Archives for November 2013

Balancing Needs in Relationships

November 18, 2013 by · 1 Comment

I don’t have time to write something long this week, but I did want to pose a question that’s been on my mind.

When someone you care about wants something and you have mixed feelings about whether to give it to them, what are your heuristics for deciding what to do?

Do you have an internal voice or feeling that you trust to guide your decisions? Do you try to calculate how much it matters to each person, and if so is that process explicit or implicit? Do you like the way you think about these questions?

It’s possible that the question I’m posing already assumes an unhelpful frame, and I think it’s true that there’s often low-hanging fruit in the category of win-win solutions. But I’d love to hear people’s answers anyway.

Any and all thoughts on the subject are welcome.

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One Thought and Two Links

November 11, 2013 by · Leave a Comment

I skipped writing a blog post last week because I was tired and busy. I don’t feel up for writing a long one this week either, but I will share a thought and some links.

I often look at my (13 month old) daughter’s eyes when I’m trying to figure out what she is thinking. But something I don’t do often enough is look at what she’s looking at. I try, and it’s easy to get a vague idea by following her gaze. I but I can get a more precise idea by actually getting my head over by her head and following more closely. I would recommend the same for getting into the head of younger babies and animals.

Here’s a post I liked about frustration and learning.

And another one about why the story about extrinsic motivation replacing intrinsic motivation may be more complicated than usually discussed.

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Hypothetical Apostasy on Nutrition

November 5, 2013 by · 5 Comments

As many of you know, I am a major proponent of paleo/primal/ancestral/etc type diets. At this point the term “paleo” has come to be applied to many very different diets, but for the record my own personal beliefs coincide most strongly with the Perfect Health Diet. Whatever you want to call it, it is certainly outside of conventional wisdom and mainstream scientific/medical opinion. This has been a point of contention between me and others who put more stock in mainstream opinion. I have spent many hundreds, or maybe thousands, of hours doing research into human metabolism, and as a result my ideas are starting to get sticky.

Periodically I like to subject my beliefs to one of my all-time favorite techniques, the hypothetical apostasy by philosopher Nick Bostrom. The basic idea is to produce a good faith effort at destroying your currently held position. This process has helped me improve my thinking on a number of topics, including the original mind-killer itself: politics. Given my particularly strong beliefs about diet, it is long past due for me to try this exercise. Below the fold is my best attempt to undermine the paleo position:

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My Current Productivity Stack

November 2, 2013 by · 3 Comments

One of the main topics of conversation on this blog is productivity, as you can tell by its weighting in the tag cloud below. Much of the discussion thus far has been about productivity hacks, various techniques or environmental factors you can tweak to optimize your performance. What I haven’t talked much about is what my own personal setup looks like. While I expect everyone’s system to be a little different, this at least provides one specific example for people to work from.

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