Postări

Do not forget

The working memory does not have room for much. So let's make it short. There is mostly one thing that you should not forget: NEVER.GIVE.UP! What exactly? Hope! I can't tell you that things outside your control will get better but when you feel that you can take it anymore you need to remember that this is temporary. Once you put your mind to rest that feeling will start to diminish and vanish like any other. If you would just make the effort of diverting your thoughts away from it. The bad news is that your mind is kind of stubborn and it thinks that it already knows what to do and it doesn't need a help like this. The good news is that the more you remember the rule and you notice that it helps you recover from bad times the more this way of thinking will become natural instead of like having to make of shopping list because you don't remember what you need to buy. 

Don't be fooled

 People like for things to be simple. They try to convince themselves that things can be made simple and they will advice you not to over-complicate them. It's not their fault. Human beings evolved to be efficient, to consume as little energy possible to achieve their goals. If your image of the world is simple it will be cheap to compute what you should do next. But the world is not simple just because we want it to be. So don't be fooled that some people behave like they know enough. Most likely they are wrong. You never know enough. Learn as much as you can. But the resources are limited. Mostly try to understand what is important.  Choose which do you think that are the important areas and have a deep understanding of the mechanisms that make those subsystems turn. Don't be fooled, this is an over-simplification, mostly we know only in retrospect what was important, but can't do much about that. Luckily, each one of us doing particular choices will cover a lot of gr...

Chesterton's fence

 https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Wikipedia:Chesterton's_fence

True Detective philosophy

" I think human consciousness was a tragic misstep in evolution. We became too self-aware. Nature created an aspect of nature separate from itself. We are creatures that should not exist by natural law. We are things that labor under the illusion of having a self, this accretion of sensory experience and feeling, programmed with total assurance that we are each somebody when, in fact, everybody's nobody." Seems to me that Bertrand Russell suggests that we should fix this accident and become nobody again: “Make your interests gradually wider and more impersonal, until bit by bit the walls of the ego recede, and your life becomes increasingly merged in the universal life. An individual human existence should be like a river — small at first, narrowly contained within its banks, and rushing passionately past rocks and over waterfalls. Gradually the river grows wider, the banks recede, the waters flow more quietly, and in the end, without any visible break, they become merged...

purpose of teaching

In this interview, along other things, Noam Chomsky explains that a teacher should not try to convince the students that he/she is right but to motivate them to think about the subject in order to find the truth themselves which sometimes is that he/she is wrong. And if a teacher or speaker has this talent of being persuasive by appealing to people's emotions they should avoid using it because it undermines their capacity for independent thinking. --- Later edit: Also, here's a quote from Dead Poets Society movie: "I always thought the idea of education was to learn to think for yourself." Here are others from the same movie.

Teenagers are trying to be different than their parents

Psychology researcher Judith Rich Harris formulated the theory that children's personalities are mostly influenced by their genes and their social group. The theory contradicts the myth that the way the parents raise their children has the most important role in the shaping of their character. According to her research the teenagers personality is formed when they are trying to fit in with the group or to compete with their peers. There is an article on edge.org about the work of Judith Rich Harris: link