I have always emphasized the willingness to discard.

If you're going to be unreligious, it's likely going to be due to reflecting on it and finding some things that are hard to believe.

You know, the standard state for people is 'mildly pleasant.' Negative emotions are quite rare, and extremely positive emotions are rare. But people are mildly pleased most of the time, they're mildly tired a lot of the time, and they wish they were somewhere else a substantial part of the time - but mostly they're mildly pleased.

Poverty is clearly one source of emotional suffering, but there are others, like loneliness. A policy to reduce the loneliness of the elderly would certainly reduce suffering.

Alternative descriptions of the same reality evoke different emotions and different associations.

The amount of success it takes for leaders to become overconfident isn't terribly large.

We are often confident even when we are wrong, and an objective observer is more likely to detect our errors than we are.