Perhaps many people don’t hold themselves to the strict standard of Kant’s categorical imperative, in that they don’t act as if their every action is to be held up as an example for all. But I still cling to the idea that most people aren’t simply utter hypocrites who will excuse themselves from moral judgment while lecturing others.

Those who may fall into the authoritarian camp appear to be an exception.
[more...]

It’s very easy for me to forget that I’m living in an area that is rather likely to be hit by earthquakes in the near future. The occasional small one hits, and I remember, and then that goes away and an irrational sense of safety follows. At times it’ll come up in discussion, as it did at lunch today, but the awareness usually slips into the background fairly quickly. This isn’t good, because there’s a 62% chance of a major earthquake in the next 30 years.
[more...]

Do people have rational reasons for believing things that are irrational?

For the purposes of this discussion, I’ll define “irrational beliefs” as “belief in things that are demonstrably untrue”. For example, the belief that the Earth is less than 10,000 years old. I regard this as demonstrably false because it’s either untrue, or almost everything we understand about the physical laws of the universe goes out the window.
[more...]

Last month I wrote about wanting to change my reading habits, so that I would think more while reading, and read more critically. Since resolving to do this, the main difference is that I’ve been reading far less.
[more...]

In the beginning was The Speaking of The Word.
[more...]

I haven’t been listening to much music recently. I’m not sure why that is, and I started thinking about what effect music has on me, or has had on me in the past
[more...]

I tend to read a lot, and I tend to read very quickly. I’m wondering if I should alter my approach.
[more...]

On Friday night, Brian and I were discussing MTG skill, in reference to my playing in the Planar Chaos prerelease tournament today.

I was thinking about possible steps to follow, along the lines of my “undistraction steps”, and commented that all of my sets of steps start with “take five deep breaths”. Brian then suggested that I try taking a deep breath at the start of every MTG turn, during my upkeep.

This seemed like an excellent idea, and I resolved to try it out, and also to take five deep breaths at the start of every game.

Also, I would take a deep breath, and try to relax, whenever I realized that I had made a mistake.

I tested these ideas out in practice today, at the prerelease. They seemed beneficial, but the sample size is probably too small to tell. I went seven–one, three–one in the individual flight and four–zero in team (although my team as a whole went three–one). Those results at the least make it unlikely that the breathing had any detrimental result.

The five deep breaths at the start of each game help to center me, and help me to concentrate. Not miraculously so, and sometimes I still had a struggle on my hands to get myself to pay attention.

The deep breath every upkeep felt like it had quite an impact. It forces me to pause, and to consider the situation. More than that, it stops me from getting into a hurried mental state. I don’t just mean a state in which I’m worried about the time, I mean a point where I think I have the next n turns planned out, and so don’t want to bother thinking through them. That’s a very dangerous state, and I definitely make a lot of mistakes in it. So forcing myself to breathe helps me force myself to think, to focus on the actual situation rather than the one I imagine will unfold.

I still lost my concentration in a number of games, sadly. And in both tournaments this occurred in the third round, which definitely makes sense—that’s when I’m beginning to get tired, and also when I’m less cognizant of the newness of my deck.

The breathing might have helped me avoid more egregious mistakes, but I still made mistakes in those rounds. I didn’t really go on tilt in either case. I lost in the individual rounds, while in team I managed to play the next two games calmly, ultimately defeating that opponent.

Recovering from mistakes (or bad situations) is just as important as not making them. Forcing myself to breathe when I realize that I’ve made mistakes helps ensure that I stay relatively calm and don’t fall apart.

It’s such a simple thing, but it’s so easy to forget, especially when doing an activity as complicated as MTG. I think it helps, and intend to keep trying this as I keep playing.

The tools I have in mind here are electronics, mainly computers, and in some cases software. Our devices obviously help us do things… but are they the right things, and does the help come at a price?
[more...]

Last Saturday I wrote about a set of steps to get into a focused state of mind. I haven’t managed to use those steps yet, suggesting that they were indeed too long.

