Fundamentals of free will

Photo source: Wikimedia Commons, W.carter

Photo license: CC BY-SA 4.0

This post is a collection of quotes about free will. There are 9 quotes divided into 3 sections.

A. Free will is a faculty that allows a being to make independent choices (3)
B. Consciousness would be evolutionarily useless without free will (3)
C. Emotion guides behavior but does not dictate behavior (3)

A. Free will is a faculty that allows a being to make independent choices

Jacob Bronoswki (1908-1974, mathematician):
1. "What we really mean by free will... is the visualizing of alternatives and making a choice between them." (The Origins of Knowledge and Imagination, 1978)

Charles Sanders Peirce (1839-1914, philosopher):
2. "The truth is, the mind is not subject to 'law' in the same rigid sense that matter is." (The Law of Mind, 1892)

John Dewey (1859-1952, philosopher):
3. "Individuality is the source of whatever is unpredictable in the world." (Time and Individuality, 1940)

B. Consciousness would be evolutionarily useless without free will

David Chalmers (1966-now, philosopher)
4. "Why doesn't all this information-processing go on 'in the dark', free of any inner feel? ...We know that conscious experience does arise when these functions are performed, but the very fact that it arises is the central mystery." (Facing Up to the Problem of Consciousness, 1995)

Amit Goswami (physicist):
5. "In this view, consciousness imposes 'downward causation'. In other words, our free will is real. When we act in the world we are really acting with causal power." (Scientific Proof of the Existence of God, 1997)

Jean-Paul Sartre (1905-1980, philosopher):
6. "Imagination is not an empirical or superadded power of consciousness, it is the whole of consciousness as it realizes its freedom." (1936, Imagination: A Psychological Critique)

C. Emotion guides behavior but does not dictate behavior

G. E. Moore (1873-1958, philosopher):
7. "Moral conduct, or duty, is defined as the obligation to select that action which will achieve more good than any alternative action..." (Goodreads.com)

Simone de Beauvoir (1908-1986, philosopher):
8. "I wish that every human life might be pure transparent freedom." (The Blood of Others, 1946)

Sigmund Freud (1856-1939, psychologist):
9. "The ego represents what we call reason and sanity, in contrast to the id which contains passions." (The Ego and the Id, 1923)

Fundamentals of God

Photo source: Wikimedia Commons

This post is a collection of quotes about God. There are 12 quotes divided into 4 sections. The drawing above is by Albrecht Durer titled Praying Hands (1508) .

A. God is a conscious being who created reality (3)
B. Reality was created through magic (4)
C. The creator is conscious because the creator has access to everything that exists its creation (1)
D. God created bad so that good can exist (4)

A. God is a conscious being who created reality

Isaac Newton (1643-1727, physicist):
1. "A heavenly master governs all the world as sovereign of the universe. We are astonished by him by reason of his perfection, we honor him and fall down before him because of his unlimited power." (Quoted in Our Humanist Heritage by George Frater, 2010)

Avicenna (980-1037, physician):
2. "God, the supreme being, is neither circumscribed by space, not touched by time; he cannot be found in a particular direction and his essence cannot change." (Quoted in Readings From Islam by Robert Van der Weyer)

Friedrich Schelling (1775-1854, philosopher):
3. "God, however, as identity of the highest order, remains above all reality and eternally has merely an indirect relationship." (Philosophy and Religion, 1804)

B. Reality was created through magic

James Dobson (1936-now, psychologist):
4. "Try to analyze [God's] omnipotence is like an amoeba attempting to comprehend the behavior of man." (Quoted in On Reading the Bible by Bill Bradfield)

Philolaus (470-385 BC, philosopher):
5. "The essence of things is eternal; it is a unique and divine nature, the knowledge of which does not belong to man." (The Life of Pythagoras)

John Polkinghorne (1930-now, philosopher):
6. "If the physicists seem to achieve their ends more successfully than the theologians, that is simply a reflection of how much easier science is than theology." (Goodreads.com)

Max Weber (1864-1920, philosopher):
7. "The fate of our times is characterized by rationalization and intellectualization and, above all, by the disenchantment of the world." (Science as a Vocation, 1917)

C. The creator is conscious because the creator has access to everything that exists in its creation

Max Planck (1858-1947, physicist):
8. "We must assume behind this force the existence of a conscious and intelligent spirit. This spirit is the matrix of all matter." (The Nature of Matter, 1944)

