Dostoevsky is a two-trick pony

Like most other people who enjoy self-abuse through reading thousand-page novels, I’ve had the experience of reading Dostoevsky and marveling at his ability to capture “reality”. I’ve read “Crime and Punishment” in the past, and am now reading “The Brothers Karamazov”. Needless to say, there have been many parts that have completely floored me. I

The futility of contrarian arguments

Since I was very young, I used to want to tell people exactly what I think about something. Most of these views would be contrarian, and I would assume that I am adding value to the conversation by presenting an alternate view. Needless to say, I often had trouble making friends in middle school, high

Dealing with conflicting goals

Today I read an amazing paper titled “Behavioural Consistency and Inconsistency in the Resolution of Goal Conflict” by Laran and Janiszewski. It was published in the Journal of Consumer Research in 2009, and is one of the most highly cited papers in the field. I think this paper really helped me understand my daily behaviour,

Decoding human personality

I recently had the opportunity to read a fascinating paper titled “A model for personality at three levels” by Revelle and Condon. I was expecting the article to be rather dry, from which I would need to extract useful facts after a lot of effort. However, it proved to be fantastically “wise”, with deeply penetrating