Geoff's Miscellany

Miscellaneous Musings

Thoughts

On the Accumulation of Tradition in Christianity

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Nicholas Taleb helps us understand why tradition is helpful::

Consider the role of heuristic (rule-of-thumb) knowledge embedded in traditions. Simply, just as evolution operates on individuals, so does it act on these tacit, unexplainable rules of thumb transmitted through generations— what Karl Popper has called evolutionary epistemology. But let me change Popper’s idea ever so slightly (actually quite a bit): my take is that this evolution is not a competition between ideas, but between humans and systems based on such ideas. An idea does not survive because it is better than the competition, but rather because the person who holds it has survived! Accordingly, wisdom you learn from your grandmother should be vastly superior (empirically, hence scientifically) to what you get from a class in business school (and, of course, considerably cheaper). My sadness is that we have been moving farther and farther away from grandmothers.

Taleb, Nassim Nicholas (2012-11-27). Antifragile: Things That Gain from Disorder (Kindle Locations 3841-3847). Random House Publishing Group. Kindle Edition.

Now, in Christianity tradition includes, but is not limited to Scripture. The idea is that Scripture is the measuring rod against which other traditions are judged. Scripture takes pride of place whether the church is examining practices, beliefs, or ways of speaking about God. But this does not mean that traditions are always wrong.

Socrates is right that everything should be questions. Postmodernists are wrong that they should be rejected.

How to read several books a year

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I love reading and I love reading a lot. But sometimes I get depressed and don’t “feel it” or I get busy and don’t pick up a book. Author Jeff Olson, in his book The Slight Edge offers a solution to this problem:

Everything you need to know to be successful—every how-to, every practical action—is already written in books like these. Here’s a Slight Edge action guaranteed to change your life: read just ten pages of a good book, a book aimed at improving your life, every day.

If you read ten pages of a good book today, will your life change? Of course not. If you don’t read ten pages of a good book today, will your life fall apart? Of course not.

I could tell my shoeshine friend that if she would agree to read ten pages of one of these good books every single day, over time, she could not help but accumulate all the knowledge she’d ever need to be as successful as she ever wanted to be—successful enough to send her daughter to that cheerleading camp and hey, to send her to the best college in the country if she wanted. Like a penny over time, reading ten pages a day would compound, just like that, and create a ten-million-dollar bank of knowledge in her.

Would she do it? On day 1, sure. And day 2. And maybe day 3. But would she still be doing it by the end of the week? If she did keep reading, over the course of the year she would have read 3,650 pages—the equivalent of one or two dozen books of life-transforming material! Would her life have changed? Absolutely. No question. But here, back in week 1, all that’s still an invisible result.

And that is exactly why most people never learn to recognize or understand the Slight Edge, the reason most people never learn how to make the Slight Edge work for them, and why the Slight Edge ends up working against them: When you make the right choice, you won’t see the results. At least, not today.

We live in a result-focused world. We expect to see results, and we expect to see them now. Push the button, the light flicks on. Step on the scale, look in the mirror, check the account balance online 24/7. Give me feedback, trip a sensor, hit a buzzer, tell me, tell me, tell me it’s working!(Olson, 37)

Just ten pages a day, a discipline that could be accomplished a page at a time if necessary could lead you or I to read 3650 words per year, minimum. Most people won’t do it because it doesn’t feel epic enough. Same reason many people quit simple but effective training routines like Starting Strength by Mark Rippetoe, Body by Science by Doug McGuff, the six week program by Johnny Candito or Heavy Duty by Mike Mentzer. All of these programs will yield impressive results over the course of 12 months. The results will be even more impressive if the training is accompanied by increased sleep and improved diet. But, since the results won’t be evident in three weeks or six weeks, most people will give up. When I was a personal trainer I had several people give up while they were still simply learning perfect form.

Anyhow, don’t let time be the excuse you don’t read. This is especially important if you’re a teacher or a clergy member whose job is to be informed.

