Becoming Eden

Month: October 2013

  • Other People’s Emotional States

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    divia
    in

    Last week I posted as my Facebook status that: “Someone else’s emotional state is almost always a terrible optimization target.” I got a couple of requests to expand the thought to the length of a blog post, so here I go! I’ve been thinking since I posted it, and I think there are two fairly…

  • Religious Fasting Traditions

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    by

    will
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    If you’ve ever talked to me about nutrition, you would know that I’m a huge proponent of fasting. I knew that cultural and religious traditions throughout the world had incorporated some form of fasting practice into their doctrines, though I had not systematically tried to document it myself at the time. There may be a…

  • Memorizing Emotionally Salient Quotations

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    divia
    in

    One of the more unusual projects I undertook a few years back was memorizing a bunch of quotations. In particular, I mostly picked ones that seemed emotionally salient. I love it when I read something that lets me glimpse a truth about the world that I hadn’t quite noticed or thought of in that way.…

  • Parenting and the Non-Shared Environment

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    by

    will
    in

    There is a major thread in the parenting literature that claims, in short, that parenting (short of outright abuse) has little to no effect on adult outcomes that we care about. Two exemplars in this category include The Nurture Assumption and Selfish Reasons to Have More Kids. This claim is largely based on twin and adoption studies,…

  • Suffering is Created by Resistance

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    divia
    in

    I got an email a few days ago about a card from one of my Anki decks that says “Suffering is created by resistance.” I wanted to explain what that statement meant to me. To start, in my mind there is a companion phrase: “Pain is not suffering.”  Here’s what I’ve written about that statement. I…

  • Feeling Better than Other People

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    by

    divia
    in

    This post will just be a quick note based on a conversation I had with someone recently on the subject of feeling superior to other people. I’ve been there before, as I suspect many people have. If you find yourself simultaneously thinking you’re somehow better than other people and thinking it’s wrong to think that…