Pointless →

Published February 17, 2023  ·  All posts on Feb 17  ·  

At first, the inherent unimportance of these pursuits coupled with the grueling commitment required to attain them seem at odds: Why set a target and spend so much effort on something that doesn’t matter? But a good meaningless goal is an act of protest against the self-optimization hamster wheel. It subverts the cult of productivity by sneakily leveraging the tools of productivity.

~ Gloria Liu from, In Praise of Pointless Goals

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Someone recently used the phrase “QM’ing to Valhalla” in a conversation I was having. (I’m pretty sure it’s in a Movers Mindset podcast, but I fear it may have been part of a conversation before we were recording.) Everyone who does the movement thing I love, chuckles at this phrase. There’s a lesson buried deep inside of the culture of effort which you only learn when you really try to QM to Valhalla.

To unpack the joke a bit. First, “QM” is short for quadrupedal movement; Movements where your hands and feet are supporting you (and sometimes, but usually not, your knees.) All QM is hard work, and excellent exercise. QM is great for a workout or a warmup. Second, of course, Valhalla is the hall of Norse mythology where one might end if one died in battle. So to some degree “QM’ing to Valhalla” is also about imagining oneself in some battle with… I dunno. It all seems quite wrong-headed when I try to actually explain it.

So why then, Craig, are you on your hands and feet crawling across the Williamsburg bridge?! Answer: I’m, apparently, trying to QM to Valhalla. When I heard the phrase, it was immediately clear that it doesn’t have to be literally QM. The phrase also applies to other pointless goals of mine. For example, I once tried to do 10,000 repetitions of 5 “simple” activities within one calendar year, and once tried to do something active for 100 straight days.

I can’t say I’ve given up pointless goals, but it feels like I have. Maybe I’ve learned the lesson? Although, if I did learn the lesson, then I should be able to explain it. I’m not sure if the lesson is that Valhalla doesn’t exist, or that you can’t get there solely by hard work.

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Four stories →

Published February 16, 2023  ·  All posts on Feb 16  ·  , ,

There are only four stories: A love story between two people, a love story between three people, the struggle for power, and the journey. Every single book that is in the bookstore deals with these four archetypes, these four themes.

~ Paulo Coelho

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Still-mind with Martin Svenselius →

Published February 15, 2023  ·  All posts on Feb 15  ·  

Still-mind with Martin Svenselius

How can one balance the physical, mental, and social aspects of movement practices while teaching and maintaining personal growth?

The conversation explores how movement practice evolves from playful beginnings to structured teaching.

I prefer the term still mind… because I want the— however exerted my body is, I wanted my mind to stay as calm as possible.

~ Martin Svenselius (21:51)

The conversation examines the challenges of balancing the physical joy of movement practice with the structured demands of teaching it. Martin reflects on the evolution from playful group activities to professional instruction, noting the difficulties of maintaining personal practice while managing classes. He discusses the need to balance work and play, particularly when movement becomes a career, and the psychological strain of sustaining this balance.

Another focus is on teaching methods that encourage self-leadership. Martin emphasizes the importance of understanding body mechanics, offering scalable challenges, and fostering creativity. He stresses how personal training values, such as calmness and consistency, shape their approach to coaching, while also exploring the need to challenge traditional views on physical training.

Takeaways

Balancing work and play — Achieving a sustainable relationship between teaching movement and personal practice.

Self-leadership — Helping students transition to self-directed training through scalable challenges and creativity.

Role of creativity — Encouraging exploration and adaptation in movement practice to foster personal growth.

Importance of mindset — Viewing training as a means to challenge oneself physically and mentally rather than just seeking comfort.

Teaching philosophy — Emphasizing understanding the body’s mechanics over reliance on equipment.

Cultural and psychological layers — Addressing differences in training mindsets across cultures and individual personalities.

Consistency in practice — Incorporating movement daily to maintain personal growth and discipline.

Resources

Jersey Gregorek — Known as the “Lion of Olympic Weightlifting,” who coined the phrase, “easy choices, hard life; hard choices, easy life.”

(Written with help from Chat-GPT.)

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It goes both ways →

Published February 15, 2023  ·  All posts on Feb 15  ·  ,

Still, I try to lean into the benefits of travel. And I, personally, also feel that I’m offering something important while traveling: representation. Black people do travel (and ski and horseback ride and swim and hike)! Some people’s only impressions of Black Americans come from TV shows and media, which are rife with stereotypes. The beauty is, the broadening of horizons go both ways when people travel and cultures collide.

~ Christine Pride from, Race Matters

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I’ve come to say that I travel so that when I return I can see my home in a new way. I travel to broaden my horizons. I definitely do not travel hoping to broaden other’s horizons. After all, travelers who come bearing gifts rightly raise suspicion.

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Courage →

Published February 14, 2023  ·  All posts on Feb 14  ·  ,

Physical courage which despises all danger, will make a man brave in one way, and moral courage, which despises all opinion, will make a man brave in another. The former would seem most necessary for the camp; the latter for the council. But to constitute a great man both are necessary.

