Thought of the Day #36: Don't interact with people who turn your brain off

Don't interact with people who turn your brain off. 

Interact with the intellectually stimulating, with people smarter than you, if you can.

Don't buy products with ads that are too flashy. Just look at the specs and compare.

Be wary of "instant rewards", "gifts". Look for the strings attached.

Don't talk to salespeople who are too good at selling things. Just get the catalog.

Don't support politicians who are too good at public speaking techniques. Just don't support any.

Don't date women who makes you think "cute" or "sexy" instantly. Date the people who turn you off.

Don't call sexually-mature human females "girls".  Call them women/people.

Women, stop calling sexually-mature human males "guys". Call us men/people.

"The most important rule there is, the Wizard's Sixth Rule: the only sovereign you can allow to rule you is reason. The first law of reason is this: what exists, exists, what is, is and from this irreducible bedrock principle, all knowledge is built. It is the foundation from which life is embraced.

Thinking is a choice. Wishes and whims are not facts nor are they a means to discover them. Reason is our only way of grasping reality; it is our basic tool of survival. We are free to evade the effort of thinking, to reject reason, but we are not free to avoid the penalty of the abyss that we refuse to see. Faith and feelings are the darkness to reasons light. In rejecting reason, refusing to think, one embraces death."

Faith of the Fallen

In my experience, very Randian and hard to live by. But the way I see it, that is the way things seem to be heading.

Email of the Day #1: "Alumni Profile"

Since this blog is called "SEAT at south island school", SIS news has to come in somewhere.

How do you feel about this?

http://www.esf.edu.hk/alumni_profile

The importance of Free Time

Free time makes me feel free.

The whole purpose of free time to be be free to do whatever you please. The moment time is scheduled, you aren't as free. The time is allocated.

The mystery here is, this is not the only way to look at time.

Thought of the Day #33: Odd Things make me happy!

http://www.odditycentral.com/news/most-frugal-woman-in-the-uk-lives-on-just-3500-a-year.html

Frugal woman truck driver who finds fashion, credit difficult to comprehend? That's special.

Thought of the Day #32

What is good for you as an individual may not be good for your genes.
What is good for your genes may not be good for you as an individual.

You are not just your genes. We are so much more than our genes.

Surfing food pages on wikipedia is lots of fun!

Hmm, now what if we could just 3D print these so that people can eat whatever, whenever, wherever they want?

Also, the idea that we need to digest everything we eat is ridiculous. How about some med that would just prevent the food from being digested?

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/List_of_regional_dishes_of_the_United_States

Useful Mental Simulations

Motivation

I sometimes get this feeling that people are not being totally true, that for one reason or another, they are compartmentalised, and if something happened that was unexpected and negative (or highly positive), they would not cope well.

Also, my dreams can be boring, so I like to persuade myself to dream about something else.

Scenarios

Imagine you are about to die.

I imagine myself lying there and waiting for the moment. I look back at the things I haven't done, and the few things that I have done, the things I am happy about, the things I wish could be better. I see all the possibilities and how I am only a small subset of this universe. I happily shrink into nothingness from which I came.

Imagine you win the lottery. (Let's say you do play)

I say to myself "oh wow, is this for real?" I go to my list of things I'd do if money is no object and start to pounder them one by one.

Imagine a loved one is about to pass away.

No imagination needed.

Imagine the birth of your first child. (Let's assume by normal means.)

...TBC...

Imagine a house search.

...TBC...

Suspended Disbelief

Motivation

"Suspended. Belief."

These are two words that have always struck me as strange.

Analysis

When we go watch a movie, we think of the movie as real.

Do we really?

Do we have to think, consciously, to convince ourselves that something is real,

or

Do we have to think, consciously, to decide that something is not real?

The way I see it, we automatically see everything as reality. Something being not real is a higher level concept. 

So if we just sit and look, that is belief in reality.

It takes more thinking to not believe in reality, to see the context, that we may be in a cinema, and images on the big screen are not real - it's a movie.

Conclusion

Believing is the norm. Disbelief is an action that comes afterwards.

Thinking consciously should be called suspended belief.  "Suspended disbelief" is the state humans are in, by default. There is nothing to suspend.

Secular Religion

Religion: Belief in a deity/group of deities/concept that can't be proven to exist.

When traditional religion fades, other things must occupy the minds of the non-religious multitudes.

1. Something else faith-based is going to take over.

These are some of the rising candidates.

Sports: Belief in a concept, or that some event will happen. A sports team. "Superbowl". American football. Also known as bread and circuses.

Horoscopes: Very faith-based and convoluted.

Tarot cards: Ancient. Faith-based. Convoluted. But it's a bit too mysterious.

Zodiac signs: Here, it's not a matter of faith, but of general mass hypnosis, where the people have an incentive to believe, because it's fun to believe it.

2. "Age of reason"

• Tales and legends are seen as what they are, not as what people want them to be. The works of fiction that inspired "scientology" would remain as fiction, without suspended disbelief.

• Other kinds of irrationality, self-deception would take over. Like market bubbles, startup unicorns...

• People would indulge totally in whatever makes them happy, to the extent where there is virtually no time in which they are unsatisfied, meaning that scarcity, the fundamental problem in economics, is solved as soon as it appears. Finding things to want then becomes the full time job (#futureFirstWorldProblems). Religion becomes one of many possible things we can choose to fill our heads with. We are still far from that.

It may well be that population-wide religion would make a comeback if we enter another dark ages. In the meantime, people can always find something to burn away time and brain cells.

Why are shrinks called shrinks?

The whole point of getting counselling/therapy is to help one make sense of troubling things.

Once the trouble is gone, life becomes far simpler. One's head gets smaller, or shrunk.

-

In therapy, there is often the challenge of getting the client to see themselves and understand their responsibility. It can very difficult.

There is a way to get this to happen.

People generally look down on the ground when they think, when they talk and think to themselves. Likewise, people are more likely to self-reflect when looking downwards.

Thought of the Day #02022016

Intelligence had better be made irrelevant by technology, or the inequality in the ability to gain wealth will only become more profound.