Last weekend saw the TOD’s first birthday and, celebrations aside, I figured this was a good time to reflect on the future of this project, ie. whether I will continue working on it and if so in what format.
The basic problem I am facing is that I just don’t have the time to put as much effort into this site that I’d like to. I spend a good 20 hours a week doing research/reading/etc, and it would take at least as long to post everything I’d like to post. That pretty much adds up to a full time job and unfortunately I already have one of those. Currently I only end up posting perhaps a quarter of what I attempt to line up for posting in one form or another, which is an endless source of frustration. We’re also entering a particularly busy time at work. Something’s got to give.
So, I am going to put this project, at least in its current form, on the back burner for now. What I would like to continue doing is post occasional longer essays/posts, without trying to keep up my regular posting schedule (which is currently about 10 posts over 4 days a week, if you’re curious). Then perhaps when things clear up (or more likely when I get sucked into a shit fight I just can’t stay out of) I’ll be back.
This hasn’t been an easy decision because I have really enjoyed blogging and things have been steadily picking up around here. But its getting to a point where other areas of my life are suffering… which is kind of lame really. This blogging business is addictive!
So goodbye for now, but not really. I’ll now have more time to drop by other people’s blogs and rant and fisk and jibe on in the comments and perhaps even write some occasional longer posts of quality, rather than churn out surf-by quotathons and dive into self-indulgent fiski-cuffs.
Filed under Life, Blogging by Popovich at 6:32 pm EST (GMT+10)
I’m back and ready to rumble. The TOD will return to regular de-programming shortly, I’ve just gotta chew through (at double speed) all the work that has piled up for me on five different fronts. For now, here’s Stuck Mojo with the CAIR remix of their track “Open Season”, to get you in the mood:
[..] The question is, how do we find our way out of the wilderness that has grown in the heart of man? How does a society, a whole civilization, that is on the skids and bound for destruction, arrest its slide? I pose this today in the broadest possible way, because I think it is the one, common, practical, and even political question that should remain near the front of all minds capable of charity and goodwill.
The obvious answer, to those who realize that our civilization was built not only by human hands, but under the guidance of Church and religion, is to counsel a re-centring, a return to God. But for those who have moved and been moved so far away, that the very idea of God chills them, what paths lie open?
I think there are quite a few, and that all have in common this mysterious element of joy. I think art, broadly, offers many alternative means to the kind of regeneration — moral, and ethical, as well as aesthetic — that can help us out of our enclosed spaces. Learning to draw, from nature; to sing, in key; to dance, in pattern; to write, metrically; even to sew, or to master carpenter’s joints — all such enterprises offer the lost soul an individual direction out of the jungle.
The reason why, is that each is a discipline that restores us to harmony with the natural order of things. Each offers a way of seeing into God’s creation, and puts us in the presence of what is infinitely greater than ourselves.
To be able to draw a single flower, with full attention to all its colours and parts, is to be lifted out of one’s tawdry self into a realm where good, truth, and beauty still prevail. It is to recover joy.
“Every conquering temptation represents a new fund of moral energy. Every trial endured and weathered in the right spirit makes a soul nobler and stronger than it was before.” - William Butler Yeats
This of course has implications for success in many areas of life not just the academic. Like many a great venture, this one starts with an experiment (from the Australian, 14/6/06):
Psychologists Angela Duckworth and Martin Seligman descended on the eighth grade of a large public school in the northeast of the US. As the autumn leaves fell, each of the 160-odd children took an IQ test, then they (and their parents and teachers) answered questionnaires that probed self-control. Are you good at resisting temptation, they were asked. Can you work effectively towards long-term goals? Or do pleasure and fun sometimes keep you from getting work done?
The children were also given a real-life test of their ability to delay gratification. Each was handed a dollar bill in an envelope. They could choose either to keep it or hand it back and get $2 a week later. Their decision was carefully recorded.
The researchers returned in spring. They took note of each child’s grades and then looked back to see both how clever, and how self-controlled, that student had been in autumn. What, they wanted to know, was the most important factor in school grades?
