fristechill's comments

Sustained interest in a topic solves the problems associated with how to express ideas about it. There's a co-evolution between developing an ability and having a motivation for doing so.

The flaws in writing you've mentioned are valid, but in the right hands they've all been used as rhetorical devices at some time or another.

The reason why some/many people are bad at writing is because they haven't yet discovered anything interesting to say. Therefore they weren't motivated to improve.

This is the criterion: is it interesting? 'Yes' means it's not AI-generated. 'No' means it's not worth reading.

Yes I agree. I'm totally in favour of married life and family life. However calling something by a name isn't necessarily the same as what the name superficially implies.

At the very least it's an interesting cultural phenomenon if 'dates' are transmuting from something people are supposed to do before they get married, in order to get married, into something they're supposed do after marriage.

Clearly 'date night' is more important to people than I knew. Partly for this reason, I doubt it will be sufficient to save or maintain marriage, the institution, beyond a generation or two. It reminds me of the concept of quality time which was introduced in the 70s/80s at the same time as divorce was skyrocketing and children were being increasingly neglected. Yet who can gainsay it? Who doesn't want more 'quality time'?

It's very sad and I'm sorry to have brought it up.

Apologies--I seem to have touched a nerve here. There are worse things than dates, I'm sure, e.g. hookup apps

Equally disturbing is the fact that many married men are being encouraged to participate in a permanent state of ersatz courtship known as 'date nights'. What's the point of getting married if you still have to go on dates?

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=mm1HgQbXFEE

Parents, love your children, as much as you can. Children, honour your parents, as much as you can.

The alternative is resentment, a condition toxic enough to keep anyone in hell.

I've experienced frisson at great moments in music but only when fantasising about performing the music (or some part of it) myself. I did a lot of this as a teenager...

>they can even be an asset to the community and volunteer in exchange for kudos in the right circumstances

Yes, and a relatively harmless source of narcissistic supply would seem to be in the performing arts.

My children would concur: they prefer digital time I think because that's what computers generally give. Also they prefer to have subtitles on but that's by the by.

I enjoyed Douglas Adam's letter though I can't help thinking it was meant for publication.

Problem is that, as I said, the architects of globalism are using this issue. They aren't motivated by the climate or any other of several, rotating concerns. They're motivated by a lust for power/wealth/prestige. You can't achieve difficult objectives unless you are really trying--and they aren't!

However you can ruin the efforts of others by demanding that their work serve a primary political agenda.

The issue of climate change, among other issues, is being used to promote unity and one world government. But it doesn't follow that this approach is best to climate change or anything else. We need variation in policies and technologies in order to select the best approach (and not get locked in to a sub-optimal approach).

One world government is bad because it will attract evil elements who use it to place all peoples under their control/taxation/exploitation, with no recourse or escape. All in the name of helping people and fighting for <insert your favourite political cause>.

By analogy, it might seem more efficient if families were to live in communal dormitories instead of their separate houses. In reality it would create stultification and at worst mass suffering when individuals took control over all aspects of other families' lives.

Humility before the truth is vital but not necessarily humility as expressed in one's public statements.

Indeed psychoticism was identified by the psychologist Hans Eysenck as one of the traits of genius, including scientific genius. Psychoticism is a package which includes associative thinking, creativity, disagreeableness, lack of empathy, antisocial nature, introversion, coldness, aggression, high self-esteem.

The problem is that most people are afraid of giving offence, of being ostracised by their colleagues and so on, and so they self-censor their original thoughts and never create anything fundamentally new and important.

So it's unsurprising that most of the great scientists in history had very difficult personalities (Faraday may have been an exception). I think the optimal approach is to study and benefit from the work of geniuses but have as little to do with them personally as possible. Leave them alone to their work.

Of course the fact that someone has a difficult personality does not mean he is a great thinker. However science has a mechanism for dealing with that via the publication system, where ideas that are wrong are eventually criticised and ultimately forgotten.

I share the sentiment however the grain of truth here is that it does take a lot of effort to appear normal. The essence of being normal is trying to appear normal which is what most people are engaged in most of the time.

The hidden motivation behind this is fear of other people and the fear of evil which for most people has all but conquered their love of reality, truth, and so on.

If one does have other genuine interests and pursuits (for example foreign languages) then the task of appearing normal is harder. So the implication that he isn't smart enough to be normal is in this sense correct.

Which by the by suggests that motivation is the key to learning, not attention control, repetition, particular books, starting young or the other usual suspects and methods. These are downstream from motivation.

Do you know what kinds of oil are commonly used for the frying?

Couldn't agree more. People think that humans are more intelligent because we learnt to speak, but it's really language itself that makes us smart in the sense of making us universal problem solvers. Animals are conscious creatures which can and do solve problems in novel situations.

I think your preferences make total sense. Though I have little experience with wildfires. Would an air filter help?

For my own eccentricities, I have the bedroom window open slightly while sleeping, closed when awake.

During the winter, when inside I wrap up in warm clothes, thermals, scarf. When exercising outside I wear only one or two layers. I call it the 'Winter Paradox'.

Introverts of the world unite! Seriously, night time is great because having large chunks of unstructured time is good for creativity. There's no one to interrupt you or be offended by your (unpredictable) results.

My waking hours are typically 12pm-3am. Can confirm that eating during the early morning (i.e. when normally asleep) puts a noticeable strain on the system. Which must be connected to the scientific fact that night shifts are bad for health. I presume partly because night shift people don't do night shifts all the time and thus have to continually reset their circadian clocks, which will include eating at the 'wrong' times.

Intuitively the converse seems to be true: getting into a hot bath, the muscles relax, the arteries relax and the mind goes merrily off to the races with interesting ideas. Presumably because it is freed from a certain amount of its bodily management duties.

>"When you rely on incentives, you undermine virtues. Then when you discover that you actually need people who want to do the right thing, those people don't exist." —Barry Schwartz

Quite so. And things may be worse than that. It may be that both incentives and virtues are unreliable. For example, the famous day care study mentioned in Freakonomics casts doubt on the utility of incentives when it comes to social problem-solving:

https://sites.google.com/site/cvhsbahm/economics/econ_calend...

Moreover, my guess is that virtues themselves may also be unreliable because they're are about outward behaviour, which is often inherited and not explicitly understood, and which may not be passed on.

Jacob Bronowski, scientist and author of The Ascent of Man, identified the primary scientific virtue as what he called the habit of truth. This is to rigidly tell the truth about all things, both in private and in print, including about the minutest details, in one's scientific work.

It is a matter of opinion, but it seems that the habit of truth no longer pervades the scientific enterprise, now fully professionalized and bureaucratised.

Perhaps it was lost because it was only a habit. Whereas the love of truth, beauty, and so on, are spiritual values: modes of being rather than habitual outward behaviours. Which may explain why (according to Ed Dutton and Bruce Charlton), many 20th century scientific geniuses were first generation atheists. They inherited a reverence for truth and reality; they were able to make important scientific progress, but their ardour could not be sustained beyond a generation or two.

https://geniusfamine.blogspot.com/

Love as I understand it is not strictly an emotion but rather an absence of fear when attending to the object of love. It appears emotional because there's a change in the baseline emotional state. The results is a whole-hearted engagement which with sufficient investment of time has the potential to become creative.