Planen:

I keep six honest serving-men

(They taught me all I knew);

Their names are What and Why and When

And How and Where and Who.

Rudyard Kipling

Im Bezug auf die Handlungsplanung scheinen primär vier dieser sechs Fragen relevant zu sein:

Was? Welches Ziel wird angestrebt.

Wann? Der Zeitpunkt oder die Zeitspanne für die Erreichung des Ziels bzw. der Zeitrahmen für einzelne zielführende Handlungen.

Wie? Ein detailierter Plan, welche Schritte bzw. welche Wege zum Ziel führen.

Warum? Der Grund dafür, weshalb das Ziel angestrebt wird bzw. die Begründungen, warum jeweilige Zwischenschritte notwendig sind.

Denken als Informationsverarbeitung:

Denken lässt sich als ein informationsverarbeitender Prozess verstehen, da innere Modelle aufgrund neu eintreffender Information fortlaufend überarbeitet werden. Die Überarbeitung nimmt gegebenenfalls größere Zeiträume in Anspruch und kommt nicht zwingenderweise im unmittelbaren Anschluss an das Eintreffen von neuer Information zum Abschluss. So können gravierende Ereignisse für Tage, für Wochen, oder gar für längere Zeitspannen, 'Denkstoff' liefern.

Selbstdenken:

Als man zum ersten Mal Schopenhauers Aphorismen über das Selbstdenken las, wollte man sich gleich hinsetzen und produktiv denken. Dennoch verhält es sich leider so, dass man sich zwar jederzeit zum Denken bemüßigen kann, dies aber noch keineswegs garantiert, dass die erzeugten Gedanken auch relevant sind. Irrelevante Gedanken, so scheint es, lassen sich durchaus am Fließband erzeugen. Solche Gedanken, auf die es ankommt, allerdings nicht.

Kernfunktionen der Sprache:

Neben Spiegelung bzw. Abbildung der Um- und Innenwelt, der Vergangenheit und Zukunft, erlaubt uns Sprache auch, über bewusst sprachlich-fixierte Zielsetzungen, einen vertieften Eingriff in die Welt. Eine gute Portion der menschlichen Tatkraft dürfte eng mit unserem Sprachvermögen assoziiert sein.

[Siehe auch: Gerhard Roth - Sprache als Intelligenzverstärker]

[Die menschliche Planungsfähigkeit bzw. Voraussicht weist eine enge Kopplung an das sprachliche Denken auf. Vermutlich erhielt der Mensch erst mit dem Aufkommen und der Entwicklung der Sprache die Befähigung, Jahrzehnte (oder noch weiter) entfernte zeitliche Fernziele anzustreben.]

The Hajnal Line and Gene-Culture Coevolution in Northwest Europe

The Hajnal Line and Gene-Culture Coevolution in Northwest Europe

Peter Frost (August 2017)


Abstract

North and west of a line running from Trieste to St. Petersburg, social relations have long conformed to the Western European Marriage Pattern, i.e., men and women marry relatively late; many people never marry; children usually leave the nuclear family to form new households, and households often have non-kin members. This pattern goes back at least to the thirteenth century and perhaps to prehistoric times. I argue that this environment of weaker kinship caused northwest Europeans to create communities based on shared moral rules, rather than shared kinship. Community members enforced these rules by monitoring not only the behavior of other members but also their own behavior and even their own thoughts. Initially, this new mindset did not have a genetic basis. Individuals acquired it within the bounds of phenotypic plasticity. Over time, however, a genetic basis would have developed through the survival and reproduction of individuals who were better at being socially independent, at obeying universal rules, at monitoring other community members, and at self-monitoring, self-judging, and self-punishing. These psychological adaptations—independent social orientation, universal rule adherence, affective empathy, guilt proneness—are moderately to highly heritable. Although they are complex, they required only minor evolutionary changes to evolve out of mechanisms that were already present but limited to specific behavioral contexts. Affective empathy, for instance, is a species-wide trait but usually confined to relations with close kin, particularly between a mother and her young children. An evolutionary scenario is proposed, and two questions discussed. Are these mental traits too complex to have evolved over a span of 30 to 300 generations? Are they too altruistic to be sustainable?


Peter Frost: "I'm back to blogging, perhaps a new column every two weeks."

Studying through Active Recall

The lifestyle-design community

Why Skills Trump Passion

Cal Newport (2012)

"The more I studied examples of control, the more I encountered people who had made ... mistakes. Jane’s story, for example, is just one of many from the growing lifestyle-design community. This movement argues that you don’t have to live life by other people’s rules. It encourages its followers to design their own path through life—preferably one that’s exciting and enjoyable to live. It’s easy to find examples of this philosophy in action, because many of its disciples blog about their exploits.

At a high level, of course, there’s nothing wrong with this philosophy. The author Timothy Ferriss, who coined the term “lifestyle design,” is a fantastic example of the good things this approach to life can generate (Ferriss has more than enough career capital to back up his adventurous existence). But if you spend time browsing the blogs of lesser-known lifestyle designers, you’ll begin to notice the same red flags again and again: A distressingly large fraction of these contrarians, like Jane, skipped over the part where they build a stable means to support their unconventional lifestyle. They assume that generating the courage to pursue control is what matters, while everything else is just a detail that is easily worked out.

One such blogger I found, to give another example from among many, quit his job at the age of twenty-five, explaining, “I was fed up with living a ‘normal’ conventional life, working 9–5 for the man [and] having no time and little money to pursue my true passions… so I’ve embarked on a crusade to show you and the rest of the world how an average Joe… can build a business from scratch to support a life devoted to living ‘The Dream.’ ” The “business” he referenced, as is the case with many lifestyle designers, was his blog about being a lifestyle designer. In other words, his only product was his enthusiasm about not having a “normal” life. It doesn’t take an economist to point out there’s not much real value lurking there. Or, put into our terminology, enthusiasm alone is not rare and valuable and is therefore not worth much in terms of career capital. This lifestyle designer was investing in a valuable trait but didn’t have the means to pay for it.

Not surprisingly, things soon turned bleak on this fellow’s blog. After three months of posting several times a week about how to fund an unconventional life through blogging—even though he wasn’t making any money himself from his own site—some frustration crept into his writing. In one post, he says, with evident exasperation, “What I noticed is that [readers] come and go. I’ve put in the hard yards, writing quality posts and finding awesome people… but alas many of [you] just come and go. This is as annoying as trying to fill up a bucket with water that has a bunch of holes in it.” He then goes on to detail his ten-point plan for building a more stable audience. The plan includes steps such as “#2. Bring the ENERGY” and “#4. Shower Your Readers with Appreciation,” but the list still excludes the most important step of all: giving readers content they’re willing to pay for. A few weeks later, the posts on the blog stopped. By the time I found it, there hadn’t been a single new post in over four months.

This story provides another clear example of the first control trap: If you embrace control without capital, you’re likely to end up like Jane, Lisa, or our poor frustrated lifestyle designer—enjoying all the autonomy you can handle but unable to afford your next meal. This first trap, however, turns out to be only half of the story of why control can be a tricky trait to acquire. ...[E]ven after you have the capital required to acquire real control, things remain difficult, as it’s exactly at this point that people begin to recognize your value and start pushing back to keep you entrenched in a less autonomous path."

[Also see: Scott Adams on Passion]