Tag: About the web and you and me and all…

About the web and you and me and all!

Intuition and decision making

isi / / About, Stuff that matters

Brain science tells us there are three kinds of intuition: ordinary, expert, and strategic.

Ordinary intuition is just a feeling, a gut instinct.

Expert intuition is snap judgments, when you instantly recognize something familiar, the way a tennis pro knows where the ball will go from the arc and speed of the opponent’s racket.

Strategic intuition is a clear thought. It’s not a vague feeling, like ordinary intuition. And it’s not fast like expert intuition. It’s slow. That epiphany of insight you had last night might solve a problem that’s been on your mind for a month. And it doesn’t happen in familiar situations, like a tennis match. Strategic intuition works in new situations. That’s when you need it most.

This third kind of intuition is what I go by whenever I can. Strategic intuition is what guides the majority of my decision making. And while it is unpopular these days to request time for thinking, you have to take your stand and do it anyway, and allow for proper time to reflect. I have a 24 hrs ‘sleep it over’ rule.

Which compliments my other approach to life and everything, something that’s called the OODA loop (observe, orient, decide and act). This ‘rapid evaluation routine’ keeps running permanently on the back of my mind (or wherever my intuition-o-meter sits). Originally the OODA method was derived by pilots who apply the loop to make fast decisions and review them in a constant cognitive circle.

