I can see through you

All day, every day, people are telling us what we should think.

And loads of things that are labelled 'empowerment' are fairly (and sadly) obvious exercises in pushing people around.

From John Riedl and Joseph Konstan's brilliant book on collaborative filtering, comes a pious thought from mathematician Blaise Pascal that's worth remembering in an age of super-smart messaging and fairly loose use (and abuse) of the 'E' word:

We are generally the better persuaded by the reasons we discover ourselves than by those given to us by others.

Image from Danske via Flickr.