Motivation:

Da findet sich nun öfters Zeit, um an ein paar langen Abenden in Bücher einzutauchen.

Eines dieser Bücher, das ich hierbei nun zur Hand genommen habe war "God's Debris" von Scott Adams. (Ich habe von ihm "How to Fail at almost Anything and ..." vor ein paar Jahren gelesen und damals als recht gut befunden. Beeindruckt hat mich hierbei vor allem, wie viel dieser Scott Adams in all den Jahren so gemacht hat. Ein bisschen hat's mit "Kreativen" (ein etwas abgenutztes Wort) schon so auf sich, dass sie einfach viel unternehmen und unternommen haben, dass sie Abenteurer, im echten Sinn des Wortes, sind, während andere zu Hause sitzen bleiben, über viele Jahre hinweg, und nichts erleben. Neben interessanten Inhalten hat mir das Buch damals diesen Eindruck recht deutlich hinterlassen.)

Eine Stelle, die ich hier kurz anführen will ist über "God's Motivitation" (ja, "Gott" kommt in dem Buch vor, aber keine Angst, es wird nicht gefrömmelt oder dergleichen, ist bei Scott Adams ja auch nicht zu erwarten).

"If you were God" ... "what would you want?"

und weiters:

"Imagine you are omnipotent. You can do anything, create anything, be anything. As soon as you decide you want something, it becomes reality."

"Does it make sense to think of God as wanting anything? A God would have no emotions, no fears, no desires, no curiosity, no hunger. Those are human shortcomings, not something that would be found in an omnipotent God. What then would motivate God?"

"Omnipotence means that nothing is a challenge. And what could stimulate the mind of someone who knows everything?"

"Hunger motivates animals. Lust motivates animals. Fear and pain motivate animals. A God would have none of these impulses. Humans are driven by all of these passions plus loftier-sounding things like self-actualization and creativity and freedom and love. But God would care nothing for those things, or if he cared he would already have them in unlimited quantities. None of them would be motivating."

Und in der Tat, wenn man sich diese Überlegungen so anhört, von einem "Leben", das zwar irgendwie vollkommen wäre, aber ohne Leidenschaften, ohne starke Motivation, ohne bewussten Willen ... bekommt man doch recht Lust darauf, die eigene Haut nicht zu verlassen, trotz all der vielen Dinge, die mit dem Vorhandensein von Bedürfnissen, Wünschen und Sehnsüchten einhergehen. Ein gesättigtes Sein, das wäre schon nichts. 

Viel Freude am Lesen besteht doch darin, ein paar Denkanstöße einzusammeln. Dieses Buch, wie auch andere Bücher von Scott Adams, sind gespickt voll damit.

Produktivität:

Sphären, Räume, Zeitfenster sich schaffen mit wenig Ablenkungen. Die geradezu dazu auffordern, produktiv zu sein.

Persönlich scheinen mir zwei Textdateien besonders wichtig zu sein:

[-] Erledigungslisten (handlungsfokussierte Texte)

[-] Notizen von Einfällen / freies Assoziieren bzw. Schreiben (auf Erinnerung / Vergegenwärtigung fokussierte Texte)

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Ergänzung, September 2023:

[-] Konzepte (wie beispielsweise das Erstellen einer Lebensanleitung, aber auch das Zusammentragen von Wissen zu einem bestimmten Thema)

Freundschaft:

Freundschaft ist schon so eine Überschneidung in der Aufmerksamkeit: Da gibt es Sachen, für die sich beide interessieren.

Schreibübungen:

Es gibt den Gedanken, dass man Schreiben nur lernt, wenn man regelmäßig schreibt. Wie lässt sich Schreiben also üben? Indem beispielsweise eine Seite pro Tag mit Aussagen angefüllt wird, und zwar in einer Weise, dass diese Aussagen auch miteinander verknüpft sind. Man wartet also, bis die erste Aussage kommt, die es Wert scheint, niedergeschrieben zu werden. Nun wartet man bis die nächste Aussage kommt, die es Wert ist, niedergeschrieben zu werden, die noch dazu mit der bereits notierten Aussage in Zusammenhang steht. So schafft man Aussage um Aussage bis schließlich das Blatt voller Aussagen ist. Hiernach wird das Schreiben beendet, selbst wenn manches zum Thema noch geschrieben oder assoziiert werden könnte.

