Thought and Philosophy

Trying not to try

July 6, 2015

My guess is that we have all experienced this combination of effortlessness and effectiveness at some point in our lives. While we are completely absorbed in chopping and sautéing, a complex dinner simply assembles itself before our eyes. Fully relaxed, we breeze through an important job interview without even noticing how well it’s going. Our own experiences of the pleasure and power of spontaneity explain why these early Chinese stories are so appealing and also suggest that these thinkers were on to something important. Combining Chinese insights and modern science, we are now in a position to understand how such states can actually come about.

~ Edward Slingerland from, Trying Not to Try – Nautilus

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Overcoming the distraction habit

June 26, 2015

One of the insidious things about the distraction habit is that we often don’t even realize it’s happening. It sneaks up on us, like old age, and before we know it we’re addicted and powerless.

But actually we’re not powerless. The power we have is our awareness, and you can develop it right now. Pay attention to what sites you visit, how often you’re looking at your phone, how long you’re spending in front of a screen all day.

~ Leo Babauta from, An Addict’s Guide to Overcoming the Distraction Habit – Zen Habits Website

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A just cause? A just war?

June 16, 2015

We’re supposed to be thinking people. We’re supposed to be able to question everything.

There are things that happen in the world that are bad, and you want to do something about them. You have a just cause. But our culture is so war prone that we immediately jump from “This is a good cause” to “This deserves a war.”

You need to be very, very comfortable in making that jump.

~ Howard Zinn from, «http://www.progressive.org/zinnjuly09.html»

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Thriving in uncertainty

May 9, 2015

Yet from the first encounter, the theories unraveled in the face of situations that could never have been predicted. The most respected generals in the world were made to look like amateurs. Their faith in abstract planning blinded them to the reality of the situation. It took years of conflict before they began to really adapt to the reality of their situation.

~ Kyle Eschenroeder from, 5 Tools for Thriving in Uncertainty

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The other is a disease

April 2, 2015

This distinction holds for adult reading too. The dangerous fantasy is always superficially realistic. The real victim of wishful reverie does not batten on the Odyssey, The Tempest, or The Worm Ouroboros: he (or she) prefers stories about millionaires, irresistible beauties, posh hotels, palm beaches and bedroom scenes—things that really might happen, that ought to happen, that would have happened if the reader had had a fair chance. For, as I say, there are two kinds of longing. The one is an askesis, a spiritual exercise, and the other is a disease.

~ C.S. Lewis from, C.S. Lewis on the Three Ways of Writing for Children and the Key to Authenticity in All Writing

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If you win the rat race, you’re still a rat

February 25, 2015

(Part 12 of 72 in series, My Journey)

Don’t ever confuse the two, your life and your work. That’s what I have to say. The second is only a part of the first. Don’t ever forget what a friend once wrote to Senator Paul Tsongas when the senator had decided not to run for reelection because he’d been diagnosed with cancer: “No man ever said on his deathbed I wish I had spent more time at the office.”

Don’t ever forget the words on a postcard that my father sent me last year: “If you win the rat race, you’re still a rat.”

~ Anna Quindlen from, A Short Guide to a Happy Life

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From Maria Popova’s A Short Guide to a Happy Life: Anna Quindlen on Work, Joy, and How to Live Rather Than Exist.

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Conspiracy theories on facebook

February 18, 2015

Do you believe that the contrails left by high-flying aircraft contain sildenafil citratum, the active ingredient in Viagra? Or that light bulbs made from uranium and plutonium are more energy-efficient and environmentally friendly? Or that lemons have anti-hypnotic benefits?

If you do, then you are probably a regular consumer of conspiracy theories, particularly those that appear on the Italian language version of Facebook (where all these were sourced). It is easy to dismiss conspiracy theories as background noise with little if any consequences in the real world.

