Gradually it has become clear to me what every great philosophy so far has been: namely, the personal confession of its author and a kind of involuntary and unconscious memoir.
There are two kinds of paradoxes. They are not so much the good and the bad, nor even the true and the false. Rather they are the fruitful and the barren; the paradoxes which produce life and the paradoxes that merely announce death. Nearly all modern paradoxes merely announce death.
My mom was on welfare and the occasional food stamp, but I have never participated in any of those governmental programs, even the ones that kind of work like education, scholarships and whatever, and I managed to do just fine.
For me, writing has always come out of living a fairly to-the-bone kind of life, just really being present to a lot of life. The writing has been really a byproduct of that.
Our characterization of collective folly is that sound judgment is not feasible when there is forced or false agreement in groups. We also show how group polarization sets the stage for risky and even dangerous decisions to be made. How we navigate between false agreement and polarization is the kind of mastery that collective wisdom represents.