“mindfulness”
26 posts under this tag.
Each person creates the world he or she lives in by investing attention in certain things, and by doing so according to certain patterns. The world constructed on the blueprints provided by the genes is one in which all of a person’s attention is invested in furthering the agenda of “reproductive fitness.” This is a simple goal: How can I get enough out of the environment to make sure that I reproduce and that my children will also have children? In less complex organisms, like many species of insects, practically the entire life span is dedicated to the project of laying a clutch of eggs; promptly afterward, the parents expire. Like every other organism, the butterfly has evolved to see only those things that will either help or hinder the survival of its offspring. Its world is made up of flowery shapes that provide nectar, and shapes that resemble predators that are best avoided. Poets make much of the majestic eagle soaring freely among the snowy peaks. But the eyes of the eagle are generally focused on the ground, searching for rodents lurking in the shadows. The lives of much of humanity could be summed up in similar terms.
Mihaly Csikszentmihalyi, The Evolving SelfAM
Flow was one of the best books I’ve ever read. I’m halfway through its sequel, The Evolving self, and I can already say the same for it. I’m already having trouble remembering meself before I started reading it—it’s one of those books that stretches and rewrites you as you read it. It’s also deeper than Flow, more speculative, darker—the whole first half has been about the (inevitable) obstacles to human freedom.
After reading Flow I felt confident happiness, joy, flow, would always be at hand, always within me. Yet I also realized that happiness, joy, and flow were not enough. The Evolving Self is about what’s missing.
Put the effort. ”An overemphasis on intellect or talent—and the implication that such traits are innate and fixed—leaves people vulnerable to failure, fearful of challenges and unmotivated to learn.” That, in a sentence, is Scientific American’s excellent The Secret to Raising Smart Kids. It’s really some of the best life advice you can get (intelligence is just a nice case example).
The result plays out in children like Jonathan, who coast through the early grades under the dangerous notion that no-effort academic achievement defines them as smart or gifted. Such children hold an implicit belief that intelligence is innate and fixed, making striving to learn seem far less important than being (or looking) smart. This belief also makes them see challenges, mistakes and even the need to exert effort as threats to their ego rather than as opportunities to improve. And it causes them to lose confidence and motivation when the work is no longer easy for them.
Praising children’s innate abilities, as Jonathan’s parents did, reinforces this mind-set, which can also prevent young athletes or people in the workforce and even marriages from living up to their potential. On the other hand, our studies show that teaching people to have a “growth mind-set,” which encourages a focus on effort rather than on intelligence or talent, helps make them into high achievers in school and in life.
[The other test group], meanwhile, focused on fixing errors and honing their skills. One [schoolchildren] advised himself: “I should slow down and try to figure this out.” Two schoolchildren were particularly inspiring. One, in the wake of difficulty, pulled up his chair, rubbed his hands together, smacked his lips and said, “I love a challenge!” The other, also confronting the hard problems, looked up at the experimenter and approvingly declared, “I was hoping this would be informative!” Predictably, the students with this attitude outperformed their cohorts in these studies.
In the growth mind-set classes, students read and discussed an article entitled “You Can Grow Your Brain.” They were taught that the brain is like a muscle that gets stronger with use and that learning prompts neurons in the brain to grow new connections. From such instruction, many students began to see themselves as agents of their own brain development. Students who had been disruptive or bored sat still and took note. One particularly unruly boy looked up during the discussion and said, “You mean I don’t have to be dumb?”
It’s a tough call, distinguishing talent from effort. Intimidation and discourage further muddle the waters. But the question is rather whether or not you want to get better. Talented or not, you will not get magically better without effort. Talented or not, you will get better with effort.
So rub your hands together, smack those lips, and join that wonderfully ridiculous schoolboy: “I love me a challenge!”
Am I not destroying my enemies when I make friends of them?
E Pluribus Unum (From Many, One)
Traditional U.S. motto
Transhumanist transgender Martine Rothblatt proposes the most original solution to the Israeli-Palestinian conflict I’ve ever conceived: Two Stars for Peace—the incorporation of Palestine and Israel into the U.S. as the 51st and 52nd states. She has wrote a book making the detailed case and has spoken about it on Sirius satellite radio:
A young person in Palestine and Israel today looks forward to future with depression and with fear, but with Two Stars for Peace, the young people of Israel and Palestine can look forward to a future when they can travel freely throughout the United States, get their education in any part of the United States, or they can travel back and forth between Israel and Palestine. They can look forward to a future of instead of warring armies, everybody is part of a single United States army. The young people have no vested interest in the past of bickering and hostility. It’s depressing. But Two Stars for Peace gives them a way to have a good life.
This is so far out our ordinary could I’m still shocked. My rather unusual Mexican high school put an odd emphasis on the Middle East and this is by far the best idea I know of. Just imagine, fighting war with peace. Hope. Freedom.
