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I take notes on my phone. I think some big tradeoffs compared to a paper notebook are less ease of writing, more convenience, less physical space taken up, and an end result that is easier to back up and work with in many ways.
Likewise.
Is human mind space countably finite? Just bring us all back please, I'll be in there somewhere.
Just curious, what are your thresholds for what qualifies as 'changing the world' and 'making a difference'. Where do these come from, and how specific do you think they are?
I know that lots of people seem to believe that the thresholds exist, but I've always found them perplexing.
I don't think there's a precise threshold, but when I use the phrase "change the world", I'm pretty confident that my interlocutor is thinking of people like Steve Jobs and companies like Apple and not thinking of people like me who don't have our own wikipedia articles and companies like the ones I work for that don't have names many would recognize and aren't credited with inventing/popularizing important product categories that millions of people now use every day.
People who "change the world" make big political, technological, or scientific changes and bring them into the lives of many people.
In response to
Irrationalism on Campus?
I am a recent graduate of the University of Toronto, where we've seen that talks on campus that are viewed as opposing or questioning feminism will have their advertisements torn down and mobs organized by the student union will show up to harass and physically block attendees and take other disruptive actions like pulling fire alarms. I expect this would generalize to suppression of other forms of un-PC speech and thinking.
That said, the administration at UofT seems to respond to these incidents more reasonably than the UCLA administration in the article (i.e. they didn't thoughtlessly capitulate), and my experience from taking courses across science, social science, and humanities faculties is that the atmosphere in general is definitely not extreme to the level of fire alarm pulling. I would guess that the extreme elements are mostly local to a small number of particular academic subject areas like women's studies, but that this minority has significant power to influence what is acceptable speech and thought.
In response to
Stupid Questions (10/27/2014)
I am very afraid of bugs. I have to psyche myself up to get close enough to a bug to smash it. I have, on more than one occasion, decided to go to work without showering because there was a spider in the bathroom. Ants and flies don't bother me for whatever reason, but spiders/moths/beetles/grasshoppers/silverfish and almost anything else bug-like are very disconcerting to look at or be near.
This only rarely interferes with my life, but it is very frustrating. I'm not sure if I'm looking for a way to remove the irrational fear, or a coping strategy. "Keep gloves and lots of RAID around the house" is my current best idea.
I used to be creeped out by house centipedes, but I decided to get along with them after reading that they are generally harmless to humans and useful to have around because they kill all sorts of other household pests.
I think just remembering that they are a good thing and thinking of them as being on my team was helpful. I also gave cool names to the ones living in my basement (e.g. Zeus, Odin, Xerxes) and talked to them e.g. "Hi, centipedes. Keep up the good work, but please do try to stay away from me during the day, and remember our deal: you can live here, but my species has an ingrained fear of you guys, so if you drop down onto me from the ceiling or something I'm probably going to instinctively smash you."
I think ordering/ranking experiences would be more successful (in general) than trying to just give them scores.
An example of such a system: Every ping asks you to briefly describe the previous hour, and then shows you a list of every other ping you've written for the last week/month or so. You then put the description wherever it fits in the list, above everything that was less fun to experience, and below everything that was more fun.
In this way it's very easy to notice happiness trends (whether or not you're getting happier or sadder over time) without worrying about associating the same activity with the same score, even if it's becoming less or more fun to do.
My worry in that case would be present conditions bleeding into the memory and evaluation of those earlier pings. For example, I'd expect that when you're hungry your relative ranking of past ping moments is going to change to more heavily weigh moments when you were eating.
In response to
Stupid Questions (10/27/2014)
How do you actually get a first job? I haven't completed my degree, am struggling to live on my government provided student allowance, and don't have any experience to put on my CV.
Your school might have useful resources. If there is a career center, go there and see what kind of resources and help are available. There could be a student internship program, student job boards, career fairs, etc. Professors sometimes have work opportunities as well (they might announce these, or you may have to ask).
In response to
Stupid Questions (10/27/2014)
I've read that the CEO of Levi's recommends washing jeans very infrequently.
Won't they smell? I have a pretty clean white-collar lifestyle, but I'm concerned about wearing mine even once or twice between machine washing. Is it considered socially acceptable to re-wear jeans?
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Note that only the future is probabilistic. The past is fixed, the probability of Putin ordering airstrikes in Syria is 1 -- it happened.
But also note that while the past may be fixed, your knowledge of the past is probabilistic. I assume there is evidence you could encounter that would convince you that Putin ordering airstrikes in Syria didn't actually happen.