You have to swim fast when the water is cold…
ooda loop

Top 100 stories of humanity

isi / / Stuff that matters

1. The Odyssey (Homer, 8th Century BC)
2. Uncle Tom’s Cabin (Harriet Beecher Stowe, 1852)
3. Frankenstein (Mary Shelley, 1818)
4. Nineteen Eighty-Four (George Orwell, 1949)
5. Things Fall Apart (Chinua Achebe, 1958)
6. One Thousand and One Nights (various authors, 8th-18th Centuries)
7. Don Quixote (Miguel de Cervantes, 1605-1615)
8. Hamlet (William Shakespeare, 1603)
9. One Hundred Years of Solitude (Gabriel García Márquez, 1967)
10. The Iliad (Homer, 8th Century BC)
11. Beloved (Toni Morrison, 1987)
12. The Divine Comedy (Dante Alighieri, 1308-1320)
13. Romeo and Juliet (William Shakespeare, 1597)
14. The Epic of Gilgamesh (author unknown, circa 22nd-10th Centuries BC)
15. Harry Potter Series (JK Rowling, 1997-2007)
16. The Handmaid’s Tale (Margaret Atwood, 1985)
17. Ulysses (James Joyce, 1922)
18. Animal Farm (George Orwell, 1945)
19. Jane Eyre (Charlotte Brontë, 1847)
20. Madame Bovary (Gustave Flaubert, 1856)
21. Romance of the Three Kingdoms (Luo Guanzhong, 1321-1323)
22. Journey to the West (Wu Cheng’en, circa 1592)
23. Crime and Punishment (Fyodor Dostoyevksy, 1866)
24. Pride and Prejudice (Jane Austen, 1813)
25. Water Margin (attributed to Shi Nai’an, 1589)
26. War and Peace (Leo Tolstoy, 1865-1867)
27. To Kill a Mockingbird (Harper Lee, 1960)
28. Wide Sargasso Sea (Jean Rhys, 1966)
29. Aesop’s Fables (Aesop, circa 620 to 560 BC)
30. Candide (Voltaire, 1759)
31. Medea (Euripides, 431 BC)
32. The Mahabharata (attributed to Vyasa, 4th Century BC)
33. King Lear (William Shakespeare, 1608)
34. The Tale of Genji (Murasaki Shikibu, before 1021)
35. The Sorrows of Young Werther (Johann Wolfgang von Goethe, 1774)
36. The Trial (Franz Kafka, 1925)
37. Remembrance of Things Past (Marcel Proust, 1913-1927)
38. Wuthering Heights (Emily Brontë, 1847)
39. Invisible Man (Ralph Ellison, 1952)
40. Moby-Dick (Herman Melville, 1851)
41. Their Eyes Were Watching God (Zora Neale Hurston, 1937)
42. To the Lighthouse (Virginia Woolf, 1927)
43. The True Story of Ah Q (Lu Xun, 1921-1922)
44. Alice’s Adventures in Wonderland (Lewis Carroll, 1865)
45. Anna Karenina (Leo Tolstoy, 1873-1877)
46. Heart of Darkness (Joseph Conrad, 1899)
47. Monkey Grip (Helen Garner, 1977)
48. Mrs Dalloway (Virginia Woolf, 1925)
49. Oedipus the King (Sophocles, 429 BC)
50. The Metamorphosis (Franz Kafka, 1915)
51. The Oresteia (Aeschylus, 5th Century BC)
52. Cinderella (unknown author and date)
53. Howl (Allen Ginsberg, 1956)
54. Les Misérables (Victor Hugo, 1862)
55. Middlemarch (George Eliot, 1871-1872)
56. Pedro Páramo (Juan Rulfo, 1955)
57. The Butterfly Lovers (folk story, various versions)
58. The Canterbury Tales (Geoffrey Chaucer, 1387)
59. The Panchatantra (attributed to Vishnu Sharma, circa 300 BC)
60. The Posthumous Memoirs of Bras Cubas (Joaquim Maria Machado de Assis, 1881)
61. The Prime of Miss Jean Brodie (Muriel Spark, 1961)
62. The Ragged-Trousered Philanthropists (Robert Tressell, 1914)
63. Song of Lawino (Okot p’Bitek, 1966)
64. The Golden Notebook (Doris Lessing, 1962)
65. Midnight’s Children (Salman Rushdie, 1981)
66. Nervous Conditions (Tsitsi Dangarembga, 1988)
67. The Little Prince (Antoine de Saint-Exupéry, 1943)
68. The Master and Margarita (Mikhail Bulgakov, 1967)
69. The Ramayana (attributed to Valmiki, 11th Century BC)
70. Antigone (Sophocles, c 441 BC)
71. Dracula (Bram Stoker, 1897)
72. The Left Hand of Darkness (Ursula K Le Guin, 1969)
73. A Christmas Carol (Charles Dickens, 1843)
74. América (Raúl Otero Reiche, 1980)
75. Before the Law (Franz Kafka, 1915)
76. Children of Gebelawi (Naguib Mahfouz, 1967)
77. Il Canzoniere (Petrarch, 1374)
78. Kebra Nagast (various authors, 1322)
79. Little Women (Louisa May Alcott, 1868-1869)
80. Metamorphoses (Ovid, 8 AD)
81. Omeros (Derek Walcott, 1990)
82. One Day in the Life of Ivan Denisovich (Aleksandr Solzhenitsyn, 1962)
83. Orlando (Virginia Woolf, 1928)
84. Rainbow Serpent (Aboriginal Australian story cycle, date unknown)
85. Revolutionary Road (Richard Yates, 1961)
86. Robinson Crusoe (Daniel Defoe, 1719)
87. Song of Myself (Walt Whitman, 1855)
88. The Adventures of Huckleberry Finn (Mark Twain, 1884)
89. The Adventures of Tom Sawyer (Mark Twain, 1876)
90. The Aleph (Jorge Luis Borges, 1945)
91. The Eloquent Peasant (ancient Egyptian folk story, circa 2000 BC)
92. The Emperor’s New Clothes (Hans Christian Andersen, 1837)
93. The Jungle (Upton Sinclair, 1906)
94. The Khamriyyat (Abu Nuwas, late 8th-early 9th Century)
95. The Radetzky March (Joseph Roth, 1932)
96. The Raven (Edgar Allan Poe, 1845)
97. The Satanic Verses (Salman Rushdie, 1988)
98. The Secret History (Donna Tartt, 1992)
99. The Snowy Day (Ezra Jack Keats, 1962)
100. Toba Tek Singh (Saadat Hasan Manto, 1955)

See full article here  http://www.bbc.com/culture/story/20180521-the-100-stories-that-shaped-the-world

INFJs and doorslams

isi / / About, Stuff that matters

Today I learned about the concept of a doorslam. Or to be precise: I was acutely aware of what it is and how it happens, I just did not know it has a name. But can confirm: it is about self preservation, and trust. And it is irreversible.

From Quora: “An INFJ will exit (door slam) someone when:

  1. They feel a person is toxic and the emotions they keep giving off are burning them. INFJs are sensitive to absorbing and picking up others’ emotions. Who wants to absorb toxicity for long? Still, it takes quite some energy to get out…
  2. They feel used and a relationship has become far too one-sided and people are only coming to them for help and not for true friendship. INFJs like to help – we were put on this earth to help – when people misuse this, we get fed up and exit.
  3. Don’t like the people’s values. INFJs have a strong value system and are often clear about what is right and wrong. If someone does not have the same values they can find this a let down and give up on the person.
  4. They are also skilled at picking up the intentions of other people. When they detect people whose intentions are not kind, good, or healthy, they get out of the way and terminate the relationship.
  5. They feel things are bad between them and another person, and as they don’t like conflict they exit, never to be seen again!

