Kyle's Files: Stop Fixing Yourself, Good Ideas, Factivism
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As always, here's a bunch of ideas that have been working on me in interesting ways--
1. Tweets'n'Things™
Emotions work best when you also have another plane that is not emotional. Ram Dass
natural philosophy is only a world-exposition and world-arrangement (according to us, if I may say so!) and NOT a world-explanation... Nietzsche
Point of view is that quintessentially human solution to information overload... In a world of hyper-abundant content, point of view will become the scarcest of resources. Paul Saffo
Under peaceful conditions the militant man attacks himself. Nietzsche
The thing I have noticed is when the anecdotes and the data disagree, the anecdotes are usually right. There's something wrong with the way you are measuring it. Jeff Bezos
Our vanity is most difficult to wound just when our pride has been wounded. Nietzsche
The secret to doing good research is always to be a little underemployed. You waste years by not being able to waste hours. Amos Tversky
He who binds to himself a joy
Does the winged life destroy;
But he who kisses the joy as it flies
Lives in Eternity’s sunrise.
William Blake
You can’t just tell someone what they’re saying is pointless. So you tell them it’s wrong. Deleuze
With the emphasis on the great truth of suffering and its causes, on the need for right effort, on the dangers of continually indulging sense desire, it is sometimes easy to overlook that this is a path of happiness, leading onward to happiness. Joseph Goldstein on Buddhism
To cast a spell is simply to spell, to manipulate words, to change peoples consciousness, and this is why I believe that an artist or writer is the closest thing in the contemporary world to a shaman. Alan Moore
2. Kevin Kelly’s Birthday Advice
He had a birthday, so he gave us a bunch of very good ideas. The last bit of advice is about dealing with advice:
Advice like these are not laws. They are like hats. If one doesn’t fit, try another.
The rules range from very practical:
• A balcony or porch needs to be at least 6 feet (2m) deep or it won’t be used.
• Learn how to tie a bowline knot. Practice in the dark. With one hand. For the rest of your life you’ll use this knot more times than you would ever believe.
• You can eat any dessert you want if you take only 3 bites.
• Most overnight successes — in fact any significant successes — take at least 5 years. Budget your life accordingly.
• Be frugal in all things, except in your passions splurge.
To more philosophical:
• Jesus, Superman, and Mother Teresa never made art. Only imperfect beings can make art because art begins in what is broken.
• You are only as young as the last time you changed your mind.
• You are given the gift of life in order to discover what your gift *in* life is. You will complete your mission when you figure out what your mission is. This is not a paradox. This is the way.
• Something does not need to be perfect to be wonderful. Especially weddings.
• The greatest rewards come from working on something that nobody has a name for. If you possibly can, work where there are no words for what you do.
And everywhere between:
• The worst evils in history have always been committed by those who truly believed they were combating evil. Beware of combating evil.
• It is much easier to change how you think by changing your behavior, than it is to change your behavior by changing how you think. Act out the change you seek.
• Work to become, not to acquire.
• Don’t worry how or where you begin. As long as you keep moving, your success will be far from where you start.
• Take one simple thing — almost anything — but take it extremely seriously, as if it was the only thing in the world, or maybe the entire world is in it — and by taking it seriously you’ll light up the sky.
The other 83 rules are worth reading.
3. How To Approach New Ideas
The next couple of sections include ideas that might require lowering defenses. Nietzsche offers a productive way to approach new ideas, and that type of ideas especially:
Whoever wants really to get to know a new idea does well to take it up with all possible love, to avert the eye quickly from, even to forget, everything about it that is objectionable or false. We should give the author of a book the greatest possible head start and, as if at a race, virtually yearn with a pounding heart for him to reach his goal. By doing this, we penetrate into the heart of the new idea, into its motive center: and this is what it means to get to know it. Later, reason may set its limits, but at the start that overestimation, that occasional unhinging of the critical pendulum, is the device needed to entice the soul of the matter into the open.
(That quote came from the super-good A Primer for Forgetting, which I'm excited to share more from here soon.)
4. Fact-ist Politics
The Danger of Fact-ist Politics is one of the more interesting political takes I’ve seen recently. In a nutshell:
The belief that misinformation is today’s main threat to democracy blinds us to the pernicious effects of a broader preoccupation with certitude.
Each side has its own flavor of certitude:
Scientism lets us convince ourselves that “the facts” do not compose an imperfect map of an incredibly complex reality but instead constitute the territory itself.
...
Conspiracism goes further than conspiracy theorizing. It reduces all political issues to the machinations of powerful elites, adopting what Woodhouse and Nieusma called the “cynical theory of expertise” in which “expertise serves only the affluent and the powerful.”
Each of them are a different approach to easing the pain of uncertainty:
Conspiracism and scientism are jointly preoccupied with certainty. They enjoy a fantasy in which experts are uniquely able to escape the messiness of politics, discern the facts plain and simple, and from their godlike viewpoint turn back to politics and dispense with it. Both seduce members of open, uncertain societies with the promise of a more simply ordered world.
This faith in our set of facts makes more workable politics (compromise, negotiation, the ability to make a wrong call) impossible:
Once we see policy as defined solely by “the facts,” politics no longer happens, at least not in the traditional sense. Democracy traditionally works through the constant fracturing and reforming of coalitions, alliances composed of disparate groups each seeking to get their own aspirations turned into law. It depends upon previous enemies sitting down and negotiating to make deals happen, to achieve common goals. Once all political opposition is cast as the product of misinformation or science illiteracy, compromise becomes irrational, the sacrifice of truth to appease the ignorant.
Noticing this fundamental stance was the most useful for me, but the whole post is interesting and the author proposes some solutions.
5. Stop Trying
The new Anthony De Mello book's title does a great job of summing up the message: Stop Fixing Yourself: Wake Up, All Is Well. Of course this an "at some level" claim. And one that's not difficult to pick at. It's been helpful for me to "challenge from an attitude of openness":
You’ve got to challenge everything I’m saying. But challenge it from an attitude of openness, not from an attitude of stubbornness.
The big idea is that if we'd stop trying so hard and just see ourselves, we'd be free:
The trouble with most people is that they’re busy trying to fix things in themselves that they really don’t understand. Stop fixing yourself. You’re OK. Don’t interfere. Don’t fix anything. Simply watch. Observe. These things in you that you struggle to fix just need to be understood. If you understood them, they would change.
In fact, De Mello believes that trying hard is counterproductive:
At best, effort leads to repression and a covering over of the root problem. Effort may change the outward behavior, but it does not change the inner person.
Later in the book he elaborates on why this is:
Think of the sad history of your self-improvement efforts—they either ended in disaster or they succeeded only at the cost of struggle and pain. You are always dissatisfied with yourself, always wanting to change yourself, always wanting more. So, you are full of violence and self-intolerance, which only grows with every effort that you make to change yourself. Thus, any change you achieve is inevitably accompanied by inner conflict.
There's a strange sense of safety that comes from feeling the need to be better or have more:
You also falsely think that your fears protect you, that your beliefs have made you what you are, and that your attachments make your life exciting and secure. You fail to see that they are actually a screen between you and life’s symphony.
The claim that we think our fears protect us seems ludicrous at first glance and obvious if we look at them a little closer. We're so grounded in these fears, beliefs, and attachments that it feels we might lose contact with reality if we let them go. The leap of faith being demanded is more possible once we glimpse that that isn't true.
