Three books to read this summer

I just ordered three books from Amazon, can't wait to get my hands on them...

Space and Place: The Perspective of Experience by Yi-Fu Tuan

Cosmos and Hearth: A Cosmopolite's Viewpoint by Yi-Fu Tuan

Stumbling on Happiness by Daniel Gilbert

Structured Procrastination

It makes sense to me. We all are procrastinators to some extent, why not exploit it?

All procrastinators put off things they have to do. Structured procrastination is the art of making this bad trait work for you. The key idea is that procrastinating does not mean doing absolutely nothing. Procrastinators seldom do absolutelynothing; they do marginally useful things, like gardening or sharpening pencils or making a diagram of how they will reorganize their files when they get around to it.

Structured procrastination means shaping the structure of the tasks one has to do in a way that exploits this fact. The list of tasks one has in mind will be ordered by importance. Tasks that seem most urgent and important are on top. But there are also worthwhile tasks to perform lower down on the list. Doing these tasks becomes a way of not doing the things higher up on the list.

The trick is to pick the right sorts of projects for the top of the list. The ideal sorts of things have two characteristics, First, they seem to have clear deadlines (but really don't). Second, they seem awfully important (but really aren't).

One personal experience with SP: On some weekends I have to finish 3 homework: Mirco, Macro and Metrics. The first two are not that time consuming, each would normally take me a few hours. Metrics is really a time sink so I put it off as much as possible. While putting off Metrics homework, I am quite motivated to finish off Mircro & Macro. And finallly when it comes to time I have to do Metrics homework, I use it again as decoy to really go over the notes and pick up really stuff, and at the last moment I can do it as quickly as possible since that homework is graded by effort instead of correctness. And that works out pretty well.

Why do people celebrate anniversary?

Most of us do it without thinking much about it, be it a happy event or a sad one. Here are some hypothesis I can think of:

1. To prevent us from forgetting about something important. A counter point on this is that if it's really important and has left an irreversible mark on you, you will not forget it anyway. Likewise, the fact you've forgotten about it means it's really not that important.

2. To take advantage of anniversaries to get something material, like diamonds for ladies.

3. To enjoy the good memories. But you don't have to do it only that day, nobody is preventing you from enjoy them anytime. Plus there is a diminishing marginal utility from it: how many times do you get the same excitement as you did for the first a few times?

4. To impress other people. See, we've been together for 30 years...

5. To get a change of mode.

Don't blame it on Internet

Interesting article from Wired:

Our reasons [of trying to connect online] are more complex than bodily need: Most people seem to be seeking some combination of understanding, a sense of belonging, excitement, pleasure, novelty, stimulation, validation, romance or even just temporary escape from the demands of ordinary daily life.

I'm not talking about biology here, which -- to oversimplify for brevity -- suggests that we are hardwired for nonmonogamy but able to overcome those instincts and mate with only one partner. I'm just noting the gap between what we preach as "right and good for everyone" and what a good many of us (the majority?) actually do. Because we can't pretend anymore that we don't.

It's no wonder we're in turmoil, demonizing the internet as if it invented unconventional sexual behavior. It's easier to blame the new technology, be it telegraphs or telephones or telecommunications, than to admit to cheating on a partner or being turned on by images we think might be taboo.

But I think all we've lost by this transparency is our innocence. Or more accurately, our hypocrisy.

Here is the main point: don't blame it on Internet, it just helps you come out of your closet and makes it easier for you to be accepted, by yourself or maybe the society. Human nature is not something technologies can alter easily. We might be better off accept it and stop living under the lies.

Will I buy into this argument? I'd put more weights on the influences of culture. I have a strong belief in our brain's plasticity: people grow up with widely different views and moral values. I genuinely admire those with strict moral codes as long as they do what they preach. However, being strict yourself does not automatically give you the higher moral ground to look down at others.

Praise for effort, not smart

This article is quite insightful. Here is a quick excerpt.

“When we praise children for their intelligence, we tell them that this is the name of the game: Look smart, don’t risk making mistakes."....They’d chosen to look smart and avoid the risk of being embarrassed.

"Emphasizing effort gives a child a variable that they can control, They come to see themselves as in control of their success. Emphasizing natural intelligence takes it out of the child’s control, and it provides no good recipe for responding to a failure.”

[...t]hose who think that innate intelligence is the key to success begin to discount the importance of effort. I am smart, the kids’ reasoning goes; I don’t need to put out effort. Expending effort becomes stigmatized—it’s public proof that you can’t cut it on your natural gifts.

[...p]raised students become risk-averse and lack perceived autonomy. The scholars found consistent correlations between a liberal use of praise and students’ “shorter task persistence, more eye-checking with the teacher, and inflected speech such that answers have the intonation of questions.”

[...r]esearch on overpraised kids strongly suggests that image maintenance becomes their primary concern—they are more competitive and more interested in tearing others down. A raft of very alarming studies illustrate this.

