What My Mind Thinks

The word "no" has a bad reputation in parenting - Harvard psychologist Howard Gardner even recommends ways to avoid it . The charge is that the word can be used up 400 times per day, eventually causing children to overreact to it by flying into a tantrum, or otherwise ignore it altogether. But the Popperian style of parenting not only loosens restrictions on using the word, it sees "no" as a crucial word in children's development. To see why, we need to take a pretty large step back and consider the purpose of parenting.  For Popperians, the job of the parent is to help the child understand the world. By developing explanations for how the world works, including how the child's own mind and psychology works, the child becomes a healthy adult. Interestingly, this process doesn't stop in adulthood, because no explanation is ever known to be the final, best explanation. In fact, adulthood is an arbitrary designation that has more to do with cultural...

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...