This is why Bipolar is considered a disease. You are only truly free if you are in the middle. Too far one way or the other and you become entrapped by either a Dystopia (no freewill) or Utopia (complete freewill).
This is why I also balance my use of legal and illegal drugs. Too far one way or the other is unhealthy.
Some would say Everything In Moderation, Even Moderation.
However I say, Everything In Moderation, Except Moderation.
Consistency is everything. Balance is everything.
This is why the BLOCKCHAIN is a breakthrough. Because it enforces 10m timestamps in the QUANTUM computer we are collectively building.
In the current Quantum computers (the human brain) we have inconsistent timestamps. Somepeople sleep every night, others stay awake for longer.
You can only stay awake maximum 7 days. God made the world in 7 days.
Everytime you sleep you can think of this like the brain producing a BLOCK in your brain on the LARGE block chain.
Likewise, everytime you blink you can think of this like the brain producing a BLOCK in your brain on the SMALL block chain.
These large inconsistencies in BLOCK size between chains causes multiple universes to be created, aka false memories.
I suspect what truly works is (a) the instructor knows something that you don't know, (b) you want to learn it, (c) you establish communication. Praise and blame are an inherent part of that communication. In certain circumstances, especially where (b) is less true, then praise and blame get upgraded to reward and punishment. For example if you are a child at school.
We like to say that people (especially children) shouldn't be punished; they should only be rewarded. And then we deny that we are still punishing them, after all, for example by silence and withdrawal.
The reality is you aren't in a relationship if you only get praise and positivity. That feels meaningless or even creepy depending on the intensity. A genuine connection will feel positive/neutral most of the time and negative occasionally, since we are knowledge-creating entities. For example, in a computer game you're learning optimally if your win:lose ratio is somewhere around 80:20. I would guess this applies to our relationships too.
Neither reward nor punishment will 'work' in the absence of the other. This is why tyrants go over the top with punishment, because all blame and no praise is lack of relationship too.
I think context-specific norms are important, too. I was on a lot of Little League teams where the coach was a curmudgeonly guy who was always yelling, and the kids mostly didn't mind being yelled at. It was happening to everybody, so it didn't mean anything bad about them personally. Same thing in school; some teachers were just mean. But then there were teachers who would treat different kids differently. Some kids would get the acid tongue over and over again no matter how hard they tried; others just got sweetness and light. That's terrible. It definitely doesn't have the desired effect; at least, I hope no teacher would want to make kids feel sick about coming to school every day.
If you establish a norm that everybody gets yelled at, even the better performers, then getting yelled at comes to just mean "pay attention" or "you need to focus more on this." Otherwise getting yelled at means, "You are not living up to the standards of the group, and we resent you for it. You should worry about what's going to happen to you here, if you're even allowed to remain."
> Praise and blame are an inherent part of that communication.
Language acquisition presents what is perhaps the easiest falsification of your claim. Children don't learn verbal communication so well because of a system of instruction inescapably based on rewards and punishment from an instructor who can teach the lessons that the child wishes to learn (or thinks they should learn). They learn so well because their brain essentially builds them a nice filter chain based on the sounds they hear at an early age range (thus language exposure is an important factor in later language learning).
We hoist praise and blame onto that process mainly because most parents have decades- (or sometimes centuries-) old concepts of learning that aren't based on modern research. Still, I'd much prefer they err on the side of too much praise rather than risk abusing their children. We have plenty of research that tells us the clear risks when that happens.
> In certain circumstances, especially where (b) is less true, then praise and blame get upgraded to reward and punishment.
The example above is a case where (b) is less true. Infants don't desire to build a language filter based on the sounds they are hearing. It happens involuntarily. But your system would actually guide a parent in the wrong direction-- escalating praise/blame to reward/punishment in a situation where neither are warranted.
> For example, in a computer game you're learning optimally if your win:lose ratio is somewhere around 80:20. I would guess this applies to our relationships too.
