How should we handle talentless "Alpha male" ?

http://phinnweb.blogspot.com/2004/10/right-man-and-fear-of-losing-face.html

I always thought it's important to teach children to be confident in themselves and not be bothered by misguided outside disapproval. I wonder if that would alleviate this "fear of losing face".

Reason is not for getting to the truth, but for arguing what you already are convinced is true. Everything makes sense now...

"Reasoning was not designed to pursue the truth. Reasoning was designed by evolution to help us win arguments. That's why they call it The Argumentative Theory of Reasoning. So, as they put it, "The evidence reviewed here shows not only that reasoning falls quite short of reliably delivering rational beliefs and rational decisions. It may even be, in a variety of cases, detrimental to rationality. Reasoning can lead to poor outcomes, not because humans are bad at it, but because they systematically strive for arguments that justify their beliefs or their actions. This explains the confirmation bias, motivated reasoning, and reason-based choice, among other things."


http://edge.org/conversation/the-argumentative-theory

An interesting take on problem solving.

Rory Sutherland: Sweat the small stuff

This seems like a good idea to improve political discourse

Michael Sandel: The lost art of democratic debate

A fact based view of the world

Hans Rosling has put together an awesome site gapminder.org where you can get an impressive statistics tool for understanding the world.

Terror management theory

I never heard of this before listing to the last episode of Reasonable Doubts podcast.
Terror management theory gives an interesting explanation to some of the irrational behaviors we meet sometime.

Motivation science has a deep insight into human nature

Some very interesting research shows deep flaws in the (american) business model of human motivation.
Dan Pink on Motivation at TED
This also links with the behavior economics from Edge Video.