How to Avoid Getting in our own Way

I'm a longtime fan of Eric Barker's blog, "Barking up the Wrong Tree." He opens a recent blog post with this incredible story:

George was late again.

It was 1939 and math PhD student George Dantzig arrived to find he had already missed much of the lecture. The two homework problems were already up on the chalkboard. He scribbled them down.

But this day only got worse. When he got to work on the problems that night, he realized they were hard. Really hard. George was a super smart guy but these problems were insanely difficult. They took him days to complete. So now he was going to be late again, this time turning in his homework. Yeesh.

He delivered them to his professor, Jerzy Neyman, apologizing profusely. Neyman’s eyes went wide. George worried he was going to be in a lot of trouble. But that’s not why Neyman was reacting so strangely…

The two problems on the board hadn’t been homework at all — they were two issues in statistical theory that had been deemed “unsolvable” by the best mathematicians in the world. Far from being angry, Neyman was blown away.

Yeah, George was a genius. And, no, the lesson here is not “show up late.”

Point is, if George had known what he was up against, he never would have even tried. His amazing potential might never have been recognized.

Barker springs off this anecdote to offer five tips for getting more done. The title of his article: "How To Stop Being Lazy And Get More Done – 5 Expert Tips."

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National Crisis of Smartphone-Inflicted Loneliness Hurting our Teenagers

Jonathan Haidt and Jean M. Twenge warn that we need to separate teenagers from their smartphones:

Teenage loneliness was relatively stable between 2000 and 2012, with fewer than 18 percent reporting high levels of loneliness. But in the six years after 2012, rates increased dramatically. They roughly doubled in Europe, Latin America and the English-speaking countries, and rose by about 50 percent in the East Asian countries . . . All young mammals play, especially those that live in groups like dogs, chimpanzees and humans. All such mammals need tens of thousands of social interactions to become socially competent adults. In 2012 it was possible to believe that teens would get those interactions via their smartphones — far more of them, perhaps. But as data accumulates that teenage mental health has changed for the worse since 2012, it now appears that electronically mediated social interactions are like empty calories. Just imagine what teenagers’ health would be like today if we had taken 50 percent of the most nutritious food out of their diets in 2012 and replaced those calories with sugar. So what can we do? We can’t turn back time to the pre-smartphone era, nor would we want to, given the many benefits of the technology. But we can take some reasonable steps to help teens get more of what they need.

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Cheat Sheet for Responding to Social Justice Rhetoric

This cheat sheet is courtesy of the Oregon Association of Scholars. The authors are Drs. Bruce Gilley, Peter Boghossian and James Lindsay. Click on the image to view it larger at its source.

From the About page,

The Oregon Association of Scholars is a non-profit organization incorporated in the state of Oregon that promotes excellence, freedom, and merit in higher education in the state.

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What does it mean to be “mentally ill”?

Fascinating. So what is it, at bottom, to call someone "mentally ill? Is it essentially name calling? We are surrounded highly functional people who periodically and temporarily seem highly dysfunctional in specific ways. We have been cobbled together by natural selection, living Rube Goldberg machines, we are also equipped with sophisticated built-in PR departments that make it seem like we are more purposeful, more functional than we actually are. Further, Randolph Nesse has made a strong case that many "mental illnesses" are adaptive. What does it help use a global stamp of "mentally ill"?

Here's an excerpt from Nesse's 2020 book, Good Reasons for Bad Feelings:

The question “What is a mental disorder? ”has been addressed by Jerome Wakefield, a social worker, clinician, researcher, and philosopher at New York University. His pithy conclusion is that mental disorders are characterized by “harmful dysfunction.”“Dysfunction”means a malfunction in a useful system shaped by natural selection. “Harmful”means that the dysfunction causes suffering or other harm to the individual. Wakefield’s analysis grounds psychiatric diagnosis in an evolutionary understanding of the normal functions of brain/mind, the same way the rest of medicine understands pathology in the context of normal physiology. His cogent analysis has, however, had little influence on how psychiatrists make diagnoses.

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