What My Mind Thinks

When I first saw this study, I tried to develop ways to hide my phone from myself: " The Mere Presence of Your Smartphone Reduces Brain Power " But Lulie Tanett flipped this around on me. Study finds that people prefer to do other things with their time than complete boring tasks: https://t.co/i8EQmuDLcc — Lulie (@reasonisfun) July 16, 2019 Of course! Of course it's hard to do boring tasks with the option of something more interesting nearby. The lesson, according to Lulie, is that we should be focusing on not forcing ourselves to do boring stuff. As she articulates here , relying on self discipline to force oneself to complete boring tasks is a failure, not a virtue. It is a failure to recognize why the task is valuable, which makes it fun. To do boring stuff is to be confused. This informs the entire discussion about "screen time." We should stop thinking about screens as stealing our attention away from what matters, and instead think about sc...

Tyler Cowen recommends writing daily as a means of improving one's writing and memory, not to mention the rewards of being a good a prolific writer. I'm convinced - in fact I've tried daily writing for 20 minutes. That failed, and now with the birth of our second child, I'm skeptical that a recommitment to that effort will succeed. However, what if I write for only 10 minutes daily? Can I say something worthwhile in only 10 minutes? That is my current challenge. The frustration of writing, for me, is that the final product is rarely a clear representation of my thoughts. In conversation I feel as though I can pretty easily and succinctly articulate my ideas. Yet, even when writing down ideas that I have refined over the course of several conversations, I find it takes an exceedingly long time, with several revisions, to get down anything close to what I have in mind. And, with a thud, comes the point: that's the value of writing, to realize that my thinkin...

Instead of trying to settle the controversy about vaccines, I want to target those who are genuinely curious, confused, or otherwise unclear about the question of whether it's a good idea to vaccinate your kids. My method is not to offer incontrovertible facts, but instead provide a pathway to the question that might lead the reader to conclusions that feel suitably rational. The simplest path is that is to consider what the medical field thinks about vaccines. Although medicine may seem cooly scientific, internal debates rage about the efficacy of even the most straightforward treatments. Mainstream figures in medicine make compelling arguments that the standard treatments for common conditions like heart attack and stroke are more harmful than helpful. This trial , published in the New England Journal of Medicine, found that coronary artery stenting for a large portion of heart attacks was unhelpful. This study in the same journal is one of many that question the value...

A recent conversation with my friend Michael illustrates the point: We had been talking about art and creativity and the like, and at some point he blurted out at me to "go and make some art." I challenged him on the definition of art by claiming that I do creative things all the time. Thus ensued a back and forth about definitions, what counts as artisinal versus functional, what theories of art are important. When Michael suggested we learn about Bauhaus to see if it can shed light on our discussion, I suddenly grasped the relevance of Karl Popper. Popper hated quibbling about definitions, claiming an inverse relationship between the amount of jargon in a field and the information content within it. Practitioners wind up endlessly debating semantics and take their eye off knowledge creation. For Popper, knowledge creation comes from finding and addressing problems. What is wrong about the world? What doesn't make sense? What two ideas or explanations contrad...

What could the fire at Notre Dame NOT mean? The NYTimes describes the inescapable symbolism of the fire representing the tumultuous times in France. What would the symbolism mean in teams of stability and plenty? Surely, it would be a sign of our carelessness amidst decadence. In a time of austerity it might mean that we did not spend enough money/time/effort to maintain society. In a time of hope it might represent hubris. Could there be a time in France when the burning of the cathedral might simply be seen as an accident, signifying nothing about society or the state of things? Probably not. It seems the news outlets are increasingly prone to broad interpretations of big events. Rather than simply describing what happened, we hear pontifications about how it shows this or that about the way we live. And as outlets are increasingly polarized, pitching the most click-worthy slant to that outlet's clickiest audience, the role of interpreting events to suit that slant f...

I got this from the excellent marginal revolution on teen suicide and screen use. https://twitter.com/drandreahoward/status/1111641594141143040?s=12   I cannot believe we are studying teen suicide based on teen self reports of screen time. You think teens reliably know their screen usage? Looks like the whole field has been using self report, and the correlation is only 0.2 ! (Meaning people are almost no better than chance at accurately reporting screen time.) Anyway, the best part of the teen study is that they recommend against 1-5 hours per day as really dangerous. Even though of the kids who attempted, over half had less use and some had zero. So, you could just as easily say that heavy screen time was protective.  A shocking number of times, data seems to add fuel to bad thinking, rather than the opposite. Maybe it won't be fire or nukes that proves to be the technology that humans can't handle responsibly and ruins us, it'll just be data.  ...