Becoming Eden

Tag: cognition

  • Developing Object Permanence Around Flinches

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    divia
    in

    Many years ago, I did an exercise where I made a list of thoughts that I flinched away from. Then, I made spaced repetition cards with the thoughts. The cards were statements like: “As of March 2009, I am currently uncomfortable with the idea that quitting my job might be the right move.” (Totally fake…

  • Instrumentally Caring Intrinsically

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    divia
    in

    A way of thinking that I’ve been using for a few years now, but I don’t think I’ve ever written up, is the idea of instrumentally caring about things intrinsically.   Caring about something intrinsically is often very useful for coordinating with others. When you care about something for its own sake: It’s easy to…

  • The Heritability of Everything

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    Will
    in

    The gold standard in heritability estimates is the twin study, which involves looking at identical and fraternal twins, raised together or apart. This allows the cleanest test of decomposing the variance in observed traits into genetics, shared environment (factors equally affecting all children raised together), and non-shared environment (everything else, including random noise) contributions. Generally…

  • What Is Submission?

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    divia
    in

    This weekend, I had a good conversation with a good friend of mine about the meaning of submission. I ended up clarifying my thoughts on the concept quite a bit, in a way that I expect to be useful, despite being pretty abstract and meta. As long as I can remember, I’ve had pretty negative…

  • Feelings and Needs

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    divia
    in

    I’m a huge fan of Nonviolent Communication. I think I forget how much studying it has changed my life, because I take a lot of its lessons mostly for granted these days. I’m pretty good at empathizing, both with myself and others. I’m much better than I used to be at expressing what’s going on…

  • Summary of A Guide to the Good Life

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    Will
    in

    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…

  • Beyond Rationality

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    Will
    in

    I called this post “Beyond Rationality” because I wanted to move past the unfortunate connotations and bad habits associated with the word “rationality” in our culture. With tongue firmly in cheek, Divia and I often refer to the cluster of ideas I am about to present as post-rationality, and you may well encounter us using…

  • The Promise and Perils of Rationality

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    Will
    in

    In my previous post I laid out what I did and did not mean by the term “rationality”. While I addressed what I consider to be misconceptions around the word rationality and how self-described rationalists would behave, I do think that there are some common problems that real-life rationalists run into in practice. In this…

  • Rationality, Unpacked

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    Will
    in

    The word “rationality” carries a lot of historical baggage and cultural misconceptions, enough so that I have considered not using it at all. Yet a substantial portion of my social circle has decided to adopt this label (spoiler alert!), and for better or worse, it is the label that I use in my own mind. First I am…

  • Your Inner Virtue Ethicist Should Like Self-Compassion

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    divia
    in

    If you haven’t read Virtue Ethics for Consequentialists, I highly recommend it. As I see it, consequentialism is obviously correct, and virtue ethics is how you implement it on human hardware. I’m also a big fan of self-compassion. Today, I was working with someone, and while we did some good IFS work together, we didn’t…