D. God created bad so that good can exist

Zhuang Zhou (369-286 BC, philosopher):
9. "Division is the same as creation; creation is the same as destruction. There is no such thing as creation or destruction, for these conditions are again levelled together into One." (Zhuangzi)

Gottfried Wilhelm Leibniz (1646-1716, mathematician):
10. "Now as there is an infinity of possible universes in the ideas of God, and as only one of them can exist, there must be a sufficient reason for God's choice, which determines him toward one rather than another." (La Monadologie, 1720 posthumous)

Voltaire (1694-1778, writer):
11. "If this is the best of possible worlds, what then are the others?" (Candide, 1759)

Michelangelo (1475-1564, artist)
12. "Every beauty which is seen here below by persons of perception resembles more than anything else that celestial source from which we all are come." (Quoted in Invitation to Italian Poetry by Luciano Rebay)

Fundamentals of reality

Photo source: Wikimedia Commons

This post is a collection of quotes about reality. There are 8 quotes divided into 3 sections. The painting above is by Hieronymous Bosch titled Adoration of Magi (1500).

A. Reality is the actual state of affairs (2)
B. Why is there something rather than nothing? (4)
C. Magic is the only explanation for reality existing (2)

A. Reality is the actual state of affairs

Anatol Rapoport (1911-2007, psychologist):
1. "A fundamental value in the scientific outlook is concerned with the best available map of reality." (Science and the Goals of Man, 1950)

Georg W. F. Hegel  (1770-1831, philosopher)
2. "The enquiry into the essential destiny of Reason as far as it is considered in reference to the World is identical with the question, what is the ultimate design of the World?" (Lectures on the Philosophy of History, 1832)

B. Why is there something rather than nothing?

Gottfried Wilhelm Leibniz (1646-1716, mathematician):
3. "Why is there anything at all rather than nothing whatsoever?" (De Rerum Originatione Radicali, 1967)

Ludwig Wittgenstein (1889-1951, philosopher):
4. "It is not how things are in the world that is mystical, but that it exists." (Tractatus Logico-Philosophicus, 1922)

Martin Heidegger (1889-1976, philosopher):
5. "Why are there beings at all, and why not rather nothing? That is the question... And yet, we are each touched once, maybe even every now and then, by the concealed power of this question, without properly grasping what is happening to us." (What is Metaphysics? 1929)

Stephen Hawking (1942-2018, physicist):
6. "The usual approach of science of constructing a mathematical model cannot answer the questions of why there should be a universe for the model to describe. Why does the universe go to all the bother of existing?" (1988, A Brief History of Time)

C. Magic is the only explanation for reality existing

Friedrich Nietzsche (1844-1900, philosopher):
7. "Underneath this reality in which we live and have our being another different reality lies concealed..." (The Birth of Tragedy, 1872)

David Hume (1711-1776, philosopher):
8. "The whole is a riddle, an enigma, an inexplicable mystery." (The Natural History of Religion, 1757)

Fundamentals of understanding

Photo source: Wikimedia Commons

This post is a collection of quotes about understanding. There are 17 quotes divided into 6 sections. The painting above is by Paul Signac titled The Pine Tree at Saint Tropez (1909).

A. Understanding is the condition of knowing the explanation of something (2)
B. Understanding is the condition of having competent knowledge in something (2)
C. An explanation is a description of why something happens or happened (2)
D. An explanation is a description that makes something clear (3)
E. Meditation leads to higher understanding (5)
F. Systematic analysis organizes our thinking (3)

A. Understanding is the condition of knowing the explanation of something

Mark Twain (1835-1910, writer):
1. "We have not the reverent feeling for the rainbow that the savage has, because we know how it is made. We have lost as much as we gained by prying into that matter." (A Tramp Abroad, 1880)

Ludwig Feuerbach (1804-1872, philosopher):
2. "The first philosophers were astronomers. The heavens remind man... that he is destined not merely to act, but also to contemplate." (The Essence of Christianity, 1841)

B. Understanding is the condition of having competent knowledge in something

Laurent Schwartz (1915-2002, mathematician):
3. "At the end of the eleventh grade, I took the measure of the situation and came to the conclusion that rapidity doesn't have a precise relation to intelligence. What is important is to deeply understand things and their relations to each other. This is where intelligence lies." (A Mathematician Grappling with his Century, 2001)