To some degree I was a 'victim' of being overpraised: I was always told being the smartest kid in the school up to high school, by my parents and relatives. Fortunately my parents always pushed me to work hard at the same time. Yet I can still trace some of my behavioral patterns -- like putting up a good image, staying away from something I think I am not good at it -- back to it. But by and large, my philosophy on success leans toward effort and luck, not innate abilities.

How often do you want to fall in love?

Not that often if you are a rational person:

[...When you are in love,]You're feeling intense romantic love, you're willing to take big risks, you're in physical pain, obsessively thinking about a person and you're struggling to control your rage. You're not operating with your full range of cognitive abilities. It's possible that part of the rational mind shuts down...

Fortunately(or unfortunately?) our brain is not wired to be rational. Here is the article in today's WSJ.

Bloggers on blogging

Why do we blog? And how does blogging change our life? Here are some rants & raves, from MR.

From Cowen:

Blogging, of course, is one of the ultimate forms of self-experimentation.

Blogging makes us more oriented toward an intellectual bottom line, more interested in the directly empirical, more tolerant of human differences, more analytical in the course of daily life, more interested in people who are interesting, and less patient with Continental philosophy.

From the comments:

1. The IT industry has an unusually high proportion of emotionally immature libertarians, and blogging (as a recent fruit of IT) seems to provide a strong outlet for self-indulgent reveling in one's own thoughts and self-congratulations on one's rational approach to life. Plus there are plenty of other libertarian bloggers out there to make the libertarian feel a solidarity in his or her selfishness.

2. Last night I was watching television with my wife and made a comment about a TV ad. She said, laughing, "you analyze everything...and figure out how you can use it in your blog!"

3. Blogging allows me to clarify my thoughts and put them into cogent arguments well before I am called on to use them in another context. It exercises analytical writing skills by putting you through the paces of analysis on a regular basis. As a law student, I have found that is a very valuable excercise. And, yes, it does provide for a better process of self-reflection than thought alone.... by putting my thoughts down and facing them over the passage of time, I am able to more correctly identify themes in my discourse.

4. I pay more attention to everyday stuff; and it demands more coherence in my thinking.

5. I can't go anywhere or do anything without mentally composing a blog post in my head about it.

6. It (blogging) seems to encourage or provide a forum for narcissism.

#2, 4 and 5 are kind of along the same line: we tend to live life to a fuller extent if we know we will blog about it, trying to make it a more positive experience than otherwise would. #3 would be my main reason to blog since most of my posts are not directly coming from my everyday life. Points made on #1 and #6 are very valid, but who is not a narcissist to some extent anyway?

My BS

I always remember vividly the witty lines at the end of 92 Dustin Hoffman movie Hero:

People are always talking to you about truth. Everybody always knows what the truth is, like it was toilet paper or something and they got a supply in the closet. But what you learn as you get older is that there ain't no truth. All there is is bullshit, layers of it. One layer of bullshit layered on top of another. And what you do in life, like when you get older, is you pick the layer of bullshit you prefer, and it's your bullshit.

I guess when you start to sticking to your own BS, you are showing signs of maturity. So it might be interesting to see what my BS are.

• Evolution is the general rule, not revolution. Things don't happen overnight.
• We live in a modern society with pre-historic hunter-and-gatherer's body and mind.
• Our brain is a lot more individualistic and plastic than we think. By nature inconsistency is the norm, not the exception.
• Unfortunately our brain still works primarily in a reactionary mode and we tend to overestimate our ability to act proactively. In that sense habits trump over will power.
• Talents are made, not born. Practice makes perfect.
• We construct our own versions of reality in our brains by sensemaking retrospectively. Our values dictate our actions, but at the same time our actions shape our values. Self-fulfilling prophecy is often very powerful.
• Actions help you simplify your thought, so do more and think less.
• Goals are often discovered, not set.
• We are born to be emotional and trained to be rational.
• We are born to be selfish and brought up to be compassionate.
• In a pecking order I would rank from top to bottom as follows: liberty, utility, moral/ethics, law and authority. If everyone could act freely without stepping onto each other, that would be my utopia. Next I'd like to maximize everyone's utility if we have to put some limits on liberty. To get maximum utility for everyone, moral and ethics work better that law, which in turn better than authority.
• Economics will hep you organize your life, but it probably will not make you happier. We live by our emotions, not rationalities.

It will be more interesting to see how my BS evolves over time.

New Year Resolution

I'm a bit embarassed that I am just writing the very first blog this year, after almost three weeks into 2007. But I am not really. Part of the reason is that I have a much tighter schedule this year for my work as well as my studies, also it's kind of hard to pick up somthing again after you put it down for a while.

Quite obviously these are just excuses. If I look at beneath the veneer, I can say that it's just procrastination. But this time I want to take one step furthur to ask why I procrastinate. Well, you can say that everybody does it, it's not just me, we are all procrastinators in a one way or another. But deep inside we can see that fear is the what makes us procrastinate: we are not sure how things will play out . Will my rushed blogs make no sense at all? What if I put my foot in my mouth in a hurry? As the result we just sit there idle.

So as my new year resolution, I will tell myself that there is not much to fear in life, really. I will still try to be as good as I can get, and I will accept whatever I get in the end.