The psychologists discovered it was self-control, by a long shot. A child’s capacity for self-discipline was about twice as important as his or her IQ when it came to predicting academic success.
The science seems to back up the writer Kingsley Amis’s well-known advice that “the art of writing is the art of applying the seat of one’s trousers to the seat of one’s chair”. [..] Amis kept to an “unflinching schedule” of 500 words a day, according to The Guardian.
And advise for just about everyone:
So what can we do to strengthen self-discipline, to transform ourselves from impulsive dollar-snatchers to lofty long-term investors in future success?
Help lies in seeing willpower as a muscle, recent research suggests. The “moral muscle”, as it has been called, powers all of the difficult and taxing mental tasks that you set yourself. It is the moral muscle that is flexing and straining as you keep attention focused on a dry academic article, bite back an angry retort to your boss, or decline a helping of your favourite dessert. And herein lies the problem: these acts of restraint all drain the same pool of mental reserves.
Those lofty sciency people have a experiment to prove that also:
Take, for example, a group of hungry volunteers who were left alone in a room containing both a tempting platter of freshly baked chocolate chip biscuits and a plate piled high with radishes. Some of the volunteers were asked to sample only the radishes. These peckish volunteers manfully resisted the temptation of the biscuits and ate the prescribed number of radishes. Other, more fortunate, volunteers were asked to sample the biscuits.
In the next, supposedly unrelated, part of the experiment, the volunteers were asked to try to solve a difficult puzzle. The researchers weren’t interested in whether the volunteers solved it. (In fact, it was insoluble.) Rather, they wanted to know how long the volunteers would persist with it. Their self-control already depleted, volunteers forced to snack on radishes persisted for less than half as long as people who had eaten the biscuits or (in case you should think chocolate biscuits offer inner strength) other volunteers who had skipped the eating part of the experiment.
As this and many similar studies show, if you draw on your reserves to achieve one unappealing goal - going for a jog, say - your moral muscle will be ineffective when you then call on it to help you switch off the television and start essay-writing.
Ready for some moral muscle cross-training?
Evidence is starting to accumulate that the moral muscle, like its physical counterpart, can become taut and bulging from regular exercise. People asked by experimenters to be self-disciplined about their posture for two weeks were afterwards stronger willed when it came to a test of physical endurance, compared with other people allowed to slouch about in their usual comfortable way during the fortnight.
By regularly exercising self-restraint and virtue in all areas of life (moral muscle cross-training, we may call it), we will come to resist temptations with the same casual ease with which a world-class athlete sprints to catch a train. That, at least, is the idea.
If you’re in Sydney you may like to drop round to Centennial Park sometime and check out the newly hatched signets. Here are some photos I took with a phone camera.
In “Adults aren’t growing up” the ABC reported last Monday on the research of British evolutionary psychiatrist Bruce Charlton. Bruce Charlton is Reader in Evolutionary Psychiatry at the University of Newcastle-upon-Tyne, editor-in-chief of Medical Hypotheses and author of “The Modernization Imperative”. His recent research paper “The rise of the boy-genius: Psychological neoteny, science and modern life”, looks at the rise of ‘Psychological neoteny’ in Western culture, since around the middle of the 20th century. ‘Psychological neoteny’ is the name Charlton’s gave to the phenomenon whereby people “retain for ever-longer the characteristic behaviours and attitudes of earlier developmental stages”. Put more simply Charlton is saying Western adults are retaining the psychological make-up of teenagers further into their adult years and in some cases for their whole lives.
From Charlton’s paper:
Whereas traditional societies are characterized by initiation ceremonies marking the advent of adulthood, these have now dwindled and disappeared. In a psychological sense, some contemporary individuals never actually become adults. A child-like flexibility of attitudes, behaviours and knowledge is probably adaptive in modern society because people need repeatedly to change jobs, learn new skills, move to new places and make new friends. It seems that this adaptation is achieved by the expedient of postponing cognitive maturation – a process that could be termed psychological neoteny. Psychological neoteny is probably caused by the prolonged average duration of formal education, since students’ minds are in a significant sense ‘unfinished’.… the faults of youth are retained with well as its virtues: short attention span, sensati