Albert Einstein (1879-1955, physicist):
4. "By means of such concepts and mental relations between them, we are able to orient ourselves in the labyrinth of sense impressions." (Physics and Reality, 1936)

C. An explanation is a description of why something happens or happened

Carl Friedrich Gauss (1777-1855, mathematician):
5. "By explanation the scientist understands nothing except the reduction of the least and simplest basic laws possible, beyond which he cannot go, but must plainly demand them; from them however he deduces the phenomena absolutely completely as necessary." (Quoted in Carl Friedrich Gauss: Titan of Science by Guy Waldo Dunnington)

Linus Pauling (1901-1994, biochemist):
6. "Life is too complicated to permit a complete understanding through the study of whole organisms. Only by simplifying a biological problem - breaking it down into a multitude of individual problems - can you get the answers." (Interview with Neil A. Campbell, 1986)

D. An explanation is a description that makes something clear

Socrates (470-399 BC, philosopher):
7. "Everything is plainer when spoken than when unspoken." (Quoted in Phaedrus by Plato)

John Searle (1932-now, philosopher):
8. "Where questions of style and exposition are concerned I try to follow a simple maxim: if you can't say it clearly you don't understand it yourself." (Intentionality: An Essay in the Philosophy of Mind, 1993)

Arthur Schopenhauer (1788-1860, philosopher):
9. "From every page and every line, there speaks an endeavor to beguile and deceive the reader, first by producing an effort to dumbfound him, then by incomprehensible phrases and even sheer nonsense to stun and stupefy him, and again by audacity of assertion to puzzle him, in short, to throw dust in his eyes and mystify him as much as possible." (Sketch of a History of the Doctrine of the Ideal and the Real)

E. Meditation leads to higher understanding

Isaac Newton (1642-1726, physicist)
10. "I keep the subject constantly before me, and wait until the first dawnings open slowly, by little and little, into a full and clear light." (Quoted in Biographia Britannica)

Rene Descartes (1596-1650, philosopher):
11. "We ought to give the whole of our attention to the most insignificant and most easily mastered facts and remain a long time in contemplation of them until we are accustomed to behold the truth clearly and distinctly." (Rules for the Direction of the Mind, 1628)

Ludwig Wittgenstein (1889-1951, philosopher):
12. "There is no more light in a genius than any other honest man, but he has a particular kind of lens to concentrate this light into a burning point." (Culture and Value, 1980 posthumous)

Wolfgang Amadeus Mozart (1756-1791, composer):

13. "Neither a lofty degree of intelligence nor imagination nor both together go to the making of genius. Love, love, love, that is the soul of genius." (Goodreads.com)

John Locke (1632-1704, philosopher)

14. "We are the ruminating kind, and it is not enough to cram ourselves with a great load of collections; unless we chew them over again, they will not give us strength and nourishment." (Hand Book: Caution and Counsels)

F. Systematic analysis organizes our thinking

Hesiod (8th century BC, poet):

15. "It is best to do things systematically, since we are only human and disorder is our worst enemy." (AZQuotes.com)

Paul Feyerabend (1924-1994, philosopher):
16. "The best way of presenting such knowledge is the list - and the oldest scientific works were indeed lists of facts, parts, coincidences, problems in several specialized domains." (Farewell to Reason, 1987)

E. O. Wilson (1909-now, biologist):
17. "The ideal scientist thinks like a poet and only later works like a bookkeeper." (Letters to a Young Scientist, 2013)

Fundamentals of consciousness

Photo source: Wikimedia Commons, Eexistentialcrisiss

Photo license: CC BY-SA 4.0

This post is a collection of quotes about consciousness. There are 15 quotes divided into 7 sections.

