It is axiomatic around here that large corporations cannot change, except by acquiring start-ups.
Why? Because any organisation with more than N employees starts to behave unconsciously, evolving according to profit and logic-of-the-situation. (I don't know what N is. Somewhere between 8 and 200?)
That's what those people are (unconsciously, angrily) reacting too.
I believe in gradual change. Ending the extrajudicial punishment of children is not such a big step, because it entails only a small extension of human status (having already incorporated women, slaves, foreigners, etc.)
I doubt that judicial punishment of strangers is going to end anytime soon, but note how different that is to punishing a family member.
However, now you mention it, there is an interesting similarity. Why does punishment happen? Not for the reasons most people think. For instance, it doesn't (and can't) transmit moral knowledge from the punisher to the punished. Neither does it reliably cause obedience.
In reality, society punishes criminals in order to prevent greater suffering in the form of larger scale rioting and madness.
Similarly, parents punish children to prevent themselves from going mad. But if knowledge spread of how to be a better and happier parent then this sort of punishment would end.
It sounds crazy, doesn't it? Of course, the idea of not punishing one's wife after she had done something which she understood to be wrong, once upon a time, also sounded crazy.
This applies to all moral progress. Any prediction about morality that doesn't shock at least some people is unlikely to be both true and important.
For their own good: locking children up in schools; telling them what to learn; coercing them in the name of health and education; punishing children at home.
These things won't happen eventually. Yet future generations will take education, health and morality more seriously than we do.
Indeed. Quality thinking can't be forced or managed.
I really do feel that this time management business is a will-o'-the-wisp. Time spent thinking about time management is time not spent thinking about interesting problems. When I run across a room strewn with toys I don't have to think about 'space management', and when I switch between tasks I do so automatically and intuitively, mostly without thinking (and certainly never by firing up some piece of software).
Leonhard Euler had 13 children, who, the story goes, played at his feet. He also wrote over 1100 publications. Go figure.
[Update: Err, ahem, I read now that 8 of the children died. Perhaps he isn't the best choice of example.]
Premise: learning is fun.
Premise: school children are bored.
Conclusion: learning is not taking place in schools.
This seems as true now as it has ever been. The belief that schools can be fixed is one of the main reasons people become teachers and why the existence of schools will drag on for at least another half century.
>No down voting: So people will not lose karma just for having an opposing view.
Still better would be to make downvoting cost one point to the downvoter. This would discourage rather than prevent downvoting (and people will happily pay to correct real injustices).
It would also more accurately reflect human psychology: in IRL conversations a participant occasionally gets angry, but it always comes at a cost to himself.
>keep electronic media, especially video games and recreational Internet, under control (that is to say, almost completely absent). Then fill your shelves with good books.
The problem with these books is that they interfere with the more traditional crafts of conversation and oratory.
>why did the obesity crisis only come about in the last part of 20th century
I can guess at two factors. Firstly, food started to get really cheap in the 1960s.
Secondly, and not entirely unrelatedly, since that time we haven't suffered a major war or plague. (Up till this point, European history had more or less consisted of wars and plagues.)
Instead people have enjoyed prosperity with more and more attendant consumption, not just of food, but of entertainment and culture.
Here's the potentially controversial bit: in my experience, cultural consumption is enhanced by 'lower level' consumption such as eating rich food and drinking coffee and alcohol. The reason these help is (paradoxically) because they distress the body, causing the brain to compensate by secreting natural sedatives.
These in turn allow the mind to race, temporarily free from the constraints of fear and worry. Gluten, being a lectin, is a stressor of animal intestines. Hence bread, cakes and pasta serve admirably in this regard.
$59 could also buy folic acid, vitamin d3 and choline capsules.
There's a simple exercise you can do in the final weeks of pregnancy to encourage your baby to lie in the optimal position for childbirth (which is ofc free to view, but, amazingly, isn't widely put into practice, I understand).
I am one of the few who (I believe) has made a transition from 'high latent inhibition' to 'low latent inhibition'.
It happened through no intention of mine and was quite a scary experience, like letting go or admitting defeat. With respect to Jonah Lehrer I must report that it felt totally the opposite to implementing a 'cognitive strategy’.
All kinds of new sensations, thoughts and impressions now make their way into my consciousness where previously they must have been filtered. The world is enlarged, enriched and more colourful (literally, and with Vermeer-like shading everywhere).
Although these 'extras' are available to me they don't seem to distract in an unhelpful way. Rather they provide subtle analogies and metaphors to whatever else I'm thinking about. (I suppose that’s where the creativity part comes in.)
Am I more distractible? Well, no, I don't think so, because I still get to choose which thoughts to follow. If one is concerned with explaining the world then only truly surprising perceptions (those few that don't fit in with one's worldview), have the potential to distract.
[I apologise to any readers who consider this report unfalsifiable nonsense or arrogant boasting. I can only reply, respectively, that presumably only the experience of transition can convince, and, as I said above, it was most humbling.]