Bildschirmfreie Zeiten:

Bildschirmfreie lange Abende, das sind dann, in meinem Fall, Abende, die Gesprächen, dem Lesen, dem Schreiben, oder sportlichen Tätigkeiten gewidmet werden.

Hyperagreeable Men:

In my opinion, "No More Mr. Niceguy" isn't well written. (Robert Glover's writing skills just weren't that good.) But it deals with certain problems, hyper-agreeable men regularly experience.

depression in men:

"Evidence suggests that men commonly experience depression as feelings of anger ..."

Detachment:

Ein Sich-Lösen-Können von einer Angelegenheit / Wegfokussieren von einer Sache.

Versus

Emotional hoch involviert zu bleiben.

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definition:

"a feeling of not being emotionally involved:"

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stiff upper lip:

"A person who is said to have a stiff upper lip displays fortitude and stoicism in the face of adversity, or exercises great self-restraint in the expression of emotion. The phrase is most commonly heard as part of the idiom "keep a stiff upper lip", and has traditionally been used to describe an attribute of British people in remaining resolute and unemotional when faced with adversity."

lifestyle choices of digital minimalists:

Cal Newport:

"it's easy to think of their lifestyle as extreme, but the minimalists would argue that this perception is backward: what's extreme is how much everyone else spends staring at their screens."

kleinlaut:

Definition:

plötzlich leise und zurückhaltend, mit vorübergehendem Verlust an Selbstsicherheit

How do Women Compete for Partners?

Spouses:

farnam street:

"A person’s choice of a spouse—or if they aren’t married, their closest lifelong partner—is much more revealing than anything they say or do in public. This choice tells you about their own innermost longings, expectations, and needs. It tells you what they think of themselves, and what they think they deserve in life (or will settle for). It is, I believe, the clearest indicator of priorities and values you will ever find."

Sich Zeit Nehmen:

Hartmut Rosa:

"Man sollte sich nicht Zeit für sich nehmen, sondern Zeit für eine Sache; etwas, was einem wirklich wichtig ist oder für einen Menschen."

Doing Hard Things:

Via Twitter / Rob Henderson / Meaning Labs:

"essentially, the more effort we put into something, the more meaningful we are likely to find it...in retrospect, what we’re most proud of are the tribulations we’ve overcome... this gives us a clue about where to look for meaning: in hard things."

Bücher:

Ich habe lange Jahre kaum Erzählungen gelesen. Beobachtet habe ich folgendes: Leicht gelingt es, in eine Erzählung einzutauchen, in der Humor mitschwingt. Humor vielleicht im Sinne von einem Verständnis für das allgemein Menschliche. Auch einmal Fünf gerade sein lassen zu können, wenn es mal, falls es mal doch nötig ist. Der Humor des Schreibenden breitet sich dann wie eine angenehme Atmosphäre aus und durchdringt die gesamte Erzählung. Ein paar Stunden an so einer Welt teilhaben zu können, das hat schon Reiz.

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Humor:

Persönlich würde ich sagen: Das Gute im Menschen deutlich spüren zu können, ohne dabei blind zu sein für das Ungute, Schlechte und Widerliche. Eine sehr menschenfreundliche und lebensbejahende Sicht zu bewahren, trotz eingehender Vertrautheit mit der Wirklichkeit.

Mußestunden:

Gelegentlich Zeit finden, Zeit zu spielerischer Tätigkeit.

Schlaf:

Schon mehrmals gehört, dass der einfachste / wichtigste Weg zu mehr Produktivität darin bestehen sollte, regelmäßig, ausreichend und viel zu schlafen (also zum Beispiel acht Stunden täglich innerhalb eines gleichbleibenden Zeitfensters). Wie stichhaltig und begründet ist diese Aussage, wie abgesichert der Zusammenhang?

Major Revolutions:

Tyler Cowen:

https://marginalrevolution.com/marginalrevolution/2023/01/the-major-revolutions-i-have-seen-in-my-lifetime.html

The Vulnerability Hype:

There is this vulnerability hype - insofar it is interesting to know what "science says" about "radical openness / vulnerability / etc.":

Aaron Ben-Ze'ev, The Subtlety of Emotions:

"emotions express our most profound values and attitudes; revealing them may disclose our innermost, private emotions, thereby making us more vulnerable. Those who know all our emotional intimate details are in a better position to hurt us, if they chose to do so. Privacy is an essential characteristic of human existence and relinquishing it can be dangerous. We are not supposed to expose ourselves to everyone and to the same extent; the degree of exposure depends on the degree of closeness in our relationship. Full and limitless exposure is dangerous not merely to our physical well-being but also, or even mainly, to our mental safety. Despite the great authenticity of emotional states, expressing them constantly and publicly may be harmful insofar as our private self becomes part of the public domain. The demand for a total mental exposure is typical for totalitarian systems in which privacy endangers the very existence of the system."