A. Consciousness is a faculty that allows a being to be awake to experience (1)
B. Behind every consciousness is a transcendental soul (2)
C. Consciousness itself is not physical matter (4)
D. The soul behaves according to emotion instead of determined laws (2)
E. Cognition and memory are mostly physical processes (2)

A. Consciousness is a faculty that allows a being to be aware of experience

Carl Jung (1875-1961, psychologist):
1. "It is the ego that serves to light up the entire system, allowing it to become conscious and thus to be realized." (Man and His Symbols, 1964 posthumous)

B. Behind every consciousness is a transcendental soul

Carl Jung (1875-1961, psychologist):
2. "Nevertheless, we have good reason to suppose that behind this veil there exists the uncomprehended absolute object which affects and influences us - and to suppose it even, or particularly, in the case of psychic phenomena about which no verifiable statements can be made." (Memories, Dreams and Reflections, 1963 posthumous)

Michel de Montaigne (1533-1592, philosopher):
3. "It is a thorny undertaking, and more so than it seems, to follow a movement so wandering as that of our mind, to penetrate the opaque depths of its innermost folds, to pick out and immobilize the innumerable flutterings that agitate it." (Essais, 1580)

C. Consciousness itself is not physical matter

Gottfried Leibniz (1646-1716, philosopher):
4. "Moreover, we must confess that the perception, and what depends on it, is inexplicable in terms of mechanical reasons, that is, through shapes and motions." (Monadology, 1714)

Erwin Schrodinger (1877-1948, physicist):
5. "Consciousness cannot be accounted for in physical terms. For consciousness is absolutely fundamental. It cannot be accounted for in terms of anything else." (Quoted in The Observer, 1931)

Erwin Schrodinger  (1877-1948, physicist):
6. "[Science] cannot tell us a word about red and blue, bitter and sweet, physical pain and physical delight; it knows nothing of beautiful and ugly, good or bad, god and eternity. Science sometimes pretends to answer questions in these domains, but the answers are very often silly that we are not inclined to take them seriously." (Nature and the Greeks, 1954)

Alfred Russel Wallace (1823-1913, naturalist):
7. "To say that mind is a product or function of protoplasm, or of its molecular changes, is to use words to which we can attach no clear conception. You cannot have, in the whole, what does not exist in any of the parts; and those who argue thus should put forth a definite conception of matter, with clearly enunciated properties, and show, that the necessary result of a certain complex arrangement of the elements or atoms of that matter, will be the production of self-consciousness." (Considerations to the Theory of Natural Selection, 1870)

D. The soul behaves according to emotion instead of determined laws

Jacques Lacan (1901-1981, psychologist):
8. "Desire, a function central to all human experience, is the desire for nothing nameable. And at the same time this desire lies at the origin of every variety of animation." (Goodreads.com)

Simone Weil (1909-1943, philosopher):
9. "There is a reality outside the world, that is to say, outside space and time, outside man's mental universe, outside any sphere whatsoever that is accessible to human faculties. Corresponding to this reality, at the centre of the human heart, is the longing for an absolute good, a longing which is always there and is never appeased by any object in this world." (Draft for a Statement of Human Obligation, posthumous)

E. Cognition and memory are mostly physical processes

Alan Turing (1912-1954, computer scientist):
10. "If one wants to make a machine mimic the behaviour of the human computer in some complex operation one has to ask him how it is done, and then translate the answer into the form of an instruction table. Constructing instruction tables is usually described as 'programming'." (Computing Machinery and Intelligence, 1950)

Alan Turing (1912-1954, computer scientist):
11. "We may hope that machines will eventually compete with men in all purely intellectual fields. But which are the best ones to start with? Many people think that a very abstract activity, like the playing of chess, would be best. It can also be maintained that it is best to provide the machine with the best sense organs that money can buy, and then teach it to understand and speak English." (AZQuotes.com)

List of favorite songs

This post is a list of my favorite songs. There are 228 songs listed below by year and alphabetically. This post was last updated for 2021.

7th grade
Crazy in Love - Beyoncé

Float On - Modest Mouse

Hey Ya - Outkast

In My Place - Coldplay

The Scientist - Coldplay
Seven Nation Army - The White Stripes

Yellow - Coldplay
Your Song - Elton John

8th grade
Adam's song - Blink 182
Don't speak - No Doubt

First Day of My Life - Bright Eyes

I Miss You - Blink 182

If I Ain't Got You - Alicia Keys

Makes No Difference - Sum 41

Mr. Brightside - The Killers

Spitting Games - Snow Patrol

Swing Swing - All American Rejects
What Are You Waiting For - Gwen Stefani

9th grade
21 Questions - 50 Cent

Banquet - Bloc Party

Hands Open - Snow Patrol

Hate It or Love It - The Game

Honest Mistake - The Bravery
Hung Up - Madonna

Lights and Sounds - Yellowcard

Predictable - Good Charlotte
Put Your Records On - Corinne Bailey Rae
Soul Meets Body - Death Cab for Cutie

