Peter Hurford’s recent post challenges us to find ways to engage new EAs. In this post we explore travelling to an EA hub as a means to achieve this goal, and consider whether we would advise others to undertake the same trip we did.
Julian Rotter, one of the most influential academic psychologists of the 20th century, suggested that people tend to fall somewhere on the scale between having what he called an internal locus (‘internals’) and having an external locus (‘externals’). What does this mean, and what are the implications?
Why do some discussions involving smart and reasonable people generate such emotive responses and so often go nowhere? Why does this happen more often for politics and religion than for discussing, say, preferred sock colours? In Paul Graham’s essay Keep Your Identity Small, he suggests that these topics are often too close to our identities which can obscure the truth:
