Category: prudence

“If only Google knew what Google knows.”

[search]

The Jive Aces present: Bring Me Sunshine

“Man is the animal that believes something is wrong,” offers the theosophist Richard Smoley.

As online snippets seek to explain all things…

We’ve found, in our work with executives at dozens of organizations, that it’s possible to build any given skill or capacity in the same systematic way we do a muscle: push past your comfort zone, and then rest.

Tony Schwartz at Harvard

Here, then, are the six keys to achieving excellence we’ve found are most effective for our clients:

1. Pursue what you love.
2. Do the hardest work first.
3. Practice intensely.
4. Seek expert feedback, in intermittent doses.
5. Take regular renewal breaks.
6. Ritualize practice.

A new analysis of walking speed …
an older person’s pace, along with their age and gender, can predict their life expectancy just as well as the complex battery of other health details.

So instead of a doctor assessing a patient’s blood pressure, body mass index, chronic conditions, hospitalization history, smoking history and use of mobility aids to estimate survival, a lab assistant could simply time the patient walking a few meters and come up with just as accurate of a prediction of their likelihood of living five or 10 more years—as well as a median life expectancy.

for people right,
for people wrong,
for people all around,
yes,
there will be 2011,
and our theory of it too.

The fact remains that getting people right is not what living is all about anyway.

It’s getting them wrong that is living, getting them wrong and wrong and wrong and then, on careful reconsideration, getting them wrong again.

That’s how we know we’re alive: we’re wrong.

Maybe the best thing would be to forget being right or wrong about people and just go along for the ride.

But if you can do that, well, lucky you.

That’s our American Pastoral, as Phillip Roth put it.

By adulthood, our worldview is so fixed that most people don’t even know that there is another way to be.

To further complicate matters, these unconscious tendencies to feel threatened leave many people open to manipulation by the demagogues of the day.

Ronit Herzfeld:

Ninety percent of human-brain growth occurs in the first five years of life.  During this critical developmental period, life experiences determine how the millions of neurons in the human brain connect. These connections form the structure of our brains, which in turn create our minds.  Hence, our early life experiences shape our minds and define our individual beliefs and values — who we are.  While genetics plays a significant role, our experiences are responsible for how the genes are expressed, because our experiences actually shape our brain structure.

As we continue to grow, our tendency is to filter new information and experiences through our initial sets of beliefs and values.  We develop patterns in our brains that determine how we perceive and respond to our world. These patterns are relatively fixed and will tend to stay that way unless and until repeated new experiences restructure the brain, and thereby change the mind. For example, if a child is raised by racist parents, his brain structure becomes wired to think and feel racism.  The child’s view can change, however, if he is actively exposed to tolerance.

Our worldview is so fixed that most people don’t even know that ?!

“A new type of thinking is essential if mankind is to survive and move toward higher levels.” —Albert Einstein

When you think you’re the highest point, you don’t look up.

American States, like Americans themselves, are fond of trumpeting their superlatives.To hear them tell it, they’re all first in something: Corn growth, coal production, giant-est giant-ball-of-twine, blah, blah, blah.

But something’s not adding up, States: If you’re all so great, how come the country’s giving off the distinct odor of failure?

“Do you have something that might fix me?

“Things went kaboom. I went kerplut.

“I knew I was in kind of serious trouble when I really started to refer to myself in the third person and was just observing my own life rather than living it and participating in it.”

[yo. don’t jerk yourself up. it’s a rhetorical, er, statement.]

Fun & Fulfillment & Friday is our task we do not leave to error.

“Exposing young people to alcohol could permanently disrupt normal connections in the brain that need to be made to ensure healthy adult brain function.”

Scarcity determines value.

Among freshman boys, what’s rare, and therefore valuable, are freshman girls willing to have a relationship and, even better, willing to have sex.

Among senior girls, what’s rare, what’s valuable and scarce, are boys willing to have a relationship without having sex.

Game and its Theory, Bargaining, a multiplex emerges, a multitude of yearning, our multiplexipline, a contextual envelope, a dynamic of influence ::: prime anthropological stuff ::: Social Imitation Theory, Mutual Contingency, Attribution Modeling, Transference, Exchange Theory, the overt/covert power of cue.

Let’s see now:

“The air’s bad, the ozone’s fucked, the water’s poison, and into whose eyes do we find ourselves staring when we look for providence? We have emptied out the heavens and put oblivion in the hands of a bunch of…”

People Without A Conscience, says Paul Lawrence.

People without a conscience don’t need to satisfy the drive to bond and can focus entirely on the drive to acquire, making them more likely to seek leadership positions.

When you’re considering candidates for a powerful position, you can say:

“Well, maybe we ought to test them and see that they get a license, so that they’re qualified,” the way we do with people that are going to be airline pilots or the people that are going to be a number of professional roles like doctors and lawyers and so forth—they have to produce a test for being licensed for those roles.

We pause for a wee moment to calibrate our cajones.

What is THE practical question?

1) “How can we make the transition to a post-cheap-oil, post-stable-climate, post-industrial-economy society?”

2) “What does it mean to live a good life?”

You’re invited to reply to one, two, both, more.

From Jo at Majority of Two, composed vignette of purpose.

At one time, folks all lived in small communities and everyone knew each other. Even in large cities, people lived in specific areas and everyone worked, lived, and socialized within their own community. Everyone knew everyone else, people visited back and forth in each other’s homes and there was a real sense of belonging.

h/t Pauline.

