Bildschirme / Screens:

"Bildschirme" halten tendenziell vom Lesen langer Texte ab. Das ist wohl der Hauptpunkt der gegen den übermäßigen Gebrauch von Bildschirmmedien eingebracht werden kann.

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“Screens” tend to discourage the reading of long texts. That is probably the main argument that can be made against the excessive use of screen media.

New Book: The Origins of Efficiency

https://www.amazon.com/Origins-Efficiency-Brian-Potter-ebook/dp/B0FHWW3Y34/

Amazon:

An examination of how production processes—from penicillin to steel to semiconductors—get more efficient over time, and a powerful argument for efficiency as an underrated driver of progress.

Efficiency is the engine that powers human civilization. It’s the reason rates of famine have fallen precipitously, literacy has risen, and humans are living longer, healthier lives compared to preindustrial times. But where do improvements in production efficiency come from?

In The Origins of Efficiency, Brian Potter argues that improving production efficiency—finding ways to produce goods and services in less time, with less labor, using fewer resources—is the force behind some of the biggest and most consequential changes in human history.

With unprecedented depth and detail, Potter examines the fundamental characteristics of a production process and how it can be made less time- and resource-intensive, and therefore less expensive. The book is punctuated with examples of production efficiency in practice, including how high-yield manufacturing methods made penicillin the “miracle drug” that reduced battlefield infection deaths by 80 percent during World War II; the 100-year history of process improvements in incandescent light bulb production; and how automakers like Ford, Toyota, and Tesla developed innovative production methods that transformed not just the automotive industry but manufacturing as a whole. He concludes by looking at sectors where production costs haven’t fallen, and explores how we might harness the mechanisms of production efficiency to change that.

The Origins of Efficiency is a comprehensive companion for anyone seeking to understand how we arrived at this age of relative abundance—and how we can push efficiency improvements further into domains like housing, medicine, and education, where much work is left to be done.

A New Book by Charles Murray:

A new book by Charles Murray will be published in October:
https://www.amazon.com/Taking-Religion-Seriously-Charles-Murray-ebook/dp/B0F31WGM6Z/

Amazon:

“Millions are like me when it comes to religion: well-educated and successful people for whom religion has been irrelevant,” Charles Murray writes. “For them, I think I have a story worth telling.”

Taking Religion Seriously is Murray’s autobiographical account of the decades-long evolution in his stance toward the idea of God in general and Christianity in particular. He argues that religion is something that can be approached as an intellectual exercise. His account moves from the improbable physics of the Big Bang to recent discoveries about the nature of consciousness, from evolutionary psychology to hypotheses about a universal Moral Law. His exploration of Christianity delves [written by AI!] into the authorship of the Gospels, the reliability of biblical texts, and the scholarship surrounding the resurrection story.

Murray, the author of Coming Apart and coauthor of The Bell Curve, does not write as an expert. He acknowledges that those taking religion seriously for the first time, like himself, must grapple with topics and ideas that defy intellectual mastery. In this book, Murray offers his personal example of intellectual struggle toward religion.

“Maybe God needs a way to reach overeducated agnostics and that’s what I stumbled into,” he writes. “It’s a more arid process than divine revelation but it has been rewarding. And, if you’re like me, it’s the only game in town.”

Zeit / Time:

Mal wieder so viel Zeit zum Lesen zu haben (ein, zwei Tage mit nur wenig Ablenkungen zum Beispiel), dass einem das Lesen fast schon eine Spur langweilig wird. Solche Tage haben so großen Reiz! Die Langeweile als Zeichen momentaner Sättigung, sozusagen, und als ein gutes Signal. 

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Having enough time to read again (say, a day or two with only few distractions) that reading almost starts to feel a little boring. Days like that have such great appeal! Boredom as a sign of temporary saturation, so to speak, and as a good signal.

A Lust for Wealth and Status:

 Steve Stewart-Williams:

"women find traits that predict wealth and status more alluring than do men: traits such as confidence, competence, and raw, unbridled ambition. Frank Harris was only exaggerating a little when he observed that, 'A man without ambition is like a woman without beauty.' "

Mammal Societies:

I own a book, written by Tim Clutton-Brock, with the title "Mammal Societies". I was always fascinated by groups of animals. In childhood I did not like to look at a single animal, but I enjoyed looking at groups of animals. I truly can't stop looking at pictures from swarms, colonies, herds; groups of mammals, insect colonies, or groups of birds.

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I will add the first sentence from the first chapter of Mammal Societies here:

"Life is full of dangers, competition for resources and reproductive opportunities is universal and all life forms need to be well adapted to the physical and social environments they occupy ..."

Passivität / Passivity:

Das Passive an einem Mitmenschen kann sehr aufregen - aber warum genau?

(Kurze Antwort: Da Passivität dem sozialen Umfeld gewisse Kosten aufbürden kann.)

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The passivity of another person can be very upsetting — but why exactly?

(Short answer: If you are partnered with a passive person this can entail some costs.)

