Random quoteIt.is a curious thing that the public always hates its benefactors Ronald Ross(1857-1932 ..read more

Do you have to be an ethnologist to have an eye for the subtleties of daily life and for the subtle and small impact that social change has on daily life and on the way we live? It was the French ethnologist Marc Augé, for instance, who wrote that the names of metro stations in Paris reflect the time that these stations were built. I know that there is a Floppy Disk Road in a nearby Dutch town, and also in this case the name gives an indication about when the road was built. Floppy disks were magnetic disks for storing computer data and programs. They were developed in the 1960s and the prod ..read more

Random quoteWar is sweet to those who haven’t experienced it. Pindaros (c. 518 BC – c. 438 BC ..read more

Kahneman is known for his contributions to psychology and especially to economic psychology. He received the Nobel Prize in Economics for them. However, his work has a wider application. For example, it can be useful for the study of war and peace, as the article “Why Hawks Win” shows, which he has written with Jonathan Reshon. The authors argue that hawks usually get the upper hand over doves, when political decisions must be taken, although often wrongly. In this blog, I’ll follow Kahneman’s and Reshon’s article. Hawks are people who “tend to favour coercive action, are more willing to use ..read more

Random quoteThe opposite of tolerance is not intolerance but fanaticism. Kees Schuyt (1943 ..read more

Photo from the Nobel Foundation archive Two weeks ago, the Israelian-American psychologist Daniel Kahneman died. He was one of the most well-known psychologists of this time. He is especially known for his contributions to the theory of rationality. His studies had a deep impact on the development of the field of economic psychology, and therefore he was rewarded with the Nobel Prize in Economics. To his mind, he should have shared it with his friend Amos Tversky, but Tversky had already died, when Kahneman received the Nobel Prize. Though some see him as the father of Economic Psychology, h ..read more

Random quote“Pallid” statistical information is routinely discarded when it is incompatible with one’s personal impressions of a case. In the competition with the inside view, the outside view doesn’t stand a chance. Daniel Kahneman (1934-2024 ..read more

Photo taken at Amstel Railway Station, Amsterdam I think that many of us don’t realize how much we owe to others in what we have done and achieved, including to many we don’t know and whose work we do not build on and do not continue. I realized it again, when I was reading Aristotle’s Metaphysics, especially Book II.1, in which he says: “The investigation of the truth is in one way hard, in another easy. An indication of this is found in the fact that no one is able to attain the truth adequately, while, on the other hand, we do not collectively fail, but everyone says something true about ..read more

Random quoteIf … one were to say that a word has an infinite number of meanings, obviously reasoning would be impossible; for not to have one meaning is to have no meaning, and if words have no meaning our reasoning with one another, and indeed with ourselves, has been annihilated; for it is impossible to think of anything if we do not think of one thing… Aristotle (384-322 BC ..read more

The cast receives te applause after the performance of Stravinsky’s Oedipus Rex and Moussa’s Antigone in the Music Theatre in Amsterdam. Antigone is the woman in the middle in light dress. Recently the Dutch National Opera (DNO) performed two oratorios based on Greek mythology and classical plays: Igor Stravinsky’s Oedipus Rex and Samy Moussa’s Antigone. Oedipus Rex is about fate and deals with the question: Can we escape fate, and can we take control of our own destiny? In modern terms we would say: Does free will exist? It’s an eternal and still much debated problem. Ho ..read more