How to become a morning person

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A couple of days ago my wife wrote a post about becoming a morning person. Go read it. In the first paragraph she makes this observation:

I’ve always admired people who can get up and enjoy the early morning hours. I’ve admired their discipline and craved the fruits of what they enjoy–the peace and solitude and freshness of a day in its infancy. Really, there’s nothing quite like the morning time. Apart from the the grogginess it brought, I have always had an appreciation for the morning…when I’ve woken up early enough to enjoy it.That’s the kicker.

Have you ever struggled to be a morning person? I have. When I was younger, I could stay up all night with no problem. I could even wake up before my cousins. But even as a child, I always felt very tired in the middle of the day. Even when I’ve had manual labor jobs, I’ve usually wanted to simply be asleep from the hours of 9AM-5PM. But in the middle of the night and the early morning, I’ve always been good to go.

When I was younger, people would be amazed at how much I could read. But I used to work night jobs, which meant on days off or when I got home around midnight or later, I would simply read all night and sleep until about 11AM and get on with my day feeling exhausted until evening. And, btw, if I did wake up before 10AM, I was usually quite energized until the afternoon. In all seriousness, even on days when I worked mornings, I could stay up until a couple of hours before work, take a nap, and work and not feel any different than I would feel if I had slept eight hours.

Now I have a day-job. Like 8-5. Now, historically, this has been the time period when I’m least functional. Worst of all, right when I got hired, I grew out of the ability to go with very little sleep and have no ill-effect. If I pull all-nighters I get cranky. So, to deal with this, I had to think about how to become a “morning person/day person” so that I could still get reading and writing done. I simply didn’t want to be somebody who was in a bad mood at work from staying up late or somebody who was “normal” with respect to reading volume. “I don’t really read anymore because when I get home from work, I don’t feel like it.”

Here are the steps I took for becoming a morning person:

  1. Mindset Shift: If other people can do it, I can too.
    Although some research suggests that morning/night people are stuck that way, self-limiting beliefs of that sort are unproductive until they’re conclusively proven to be true. In fact, many doctors and refinery workers have jobs that force them to change from night to day shift on a regular basis.
  2. Visualization: Imagine yourself getting out of bed without hitting the snooze button before you start your evening reading/prayer time in bed.
    One can elicit all sorts of physiological and neurological effects through visualization. If you imagine an embarrassing event from your youth, your cheeks can go beet red. So set yourself for a habit you don’t have yet by imagining getting up in the morning and associating that with positive feelings.
  3. Lists: Make lists of what you wish to accomplish in your mornings.
    Even if you simply want a leisurely morning so that the trip to work isn’t a terrible rush, make a list the night before. That always helps me.
  4. Fatty Food: Only eat fat and protein within three hours of bedtime, no carbs.
    I’m no doctor and this isn’t medical advice, but I hypothesize that only eating fat and protein late in the day will keep you from waking up in a hypoglycemic stupor because your body will already be in a fat burning state. This change might necessitate and entire dietary transformation, though.
  5. Find a ‘why’: Determine why mornings are important to you and make them non-negotiable.
    As a Christian, perhaps mornings are important because they give you time to pray, as a parent, they give you alone time, as a programmer they give you time for personal projects, as an athlete they give you time to prepare meals, or whatever it is figure it out. Until those values are no longer important to you, make yourself do the thing in the morning. You are what you do and if your “why” results in no “what,” then over time you will value that thing less and less until it is no longer a part of your life. Mornings can save you from giving up on your purpose.
  6. Get Enough Sleep: Go to bed early enough to get your ideal amount of sleep.
    Some people need four hours of sleep, some people need twelve. Find your number and go to bed with enough wiggle room to take 30-minutes to doze off and therefore achieve your ideal amount of sleep.