If adults were merciful and resolute, we would all see that stress derails:

Babies brains build a basic architecture by forming synapses and then a more complex architecture develops on top of that.  For the first three year of life, babies’ brains form 700 synapses a second.

Genes provide the template for this work, but experiences turn the genes on and off.  So early life experiences are built into our bodies, encoded in our brains – for better or for worse.

Agents are absorbed in their affairs and act in ways which are inscribed in the game itself.

We can only interact with each other locally and that local interaction always reflects population-wide generalizations and idealizations most of which we are not conscious of.

Habitus is a complex concept, but in its simplest usage could be understood as a structure of the mind characterized by a set of acquired schemata, sensibilities, dispositions and taste… [wiki]. Please pause to notice ‘acquired…’

Now please pause to ponder:

1. Of all in your mind, what is intentionally put there by others?
2. And of that, what has your permission?

A New Scientist post reveals emerging technology which may give humanity a new opportunity to protect our mental boundary.

Since the 80s I’ve called it Information Sovereignty and I look forward to its adoption, a critical extension of rights at least as important as charters protecting body and property.

There are attempts to describe habitus:

We acquire our interest in social games living in the society we are born.

Our minds are structured by social experience imprinted in our bodies as feel for the game…

Agents are caught up in social games and the stakes at play. They are invested in the stakes and act what some call habitus, the ways of thinking into which they are born.

People acquire social games living in the society they are born. Their minds are structured by experience imprinted in their bodies as feel for the game.

Yes, he said imprinted IN our bodies. We would not live in a home without doors.

This is in fact a national crisis, as urgent as any that we face.

We just can’t allow this to happen to us.

The nation cannot possibly afford to take care of 100 million people with these awful diseases, none of us wants to be there or see people we care about living with stroke, dementia, heart disease, blindness, immobility . . .

But what do you think are the chances of the kind of major national mobilization that would be required to save our lard butts?

A. And this is why I loved the mental ward, by the way. You learn so much about life from people who are unable to live it.

B. Not perfectly, but enough so that the pills and the wine and the self-destruction are not necessary. But they are there, just in case.

http://blog.penelopetrunk.com/

I would have loved to hear your side of this.
“I would have loved to” gets about four million hits.

But it’s not that easy; just not that easy. Why?

Because “I would have loved to hear” is incorrect.

“I would have loved” suggests “but I do not, in fact, love.”

“I would love to have heard” is correct.

Ahh, so you would have loved after all.

Did you know that 10 words is 25% of all the words we write?

the
is
to
and
of
a
in
that
have
I

The way we raise our children today in this country is increasingly depriving them of the practices that lead to well being and a moral sense.

When I learn I do not cry. Who are the bully parents that teach their children with tears?

Pause for something not brutal. Foraging hunter-gatherer. Humans far before this Dominionist era. That’s 99% of our history. Were they parents? Were they good parents? Answer: Are you here?

Darcia Narvaez:

Ever meet a kindergartener who seemed naturally compassionate and cared about others’ feelings? Who was cooperative and didn’t demand his own way?

Chances are, his parents held, carried and cuddled him a lot; he most likely was breastfed; he probably routinely slept with his parents; and he likely was encouraged to play outdoors with other children.

Foraging hunter-gatherer societies gave their children better mental health, greater empathy and conscience development, and higher intelligence.

Characteristics of child rearing that were common to our distant ancestors:

• Lots of touch and no spanking, but nearly constant cuddling and holding;
• Prompt response to fusses and cries. You can’t ‘spoil’ a baby.
• Meet a child’s needs before the brain is flooded with toxics.
• Breastfeeding that builds real immunity.
• Care beyond mom and dad. Love for this child.
• Free play with multi-age playmates. Or risk ADHD and mental health.
• Childbirth which provides mothers with the energy to care.

The U.S. has been on a downward trajectory on all of these care characteristics. Go figure.

“Kids who don’t get the emotional nurturing they need in early life tend to be more self-centered. They don’t have available the compassion-related emotions to the same degree as kids who were raised by warm, responsive families.”

Error and turmoil or utter sloth? My children would generally invite and celebrate my interruption. I was not their worry. Life does that. I am something wanted, to look forward to; to trust. There is good here. A little alarm. A little serious. A little adventure. A little fun. Much warmth. And a lot of new and better choices. The only correction. See?

Tools. There is good here, and here, and here… That’s discipline. That’s parenting!

Seth Godin’s call for breakthrough:

Where, precisely, do you go in order to get permission to make a dent in the universe?

The accepted state is to be a cog. The preferred career is to follow the well-worn path, to read the instructions, to do what we’re told. It’s safer that way. Less responsibility. More people to blame.

…

Our obligation today isn’t to spare the feelings of our peers from future disappointment. It’s to establish an expectation that of course they’re going to do something that matters.

If you think there’s a chance you can make a dent, GO.

Now.

Hurry.

You have my permission. Not that you needed it.

Go ahead. Create any habit you want. Break any habit you choose. Or wait for the damn infomercials and phony testimooials [sic] to fix you.

Before now, no-one had actually studied habits!

The average time to reach automaticity is 66 days. But about half fail to achieve a enough automaticity to grow a habit. Oops.

Random is better.

The 2010 Ignoble Awards were handed out on September 30th and one of the prize winners firmly demonstrated that if the Peter Principle is true, organizations would be better off promoting employees randomly.

Grok!