Log
I’m trying a new thing of writing first thing in the morning.
I’m often dogmatic in my thoughts. In some arenas, overarching ideas and calls to strong action causes a strong aversion but the same ideas on a smaller scale, like not eating carbs, or Stoicism occupy my head as all encompassing beliefs. An example of the first kind might be stringent nationalism or and ideology like socialism. Sivers talks about picking a choosing beliefs that suit you, but ultimately how can we tell what ‘suits us’. I guess, inherently I view myself as a tabula rasa, with no inherent preferences. That I look externally for guidance. At least for some of the major thoughts, this seems to be the case. Some of my happiest times is when I’m studying. The idea that your task is simple, just read this book for the next two hours etc. Similarly some of my best days are having spent all day working through a topic. These days don’t really come about by happenstance. There is some cohersion in the intial push to make me do these things. What Sivers might say is that initial reason as to ‘why’ you wanted to study the subject is the driver. In order to then, attain the knowledge you knew that you must study or read.
To focus on that initial ‘why’. Sometimes it doesn’t feel that strong and I have no idea why. Sometimes I’m really curious about something and other times (which seem to be much longer) I feel not much when I think about them. Often times its the challenge that such a subject presents. To get a bit more concrete, if I’m reading something like ‘Crashed’ the gaps in my knowledge and concepts I hold in my head can be so great that the information is overwhelming. This causes that split between giving up/ why bother and starting from a simpler case. Sometimes I choose the latter, but it can be more painful than just relaxing into the former.
When I feel I’m ‘losing track’ or not being who I want to be, I search for some ‘tenets’ to guide me back on the road. These tenets aren’t objectively true, we pick them so it can be difficult to rationalise them when you’re off the road. This is where positive self-talk can help. For instance, saying that this is what one likes to do. When I feel lost, nothing seems interesting, I feel somewhat nihilistic. It’s about just guiding one back to some common ground even if it doesn’t matter just because you know it will make you feel better.
Other times you can use emotion by bringing to mind those you admire or aesthetics and feelings that motivate you (say, like a mood board).
This might be similar to the notions of ‘games’ in life and the ones you choose to play.
I listened to a talk yesterday about Kierkegaard. It said that what one should seek is ‘understanding’, not just some technical analysis of the objective truth of the world. Not to just read from the book of nature. I like this idea although like most things I’m not too sure what to do with it.
Listened to a good podcast (panscycast) on Kierkegaard. I think Kierkegaard’s leap of faith refers to any set of values you believe in, not just Chrisitanity. Also, his idea of the aesthetic seems to be similar to the social function of things like religion. Not everyone necessarily believes but still would say they do by pure social factors.
Utilitarianism is interesting, and Bentham. It kind of structures itself as scientific or rational morals. It seemed Hume and Bentham wanted to remove emotion from the arena of social morality, something I’m trying to do in my reading of irish history.
Listening to Hanson on the ‘sacred’, the idea of construed level theory reminds me of the emotions that appear in our subconscious when we think of ‘far away’ things. Like the ‘nation of Ireland’. Interesting point made as well that often people hold their ultimate reasoning for being in a field as this fundamentally emotional sacred thing but their day to day is often not that. Maybe this is where the sacred is useful. For my work, for instance, I’m working on a particular uncertainty analysis with all its bells and whistsles, but if you asked me why I’m doing it my ultimate reasons would be more abstract such as the positive effects of making the right decisions, reasoning about the unknown etc. This is always something I’m searching for in what I do and I think its similar to creative contexts that Nielsen talks about.
Research
Linguistic formulations are not useful in relation to the goals defined in this paper of clear representation to decision makers.