy minded people. Thus far, psychology has been restricted to the study of mental illnesses but this exclusive focus…
Advice and Its Evil Twin
From The End of Wisdom - a book about why most advice is bullsh*t. This week, the chapter it opens with.The squeaky wheel gets the grease. The nail that sticks out gets hammered down. Both are proverbs, both are…
The GLP-1 Revolution Goes Oral
April 2026 marks a turning point in healthcare. The FDA approved Eli Lilly's Foundayo — the first oral GLP-1 pill for chronic weight management — while UCSF researchers identified a protein that reverses brain aging…
“The Busiest People Harbor The Greatest Weariness” Meaning
Friedrich Nietzsche’s penetrating observation that “The busiest people harbor the greatest weariness” reveals a profound paradox at the heart of modern life: the very activity that appears to demonstrate vitality and…
Maps of Meaning 4 Notes
My Notes For Maps Of Meaning 4 (2017) – Jordan Peterson Leaving Red Lobster Inn Leaving bar to go on a trip with the coachman, who finally reveals himself as satanic and instills fear in the Fox and Cat. People’s…
Thinking: Fast and Slow Summary (8/10)
Thinking: Fast and Slow by Daniel Kahneman is about the ways in which our automatic patterns of thought can mislead us.
The Value of Imperfection (Week 50 of Wisdom)
In the last few decades, the possibility of downloading our thoughts into a computer has been discussed. And just as with the internet, the first people who talked about mind uploading were small in number, and…
The One-in-Seven Economy
Last night, 60 Minutes put a question to prime-time America: will AI take your job? The number underneath the segment came from the McKinsey Global Institute, whose report “Workforce in Motion,” released last week,…