"Dropping attachments" is generally acceptable as a way to reduce suffering for many. The challenge is when he gets specific and extreme. One of the more uncomfortable examples he gives:
Want a little test to prove that you don’t want to be happy? Think of someone you love very much—someone you’re close to, someone who is precious to you—and, in your mind, say to that person: “I’d rather have happiness than have you.” Then, see what happens. Did you feel selfish when you said it? We’ve been brainwashed into thinking, “How could I be so selfish?” But look at who’s being selfish. Imagine somebody saying to you, “How could you be so selfish that you’d choose happiness over me?” Wouldn’t you feel like responding, “Pardon me, but how could you be so selfish that you would demand I choose you above my own happiness?!”
This just sounds wrong. But I read it before a difficult phone call with a loved one and I tried it on--reminding myself over and over that I don't necessarily need to be upset to engage in a conversation that would be upsetting normally. It worked really well.
This idea isn't actually that radical. Christians know that God must come first, not a spouse or child. Hindi friends of mine were given a similar instruction in their marriage. Residing in the ultimate allows for better relating.
Releasing attachments can also improves performance. This next bit makes me think of the superstar coaches like Phil Jackson that tried to keep their players focused on the present rather than the playoffs:
a lovely account from Tranxu, a great Chinese sage, that goes: “When the archer shoots for no particular prize, he has all his skills. When he shoots to win a brass buckle, he is already nervous. When he shoots for a gold prize, he goes blind, sees two targets, and is out of his mind. His skill has not changed, but the prize divides him. He cares! He thinks more of winning than of shooting, and the need to win drains him of power.” Isn’t that an image of most people? When you’re living for nothing, you’ve got all your skills, you’ve got all your energy, you’re relaxed, and you don’t care. It doesn’t matter to you whether you win or lose. Now there’s human living for you. That’s what life is all about. The mystics and the prophets didn’t bother one bit about honor. Honor or disgrace meant nothing to them. They were living in another world, the world of the awakened. Success or failure meant nothing to them.
The book Performing Under Pressure shows a lot of studies backing up this idea that the more we're concerned about performing--the more pressure we feel--the worse we perform. The idea of an athlete performing better under pressure is mostly a myth. De Mello's antidote to these attachments is to be a more thorough witness to ourselves:
Consider the attitude of a scientist who studies the habits of ants without the slightest desire to change them. He has no other aim. He’s not attempting to train them or get anything out of them. He’s interested in ants; he wants to learn as much as possible about them. That’s his attitude. The day you attain a posture like that, you will experience a miracle. You will change—effortlessly and correctly. Change will happen; you will not have to bring it about.
6. Miscellany
Becoming Nobody
This collection of lectures from Ram Dass is excellent. I found it really interesting to hear him talk about becoming more human/relatable, vs the "Ram Dass" of a few decades ago that felt the need to be "high" for others.
Why Is Everything Liberal?
A ton of interesting data comparing liberals and conservatives.
In an evenly divided country, if one side simply cares more, it’s going to exert a disproportionate influence on all institutions, and be more likely to see its preferences enacted in the time between elections when most people aren’t paying much attention.
“Thinking: Fast and Slow” Revisited
In conclusion, Daniel Kahneman is a distinguished psychologist who has made valuable contributions to the study of human decision making. His work with Amos Tversky was recognized with a Nobel Memorial Prize in Economics (APA). It is surely interesting to read what he has to say about psychological topics that range from cognition to well-being. However, his thoughts are based on a scientific literature with shaky foundations. Like everybody else in 2011, Kahneman trusted individual studies to be robust and replicable because they presented a statistically significant result. In hindsight it is clear that this is not the case. Narrative literature reviews of individual studies reflect scientists’ intuitions (Fast Thinking, System 1) as much or more than empirical findings. Readers of “Thinking: Fast and Slow” should read the book as a subjective account by an eminent psychologists, rather than an objective summary of scientific evidence. Moreover, ten years have passed and if Kahneman wrote a second edition, it would be very different from the first one. Chapters 3 and 4 would probably just be scrubbed from the book. But that is science. It does make progress, even if progress is often painfully slow in the softer sciences.