INFJs are good on disappearing acts. They simply aren’t there for that person any more. The person comes knocking on the door of friendship only to find no one answers the knock. INFJs usually reserve rage for when they are in an inferior and highly stressed state, or in an unhealthy situation.

Read more about this here.

For myself this is actually a soundless occurrence. It’s more a fadeout or disappearance than a bang. There better is an end to pain, than pain never ending.

About the need to disagree better

isi / / General stuff

How to disagree well: 7 of the best and worst ways to argue

Paul Graham, Harvard Ph.D programmer and writer, proposed that the web is turning writing into a conversation, with the internet an unprecedented medium of communication. In particular, it allows people to respond to others in comment threads. And when we respond on the web, we tend to disagree. He says this tendency towards disagreement is structurally built into the online experience because in disagreeing, people tend to have much more to say than if they just expressed that they agreed.

Interestingly, even though it might feel like it, the world is not necessarily getting angrier. But it could if we don’t observe a certain restraint in how we disagree. To disagree better, which will lead to better conversations and happier outcomes, Graham came up with these seven levels of a disagreement hierarchy:

Graham viewed his hierarchy as a way to weed out dishonest arguments or “fake news” in modern parlance. Forceful words are just a “defining quality of a demagogue”. By understanding the different forms of their disagreement, “we give critical readers a pin for popping such balloons.”

Read more about this here.

PS: I’m a sucker for AdHominem : / I need to get better at this, I want to debate from the top only.

The Inner Life of Rebellion

isi / / About, Stuff that matters

My favourite podcast, a guaranteed pick-me up at all times:

PARKER PALMER + COURTNEY MARTIN
The Inner Life of Rebellion

The history of rebellion is rife with excess and burnout. But new generations have a distinctive commitment to be reflective and activist at once, to be in service as much as in charge, and to learn from history while bringing very new realities into being. Quaker wise man Parker Palmer and journalist and entrepreneur Courtney Martin come together for a cross-generational conversation about the inner work of sustainable, resilient social change.

Parker Palmer and Courtney Martin — The Inner Life of Rebellion

Corporate priorities & innovation

isi / / Stuff that matters

At the CSL.org.au course last night a young woman from Westpac held a talk about “shared values”, and Corporate Australia. In her talk, social and environmental considerations were ‘external factors’, which could be put into the equation because that would lead to higher economic returns.

At question time I tried to explain my take on ecological economics, sustainability and triple bottom lines, whereby the economy sits as a subsection within the greater context of the natural world, the environment and the social component.

Ecological Economics

She did not follow my train of thought. She continued describing how Westpac will replace ‘a shitload of jobs’ (her words) with automation, but that Westpac would be all CSR and train 400 people up for other jobs. I mentioned the EU is considering a robot tax.

She then tilted her head and shot off a preconceived comment (seemingly a trained reflex-reply when the word ‘tax’ appears), questioning how that would “stifle innovation”. I did not reply, but the answer would have been:

If innovation only means to produce stuff cheaper, so to gain higher profit margins, then hell yeah let’s stifle that.

 

https://twitter.com/irisherself/status/905410002902441984

Senses

isi / / About

I think, while social media is all nice and good, it has the potential to lure you into a false sense of connectedness. On the most basic human level, social interaction is much more than exchanging information, words. It is a person’s body language, their presence, that nourishes the soul. You can’t get that through a screen. But as you wilt away, starving yourself from that oldest of human needs, you don’t know why you get sick… you only know that something’s not right… and if you’re a sucker for that, you will most likely blame yourself for being unwell, for not performing.

Boom.

Critique of Romanticism

isi / / About

alaindbJust can’t stop laughing about how much the truth hurts 😀

AlainDeBotton.com‘s Critique of Romanticism

http://abc.net.au/radionational/programs/bigideas/2016-08-08/7641598

A few snippets:

Instilled emotions propel us into Romanticism.

Romanticism tells us we’re quite good and pure and perfect, very optimistic, we’re all like children.

This attitude makes you self-righteous.

Bluntly: affected thru childhood and adulthood, we are all demented in slightly different ways. we’re all just holding it together somehow (13:00)

No one can be bothered to tell you your obvious craziness which they know about after 30 mins of meeting you, unlike you who still doesn’t know after 40 years.

And yes spot on about instincts. Cos while once healthy, they’re now totally screwed, and off cue!

The cult of the instinct – we’re looking for forms of torture 😉

Relationships – not about love, but about honesty!

Love is about admiration of what is good and accomplished in another person.