10th grade
1979 - Smashing Pumpkins
Adagio For Strings - DJ Tiesto

Fortress - Pinback

Gravity Rides Everything - Modest Mouse

Isn't She Lovely - Stevie Wonder

Karma Police - Radiohead

No Such Thing - John Mayer

Steal My Sunshine - Len

You Get What You Give - New Radicals
Wraith Pinned to the Mist and Other Games - Of Montreal

Summer 2007
All Caps - Madvillain

DotA - Basshunter

Forever Young - Alphaville

Gronlandic Edit - Of Montreal

I'll Fly With You - Gigi D'Agostino

Right Here, Right Now - Fatboy Slim

The Rockafeller Skank - Fatboy Slim

Seventeen Years - Ratatat

Stronger - Kanye West

Such Great Heights - Postal Service

11th grade
Around the World - Daft Punk

Be Still - Kaskade

Do You Realize? - The Flaming Lips

DVNO - Justice

Easy Love - MSTRKRFT

Harder, Better, Faster, Stronger - Daft Punk

In the Waiting Line - Zero 7

One More Time - Daft Punk

Someone Great - LCD Soundsystem

Time to Pretend - MGMT

Summer 2008
American Boy - Estelle featuring Kanye West

Forever - Chris Brown

High Together - Shwayze

Int'l Players Anthem - UGK

Just Dance - Lady Gaga

La Ritournelle - Sebastien Tellier
Prototype - Outkast
Strawberry Swing - Coldplay

12th grade

Black and White Town - Doves

Circle of Life - Lion King

Dancing Queen - ABBA

Ghosts N Stuff - Deadmau5

I Remember - Deadmau5

Kim and Jessie - M83

Porcelain - Moby

The Reeling - Passion Pit
September - Earth, Wind and Fire
The Sign - Ace of Base

Summer 2009
Black Panther - Crystal Castles

Black River Killer - Blitzen Trapper

December 1963 (Oh What a Night) - Frankie Valli

The Girl and the Robot -Royksopp

Like a Rolling Stone - Bob Dylan

Listen to the Music - The Doobie Brothers

Lolita - Throw Me The Statue

Rocket in the Sky - Benassi Bros

Stuck in the Middle with You - Stealers Wheel

World Hold On - Bob Sinclair

College freshman year
Acceptable in the 80's - Calvin Harris

Congratulations - MGMT

Empire State of Mind - Jay-Z featuring Alicia Keys

Every Morning - Sugar Ray

Feelings Gone - Basement Jaxx

Fireworks - Animal Collective

Let Forever Be - Chemical Brothers

Memories - David Guetta featuring Kid Cudi
Party and Bullshit - Notorious B.I.G.
The World is Yours - Nas

Summer 2010

Come With Me - ceo

Gettin' Over You - David Guetta

I'm Not Alone (Deadmau5 remix) - Calvin Harris
On Melancholy Hill - Gorillaz

One Love - David Guetta
Paper Romance (Urchins remix) - Groove Armada
Somersault - Danger Mouse and Zero 7

Stay Close - Delorean

Steppin Out Undertaker - Kaskade and Wolfgang Gartner
The Suburbs - Arcade Fire

College sophomore year
I Can See It In Your Face - Pretty Lights

I Forgot - Deadmau5
Illmerica - Wolfgang Gartner

Like Hot Sauce - Pretty Lights

Over - Drake

Runaway - Kanye West

See the Light (Calvin Harris remix) - The Hours

Shooting Stars - Bag Raiders

Sprawl II (Mountains Beyond Mountains) - Arcade Fire
The Suburbs (continued) - Arcade Fire

Summer 2011
Beautiful People - Chris Brown

Bright Lights Bigger City - Cee Lo Green

Drowning (Avicci remix) - Armin van Buren

Fire Breeze - Al Bizarre

College junior year
Audio, Video, Disco - Justice

Cinema - Benny Benassi

Cry (Just A Little) - Bingo Players

Happy Violence - Dada Life
I.D.G.A.F.O.S. - Dillon Francis

Pop Culture - Madeon

See Bromance (Avicci remix) - Tim Berg

Song For Lisa (Benny Benassi remix) - Japanese Pop Stars
Sun and Moon - Above and Beyond featuring Robert Bedford
Turn It Down - Kaskade

Summer 2012
4th of July Fireworks - Kelis

Big Jet Plane (Stern Disco remix) - Angus and Julia Stone

Kokomo - Beach Boys

No Beef - Afrojack and Steve Aoki featuring Miss Palmer

Perfect (Exceeder) - Mason and Princess Superstar

Que Veux Tu (Madeon remix) - Yelle
Room For Happiness - Kaskade
Stereo Love - Edward Maya and Vika Jigulina
Waves of Change (Kaskade remix) - Samantha James
Who's Your Daddy - Benny Benassi

College senior year
Baby One More Time - Brittany Spears

Break My Stride - Matthew Wilder

Bring the Noise (Pump-kin remix) - Public Enemy

Don't Dream It's Over - Crowded House
Don't Know Why -Nora Jones

The Girl You Lost to Cocaine (Stone Bridge remix) - Sia

Oops... I Did It Again - Brittany Spears

Professional Griefers - Deadmau5
The Recipe - Kendrick Lamar
Tearin' Up My Heart - NSYNC

Summer 2013
Feather - Little Dragon

Get Lucky - Daft Punk

Pupil/Patience - The Internet

Reflektor - Arcade Fire

Sleep Deprivation - Simian Mobile Disco
Whoa - Earl Sweatshirt

Fifth year - Summer 2014
Apocalypse Dreams - Tame Impala

Dreams - The Cranberries

Electric Relaxation - A Tribe Called Quest

Maxim's I - Julia Holter

Oldie - Odd Future
Roygbiv - Boards of Canada
Seeya - Deadmau5
We Disappear - Jon Hopkins

September 2014 - December 2015
420 - Macintosh Plus

A Whole New World - Aladdin

Endor's Toi - Tame Impala

My Life - Billy Joel

Private Caller - Saint Pepsi

Seasons- Future Islands

Show Love - Skuff and Inja
TV Dream - Groundislava
Walking On a Pretty Day - Kurt Vile
Waterfalls - TLC

2016

Collider - Jon Hopkins

Dead Format - Blanck Mass

Elliptic - Vessels

The Fall - Rhye

Famous - Kanye West

Lady - Modjo
Mr. Blue Sky - Electric Light Orchestra

My Boo - Ghost Town DJ's

No More Parties in LA - Kanye West
One Dance - Drake

2017
93' Til Infinity - Souls of Mischief
99 Luftballoons - Nena

Everybody Wants to Rule the Word - Tears For Fears

Everything She Wants - Wham!

Hex Girlfriend - Neon Indian

On Hold (Jaime xx remix) - The xx
Rawnald Gregory Erikson the Second - STRFKR

Set Adrift on Memory Bliss - PM Dawn

Slumlord Rising - Neon Indian
Sowing the Seeds of Love - Tears For Fears

2018
Colors - Beck

Future Reflections - MGMT

Lady Brown - Nujabes

Rap Snitch Knishes - MF Doom

Redbone - Childish Gambino

She Works Out Too Much - MGMT

The Sky Was Pink - Nathan Fake

Time Is Up - Poppy

Wherever You Are - Ulrich Schnauss

Year of the Cat - Al Stewart

2019

Don't Worry Baby - Beach Boys

God Only Knows - Beach Boys

Halcyon On and On - Orbital

Hello Goodbye - The Beatles

Hide and Seek (Afrojack remix) - Imogen Heap

I Should Have Known Better - The Beatles

While My Guitar Gently Weeps - The Beatles

With a Little Help From My Friends - The Beatles

2020

Always - Bent

Blindside Kiss - Neon Indian

Coffee and TV - Blur

Dayvan Cowboy - Boards of Canada

Friday I'm In Love (extended) - The Cure

Let It Happen - Tame Impala

Pomegranate - Deadmau5

There Is A Light That Never Goes Out - The Smiths

2021

Astral Observatory - The Legend of Zelda: Major's Mask

Borderline - Tame Impala

The Divine Chord - The Avalanches

Douha (Mali Mali) - Disclosure featuring Fatoumata Diawara

Everything is Embarrassing - Sky Ferreira

Patience - Tame Impala

Spotlight - Jessie Ware

We Go On - The Avalanches

Meditations about economics

Photo source: Wikimedia Commons, Dguendel

Photo license: CC BY 4.0

This post is a list of notes I had between April 2016 and January 2017. During that time, whenever I got a new idea or new question, I would write it on the back cover of my research notebooks. I would use these notes to meditate about the nature of economics and establish my goals for future research. This post was originally posted in January 2017.