So, I thought I’d try a shorter version. Some assumptions govern this process: that you have a list of possible tasks; that you are having some difficulty in doing any of them; that at the time you’re doing these steps there are no external constraints preventing you from doing them.

• Find a place to write (notebook page, new buffer in text editor, whatever).
• Take 5 deep breaths.
• Write down the possible tasks; there should be between two and five of them. You may need to add items and start again from this point if you get stuck below.
• For each one, write down:
  • How urgent it is.
  • How resistant you feel to it, and anything about that resistance that comes to mind.
  • Its sub-tasks, especially the first few things required to get going on it.
• Write down how much time you can commit to the task you’re about to start.
• Think and preferably say: confident, capable, calm, determined, strong.
• Start the first sub-task for the most urgent thing on the list.
• If you’re too resistant to that, go down through the list in order of urgency and start the first sub-task in the next-most-urgent task.
• Work on the task you selected for the amount of time you have committed to, and then either continue or revisit these steps.

Better. This looks less daunting.

I haven’t tried this (or the previous version) out yet, because I’ve been focused and task-driven since I wrote the previous entry. When I do get some experience with it, I will note the results and return to this in a future post.

I’m on a heavy organizational kick right now, especially concerning digital information. I’m using lists more, and I’m digging up archived stuff from way back because I want to put it into a rational and unified structure.
[more...]

Following on from the success of my set of steps for getting into a creative mode, I’ve come up with a similar process to tackle what seems like a harder problem: getting out of being frustrated/distracted and into a state of being focused.

I often get myself into states where I am distracting myself, and am frustrated by this. I find that I feel like I want to do “something”, but also shy away from actually doing anything. I think the way it works is that I approach some task, feel some resistance to doing it (fear that I won’t be able to do it, or possibly just inertia), distract myself from it with something like web surfing, get frustrated with the distraction activity (because it feels empty, naturally enough), build a desire to “do something”, encounter the resistance again, distract myself with something shiny online (or wherever), and so on. And when I realize that I’m in this state, I get frustrated with myself and look for relief from that frustration… which typically comes in the form of more distraction.

It’s clearly possible to get out of this state (else I’d never get anything done), and it seems like a process for getting out of it might be very helpful. This is my first pass at such a process:

• Take 5 deep breaths.
• Find a place to write (notebook page, new buffer in text editor, whatever).
• Take 5 deep breaths again.
• Write down the things that you want to do, or the things that you feel you should do. Preferably this should be a list of more than one thing, but it doesn’t have to be.
• (At each of the following steps, if you feel yourself getting agitated or nervous, take 5 deep breaths again whenever it might help.)
• For each one, write down how resistant you feel to it, and whatever comes to mind to describe that resistance and where it comes from.
• For each one, try to break it down into sub-tasks, with specific focus on what the first few things are that would be required to get going on it.
• For each one (or, if possible, each sub-task), write down how urgent it is. No hyperbole please.
• At this point, see if you can start the first sub-task for the most urgent thing on the list.
• If not, consider the fact that distracting yourself from it while not doing it is a waste, and that if you’re going to avoid that task you might as well do another one. Also, note any further insight on where the resistance to doing the most urgent task is coming from.
• Choose another task from the list—if you don’t have any other task on the list, make one. It doesn’t have to be related to the other item(s), and in fact it’s probably better if it’s not.
• See if you can start the first sub-task for the second-most urgent thing on the list.
• If not, try the next one, and so on. If you get to the end of the list and you’re still refusing to do any of it, try adding items like “take a break” or “take a walk”.
• If you get this far and still can’t do anything, at least stand up and get away from your workspace for a while. Consider the following words: confident, capable, calm, determined, strong.
• Start this process over again.

It’s too long. Not that the process itself might take too long, but that’s too long a list of steps. Still, I’m going to try it out before attempting to refine it, and then I’ll see what could be taken out.

A danger I see here is repetition of this process itself becoming a distraction activity (one that it’s easy not to feel guilty about since it clearly indicates at least an attempt to do whatever resisted task(s) awaits). But I’m hoping that the enforced awareness of what’s going on will eliminate that possibility.

