40 karma · joined January 4, 2022
The flaws in writing you've mentioned are valid, but in the right hands they've all been used as rhetorical devices at some time or another.
This is the criterion: is it interesting? 'Yes' means it's not AI-generated. 'No' means it's not worth reading.
At the very least it's an interesting cultural phenomenon if 'dates' are transmuting from something people are supposed to do before they get married, in order to get married, into something they're supposed do after marriage.
Clearly 'date night' is more important to people than I knew. Partly for this reason, I doubt it will be sufficient to save or maintain marriage, the institution, beyond a generation or two. It reminds me of the concept of quality time which was introduced in the 70s/80s at the same time as divorce was skyrocketing and children were being increasingly neglected. Yet who can gainsay it? Who doesn't want more 'quality time'?
It's very sad and I'm sorry to have brought it up.
The alternative is resentment, a condition toxic enough to keep anyone in hell.
Yes, and a relatively harmless source of narcissistic supply would seem to be in the performing arts.
I enjoyed Douglas Adam's letter though I can't help thinking it was meant for publication.
However you can ruin the efforts of others by demanding that their work serve a primary political agenda.
One world government is bad because it will attract evil elements who use it to place all peoples under their control/taxation/exploitation, with no recourse or escape. All in the name of helping people and fighting for <insert your favourite political cause>.
By analogy, it might seem more efficient if families were to live in communal dormitories instead of their separate houses. In reality it would create stultification and at worst mass suffering when individuals took control over all aspects of other families' lives.
Indeed psychoticism was identified by the psychologist Hans Eysenck as one of the traits of genius, including scientific genius. Psychoticism is a package which includes associative thinking, creativity, disagreeableness, lack of empathy, antisocial nature, introversion, coldness, aggression, high self-esteem.
The problem is that most people are afraid of giving offence, of being ostracised by their colleagues and so on, and so they self-censor their original thoughts and never create anything fundamentally new and important.
So it's unsurprising that most of the great scientists in history had very difficult personalities (Faraday may have been an exception). I think the optimal approach is to study and benefit from the work of geniuses but have as little to do with them personally as possible. Leave them alone to their work.
Of course the fact that someone has a difficult personality does not mean he is a great thinker. However science has a mechanism for dealing with that via the publication system, where ideas that are wrong are eventually criticised and ultimately forgotten.
The hidden motivation behind this is fear of other people and the fear of evil which for most people has all but conquered their love of reality, truth, and so on.
If one does have other genuine interests and pursuits (for example foreign languages) then the task of appearing normal is harder. So the implication that he isn't smart enough to be normal is in this sense correct.
Which by the by suggests that motivation is the key to learning, not attention control, repetition, particular books, starting young or the other usual suspects and methods. These are downstream from motivation.
For my own eccentricities, I have the bedroom window open slightly while sleeping, closed when awake.
During the winter, when inside I wrap up in warm clothes, thermals, scarf. When exercising outside I wear only one or two layers. I call it the 'Winter Paradox'.
My waking hours are typically 12pm-3am. Can confirm that eating during the early morning (i.e. when normally asleep) puts a noticeable strain on the system. Which must be connected to the scientific fact that night shifts are bad for health. I presume partly because night shift people don't do night shifts all the time and thus have to continually reset their circadian clocks, which will include eating at the 'wrong' times.
Quite so. And things may be worse than that. It may be that both incentives and virtues are unreliable. For example, the famous day care study mentioned in Freakonomics casts doubt on the utility of incentives when it comes to social problem-solving:
https://sites.google.com/site/cvhsbahm/economics/econ_calend...
Moreover, my guess is that virtues themselves may also be unreliable because they're are about outward behaviour, which is often inherited and not explicitly understood, and which may not be passed on.
Jacob Bronowski, scientist and author of The Ascent of Man, identified the primary scientific virtue as what he called the habit of truth. This is to rigidly tell the truth about all things, both in private and in print, including about the minutest details, in one's scientific work.
It is a matter of opinion, but it seems that the habit of truth no longer pervades the scientific enterprise, now fully professionalized and bureaucratised.
Perhaps it was lost because it was only a habit. Whereas the love of truth, beauty, and so on, are spiritual values: modes of being rather than habitual outward behaviours. Which may explain why (according to Ed Dutton and Bruce Charlton), many 20th century scientific geniuses were first generation atheists. They inherited a reverence for truth and reality; they were able to make important scientific progress, but their ardour could not be sustained beyond a generation or two.
That is, telling and acknowledging the truth about even the minutest facts relating to one's scientific activity, whether in public print or in strictest privacy.
People literally assemble jigsaws and exercise on treadmills in their spare time. Repeatedly! So it seems that even the most apparently mechanical tasks can be made interesting with some creative engagement.
In every job that must be done, there is an element of fun. You find the fun and - SNAP - the job's a game -- Mary Poppins
Yes, I think there's a benefit here but it's more important as an inoculation against bullying. It's the verbal equivalent of playing rough and tumble games on the lawn with Dad. Humans don't fight with each other physically nearly so much as they fight verbally.
That said I'm sceptical one can learn much about parenting from other cultures. Being a father or a mother is hard enough without trying to emulate other lineages and contexts. What we're trying to do, I think, is to include the best bits from our own childhoods, those things which brought value and hope and joy, and to de-emphasize the bad bits, or the seeming bad bits. A lot of the knowledge is tacit, which is why it's important to honour our own parents, otherwise it simply doesn't get transmitted.
Depending on where you are, a positive habit may be useful for getting you out of a hole but ultimately consciousness is not about acting or reacting stereotypically. It's about having the option to do things differently.
Consciousness, or self-awareness, is the real key to improvement, and it's actually an anti-habit.
e.g. rather than relying on the force of habit for daily exercise, one eventually comes to realise and to experience repeatedly that being fit is not only better than being unfit but it feels better too. No self-coercion is then subsequently required to maintain fitness