A Fair Ellen (noun) could be a roundabout, inefficient, sometimes extravagant and always pathetic behavior to get around a bug in a product. Particularly when it lingers on long after said bug has been fixed. From Bruce Tognazzini’s inspired collie metaphor.
Albert Payson Terhune, the author who taught the world to love collies (Lad, A Dog , et. al.), once wrote an article for the Saturday Evening Post (March 26, 1927 issue) about his beloved collie, Fair Ellen.
Terhune explained that Fair Ellen.. had been born blind, but learned to live quite happily, except for one small quirk:
If I stand beside her kennel yard and call to her to come and be put up, she does not approach me in a straight line, but along an imaginary path which has perhaps six or seven twists and turns.
This used to puzzle me, until one day I saw her run against a wheelbarrow which one of the men had left in the open patch of fairway between the house and her kennel. That was three years ago. Never since then does she come to that spot without making a careful detour around the imaginary barrow.
Her twisting course, along all familiar bits of ground, is due to her effort to skirt some box or rake or other obstruction which at some times she has struck against. She has preternatural memory for such things and for the precise spot in which once they were.
Users do the same thing. Users’ behavior will not necessarily change..[when the bug that brought that behavior into being is fixed]. Once people have learned something no longer works, once they have formed a new habit, no matter how inefficient that habit is, they tend to perpetuate it.
It may only be that my grandfather’s agony has me seeing everything with long-now eyes but these days I’m increasingly aware that I should take precautions in case I die.
I don’t want to die. I don’t shake my head and look away at death, I stand up in defiance. But the fact is our lives are still too fragile and faced with the possibility I would rather think things through.
Which is why I’ve written this short will. I shall edit and refine it as long as I’m living (with the latest version the official one, of course) and so I thought I should start now.
I name Chemie, my sister, as my executor
If I die, I
wish a 1-night wake with
Yann Tiersen’s discography as background soundtrack
no prayers or religious services of any kind
Eliezer Yudkowsky’s letter
read in English & Spanish at the wake
printed and given to everyone at departure
to be buried
wish my grave be marked by a white granite slab embedded on the ground (recumbent desk style)
on the slab, I wish this text (and nothing else) engraved verbatim:
eliazar parra cardenas
“I was so happy!”
elzr.com
wish for a pink Primavera tree seed to be planted behind my headstone so that one day its shadow may cover it
wish to donate all my organs
wish to donate all my books to the ITESM Campus Guadalajara’s library, except those that friends or family want to keep
wish anything I’ve written, coded, designed, or in any other way produced, to be released to the public domain
wish to give Jane (my desktop computer) to Chemie and Wu (my macbook) to Chefi
wish any other material possession of mine to be donated to charity, except those that friends or family want to keep
wish elzr.com be kept online, fully-enabled, forever
wish this to be posted as soon as possible
title: I was so happy!
body: I died.
salmon-of-doubt-ly, I wish that my entire harddrive be made available online (through elzr.com) to anyone for free, as technology permits (they’re 500gb after all)
particularly my “life-inside-one-big-text-file” text file and MyDocuments folder
wish that my gmail account be made available online (through elzr.com) to anyone for free
correspondents, however, may ask for any of their emails to be concealed and that wish shall be respected, as long as they live
If I were to fall into a likely irreversible comma, I
wish to be kept alive as long as it’s economically possible
wish to undergo any recovery treatment as soon as it has more than a 1% chance of success
wish that all the above death provisions be carried out, except of course the burying part and the organ donating one
Last Updated: 2007-02-15
Here 2 examples—a graph and a paragraph—from a typical article (about the paper industry’s dire prospects, of all things) in this week’s edition of The Economist.
Restructuring in the paper industry is proceeding at a furious pace. The first thing some paper companies have jettisoned is ownership of forests. International Paper (IP), one of the world’s biggest pulp-and-paper companies which is based in Tennessee, used to be the largest private landowner in America. A year ago the company sold 5.7m acres, or 90%, of its forestland—an area larger than Massachusetts. The $6.6 billion sale was “probably the hardest decision that I’ve had to make since I became CEO,” says John Faraci, IP’s boss since 2003. Most buyers were financial investors, but 5% of the land went to conservation groups.
Starting with the graph: it’s a 16-year window to worldwide newsprint production that drives home the article’s main point with eloquence: North America’s newsprint production (a fifth, you will notice, of the world’s; used to be a fourth) is slowly but decisively dwindling; production in the rest of the world, on the other hand, is increasing, albeit not in a hurry.
It’s full of conventions too, but they’re so well thought that you never need to be consciously aware of them as a reader: Take the upper-left red patch, a gentle way to guide your eyes to the graph’s title and instructions. The source always goes at the bottom, smaller-typed, and the y-axis is always labeled at the right, which I find more natural than the common left convention (it makes you look at the graph first, notice its pattern). The x-axis is usually the time axis, its gridlines usually obviated for clarity’s sake, and its labels, usually years, presented in a simple format that marks millennia only when needed. And graphs are always in this blue scheme—a convention to avoid color misinformation that still allows for meaningful distinctions between color shades: darker blue for the main variable under discussion, the foreground; lighter, fading blue(s) for the background variable(s).
