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One question separates knowledge from belief, and protects you against con artists, gurus and your own convictions: what could disprove this? On Popper and falsifiability as everyday tooling.

The oldest trick against stress is two thousand years old and fits on a single line: separate what is in your hands from what is not. A practical look at Epictetus' dichotomy of control.

A thinking machine is at its best when you don't believe it, but use it to think more sharply. And then check its work afterwards. An honest look at working with AI.

Was life-as-suffering already there before Christianity, or did the church introduce it? An honest answer to a surprisingly sharp question. And what it teaches us about who controls the meaning of suffering.

From the Roman Republic to today, the rise of the strongman follows a fixed recipe. Understanding the mechanism, without taking sides, is your best protection against both naive enthusiasm and blind aversion.

Desire is imitation: we want things mostly because others want them. Whoever sees through this can choose what they truly pursue. And finds opportunities where the herd isn't looking.

The father of economics also conceived the sharpest moral compass there is: imagine a fair, well-informed outsider looking over your shoulder. And ask whether they would approve. On Adam Smith and the conscience.

How does a city of millions get fed every morning without anyone organising it? The answer reveals why a price is congealed knowledge. And where that messenger lies. On Hayek, and the limits of what can be designed.

The new rises by sweeping away the old, that is not a side effect of progress, but the engine itself. On Schumpeter, the entrepreneur as disruptor, and the people who get buried beneath the storm.

Want to know whether a rule is fair? Imagine it as if you didn't know which place you'll end up holding in society, rich or poor, strong or weak. On Rawls, and a thought experiment that purifies your judgement.

The oldest law in the world is held up as the height of barbaric revenge. The opposite is true: 'an eye for an eye' was one of the first brakes humanity ever put on itself, the moment revenge became a rule.

There is a 250-year-old test that separates the genuinely beautiful from everything that disguises itself as beautiful in order to sell you something: do you find it beautiful disinterestedly, or do you simply want to have it? On Kant, and the difference between beauty and desire.

A machine writes you a poem that moves you, paints an image you would hang on your wall. Did it make art? A famous thought experiment, now with a brush, about the difference between a beautiful pattern and a mind that means something.

'Decadent' is one of the oldest accusations there is, and it is having another heyday: the charge that a soft, prosperous culture has lost its nerve. There is a serious version of that charge and a serious rebuttal. And the honesty lies in holding on to both.

At both political extremes the same temptation can be heard: a rigid system has to break in order to renew itself, sometimes you have to let it collapse. There is a real argument for it and a serious moral objection. And what you believe gives away where you think you'll be standing when it breaks.

'History does not repeat itself, but it rhymes', a sharp line, and fitting for a piece about getting your sources right: almost certainly not Mark Twain's. On why patterns are not prophecies, and on the difference between the engineer and the fortune-teller.

A forecast that says '73 percent chance of recession' sounds rigorous. Often it is precisely the opposite of rigorous: genuine ignorance dressed up in numbers. About a century-old distinction that makes you read every forecast differently.

You can't predict the future. So stop trying. And build in such a way that being wrong won't cost you your head. It's the oldest survival wisdom there is, and the most useful thing a builder can carry.

Anyone who wants to change something but cannot foresee how it will turn out has two tempting paths, and both are wrong. The one says: it's all predetermined anyway, so don't bother. The other says: I know where this is going, so anything goes. The honest path runs between them.

The oldest story humanity preserved is about a man who could not accept that he would die. Four thousand years later we tell it again, in lab coats. About Gilgamesh, the fight against ageing, and the snake that still slips away.

You are not short of time. It is being stolen from you. And unlike money, you never get it back. A Roman wrote the indictment two thousand years ago; it has only grown sharper since.

We treat death as the thief of meaning. The deeper claim, from the Stoa to Heidegger, turns this around: precisely because life ends, something is at stake in it. An endless life would be weightless.

Burnout looks like an affliction of our age, but its oldest description was written in a fourth-century desert. What changed between the monk and the employee. And what didn't?

The harder you grasp at calm, the more it slips away. A law that sounds like a paradox and works like physics, in Alan Watts and, by another route, in the Stoa.

For a long time the danger came from the other, the master, the guard, the village. But we have swallowed the gaze, and that makes the question strange: are we still a danger to one another, or above all to ourselves?

Plato's cave is nearly twenty-four centuries old and still the sharpest image of a manufactured reality. But his solution, let the wise decide what is real, is more dangerous than the disease.

Not all influence is manipulation. And the inability to see the difference is itself dangerous. On Aristotle's neutral weapon, and the trap of the cynicism that calls everything propaganda.

We like to believe the masses are being programmed, because it explains why the others disagree with us. Science tells a soberer, more uncomfortable story.

Whoever says 'I trust nothing and no one' is in fact trusting an enormous amount. Wittgenstein showed why total doubt cancels itself out. And where the trust then moves to.

It sounds like the most Cartesian advice imaginable, think for yourself, never trust authority blindly. And it is precisely the opposite of what Descartes did.

Sometimes doubt isn't something that grows inside a mind. Sometimes it's manufactured, in a boardroom, with a budget, as strategy. On the merchants of doubt, and the difference between distrust that was talked into you and distrust you've earned.

Twee van de invloedrijkste voorspellingen over kunstmatige intelligentie hadden een harde deadline. En beide deadlines zijn allang verstreken.

Een gedachte-experiment over een robot met IQ 150 stelt een vraag die de mensen die intelligentie het langst bestuderen zelf al hebben afgeschoten.

De hoogleraar die weigerde te kiezen tussen twee waarheden, en wat dat betekent voor wie vandaag beslist waarin te investeren.