~ Charles Caleb Colton

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Wat is this i dont even →

Published February 13, 2023  ·  All posts on Feb 13  ·  

Practice negative thinking! Visualize everything that could go wrong and learn how to get out of negative outcome situations. In activities like climbing, it can be life saving.

~ Jorge I Velez from, Risk Management from a Climbers Perspective

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It’s about climbing. But it’s also totally not just about climbing. Sometimes I find an article like this one and it just eats my life for an hour. I read it as a climber. I read it as someone who actually knows alpine climbers—not just one, but several. I read it as someone who is deeply interested in Stoicism and negative visualization [a part of Stoicism]. I spun off and found an entire new podcast that I think I want to listen to all of the episodes. *sigh* Such a delight to be swamped with such riches!

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February 12, 2023 — #19 →

Published February 12, 2023  ·  All posts on Feb 12  ·  

Reading time: About 7 minutes, 1500 words
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This issue is https://7forsunday.com/19

You don’t say →

Published February 12, 2023  ·  All posts on Feb 12  ·  , ,

I first discovered sarcasm as a freshman in college, which I realize makes me a bit of a late bloomer as far as teenagers go. There were certain classmates who seemed to always come across as clever and funny no matter the topic. Over time I noticed there was a simple formula to their contributions and it was pretty easy to mimic.

~ Andrew Bosworth from, On Sarcasm

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One could say (anyone who knows me surely would) that I can be a tad sarcastic. I used to be sarcastic, not just to a fault, but well into the realm of, s’rsly bro’, stahp. Of course I got various amounts of pushback over many years against my being so sarcastic. I received a ton of positive reinforcement in the form of attention, too. Still, no one ever made the point clearly: The sarcasm I was deploying didn’t add anything.

Reading Bosworth’s short piece made wonder: The point he makes is so clear, and yet I never heard it put as such. So how did I move away from being entirely sarcastic (“snarky” to put a fine point on it)? Well, I didn’t move away from it. Over time, with increasing regularity I moved towards engaging creatively with others; Writing, building things with technology, moving in parkour spaces, etc. The more creative I was, the more fun I had while experiencing the virtuous cycle of positive reinforcement from others. I still delight in sarcasm’s occasional use. But now I find [hope? *grins nervously*] that when I use sarcasm it brings some insight.

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Balance →

Published February 11, 2023  ·  All posts on Feb 11  ·  ,

The world is this continually unfolding set of possibilities and opportunities, and the tricky thing about life is, on the one hand having the courage to enter into things that are unfamiliar, but also having the wisdom to stop exploring when you’ve found something worth sticking around for. That is true of a place, of a person, of a vocation. Balancing those two things—the courage of exploration and the commitment to staying—and getting the ratio right is very hard.

~ Sebastian Junger

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Everyone’s talking about AI →

Published February 10, 2023  ·  All posts on Feb 10  ·  , ,

The tool was called Sudowrite. Designed by developers turned sci-fi authors Amit Gupta and James Yu, it’s one of many AI writing programs built on OpenAI’s language model GPT-3 that have launched since it was opened to developers last year. But where most of these tools are meant to write company emails and marketing copy, Sudowrite is designed for fiction writers.

~ Josh Dzieza from, The Great Fiction of AI

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Okay, fine, there have a pull-quote from an article about AI!

Today we have really amazing tools which are Large Language Models (LLMs). And today they have already changed the world. I’m not exaggerating. Today it’s possible to use LLMs to do astounding things. That’s awesome. But it’s not yet intelligence. 110% clarity here: All the stuff everyone is talking about today is freakin’ awesome.

I’m saying (I know it doesn’t matter what I say) we should save the term “Artificial Intelligence” for things which are actually intelligent. Words don’t inherently have meaning, but it’s vastly better if we don’t use “intelligence” to mean one thing when we talk about a person, and to mean something entirely different when we talk about today’s LLMs. Today’s LLMs are not [yet] intelligent.

Why this quibble today? Because when artificial intelligence appears, shit’s gonna get real. People who think a lot about AI want to talk about ensuring AI’s morals and goals are in reasonable alignment with humans’ (lest the AI end up misaligned and, perhaps, optimize for paperclip creation and wipe us out.)

My opinion: To be considered intelligent, one must demonstrate agency. Some amount of agency is necessary for something to be intelligent. Agency is not sufficient. Let’s start talking about AGENCY.

The tools we see today (LLMs so far) do not have agency. Contrast that with, say, elephants and dogs which do have agency. I believe the highest moral crimes involve taking someone’s (a word reserved for people) or something’s agency away. All the horrid crimes which we can imagine, each involve the victims’ loss of agency.

So what are we going to do when AIs appear? Prediction: We’re going to do what we humans have always done, historically to each other, elephants and dogs. As individuals we’re all over the moral map. Let’s start more conversations about agency before we have a new sort of intelligence that decides the issue and then explains the answer to us.

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