As for the paragraph, it’s brimming with fascinating facts about the world. Did you know who the world’ biggest pulp-an-paper company was and that it was located in Tennessee (WP)—of all places? Did you know it also happened to be the largest private landowner in America? (A paper company! The largest private landowner in America!) Did you know it recently sold, because of restructuring, 90% of its forestland, 5.7m acres—an area larger than Massachusetts? Did you know it sold them for $6.6 billions? (Surprisingly cheap, considering it’s an area big enough for many a country.) Did you know most buyers were financial investors but 5% were conservation groups? (A wonderful example of how trade allocates resources, peacefully and quietly, to those who care about them.) Now you know.
It has taken me some three years to realize it but when I did it was obvious. The crazy sleep schedule I’ve been riding since I dropped out of college is more than the pale-hacker tropism for long quiet nights. It’s more than manic-depression, which for a time I was sure of having. It’s more than youthful immaturity, which I’m sure of having.
I remember the first nights out from college, and some before, I would curl up on my bed, scared as I’ve ever been—fingers curled, fetal, with hamsters in my head and a stomach full of nothing, churning away anyway. Scared of what you say? Oh, the usual I guess, scared of failure, of success, of not being up to the challenge, of blowing it all away in search of some silly dream. Mostly, though, scared of this fear I knew not inside of me.
Those nights stopped without my realizing but I now know what happened to them: I tired them away. I would work (or idle) my way to exhaustion, till there was nothing left for me to do but tumble down. Sleeping was sure easier than facing my fears, and since everything could wait, what was the harm of sleeping on it? Again and again.
I remember being completely, utterly floored when reading in Henry Hazlitt’s Economics in One Lesson about how, at bottom, supply and demand are one and the same.
Those who think that the destruction of war increases total “demand” forget that demand and supply are merely two sides of the same coin. They are the same thing looked at from different directions. Supply creates demand because at bottom it is demand. The supply of the thing they make is all that people have, in fact, to offer in exchange for the things they want. In this sense the farmers’ supply of wheat constitutes their demand for automobiles and other goods. All this is inherent in the modern division of labor and in an exchange economy.
This fundamental fact, it is true, is obscured for most people (including some reputedly brilliant economists) through such complications as wage payments and the indirect form in which virtually all modern exchanges are made through the medium of money. John Stuart Mill and other classical writers, though they sometimes failed to take sufficient account of the complex consequences resulting from the use of money, at least saw through “the monetary veil” to the underlying realities. To that extent they were in advance of many of their present-day critics, who are befuddled by money rather than instructed by it. Mere inflation—that is, the mere issuance of more money, with the consequence of higher wages and prices—may look like the creation of more demand. But in terms of the actual production and exchange of real things it is not.
Yes, it was obvious. Ridiculously obvious. But I had never realized it. A whole semester of economics in high school plotting gratuitous graphs and fondling equations for what? They should have put this in big, bold black letters at the very first class and let us go afterwards. My twenty something dollars per hour would have been far better employed.
But yesterday I stumbled on Wikipedia’s trade pedia and realized, mind blown, I had only scratched the surface of it. It only took the first, luminous paragraph. (Its scary how good Wikipedia is becoming.)
Trade is the voluntary exchange of goods, services, or both. Trade is also called commerce. A mechanism that allows trade is called a market. The original form of trade was barter, the direct exchange of goods and services. Modern traders instead generally negotiate through a medium of exchange, such as money. As a result, buying can be separated from selling, or earning. The invention of money (and later credit, paper money and non-physical money) greatly simplified and promoted trade. Trade between two traders is called bilateral trade, while trade between more than two traders is called multilateral trade.
Buying and selling are concepts that only acquire meaning when we bring in money. At its essence, trade (barter), is fundamentally reciprocal—providing no ready way to distinguish between its participants.
So simple and yet so deeply buried by mindlessness. Don’t forget it and watch countless everyday fallacies come tumbling down, naked.
(Notice also the definition of market: “a mechanism that allows trade”—a mechanism that allows for voluntary exchange. There’s untold beauty and nobleness in free trade.)
Click a message checkbox, then, holding shift, click another one a couple of messages apart—all intermediate checkboxes are automatically checked.
One of the most universal uses of the ShiftWP key is to aid in selecting ranges (think how you use it to select text or several files) and yet it was only today that it occurred to me that it just might work for checkboxes. I blame years of crappy webmail for that. I checked Hotmail, Yahoo! Mail (the “standard version”, the cool beta version does implement something along these lines), and my university mail and it won’t work there—which is bollocks: it’s a tremendously useful feature that costs near nothing to implement.
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