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Sustained interest in a topic solves the problems associated with how to express ideas about it. There's a co-evolution between developing an ability and having a motivation for doing so.
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.
The reason why some/many people are bad at writing is because they haven't yet discovered anything interesting to say. Therefore they weren't motivated to improve.
This is the criterion: is it interesting? 'Yes' means it's not AI-generated. 'No' means it's not worth reading.
Yes I agree. I'm totally in favour of married life and family life. However calling something by a name isn't necessarily the same as what the name superficially implies.
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.
Apologies--I seem to have touched a nerve here. There are worse things than dates, I'm sure, e.g. hookup apps
Equally disturbing is the fact that many married men are being encouraged to participate in a permanent state of ersatz courtship known as 'date nights'. What's the point of getting married if you still have to go on dates?
Parents, love your children, as much as you can. Children, honour your parents, as much as you can.
The alternative is resentment, a condition toxic enough to keep anyone in hell.
I've experienced frisson at great moments in music but only when fantasising about performing the music (or some part of it) myself. I did a lot of this as a teenager...
they can even be an asset to the community and volunteer in exchange for kudos in the right circumstances
Yes, and a relatively harmless source of narcissistic supply would seem to be in the performing arts.
My children would concur: they prefer digital time I think because that's what computers generally give. Also they prefer to have subtitles on but that's by the by.
I enjoyed Douglas Adam's letter though I can't help thinking it was meant for publication.
Problem is that, as I said, the architects of globalism are using this issue. They aren't motivated by the climate or any other of several, rotating concerns. They're motivated by a lust for power/wealth/prestige. You can't achieve difficult objectives unless you are really trying--and they aren't!
However you can ruin the efforts of others by demanding that their work serve a primary political agenda.
The issue of climate change, among other issues, is being used to promote unity and one world government. But it doesn't follow that this approach is best to climate change or anything else. We need variation in policies and technologies in order to select the best approach (and not get locked in to a sub-optimal approach).
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.
Humility before the truth is vital but not necessarily humility as expressed in one's public statements.
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.
I share the sentiment however the grain of truth here is that it does take a lot of effort to appear normal. The essence of being normal is trying to appear normal which is what most people are engaged in most of the time.
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.
Do you know what kinds of oil are commonly used for the frying?
Couldn't agree more. People think that humans are more intelligent because we learnt to speak, but it's really language itself that makes us smart in the sense of making us universal problem solvers. Animals are conscious creatures which can and do solve problems in novel situations.
I think your preferences make total sense. Though I have little experience with wildfires. Would an air filter help?
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'.
Introverts of the world unite! Seriously, night time is great because having large chunks of unstructured time is good for creativity. There's no one to interrupt you or be offended by your (unpredictable) results.
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.
Intuitively the converse seems to be true: getting into a hot bath, the muscles relax, the arteries relax and the mind goes merrily off to the races with interesting ideas. Presumably because it is freed from a certain amount of its bodily management duties.
"When you rely on incentives, you undermine virtues. Then when you discover that you actually need people who want to do the right thing, those people don't exist." —Barry Schwartz
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.
Love as I understand it is not strictly an emotion but rather an absence of fear when attending to the object of love. It appears emotional because there's a change in the baseline emotional state. The results is a whole-hearted engagement which with sufficient investment of time has the potential to become creative.
I hope we can also revive the 'northern penguin', also known as the Great Auk:
I'm glad somebody has referred to truth at last because the habit of truth, according to Jacob Bronowski, is perhaps the primary scientific virtue.
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.
As the web matures it is time now to abandon acronyms and most other forms of abbreviation, in my opinion. At best they confuse at least some people and at worst they are shibboleths. Little would be lost since those rare abbreviations which turn out to be genuinely useful and communicative will make it into the dictionaries regardless of what we do.
Especially now, jammed together as we are in the global village, I suspect criticism is something we should only use defensively. Even criticism of ideas should be restricted to ideas we don't like but can't seem to avoid. Bearing in mind that if criticisms fail then perhaps the idea is a good one after all.
Start with ignorance, but then make the schleps as conscious and explicit as possible?
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
One way of subtly enforcing cultural norms is a [...] a kind of playful teasing. This has also been observed in other indigenous circumpolar peoples, such as the Inuit, but not in mainstream Scandinavian cultures [...] ensure they never say something really hurtful, or bully the child
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.
Yes, we can honour him for his achievements at the same time as acknowledging that he's been very lucky. Otherwise we have to ask whether we're being inspired by envy and not merely by a desire for justice.
I interpret that Lebowski quote as, "You're not wrong, Walter. You're just undermining the conditions which enable future non-wrongness to prevail."
By all means call it a habit if you wish but do distinguish it from a bad habit which I would define as something which makes you feel good without actually being good for you.
I think a major problem with the self-improvement books I've read is their emphasis on habits.
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