Ranking schools of economics
Economic knowledge test
Goals of economics
Production process of all good and services
Goal of an economist
Correct ways to use mathematics in economics
Wikipedia articles on economics
Ranking heterodox economic methods
Reorganizing my notebooks
Central bank methods
World's best economic models
Real life demand and supply for all markets
Corporate data website
Ranking competitors by profit and profit margin
Tree of economic thought
Economic policy list
Table for economic school's opinion on topics
Table for economic school's agreement on theories
Analysis of economic theories
Utopian economics
What is the ideal 21st century world economy?
Top 100 economic debates
Reconciliation of economic thought
Normative versus positive economics
Anti-positivism versus positivism
List of economists
What is Paul Samuelson's system?
What is Adam Smith's system?
What is Alfred Marshall's system?
What is John Maynard Keynes' system?
Book of quotes and rebuttals with moderators asking questions
Average systematic behavior
Who is the best at forecasting?
Autodidact economy
Regress everything against GDP growth rate
U.S. corporate outlook
Technology forecasting
Testing economic hypotheses
Newspapers most similar to The Economist
Most innovative universities in the world
Target audience of Econ Factbook
YouTube videos of economists
Consolidation of the best econometric studies
Analysis of Wealth of Nations
Methods in econometrics
History of econometrics
Social science philosophers
Modern economic models
Re-examination of statistics and correlation
Best economists prior to Adam Smith
Neoclassical models: Marshall and Samuelson
Statistical vocabulary
Enlightenment philosophy
History of economic thought
Econ Factbook 1776
Keynesian variations
History of economic models
Methods in mathematical economics
Reconciliation of papers and books
Political parties around the world
History of the scientific method
History of philosophy
Economist database excel document
Econ Factbook econometrics
History of foreign currency rates
D.C. think tanks and organizations
Scientific method of economics
Finite economic data available
History of economic textbooks
History of asset returns
Fundamental value of the S&P 500
Welfare states
Ideal policy agenda
History of political parties
Econ Factbook notecards
Health around the world
Visualized U.S. financial system
History of business
History of technology
History of economic journals
Ranking Nobel Prize in economics winners
Best economics universities
Importance of Adam Smith
Economist notecards
Event notecards
Emotional view of economics
Definitions of economics and capitalism
History of Nobel Prize winner: 1 chapter for each
Best economic reports publicly available
Cliometrics
Citation analysis
Economist interviews
Decades approach to growth
Major goal of economics: longer lifespan and happiness
Economic history integrated with relevant theories
Principles of heterodox economics
Quotes to support Econ Factbook
Michael Burry
Writing economic papers
Comparison of tax methods
History of GDP, prices and innovation
Problem solving economics
Macroeconomic diagnostics
Skeleton theory of macroeconomic data
Perspectives about economics from famous economists
How to monitor the economy
Ethics and economics
Science of economy
Specific narrow economic questions
Country history documentaries on YouTube
Data structures should be a debated topic
Structured data for specific industries
Systematic knowledge
Forecasting performance
What can academic economists learn from hedge fund analysis?
Expansion of Ha-Joon Chang's schools of thought table
Theory examples and counterexamples
How to be more scientific?
Favorite / best economic theory
What caused economics to go bad?
What caused the 2008 financial crisis?
Economists list their top 10 papers
Empirical culture
Teaching oneself economics
Discovering the unknown
Organizing blogs
What does Noah Smith believe?
Infographics as dashboards
Teaching versus science
Do hedge funds use science?
Is Wikipedia science?
Is Aristotle a scientist?
Are animals scientists?
Are infographics science?
Narrative: history of economic thought
Analysis tools
Theories = Statements
Paper introductions
Collective consciousness of economists
History of economic thought: chapters of the narrative
Organization of theories
Comparing previous narratives on the history of economic thought
How does the economy work?
Economics as a religion
Certainty
Economic scenarios
Invisible hand
Basic laws of utility
GDP = Monetized utility
Theories are stamps you can apply to reality
Falsification methods
Economics as a users manual
Method for properly matching history with theory
Statements in economics
Practical theories
Economist with the most accurate view of the economy

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