Becoming Eden

Author: Will

  • How to Build a Tribe

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    Will
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    It is important to preface this entire document by saying that I had very specific objectives for creating a tribe. In particular, I wanted a group that was emotionally vulnerable with each other, who are reacting in real time to each other’s responses, where we create a safe space to say and feel and process…

  • How to Deal with Email

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    Will
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    One of the biggest problems that I commonly hear from my friends is that processing email is completely unmanageable. The most important thing to remember is that your attention is the most precious resource that you have, and you need to guard it jealously. All of the following principles flow from this fundamental insight. The…

  • Low Hanging Fruit for Health and Wellness

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    Will
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    Include in Diet Fish or cod liver oil: excellent source of omega-3 fats which most people are severely deficient in, take 1-2 tsp/day.  These fats are fragile molecules and can go rancid easily, so store them in the refrigerator.  If you buy capsules, bite into one occasionally to test for bitterness.  I buy the oil in…

  • Hypothetical Apostasy on Nutrition

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    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…

  • My Current Productivity Stack

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    Will
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    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…

  • Religious Fasting Traditions

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    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…

  • Parenting and the Non-Shared Environment

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    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,…

  • The Comcast Gambit, or How to Save $35 Per Month in Five Minutes

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    Will
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    I really didn’t expect that was going to work. By nature I am pretty conflict averse: I don’t like to directly confront people or get angry or fight for myself. For this reason I will almost never do things like return food at a restaurant, or complain to customer service, or anything like that. I…

  • Summary of A Guide to the Good Life

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    Will
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    A Guide to the Good Life: the Ancient Art of Stoic Joy is a handbook of Stoic philosophy by professor William Irvine. He points out that Stoicism is very different than the stereotypes we have developed about unfeeling robots, and in fact it contains a lot of timeless advice for psychological well being. This is…

  • Preventing Peanut Allergies

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    Will
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    My default position when I started looking into peanut allergies was that exposure to potential allergens (particularly the ones outside our evolutionary heritage) would sensitize children to that allergen in the future. Eliezer once described changing your mind as the penultimate technique of rationality, and I always enjoy the opportunity to stretch that particular muscle.…