I actually have a new puppy - and it certainly has taken a little while for him to figure out that kibble is food so this part stood out to me :)
For example, dogs don’t learn to salivate whenever they see food. This reflex is ‘hard-wired’ into the dog
This doesn't require that dog have a hardwired food classifier. The behaviour is the dog salivating when the dog sees something it recognizes as food, not that the dog is able to recognize all foods. It just needs one hardwired FOOD neuron, that can be attached to a classifier that is later trained. (Idk the t...
All my notes take the form of questions and answers now. I find that notes that can't be used to challenge me to recall and think about the material are pointless.
Note these are not like SR flashcards, which I have had little luck with outside things such as vocab.
I keep them in markdown in Dropbox, and edit them on my iPad or phone while reading. When I feel like reviewing I have a custom style sheet to present them in a form that it is easy to cover up the answers with one hand.
In terms of deciding what information to capture, I used to fetishise names a...
Awesome. I'm going to try this on something (short).
Random thoughts:
"In particular, when it comes to marriage, outside of the aforementioned libertarian fringe, there is a total and unanimous agreement that marriage is not a contract whose terms can be set freely, but rather an institution that is entered voluntarily, but whose terms are dictated (and can be changed at any subsequent time) by the state."
If true, this is a new thing. In the past the terms were dictated by the church. I doubt you will find unanimous agreement today that the views of the church are irrelevant to marriage. So perhaps the total and un...
Perhaps the only way to train yourself to achieve long-term goals is to use short-term motivation to improve your automatic behaviours, instead of trying to train ourselves to have motivational systems that work on long-term multi-step plans.
What if we broke down the action steps of your algorithm into:
People who choose torture, if the question was instead framed as the following would you still choose torture?
"Assuming you know your lifespan will be at least 3^^^3 days, would you choose to experience 50 years worth of torture, inflicted a day at a time at intervals spread evenly across your life span starting tomorrow, or one dust speck a day for the next 3^^^3 days of your life?"
This year I've quadrupled the amount of structured meta thinking I do, compared to last year, and I have seen a big improvement in my ability to make and stick to goals. So I think more meta-thinking can help you get more done, if you have a problem with sticking to resolutions, as I do. Probably the meta-thinking has to have a point to it, though.
But I've also been amused at just how much meta-thinking it takes for me to achieve a goal. Like, currently, achieving brushing my teeth more would take hours and hours of thinking about brushing my teeth, consid...
The closest thing to a secular church that I have ever encountered are Light Opera Societies. In the UK lots of towns above a certain (quite small) size have one.
They pursue harmless but uplifting goals. The goals are challenging, but achievable. Participants must follow the instructions of a group leader precisely. Participants must learn to trust other group members. Performing in front of others is a fairly intense social experience. Once you have signed up, attendance every week is almost mandatory for a significant period of time.
EDIT: for those not into this kind of thing, Light Opera means Gilbert and Sullivan, or Singing in the Rain.
I think about my young daughters' lives a lot. One says she wants to be an artist. Another a teacher.
Do those careers make any sense on a timeframe of the next 20 years?
What interests and careers do I encourage in them that will become useless at the slowest rate?
I think about this a lot - and then I mainly do nothing about it, and just encourage them to pursue whatever they like anyway.