The wisdom of Katja Grace

She puts together some very good points and aphorisms.  It starts with this:

Do what your heart tells you ‘means ‘stop making up excuses and do what my heart tells you’. ‘Clearly’  means ‘so unclearly I don’t want to explain it’. ‘We’ means different things to those with different political leanings, which helps them disagree.

Aphorisms tend to be cynical because only knowledge you don’t want to believe is short and easily verifiable enough to be an aphorism. People are more inclined to praise long, poorly written writing than short well written ones because it is easier for the former to cheat quality heuristics. Thinking is more fun than reading because it is more like ‘chasing’ than ‘searching‘. It’s interesting that reading isn’t better suited to chasing.

There is much more, read the whole thing.