~ Alessandro Bessi et al, from Science Vs Conspiracy: Collective Narratives In The Age Of (Mis)Information

Busy is an addiction

February 14, 2015

The issue, just like exercise, is that each time you build, the high becomes slightly harder to achieve. Part of your hormonal reward is based on the fact the thing you just built has never been built before. It’s novel and your brain commensurately rewards the new because it has learned after millions of years of evolution that doing so is collectively good for our species.

~ Rands from, Busy is an Addiction

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Confirmation bias

December 17, 2014

If you are thinking about buying a new car, you suddenly see people driving them all over the roads. If you just ended a long-time relationship, every song you hear seems to be written about love. If you are having a baby, you start to see them everywhere.

Confirmation bias is seeing the world through a filter, thinking selectively.

The examples above are a sort of passive version of the phenomenon. The real trouble begins when confirmation bias distorts your active pursuit of facts.

~ David McRaney from, Confirmation Bias

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Infrastructure, suburbs, and the long descent to ferguson

December 12, 2014

The short version is that as the climate degrades and fossil fuels become simultaneously more expensive and less useable, each generation inherits from its more prosperous ancestors an infrastructure that it can’t afford to maintain. Society muddles through from year to year — sometimes even seeming to advance — until some part of that poorly maintained infrastructure snaps and causes major destruction. The destroyed area may get rebuilt, but not to its previous level. The resulting community has less infrastructure to maintain, but is also less prosperous, and so the cycle continues into the next generation.

~ Doug Muder from, Infrastructure, Suburbs, and the Long Descent to Ferguson

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He draws heavily from John Michael Greer’s The Long Descent.

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The weight of the past

July 2, 2014

This is not to say that nostalgia is our inescapable fate. The lesson I am trying to draw from reflecting on the examples of Snowden and the N.F.L. is not that the thrill ends early. Rather, in their extremity these examples bring out something else. For most of us, as our lives unfold we simply do not, we cannot, know whether we have peaked in an area of our lives — or in our lives themselves — in ways that are most important to us. The past weighs upon us, not because it must cancel the future, but because it is of uncertain heft.

~ Todd May from, The Weight of the Past – The New York Times

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Finding meaning in the mundane

May 27, 2014

Everyone here has done this, of course. But it hasn’t yet been part of you graduates’ actual life routine, day after week after month after year.

But it will be. And many more dreary, annoying, seemingly meaningless routines besides. But that is not the point. The point is that petty, frustrating crap like this is exactly where the work of choosing is gonna come in.

~ David Foster Wallace

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It occurs to me that I’ve no idea who gave the commencement address at my graduation. After a bit of digging…

Robert W. Galvin, chairman of Motorola, delivered the main address yesterday to the 1,150 graduates at the 125th commencement of Lehigh University in Bethlehem, Pa.

Mr. Galvin received an honorary Doctor of Engineering degree.

~ from the May 31st NYT archives listing several school’s commencement addresses.

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Everyday craftsmanship

March 16, 2014

Over time, the ideal of craftsmanship was cordoned off to just the technical arts. Physicians and legislators no longer thought of themselves as craftsmen, but as philosophers and natural scientists who were more concerned with the theoretical as opposed to the practical. Such a shift is a shame, for the principles of craftsmanship truly do apply to every man, whether he makes furniture or crunches numbers. Below we take a look at how these overarching principles of the traditional craftsman can apply to all areas of your life, no matter your profession.

~ Brett McKay from, Measure Twice, Cut Once

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Three types of human rights

February 8, 2014

My point is simply this: unless you are an extreme outlier, you do believe in all three types of human rights; Whether you prefer the term “Natural Law”, “God given rights”, or something else, you think that there are ethical norms that are not merely pragmatic but objective and true. Therefore government is not merely “something we all do together”, but potentially a destructive force that can commit evil. Finally, it is not only meaningful, but almost mandatory – if one is to say anything of interest – to take great care to distinguish between “is” and “ought” when speaking of rights.

~ “Clark” from, «https://www.popehat.com/2013/08/23/three-meanings-of-the-word-rights-atheists-are-confused/»

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