(53:00) But also about being pupil and teacher at the same time, pointing out stuff that sucks about the other so they get a chance to become the best possible version of themselves.

Love is connecting up with teaching. But you have to be relaxed, jovial, slightly lighthearted.

Melancholy is sadness worn with dignity. Sometimes you have to call on that emotion too.

My personal mantra echoed: Life is all about forgiveness. And so is love 🙂 just use your ethical imagination (not your ego).

Be a loveable idiot, and learn to love another idiot.

What defines a generation?

isi / / About

What defines a generation? Born in the same time bracket? But what if your parents got you really young, but your friend’s parents got their kids late? So you &  your mate might be 15 years apart, but you were both raised by people from the same generation/same time bracket/same historic background…so you are both confronted with same influences, but have different timelines and subliminal hums in your background…

So, what makes the fine grain? There are generations between generations, and types between categories, yet where does natural empathy and true understanding end?

 

Reason above all else

isi / / Beauty

About Ayn Rand

While in high school, she determined that she was an atheist and that she valued reason above any other human virtue.

Ayn RandAyn called her philosophy “Objectivism”, describing its essence as “the concept of man as a heroic being, with his own happiness as the moral purpose of his life, with productive achievement as his noblest activity, and reason as his only absolute.” She considered Objectivism a systematic philosophy and laid out positions on metaphysics, epistemology, ethics, political philosophy and aesthetics.

What an utterly inspiring woman.
en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Ayn_Rand

On the Phenomenon of Bullshit Jobs

isi / / Stuff that matters

It is imperative that you read this!

Ever had the feeling that your job might be made up? That the world would keep on turning if you weren’t doing that thing you do 9-5? David Graeber, Professor of Anthropology at the London School of Economics, explored the phenomenon of bullshit jobs – everyone who’s employed should read carefully…

“… a corporate lawyer working in a prominent New York firm [sic] was the first to admit that his job was utterly meaningless, contributed nothing to the world, and, in his own estimation, should not really exist.
There’s a lot of questions one could ask here, starting with, what does it say about our society that it seems to generate an extremely limited demand for talented poet-musicians, but an apparently infinite demand for specialists in corporate law? (Answer: if 1% of the population controls most of the disposable wealth, what we call “the market” reflects what they think is useful or important, not anybody else.) But even more, it shows that most people in these jobs are ultimately aware of it. In fact, I’m not sure I’ve ever met a corporate lawyer who didn’t think their job was bullshit. The same goes for almost all the new industries…”

read the entire article here strikemag.org/bullshit-jobs

code is poetry

isi / / About, Beauty

just stuffed up a database… hate when I do that… hate it.
have to ask my work mate whether he thinks it can be fixed… or he might just hear me swearing from the office next door and come over… he then -more often than not- knows how to fix it, but never without giving me an earful about how not to never do whatever it was that I did… I’m never looking forward to that…

imagine you just decorated an entire palace with precious ornament and pleasure and gold… took you forever…
on the way out you stumble over one cable and the entire hall falls over, leaving only rubble.

I would have to start from scratch and stick the rubble back together.

he, my work mate, he knows how to shuffle the cable back to where it was, and thereby pumps the entire room back up to its previous glory.

not keen on the earful…
but very ambivalent situation simply because I learn so much every single time it happens…

love it…
hate it…

code is poetry WP says…
life is too ,)

Individualism

isi / / About, Stuff that matters

Art is individualism, and individualism is a disturbing and disintegrating force. There lies its immense value. For what it seeks is to disturb monotony of type, slavery of custom, tyranny of habit, and the reduction of man to the level of a machine.

Oscar Wilde “The Soul of Man under Socialism”

Smart no more

isi / / General stuff

Watching my fellow humans dawdling away on all their electronic devices and doohickeys whilst developing the attention span of a fruit fly, I already had the vague feeling that us humans we’re not spinning upwards anymore… well now here’s an article by Tia Ghose @ LiveScience who had the same feeling, and investigated it…

Humans may be gradually losing intelligence, according to a new study.

The study, published in the journal Trends in Genetics, argues that humans lost the evolutionary pressure to be smart once we started living in dense agricultural settlements several thousand years ago.

“The development of our intellectual abilities and the optimization of thousands of intelligence genes probably occurred in relatively non-verbal, dispersed groups of peoples [living] before our ancestors emerged from Africa,” said study author Gerald Crabtree, a researcher at Stanford University, in a statement.

Since then it’s all been downhill, Crabtree contends…

Read the whole article here http://www.livescience.com/24713-humans-losing-intelligence.html