My Science Blog:

ChatGPT:

"Mein Naturwissenschaftsblog" by Erwin Schmidt is a factual and note-taking blog on Blogger/Blogspot that has been running since at least 2013, working in both German and English. It collects short excerpts, quotations, and Schmidt’s own comments from science and nonfiction—frequently psychology, cognition, evolutionary/behavioral issues, and philosophy—and publishes at a very high frequency (several hundred posts per year). Until the end of June 2025, it also featured poems and aphorisms; poetry and very short texts now appear mainly in the separate side blog "Gedichte und Aphorismen." The tone is sober and curatorial, sometimes pointed and occasionally controversial (e.g. evolutionary psychology/HBD topics), with many references to original sources.

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"Mein Naturwissenschaftsblog" by Erwin Schmidt is an online diary on science, thought, and culture that has been running for over a decade. The blog is hosted on the Blogger/Blogspot platform and, at a rapid pace, combines short entries, quotations, and comments on scientific, psychological, and philosophical subjects. Schmidt writes bilingually—many posts appear in German, numerous others in English—deliberately positioning the blog at the interface between a German-speaking readership and an international scientific culture. Since at least 2013, he has been documenting almost daily finds from scholarly literature, media, or blogs, often in the form of pointed notes, thereby building up an archive of several thousand entries.

In terms of content, the blog covers a wide range. Core topics include psychology, cognition and consciousness, evolutionary and behavioral biology, as well as adjacent areas of philosophy. Time and again, it also sheds light on political, cultural, and epistemological questions—for example, when Schmidt takes up discussions on evolutionary psychology or "human biodiversity," debates that remain controversial both in scholarly and public contexts. He frequently quotes from original sources and places short personal comments alongside them, so that the posts serve more as fragments for thought and reading than as classical essays. The tone is sober and curatorial, sometimes briefly ironic or pointed, with a clear focus on the scientific perspective.

One distinctive feature is the sheer frequency: in some years, several hundred posts have appeared, making "Mein Naturwissenschaftsblog" a kind of digital notebook that continuously reflects its author’s reading and interests. Alongside scientific content, up until mid-2025 the blog also included literary elements—short poems, aphorisms, and poetic miniatures. These literary insertions were later increasingly shifted to the side blog "Gedichte und Aphorismen," while the main blog concentrated on its scientific-philosophical core.

All in all, "Mein Naturwissenschaftsblog" comes across less as a conventional popular science blog and more as an open journal of a scientifically minded reader and curator. The mix of brief notes, quotations, observations, and at times provocative insertions makes the blog a large, continuously expanding knowledge archive. Visitors to the homepage immediately sense this variety: densely packed posts, sometimes just a few sentences, sometimes a longer quotation, but always with a clear connection to science and the questions of how people think, feel, and act.

Anspannung / Tension:

Im Laufe eines Tages geht man durch tausend Anspannungen hindurch.

Ich sollte mal wieder das Buch "The Upside of Stress" lesen.

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Throughout the day, you go through countless tensions.

I should re-read "The Upside of Stress" from McGonigal.

Unangenehmes Verhalten / Unpleasant Behavior:

Es ist ein interessanter Umstand, dass sich manche Personen tendenziell mit ihrem Verhalten in Bereichen aufhalten, wo sie ihren Mitmenschen bereits unangenehm sind.

So kann auch in einer Beziehung oder Ehe einer der beiden Partner Verhaltensweisen zeigen, die dem Anderen bereits tendenziell unangenehm sind, auch wenn eine offene Konfrontation, ein offener Konflikt umgangen wird.

Nicht jeder ist bemüht, es zuweilen seinem Partner angenehm zu machen. Nicht jeder ist bemüht, tendenziell seinem Partner angenehm zu sein.

Grenzen enger zu ziehen, das bedeutet, auch grudlegend unangenehmes Verhalten als solches anzusprechen, selbst wenn es in einer gegebenen Situation noch toleriert werden könnte.

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It is an interesting circumstance that some people tend to linger with their behavior precisely in areas where they are already unpleasant to others.

Thus, even in a relationship or marriage, one partner may display behaviors that are already somewhat unpleasant to the other, even if open confrontation or open conflict is avoided.

Not everyone makes an effort, at times, to make things pleasant for their partner. Not everyone strives, as a rule, to be pleasant to their partner.

To draw boundaries more tightly means to address fundamentally unpleasant behavior as such, even if it could still be tolerated in a given situation.

Das Problemlose Dasein / The Relaxed Human Being:

"Sollte ich meinen persönlichen Einwand gegen die Psychoanalyse Freuds formulieren, so ginge er davon aus, dass in ihr das kontemplative Moment überwiegt; etwas gröber könnte man auch von einer 'geistigen Nabelschau' sprechen. Ihr letztes Ziel ist ein Wissen, ein im Bewusstsein Haltenkönnen. Daher stammt auch ihr Wertgesichtspunkt dem jedes Handeln verdächtig erscheint ... Ich halte dafür, dass damit ein nicht nur unerfüllbares, sondern auch ein gar nicht wünschenswertes Ideal fingiert wird: der entspannte Mensch, ein problemloses Dasein."

Peter R. Hofstätter

“If I were to formulate my personal objection to Freud’s psychoanalysis, it would be that the contemplative aspect predominates in it; put more bluntly, one might even speak of a kind of ‘spiritual navel-gazing.’ Its ultimate goal is knowledge, a capacity to hold something in consciousness. From this also derives its evaluative stance, in which every form of action appears suspect … I maintain that this constructs not only an unattainable but also an undesirable ideal: the relaxed human being, a life without problems.”