The main problem apart from that is that when I’m in that state, I rarely seem to have the wherewithal to invoke a process like this one. But that’s a matter of training. Training to recognize the distracted state and to go through this process once such recognition occurs.

I’ll try this over the next several weeks—since I’m returning to work soon and am also planning heavy editing work on my novel, I may have plenty of opportunities to see how it works.

In conversation with my friend Sharon this evening, I started thinking about what tools can help people understand politics. I don’t mean “big stuff” like elections and how various chambers of government and so on, but a general approach that can serve as a basis for looking at any political situation.
[more...]

I thought of that somewhat obvious term last night, while replying to Seth’s post for December. It seems useful.

The meaning is fairly clear: things that you do less because you really want to do them and more because they distract you—either from specific things, or from life in general.

Television is a fairly obvious one. I’ve managed to eliminate that, and it’s been good. I don’t really count films and books as distractions in the same way, although they can be sometimes. But generally they seem like focused activities that have something to them (there are many caveats here, naturally).

Gaming can be a distractivity. I’ve certainly used it as such many times in my life, especially when in college, around exam time. But it doesn’t have to be that. It can be a relaxed/relaxing, fun activity. It can also be a focused, challenging flow experience, which is what I tend to strive for when playing. However, the possibility for it to be different things can be dangerous, because it becomes really easy to convince yourself you’re doing it for the focused challenge while in fact you’ve fallen deep into the distraction valley.

It’s hard to tell the difference, though. And it’s certainly hard to define a difference. I suspect, though, that you usually know the difference. When it’s a distraction activity for me, I generally know it at some level, and part of what I’m trying to distract myself from is that knowledge…

However, I’m not too worried about gaming as distractivity right now. In fact, I don’t think I’m gaming enough—I need to get more MTG practice in, and work on my focus on that game. And increasing my daily dose of DDR wouldn’t hurt either.

The main distraction activity for me right now, and one that seems like a canonical example of the category, is web surfing. I just do it too much. There’s so much interesting stuff out there… and there’s so much useful and educational material out there, too. I’ve learned a tremendous amount from surfing, and that includes a lot that I use professionally.

But. But, much of the time it’s clearly something I’m doing to distract myself. It eats up time, and more than that, it eats focus. The habit of surfing to get away from something, as a soothing balm for some unpleasant occurrence, obviously leads (like any addictive thing) to turning to it more often, and most importantly turning to it whenever difficulty is encountered. And so I find myself increasingly likely to web surf when I run into some problem that’s hard to solve (this doesn’t include cases where I am trying to find the answer to the problem online)… twenty minutes later, the problem is still hard to solve, and I’m completely unfocused, and in fact I’ve pushed my mind into a mode where it expects to skip around, dealing only with pleasing and interesting tidbits.

It’s similar to channel surfing on television, except that you are more or less guaranteed to come across something interesting and appealing and even worthwhile. There’s just too much content out there not to. And that makes it even more dangerous, because it’s like a reward for the mind: do something unfocused and distractive for a while, then you get this goodie! So you’re reinforcing behavior you want to reduce.

I’ve cut down on a lot of the distraction activity. No television, and I spend a lot more time engaged in projects like writing and coding. These are good trends, ones I intend to continue. But sooner or later, I suspect that it’ll be necessary to proscriptively alter my web surfing habits.

Last week I posted about some steps for getting into a creative frame of mind, and decided to try them out on my posts for the week. Overall I think that using the steps was rather effective.
[more...]

The death of the ruler of Turkmenistan prompts the question: how do people get away with this shit?
[more...]

I’ve had this item on my to-do list for a while: come up with list of instructions to self for getting into/out of certain emotional states. This mainly applies to creativity, motivation, and productivity (all of which are related).

The first one, creativity, I touched on in my post about inspiration. I think it should be possible to deliberately put myself into a mode where I’m going to either come up with ideas or do things with the ideas I already have. (This seems a more optimistic approach than simply waiting for inspiration to “strike”.)

