A Short Piece

Boredom is not only a problem for leisure but also a problem for thinking.

A society that is bored is a society that will struggle to think well. Boredom is not so much a state of having nothing to do — a person who lives in New York, for example, which is full of activities, can easily be bored — but rather boredom is a state where an individual doesn’t see significance in what he or she could do (it is a state in which a person “doesn’t see any point” in doing one thing versus another). A bored person…

An Essay Featured In The Map Is Indestructible by O.G. Rose

On the End of Argument and Rationality

The rational and logical end where death and apocalypse begin; there, the border of thinking is reached. If every man, woman, and child will die if I don’t murder someone, is it still wrong to murder? In this situation, what is a clearly immoral act is suddenly not so clearly immoral: it’s as if the “rules may have changed,” per se. If murdering a child will save the lives of a hundred children, is it wrong? Outside such a situation, it is easy to say that it’s always wrong to murder, but within…

A Short Piece

We will only thrive if we genuinely try to best one another while paradoxically accepting an unsatisfactory tie.

We’ve all heard that life is about balance. If we change too much, we feel aimless; if we change too little, we feel stagnant. If we honor tradition too much, we fail to see opportunities for growth; if we dishonor tradition, we may alienate the people around us that, say in a democracy, we need to change the society. If we’re nice all the time, we’ll be taken advantage of; if we’re never nice, people won’t want to be around us. …

A Parable Inspired by Mark Mio

On living offline and online.

Owning two houses is great, right? You have more equity, more space — lots of advantages! Imagine the two houses are built right next to one another and that both of them are two stories high. Great! But wait, who’s going to clean them? Keeping a house up is a big deal: floors to mop, bathrooms to clean, paint to keep from chipping, rugs to vacuum — it’s no small task (it’s easy to see why so many people prefer renting). Could you hire a maid? Maybe, but that costs…a lot…

So, you spend a…

Previews on Works by O.G. Rose

This is a preview list of short pieces I wrote focused on “thinking about thinking,” mental models, epistemology, and stuff like that. I hope you see something in here that you find interesting!

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Everyone Is Rational

Nobody does anything they think is irrational. If they touch fire, which is arguably stupid, they must be doing it because they want to impress someone, feel pain, or see what fire feels like. In light of this desire and want, touching the fire becomes rational to them, even if it’s not actually rational. But unfortunately, only God can ultimately know what is actually rational, and…

A Short Piece Featured In (Re)constructing “A is A” by O.G. Rose

How we associate thinking with being “out of touch” and so absolve ourselves the responsibility.

Letters don’t have meaning, and yet words are made of letters. Letters are sounds, and sounds are more “concrete” than words, and yet letters don’t mean anything. Letters seem to be both “concrete” and “abstract,” and yet we tend to think of these as opposites, that where there’s concreteness, there won’t be abstraction. What’s going on?

It’s strange to think that letters can be more abstract and meaningless than words, seeing as sounds are more physical and “in the word” than the ideas which words…

Points based on “(Im)morality” by O.G. Rose.

Do moral absolutes exist?

Well, even if “morally absolute acts (in-of-themselves)” don’t exist, “morally absolute categories” still could.

Murder is always wrong, but admittedly, it is not always clear what is murder versus killing. Killing seems like it is not always wrong (say in self-defense, in stopping a rabid animal from attacking a child, etc.), so if x is “ending a life,” the question is if x always falls under the category of murder (y) or if it sometimes falls under the category of killing (z).

“Murder” (y) is a morally absolute category…

An Essay Featured In (Re)constructing “A is A” by O.G. Rose

A Precursor to “On ‘A is A’ ”

What a thing “is” cannot be separated from what a thing “means,” as two sides of a coin are inseparable and yet distinct.¹ A given cup is ultimately a collection of “atomic facts.”² Therefore, a cup isn’t a “cup”: what a cup is isn’t what it “is” (to us). To humans, the is-ness of a cup cannot be understood; therefore, when humans speak of is-ness, they speak of what a thing “is” (to them). In other words, what a thing “is” is what a thing “means.”

To use language from “On Thinking…