My speculation is that 'willpower' or 'vitality' relates directly to the available reserves of neurotransmitter(s) in your nervous system.
Notes:
If you try to do something bad (that part of you knows is wrong), this will set up repetitious, conflicting thoughts which act to deplete willpower.
Willpower is replenished by sleep.
Activities seemingly opposite to those activities which require willpower are known as pleasures. However, my guess is that these also drain neurotransmitters, rather like revving an engine in neutral.
Therefore the way to maximise useful activity is to:
(a) do something that is genuinely in accordance with your highest wishes and values
(b) decide that it will be your sole source of pleasure and entertainment
Isn't it better to focus on oneself -- trying to be a better parent or teacher -- than to focus on testing the child in your care and trying to predict his future? It's not possible to predict people's futures anyway and all this tyrannical nonsense is simply contributing to depression and to the bureaucratisation of childhood.
Here's a radical idea: only read books that you enjoy and find interesting. Don't measure reading success by the number of books, but by how far your hair was blown back :-)
I think 'great is simple' applies to programming too. The reason I learned BASIC at school was because there were computers lying around which all had the same BASIC pre-installed on ROM. They switched on in less than a second.
Nowadays, apart from a few web-based 'try it out' pages, learning a language usually requires installing it and several other packages and getting everything to work together and with your OS. This is hard, especially for beginners. In the meantime, you're using your computer for other important things.
If I could buy a pad with the major languages and text editors pre-installed, or even just with one language and one editor, I would. It would be separate from my browsing pad. Which would be separate from my gaming pad. Etc.
Hopefully pads will continue to get thinner and cheaper because they will be a lot of them lying around the house by 2020.
Yeah, sometimes novel phenomena are stumbled upon. Where they are deliberately stumbled upon I would call it exploration rather than science.
I don't think that exercise falls into that category. There is nothing surprising about exercise per se.
Popper once challenged an audience to go out and 'observe'; I think the point of his joke was that without knowing what you're trying to observe and why then the instruction is absurd.
In order to claim that 'more exercise is good' you need to start by guessing why some exercise might be good, whilst being open to the possibility that it may not be, and then start testing the best guesses. Otherwise you literally won't be able to interpret your 'more exercise' data, even if it is relevant.
Unfortunately there's no explanation which means there's no science here. (The world seems to be full of studies which measure things that are easy to measure and say things that people want to hear.)
Here's an explanation as to why exercise might be good for you: exercise transfers attention away from repetitive thoughts and into one's body and one's surroundings. It thus confers benefits similar to those of meditation.
This theory may well be totally false. But, hey, at least it offers an explanation. There's something there to be false.
The next step would be to criticise the theory and then, if it stands up, to test it against current theories.
Any testing though, would be highly unlikely to resemble the observations referred to in the linked article. It would instead depend on the relevant details of the rival theories.
(1) I break laws I don't know about
(2) I do things which might be misinterpreted as breaking the law or as being immoral
(3) I do things which are considered immoral by most people, but which are not illegal.
For these reasons, I cannot act autonomously or creatively without privacy.
Educate students -- lecturing doesn't work. Best is working from the best material in small groups of peers and having help available from graduate students.
Socialise students -- learning to get on with people is best done with friends.
Networking -- done online.
Research and innovation -- yes. that's what universities are about.
Optimum path for students is now online self-study undergraduate degree. Can complete quickly or as slowly as required. Then go to university if you want to do a PhD.
>I can be upset and angry and still participate in a rational discussion.
The problem is that it would only take a few people who can't remain rational for a tipping point to be reached whereby the overall quality of debate badly degrades. (That's when some of the most valuable contributors start to disappear.)
>What will we do when an issue is both important and divisive
If such a political issue affected hackers directly then there'd be no way to avoid that discussion.
>Do we want to prevent, to silence, discussion?
Of course not. And that's precisely why politics in general should be avoided.
Aside from the eve psych, I'm with Eliezer Yudkowsky on this:
It's better to steer clear of political issues which are covered more than adequately elsewhere.
They are by their nature divisive and tend to make people upset and/or angry. This coarsens the atmosphere and makes reasoned and intelligent discussion far less feasible.
However, if I add salt to my pasta bake it might make it tastier.
I might therefore eat more of it and raise my blood pressure this way.