For that to be testable, your character in the game would have to stay dead once it gets killed. Or at least its injuries would need to follow it everywhere. Like a friend tries to show you a new move and hands you the controller, then the game says, "Hey, you're that guy with the broken leg," and doesn't allow you to do the move.
I think the win:lose ratio would change significantly in that case.
People implicitly praise and blame by their emotional responses. A negative response from a person you admire or seek to emulate is felt negatively whether it was intended as blame or not.
Reward and punishment are an amplification of a generally unwanted signal. I'm not advocating these; I'm not taking a moral stance. Rather I'm talking about what people already do irrespective of what they think or say they are doing.
Children learn language because it helps them to get what they want. If reward and punishment guaranteed results then adults would be able to reliably recite the multiplication tables (which they can't).
I agree with you except in interpersonal relationships people tend to confuse “punishment” with meanness or losing one’s temper. There’s never a good reason to not be patient or to lose your temper. Having room for negativity is important, but communicating negativity is much more difficult than praise on many levels.
I bet those who believe that anger is always and everywhere wrong are the ones who lose their temper. (They may go silent and direct the anger inwardly.) Those who use the anger will employ measured criticism and intensify their efforts.
I'm not sure how accurate, but I've read a book that claimed killer whale training only uses positive reinforcement. That you can't punish an orca and then expect to be able to get into the water with it.
"We like to say that people (especially children) shouldn't be punished; they should only be rewarded."
I think neither is correct. I think this is a tactical decision that needs to be made in the moment based on time and energy.
Which is to say, it is neither correct nor incorrect to slowly, agonizingly, peel off a band-aid. This can be a successful strategy. Sometimes, however, you just need to rip it off and get on with your life ...
Yes. I don't think one can escape from the fact that punishment and reward go hand-in-hand. By the contrast principle, absence of reward is logically equivalent to punishment. Even without explicit rewards and punishments, children will pick up their parents' emotions. And if there are no emotions to pick up, the child will choose another parent figure. Because children want to grow.
It's basically tar made from coal, they soak the wood in it and the tar makes the wood far more durable and waterproof. It's the same reason railroad ties can last basically forever.
Status -- those to whom we accord the highest status seem to be people who genuinely don't care about status;
Money -- companies which aim only for profit become incapable of change. Presumably something similar applies to individual fat cats;
Stability -- societies which aim for stability get wiped out by the next invasion or natural disaster.
...which is perhaps why most people don't work so hard! So what are good things to want?
>Status -- those to whom we accord the highest status seem to be people who genuinely don't care about status;
I think you are confusing people who don't care with people who don't seem fearful of losing status. As far as I can see, all "Leaders" are hyperaware of status and spend a lot of time managing their own status and the status of their peers and underlings.
As far as I can tell, the further up the chain you go, the more aware you are supposed to be of status, and the more complex the status rituals go, but even at my level (and right now, I'm IT support for an organization of very advanced electrical engineers... so I'm fairly low status, compared to those I work around and compared to other positions I've had) - there are rituals and norms that need to be respected.
That said, as far as I can tell, acting fearful (especially acting fearful of losing status) is one of the quickest ways to lose status, so I suppose that could contribute to them looking like they don't care... but from what I've seen, balancing status is a lot of what managers do... maybe most of what they do. And it's a difficult job (and it's super interesting watching someone who used to be technical who get promoted to management try to manage status; they are often a lot more explicit about it than managers who grew up in management, for whom the whole thing looks natural)
Totally agree that executives and so on are hyper-vigilant about status. However it's possible to be aware of status without aiming to increase it. Those whom I had in mind are religious leaders like Jesus or the Buddha. They apparently saw no difference between people in their essence.
Engineers work with objective reality and so they are humble at least with respect to knowledge. This will be evident from their behaviour in most cases but there will be some who are appear arrogant yet competent. I would conclude that they are humble in private.
>That said, as far as I can tell, acting fearful (especially acting fearful of losing status) is one of the quickest ways to lose status
>Totally agree that executives and so on are hyper-vigilant about status. However it's possible to be aware of status without aiming to increase it. Those whom I had in mind are religious leaders like Jesus or the Buddha. They apparently saw no difference between people in their essence.
