A week of links
Links this week:
- Malcolm Gladwell on Albert O. Hirschman. One good paragraph:
People don’t seek out challenges, he went on. They are “apt to take on and plunge into new tasks because of the erroneously presumed absence of a challenge—because the task looks easier and more manageable than it will turn out to be.” This was the Hiding Hand principle—a play on Adam Smith’s Invisible Hand. The entrepreneur takes risks but does not see himself as a risk-taker, because he operates under the useful delusion that what he’s attempting is not risky.
This list of book recommendations from Nassim Taleb is from early last year, but is definitely worth a read.
I came across the idea of pathological altruism when Barbara Oakley presented at last year’s Consilience Conference. I don’t like the idea, and neither does Robert Kurzban.