On this day

January 25th

It can also be about empowerment

January 25

Until now, she said, the history of medicine has been the history of doctors, whose priestly wisdom has been delivered to clueless, passive recipients as if it was gospel. Cousins’s story reversed that. Psychiatrists had asked him to map his moods for three months, so he developed a simple means to do it online every day and share his mood map with friends. They provided a supportive network, a bit like Weight Watchers. His moods immediately started to improve and became more stable: the act of monitoring had itself produced an effect.

~ John-Paul Flintoff, from There’s an app for that

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I particularly like, “the overexamined life is not worth living,” twist on that old phrase.

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Bootstrapping

January 25, 2023

What’s the difference between a good leader vs. bad leader? What do good leaders do differently?

It’s an essential question every leader must ask themselves.

~ Jason Evanish, from Good Leader Vs. Bad Leader

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“What do good leaders do differently?” They ask themselves that question. It’s a good article (an actual article, not just a wee listicle) worth glancing at simply for the first graphic which should make you chuckle and stick with you.

I want to ask the next question: What do effective leaders do differently? Because I’m emphatic that it’s possible to be a good leader—even a great leader—but end up not being effective. Great leader, great goal, and yet… sometimes failure. There are also some horrific examples of bad leaders who manage to be extremely effective. It really feels like the quality of a leader and the effectiveness of a leader aren’t interdependent. What’s up with that?

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Shoulders of giants

January 25, 2022

I’ve said many times of my generation that we drink deeply from wells of freedom and opportunity that we did not dig, that we eat from tables prepared for us by our ancestors, that we sit comfortably in the shade of trees that we did not cultivate. We stand on the shoulders of giants.

~ Cory Booker

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The arbiter of truth

January 25, 2020

What is the arbiter of truth? Some things might be unknowable, and some questions might be unanswerable. But for everything else, what is the arbiter of truth?

The really big questions— Why are we here? What’s the meaning of life? The really big questions may not have answers. But for everything else, what is the arbiter of truth?

How do you decide if you have the correct answer to a question?

How do you decide what to do next? You just finished something and time is marching on; what will you do with the next moment?

How do you decide what to not do? Suppose some topic interests you; how do you decide how much time you should spend on it?

Difficult questions, certainly. Can you think of any questions which are more important than these?

If not, what are you doing to work on finding answers to these questions?

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One who acts naturally

January 25, 2019

One who tries to stand on tiptoe cannot stand still. One who stretches his legs too far cannot walk. One who advertises himself too much is ignored. One who is too insistent on his own view finds few to agree with him. One who claims too much credit does not get even what he deserves. One who is too proud is soon humiliated. These are condemned as extremes of greediness and self-destructive activity. Therefore, one who acts naturally avoids such extremems.

~ Book of Tao

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Agency from individual neurons

January 25, 2018

What I’m going to argue today is that agency is a fundamental property of the brain. Not only is agency the function of the brain — and thus it’s very reason for existence — but it’s also built into the brain’s fabric and architecture. Because even neurons have agency, in the form of (metabolic) selfishness, higher-order brain systems don’t need to create agency ‘from scratch’ out of mindless robotic slaves. They inherit agency pretty much for free.

~ Kevin Simler, from Neurons Gone Wild

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The question of agency occassionally sucks me into a deep whirlpool of introspection. The idea that it might arise as an emergent property simply from the huge number of neurons is intriguing.

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The distress of the privileged

January 25, 2015

If you are one of the newly-visible others, this all sounds whiny compared to the problems you face every day. It’s tempting to blast through such privileged resistance with anger and insult.

Tempting, but also, I think, a mistake. The privileged are still privileged enough to foment a counter-revolution, if their frustrated sense of entitlement hardens.

So I think it’s worthwhile to spend a minute or two looking at the world from George Parker’s point of view: He’s a good 1950s TV father. He never set out to be the bad guy. He never meant to stifle his wife’s humanity or enforce a dull conformity on his kids. Nobody ever asked him whether the world should be black-and-white; it just was.

~ Doug Muder, from The Distress of the Privileged

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