The Attention Capital Principle:

Cal Newport:

... the human brain's ability to sustainably add value to information.

Wie macht das das menschliche Gehirn?

Das Gehirn fügt aufgenommener Information Wert hinzu, indem es Informationen aggregiert / zusammenfasst. Manche Informationen herausstreicht / betont. Andere Informationen als unwesentlich erkennt / wegstreicht. Aufgenommene Information mit bereits innerlich vorhandener Information in Verbindung setzt. Das Handeln nach verarbeiteter Information neu ausrichtet. Hierdurch fortlaufend die Informationsaufnahme verfeinert. Etc. Etc.

Intelligenz:

Manche Personen können viele Dinge sehr gut einordnen. Persönlich würde ich das als besonders deutlichen Ausdruck hoher Intelligenz ansehen.

Der Monolog:

Begriffsbedeutung:

[übertragen, abwertend]: längere, häufig langatmige Äußerung (Rede, Vortrag, ...) eines Sprechers, bei der anderen Personen nicht das Wort überlassen wird


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monologue;

a prolonged talk or discourse by a single speaker, especially one dominating or monopolizing a conversation.

a prolonged talk or discourse by a single speaker, especially one dominating or monopolizing a conversation.

male mating preferences:

via Alles Evolution / David Buss:

"there would evolve in men a preference for those women who were most fertile, or more accurately, a preference for and attraction to female cues that reliably correlated with fertility. This preference solves a reproductive problem much like food preferences solve survival problems."

"the preferences ... operate as desires, attractions, and gut-level emotions that characteristically impel a person toward some mates and repel a person from others."

"Humans like certain foods and are repulsed by others without necessary awareness of the adaptive logic of nutritive content. Similarly, humans are attracted by some potential mates and repulsed by others without any awareness of the adaptive logic behind the preference."

wimp:

Wikipedia:

"Someone who lacks confidence or courage, is weak, ineffectual, irresolute and wishy-washy."

The overfitted brain: Dreams evolved to assist generalization

The overfitted brain: Dreams evolved to assist generalization

(May 2021)

Erik Hoel

Dreaming remains a mystery to neuroscience. While various hypotheses of why brains evolved nightly dreaming have been put forward, many of these are contradicted by the sparse, hallucinatory, and narrative nature of dreams, a nature that seems to lack any particular function. Recently, research on artificial neural networks has shown that during learning, such networks face a ubiquitous problem: that of overfitting to a particular dataset, which leads to failures in generalization and therefore performance on novel datasets. Notably, the techniques that researchers employ to rescue overfitted artificial neural networks generally involve sampling from an out-of-distribution or randomized dataset. The overfitted brain hypothesis is that the brains of organisms similarly face the challenge of fitting too well to their daily distribution of stimuli, causing overfitting and poor generalization. By hallucinating out-of-distribution sensory stimulation every night, the brain is able to rescue the generalizability of its perceptual and cognitive abilities and increase task performance.

Summary

Understanding of the evolved biological function of sleep has advanced considerably in the past decade. However, no equivalent understanding of dreams has emerged. Contemporary neuroscientific theories often view dreams as epiphenomena, and many of the proposals for their biological function are contradicted by the phenomenology of dreams themselves. Now, the recent advent of deep neural networks (DNNs) has finally provided the novel conceptual framework within which to understand the evolved function of dreams. Notably, all DNNs face the issue of overfitting as they learn, which is when performance on one dataset increases but the network's performance fails to generalize (often measured by the divergence of performance on training versus testing datasets). This ubiquitous problem in DNNs is often solved by modelers via “noise injections” in the form of noisy or corrupted inputs. The goal of this paper is to argue that the brain faces a similar challenge of overfitting and that nightly dreams evolved to combat the brain's overfitting during its daily learning. That is, dreams are a biological mechanism for increasing generalizability via the creation of corrupted sensory inputs from stochastic activity across the hierarchy of neural structures. Sleep loss, specifically dream loss, leads to an overfitted brain that can still memorize and learn but fails to generalize appropriately. Herein this ”overfitted brain hypothesis” is explicitly developed and then compared and contrasted with existing contemporary neuroscientific theories of dreams. Existing evidence for the hypothesis is surveyed within both neuroscience and deep learning, and a set of testable predictions is put forward that can be pursued both in vivo and in silico.

