Words for navigating life’s forks
Last week I said I envied Obama’s patience in conflict, and this week as promised brings more about what it takes to display that sort of poise.
This discussion also keys into two of the main themes that run through my thinking and writing. One is that the foundation of good behavior is built not from [...]
In thought and conversation we each take a variety of perspectives, many of which are nested or hierarchical. That is, when you make a statement, it is worth knowing what it represents. A part of you? You overall? Us? Your community? Your country? Everybody?
I’ve written a lot in these pages about how hierarchies of perspective [...]
“Give the work to the busy man,” my mother used to say. It made sense. A busy man (or woman, in her case) had momentum and a can-do spirit.
The technical name for a can-do spirit is self-efficacy, a belief that you are capable of being effective. Psychologist Albert Bandura, who coined the term, attributes this [...]
What do you say about a deceased jerk, someone who treated you badly before shuffling off this mortal coil?The natural temptation is to say, “She could have done better,” but what could that mean? That had she tried a little harder, she would have been able to control her vices? Meaning if she had been [...]
Last week I began comparing and contrasting computers and minds, examining both human intuitions and appetites regarding the prospect that our minds are governed by the same kind of direct one-to-one-correspondence kind of cause-and-effect we see in the physical world (Aristotle’s efficient cause). If minds are really like computers, just translating information from one form [...]
I’m trying a new way to deal with effronteries. When someone does me harm, I have an old habit of compensating myself with the grant of retaliatory superiority. I automatically think, “This proves that I’m different from (and better than) them. I hold to the high standards better than they do, and I’m therefore entitled [...]
Transceivers transmit and receive, and we do too. “Transceiver bias” is my name for self-image distortions that arise from receiving information about how we’re doing while we’re preoccupied with transmitting information, that is, expressing ourselves.
We’re often surprised by photographs of ourselves. They don’t look like what we see in the mirror. Part of this is [...]
You know me. I’ve got hardly any moral principles; I’m all about moral dilemmas. I made the case a while ago (see Liar’s Paradox Moral Litmus Test) that if you can come up with a Liar’s Paradox-like statement regarding some moral principle, then it really isn’t a moral principle. Instead, it’s a moral dilemma.
In other [...]
The Golden Rule-do unto others as you would have them do unto you, is about as basic as morality gets. It’s the bridge between empathy and sympathy, between putting yourself in someone else’s shoes and making some accommodation to them as a result. Putting oneself in someone else’s shoes is, of course, a figure of [...]
Last song in a series of three, here’s one whose target audience is not the middle-aged but rather the young and restless. It was inspired by an argument I couldn’t get started with someone who only wanted to talk about how the media was to blame for youth culture’s slide into promiscuity. I agreed with [...]
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