Becoming Eden

Category: Blog

  • Updated Anki Decks

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    divia
    in

    I used to have a bunch of Anki decks up on the internet, until Posterous stopped hosting the files. I’ve gotten some requests for them to be reuploaded, so here they are! (Sadly, they’re not updated. I want to cull unnecessary cards because some of these decks are huge and make it so the clozes…

  • How to Listen Effectively

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    divia
    in

    I recently had a conversation with a friend about listening that seemed worth writing up. There are a bunch of things we humans like to do when other people are talking to us. Thinking up what we’re going to say in response is a big one, crunching social rules that we’re afraid of breaking can…

  • Relationship Tests and How to Respond

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    divia
    in

    I want to try to point at and describe a particular phenomenon I’ve often seen in relationships: testing. While I’m more familiar with the ways women test men, and I would never claim the testing is on average totally symmetrical, certainly men test women as well. This post will be about the ways that most…

  • Why Don’t We Empathize First?

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    divia
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    Last week, I advised empathizing before advising. To attempt to remedy my hypocrisy, I will now empathize with the desire not to empathize. Because there really are a bunch of good and legitimate reasons we try other tacks. I’ll say some reasons I don’t empathize, so I’m not speculating too much about general motivations, but…

  • Reminder: Empathize First!

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    divia
    in

    If you’re talking to someone who is seeking support, it is incredibly useful to empathize before giving advice. This is true even if the person is nominally seeking advice.  I know to do this, but in the past few weeks, it’s happened at least three times that I can think of that I’ve been in…

  • Conversation Rules for My Birthday Party

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    divia
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    The feedback I got indicated that the “ask a personal question” rule was the most helpful.  I suspect that setting the intention to have good conversations in the first place was more effective than the specific ruleset, but it’s hard to know with these things. I consider the ruleset an alpha version, and I want…

  • Musings on Nihilism and Metaphysics

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    divia
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    Today’s post will be a bit weirder than the usual fare. Ever since a fun discussion at Ephemerisle, I’ve had a bunch of things on my mind related to many worlds, the simulation hypothesis, and anthropics in general. I don’t understand anthropics. As far as I can tell, no one does. In the narrative of…

  • Still on Vacation, Self-leadership

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    divia
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    The usual personal-growthy stuff is less on my mind than usual (despite having gotten some good related reading done), since I’m still in Maine on vacation with my family, and I once again didn’t get around to writing my usual Monday post.  I’ll just throw out a brief story from my life. I wrote a…

  • Where I’ve Been, and a Brief Taxonomy of Bad Patterns

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    divia
    in

    I didn’t post yesterday because I was traveling all day. I got up extremely early and took Lydia on a cab to SFO for a flight to JFK, then took another flight to Portland, ME, then another cab, then a ferry. Add in time being pushed three hours ahead, and that’s the day. I also…

  • Being “Soulful”, Animal Training, and Finding Your Bottleneck

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    divia
    in

    Ever since I had a conversation with Anna Salamon a few weeks about about “soulfulness”, my thoughts keep returning to the topic. I don’t have a great definition of what being soulful is, and I’d say that it probably lines up pretty well but not perfectly with most people’s intuitive definitions. Anna explained it using…