Femme fatale:

Wikipedia:

"A femme fatale, sometimes called a maneater ..., is a ... mysterious, beautiful, and seductive woman whose charms ensnare her lovers, often leading them into compromising, deadly traps ...

The femme fatale was a common figure in the European Middle Ages, often portraying the dangers of unbridled female sexuality. The pre-medieval inherited biblical figure of Eve offers an example, as does the wicked, seductive enchantress typified in Morgan le Fay. The Queen of the Night in Mozart's The Magic Flute shows her more muted presence during the Age of Enlightenment."

-> an attractive woman who leads men on but does not care for them

Gespräche:

Wie entsteht ein gutes Gespräch? Und warum wird zwischen manchen Personen scheinbar nie ein längeres oder beiden Personen angenehmes Gespräch entstehen?

Interessant ist das Phänomen, was ich etwa als "Hakenschlagen" bezeichnen würde: Also ein Gesprächspartner springt mitten im Gespräch in einer Weise woanders hin, sodass die Gesprächsbasis unterwühlt wird. Von da an geht's mühsam oder gar nicht mehr weiter. Wie ausgeprägt sind die Antennen für den jeweils Anderen?

Forecasting:

Vorhersagemodelle sind ein spannendes Thema. Vielleicht werden hierzu in den kommenden Wochen einige Beiträge folgen. (In Form einer thematisch ausgerichteten Beitragsreihe ...)

Humor:

Allie Volpe, The very serious science of humor:

"What was surprising to Amir was the funnier the joke (as rated by independent graders), the less activity there was in the prefrontal cortex of the person who created it. What Amir determined was the neuroscience equivalent to “get out of your head” — that we’re funniest when we’re not trying so hard to be funny. Amir suspects some people might be predisposed to have less activity in this area, but practice in the art of comedy can help further quiet the noise in the prefrontal cortex. In Amir’s study, the professional comedian participants had less going on in the prefrontal cortex than non-comics.

The magical thing about humor in everyday life is its ease, its ubiquitousness. The more you think about being the funniest person in the room, the more likely you’ll fail. It’s the effortlessness at which the funniest of us can fire off witticisms, the ways in which we intuit how to amuse those we know best."

Sinn:

Eine Sache ins Auge fassen. Sich ein gutes, fundiertes Wissen aneignen, zu einem Thema, zu mehreren Themen. Das ist schon einmal, von meinem Blickwinkel her, Sinn genug. Sich orientieren zu können, sich zurecht finden zu können, in dieser Welt. Das große Ganze mehr und mehr erfassen, in all den Jahren, mit all den Jahren ...

Yours to Lose:

James Thompson, Tribes of Intellect:

"These are the top 5%. If you are fortunate enough to be in this category, the world is your oyster, unless you blow it by getting drunk, or by imaging that you are so bright that no further work is required, or you go off the rails into being some sort of clever fool, due to some personality difficulty.

Learning will be based on gathering and inferring own information. There may be lectures, but these are optional, with less frequent feedback on results, and more autonomy in learning. Learners are expected to search for faults in what they are taught.

They can deal with tasks which require the application of specialised background knowledge, dis-embedding the features of a problem from a text, and drawing high-level inferences from highly complex text with multiple distractors. They can almost certainly do the previous credit card comparison task; they can summarise from a given text two ways in which lawyers may challenge prospective jurors; and, using a calculator, determine the total cost of carpet to cover a room, given the dimensions of the room and the cost per square yard of carpeting. (There you are, at the apotheosis of intellect. You can challenge a juror and carpet a room). Their occupations will include the professions, the sciences and, with experience and application, the top posts in business and government. Entertainments will include most artistic and literary endevours, and theories will be seen as interesting in themselves. Vocabularies are in the 30,000 to 42,000 range, which is probably as high as you can go without using lots of technical terms. In modern welfare states they would be high net contributors, very probably supporting two or even three households in addition to their own, and have property and savings. In IQ terms they are 125 and above."

Social Epistasis:

Edward Dutton:

"Nihilists ... spread their way of thinking to those with whom they associate and on whom they exert an influence. This means that their friends' and acquaintances' genes will be expressed differently ..."

[Also see: Social Epistasis]