They mentioned something about overhead electrical cables.
50 karma · joined September 10, 2010
Why? Because any organisation with more than N employees starts to behave unconsciously, evolving according to profit and logic-of-the-situation. (I don't know what N is. Somewhere between 8 and 200?)
That's what those people are (unconsciously, angrily) reacting too.
Let me add the rationale: if you don't try to love your enemy, or try see something good in him, then you will hate him.
His hold over you will last as long as you hate him. Bullies feed off hate and fear.
I doubt that judicial punishment of strangers is going to end anytime soon, but note how different that is to punishing a family member.
However, now you mention it, there is an interesting similarity. Why does punishment happen? Not for the reasons most people think. For instance, it doesn't (and can't) transmit moral knowledge from the punisher to the punished. Neither does it reliably cause obedience.
In reality, society punishes criminals in order to prevent greater suffering in the form of larger scale rioting and madness.
Similarly, parents punish children to prevent themselves from going mad. But if knowledge spread of how to be a better and happier parent then this sort of punishment would end.
Such knowledge may already exist in basic form:
http://www.takingchildrenseriously.com/introductory_articles...
This applies to all moral progress. Any prediction about morality that doesn't shock at least some people is unlikely to be both true and important.
These things won't happen eventually. Yet future generations will take education, health and morality more seriously than we do.
Indeed. Quality thinking can't be forced or managed.
I really do feel that this time management business is a will-o'-the-wisp. Time spent thinking about time management is time not spent thinking about interesting problems. When I run across a room strewn with toys I don't have to think about 'space management', and when I switch between tasks I do so automatically and intuitively, mostly without thinking (and certainly never by firing up some piece of software).
Leonhard Euler had 13 children, who, the story goes, played at his feet. He also wrote over 1100 publications. Go figure.
[Update: Err, ahem, I read now that 8 of the children died. Perhaps he isn't the best choice of example.]
This seems as true now as it has ever been. The belief that schools can be fixed is one of the main reasons people become teachers and why the existence of schools will drag on for at least another half century.
More like: we were cajoled and coerced into eating vegetables by our parents, who were in turn cajoled by their parents, etc.
We then spend the rest of our lives rationalising this uncritical acceptance, which isn't the same thing as knowing something.
Still better would be to make downvoting cost one point to the downvoter. This would discourage rather than prevent downvoting (and people will happily pay to correct real injustices).
It would also more accurately reflect human psychology: in IRL conversations a participant occasionally gets angry, but it always comes at a cost to himself.
The problem with these books is that they interfere with the more traditional crafts of conversation and oratory.
I can guess at two factors. Firstly, food started to get really cheap in the 1960s.
Secondly, and not entirely unrelatedly, since that time we haven't suffered a major war or plague. (Up till this point, European history had more or less consisted of wars and plagues.)
Instead people have enjoyed prosperity with more and more attendant consumption, not just of food, but of entertainment and culture.
Here's the potentially controversial bit: in my experience, cultural consumption is enhanced by 'lower level' consumption such as eating rich food and drinking coffee and alcohol. The reason these help is (paradoxically) because they distress the body, causing the brain to compensate by secreting natural sedatives.
These in turn allow the mind to race, temporarily free from the constraints of fear and worry. Gluten, being a lectin, is a stressor of animal intestines. Hence bread, cakes and pasta serve admirably in this regard.
There's a simple exercise you can do in the final weeks of pregnancy to encourage your baby to lie in the optimal position for childbirth (which is ofc free to view, but, amazingly, isn't widely put into practice, I understand).
http://www.bloomingbellys.com/bb-blog/optimal-fetal-position...
It happened through no intention of mine and was quite a scary experience, like letting go or admitting defeat. With respect to Jonah Lehrer I must report that it felt totally the opposite to implementing a 'cognitive strategy’.
All kinds of new sensations, thoughts and impressions now make their way into my consciousness where previously they must have been filtered. The world is enlarged, enriched and more colourful (literally, and with Vermeer-like shading everywhere).
Although these 'extras' are available to me they don't seem to distract in an unhelpful way. Rather they provide subtle analogies and metaphors to whatever else I'm thinking about. (I suppose that’s where the creativity part comes in.)
Am I more distractible? Well, no, I don't think so, because I still get to choose which thoughts to follow. If one is concerned with explaining the world then only truly surprising perceptions (those few that don't fit in with one's worldview), have the potential to distract.
[I apologise to any readers who consider this report unfalsifiable nonsense or arrogant boasting. I can only reply, respectively, that presumably only the experience of transition can convince, and, as I said above, it was most humbling.]
It also suggests that ordinary people today might increase their intelligence by trying to eliminate arterial plaque.
Thus parents also worry about what other adults think of them.