I think "leaders" and "prophets" or "people who inspire" are very different animals. Leaders talk about inspiring, but... I really think leadership is about convincing, not about inspiring.
>Engineers work with objective reality and so they are humble at least with respect to knowledge. This will be evident from their behaviour in most cases but there will be some who are appear arrogant yet competent. I would conclude that they are humble in private.
many of our arguments have testable answers, yes, or to put it another way, our theories are usually more easily testable than those of management, but... status still plays into it, really in similar ways too, I think, management; You gain status as an engineer at least in part by being technically right; you gain status as a manager at least in part by convincing people of things. Do you see the similarity? People who are good at a job generally value other practitioners in how good they are at that job; it's engineering's job to be technically correct; it's management's job to convince people.
One important way that all tests are removed from reality is that the direct motivation for solving the test problem is to score well on the test rather than to understand the problem better. In real life we are sometimes motivated by factors such as curiosity or survival which marshalls our internal resources more helpfully.
(And maybe evolution gave us curiosity to save on battery power with the new knowledge it produced!)
There is some preliminary evidence that a training task called "dual n-back" may improve working memory performance. Good working memory is beneficial for a wide variety of cognitive tasks.
If you dig around, you'll find a lot of studies that are focused on a particular outcome (e.g. effects of mindfulness on the Stroop test, effects of mindfulness on athletic performance.) The quality of these studies is, of course, all over the place. Most of the research seems to come from journals dedicated to mindfulness in some capacity. For example, would you trust a study done by PhDs at reputable universities if they published in "The Journal of Alternative and Complementary Medicine"[0]?
The best research I ever found was a metastudy in Clinical Psychology Review: "Does mindfulness training improve cognitive abilities? A systematic review of neuropsychological findings"[1] concludes that there's enough evidence that further investigation is warranted.
There's also a lot of downstream research (citing articles) from both publications that are worth investigating.
Transferability though, is still an open question. Even in this meta study, the author's admit that certain types of mindfulness training may be beneficial to certain outcomes.
So perhaps you'll be more mindful and less distracted, but you won't be any "smarter."
Jeepers, his family re-invented logic, worked on the Manhattan Project, created the jungle gym. Plus he looks a bit like Davros, the (fictional) creator of the Daleks.
I wonder if the victims/hysterics themselves would react similarly upon questing? i.e. with a defensive emotional reaction, assuming such an emotion were observable in the midst of the other strange behaviour:
It certainly is fun, but it's also a source of metaphysics and morals.
For example, children can read Harry Potter, want to be in Gryffindor (at least in their imaginations) and grow up better people as a result.
One could spend a decade citing the results of scientific studies, advertising all the fashionably-correct political opinions, extolling the benefits of eating more organic vegetables, exercising and so on. Never achieving a similar result.
>then the solution is to invest more fully in the process, giving meaning to your life through activities that have no terminal point
There has to be a potential endpoint or else there's no meaning. Pick a hard problem which you find intensely meaningful and take small steps each day towards solving it.
As Karl Popper put it:
'I think there is only one way to do science – or to do philosophy for that matter; to meet a problem, to see its beauty and fall in love with it; to get married to it, and to live with it happily, till death do ye part - unless you should meet another and even more fascinating problem, or unless indeed you should obtain a solution. But even if you do obtain a solution you may then discover to your delight, the existence of a whole family of enchanting though perhaps difficult problem children for whose welfare you may work, with a purpose to the end of your days'
Popper was a fan of Schopenhauer - while he rejected Schopenhauer's metaphysics of the Will, he positively quotes Schopenhauer in Open Society and its Enemies (especially in regards to Hegel). There's also evidence that Popper's interpretation of Kant is through Schopenhauer: the Principle of Sufficient Reason, the first book of World as Will and Representation, and the appendix to the first volume also function as a good emendation of and commentary upon on Kant's Critique of Pure Reason and Prolegomena.
Assuming that free will does exist then if James hadn't believed in free will then by this act would he have made his own will unfree?