By Laura A. Roser The Comfort of Predictable Experiences Do you get this unicorn craze? At first it was kinda fun—college kids at business networking events calling themselves “unicorn entrepreneurs” or little girls licking rainbow candy shaped like poop. But I’m afraid it’s gotten out of hand. Last week, I attended the San Diego County Fair…
By Laura A. Roser Blaise Pascal’s Views on Rationality Blaise Pascal, the French mathematician, inventor, physicist, writer, and Christian philosopher, wrote in his work Pensées (“Thoughts”) in 1660-62: Men are so necessarily mad, that not to be mad would amount to another form of madness. Simultaneously Embracing Reason and Lack of Reason Life is full of…
By Laura A. Roser What’s a Family Brain Trust? A Family Brain Trust is the structure by which you capture and archive important family information. It can be in physical form – such as a file cabinet with folders that contain important documents – or in digital form – such as a file storage system…
By Laura A. Roser, excerpted from Laura’s new book, Your Meaning Legacy: How to Cultivate & Pass On Non-Financial Assets — Available on April 23, 2018. What Matters to You? Estate planning traditionally focuses on your financial assets. But there’s more to you than your physical wealth. What about your wisdom, beliefs, values, important family…
By Laura A. Roser Henry David Thoreau on Living Deliberately In his seminal work, Walden (first published in 1854), Thoreau wrote: However mean your life is, meet it and live it; do not shun it and call it hard names. It is not so bad as you are. It looks poorest when you are richest. The…
By Laura A. Roser On Consciousness and How Thought Structures Affect Our Reality Have you ever wondered if reality is subjective? Is what you’re experiencing similar to what other humans are experiencing? Do your senses interpret stimuli the same way as the majority of people around you? Is reality mostly molded by your thoughts, or is…
By Laura A. Roser How Our Environment Shapes Our Thoughts In Some Thoughts Concerning Education (1693), John Locke writes: “We are all a sort of chameleons, that still take a tincture from things near us: nor is it to be wondered at in children, who better understand what they see, than what they hear.” It is…
By Laura A. Roser Why Martin Luther King Jr. Didn’t Need Gimmicks A friend of mine called me all excited about a new video he posted on YouTube. It featured scenes of humans helping animals. “I’ve tried all kinds of videos,” he said, “but this one got the most views. It’s up over thirty-thousand! When…
Laura Roser’s Q&A with Emily Oster, Professor, Brown University LR: Tell us about your work and where your passion lies related to your research. EO: My work focuses on health economics and, in particular, on understanding when people make choices that do not seem in their best interest with respect to their health. Much of my earlier…
By Laura A. Roser Zen and the Art of Car Shopping My taste in cars drives my engineer father crazy. I rate a car’s attractiveness over its utility every time — which usually means that I end up with a cute, but temperamental foreign car that’s expensive to fix and costs significantly more than a “more…