And if that’s possible, it should be possible to push myself into other active mental states as well. By “active” I mean action-oriented—I have my doubts about moving into something like “happiness” with this kind of exercise. (An extended version of this kind of thing might qualify as “meditation”, however, and it appears likely that various forms of happiness can be aided significantly through meditation.) For the moment, I’m concerned with putting myself into a good state to do specific things.

The first one of these I actually came up with, and which gave me the idea for the others, was “consideration steps”. This could also be called “how to make a decision”. I found myself with a bunch of things to do like “Consider mootools (<http://mootools.net/download/release>)” and “consider [some] directory structure”, and found that I was shying away from those, so I came up with these steps:

• Take 5 deep breaths (I think this should probably be added to more or less every checklist…).
• Read over whatever it is.
• Write 5 or more thoughts that come to mind after reading it.
• Decide whether there are future actions that could be taken.
• List those actions, and list how much time (approximately) that each might take.
• If the action is “further consideration”, move onto separate list for this.
• If actions are indeterminate, that is, I’m not sure whether I really want to do them, move to “possible future action” list.
• Make notes on this process, and make sure that the action items (that is, the actions I’ve decided I want to take) are clear.

Nothing radical there, just a checklist for considering something and coming up with some kind of decision. The important thing appears to be deciding to make the decision, actually… and these steps help with that in the standard “delineated small things are easier to achieve than undifferentiated big things” way. At the least, I think these will get me in the right state of mind for decision-making. They’ve worked so far—except that I don’t always apply them. Decisions tend to go better when I do.

One I’ve only tried a couple of times, and which I’m superstitiously leery of using more often (something I want to get over by using it more often), and which I haven’t codified until now, is for getting inspiration, or getting into a creative mindset. What I note below is something I’ve never used (except in unconnected bits), and which I intend to try out.

• Take 5 deep breaths.
• Prepare working space for whatever creativity is going to take place. This could be notebooks, a computer, a whiteboard, paint and a canvas, whatever. But there has to be a record of some sort.
• Write down the theme or setting or desired output or whatever it is that you know about what you want to get inspiration about.
• Take 5 deep breaths again.
• Recite:
  Cast a cold eye

  On life, on death.

  Horseman, pass by!

  (Obviously, substitute whatever works for you here. The Yeats is just something that seems to do it for me.)

• Close eyes and focus on the theme/setting/desire output/whatever. Write (or paint, or output however you like) whatever comes to you at this point. Repeat this step, and keep repeating it, until you have something you think you can work on. If that doesn’t happen and you get stuck, repeat the last two steps and this one. If you get more stuck than that, go away and do something else for a while, then come back and repeat the whole thing.

Obviously, I can’t really *recommend* this, as I haven’t tried it as a whole! But I’ll use it for all my blog posts (and possibly my work on my novel) in the next week, and then report back on how it goes. (Update: I used it, it went very well, I now recommend it.)

I read a hostile review of The Root of All Evil, Richard Dawkins’ documentary, on the liberal website Alternet.org today.
[more...]

Niall sent me a large number of messages today about accidents resulting in radiation poisoning. Reading about completely unsafe practices and the escape of radioactive materials into the commercial scrap metal business made me feel rather unsafe.
[more...]

A perennial area of interest for me is how one improves skills. The obvious answer is “practice”, but for a lot of things that’s not specific enough, and figuring out exactly what and how to practice can be quite difficult.
[more...]

The meaning of ‘oblique’ that I’m addressing here is that of being indirect, unstraighforward, with connotations of slyness or underhandedness. What in our lives coomunicates indirectly and often with apparent deviousness?
[more...]

A while ago, when I was in L.A. and up late and avoiding my AFBH post for the day, I came across this blog (possibly this post), which has the brilliant tagline: “Being a good writer is 3% talent, 97% not being distracted by the Internet.” Naturally, given what I was doing versus what I was supposed to be doing, this struck a chord. I was reminded of it tonight, as I was thinking about inspiration.
[more...]

I survey the board calmly, without needing to. I know what resides there. I know the available possibilities. I draw a card, and add its potential to what I hold already.
[more...]