Other tips might include using melatonin for a brief time, using cold showers as soon as you wake up, incrementally waking up earlier (fifteen minutes a week or five minutes a day), or asking an early riser in your household to ensure your expulsion from dreamland manually.

I hope this helps. What tips do you have for becoming a morning person?

On calling people names: Fundamentalist

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Over at his blog, Mike Bird, posted this quote from Alvin Plantinga’s tome Warranted Christian Belief:

We must first look into the use of this term ‘fundamentalist’. On the most common contemporary academic use of the term, it is a term of abuse or disapprobation, rather like ‘son of a bitch’, more exactly ‘sonovabitch’, or perhaps still more exactly (at least according to those authorities who look to the Old West as normative on matters of pronunciation) ‘sumbitch’. When the term is used in this way, no definition of it is ordinarily given. (If you called someone a sumbitch, would you feel obliged first to define the term?) Still, there is a bit more to the meaning of ‘fundamentalist’ (in this widely current use): it isn’t simply a term of abuse. In addition to its emotive force, it does have some cognitive content, and ordinarily denotes relatively conservative theological views. That makes it more like ‘stupid sumbitch’ (or maybe ‘fascist sumbitch’?) than ‘sumbitch’ simpliciter. It isn’t exactly like that term either, however, because its cognitive content can expand and contract on demand; its content seems to depend on who is using it. In the mouths of certain liberal theologians, for example, it tends to denote any who accept traditional Christianity, including Augustine, Aquinas, Luther, Calvin, and Barth; in the mouths of devout secularists like Richard Dawkins or Daniel Dennett, it tends to denote anyone who believes there is such a person as God. The explanation is that the term has a certain indexical element: its cognitive content is given by the phrase ‘considerably to the right, theologically speaking, of me and my enlightened friends.’ The full meaning of the term, therefore (in this use), can be given by something like ‘stupid sumbitch whose theological opinions are considerably to the right of mine’.

Alvin Plantinga, Warranted Christian Belief (Oxford: 2000),  245.

When I was younger a friend of mine and I wanted to revive the term fundamentalist to mean what it originally meant to Christians in the early twentieth century. We never managed to do so. I don’t even fit, due to a frustration with a certain way of reading Scripture, with the historic Christian definition of fundamentalist, but I think that next time I allegedly sound like one I’ll own it anyway. Btw, here is Slavoj Zizek’s understanding of fundamentalism from his book On Violence:

This is an excellent description of the current split between anaemic liberals and impassioned fundamentalists. “The best” are no longer able to fully engage, while “the worst” engage in racist, religious, sexist fanaticism. However, are the terrorist fundamentalists, be they Christian or Muslim, really fundamentalists in the authentic sense of the term? Do they really believe? What they lack is a feature that is easy to discern in all authentic fundamentalists, from Tibetan Buddhists to the Amish in the U.S.: the absence of resentment and envy, the deep indifference towards the non-believers’ way of life. If today’s so-called fundamentalists really believe they have their way to truth, why should they feel threatened by non-believers, why should they envy them? When a Buddhist encounters a Western hedonist, he hardly condemns him. He just benevolently notes that the hedonist’s search for happiness is self-defeating. In contrast to true fundamentalists, the terrorist pseudo-fundamentalists are deeply bothered, intrigued, fascinated by the sinful life of the non-believers. One can feel that, in fighting the sinful Other, they are fighting their own temptation. These so-called Christian or Muslim fundamentalists are a disgrace to true fundamentalists.
It is here that Yeats’s diagnosis falls short of the present predicament: the passionate intensity of a mob bears witness to a lack of true conviction. Deep in themselves, terrorist fundamentalists also lack true conviction-their violent outbursts are proof of it. How fragile the belief of a Muslim must be, if he feels threatened by a stupid caricature in a low-circulation Danish newspaper. The fundamentalist Islamic terror is not grounded in the terrorists’ conviction of their superiority and in their desire to safeguard their cultural-religious identity from the onslaught of global consumerist civilization. The problem with fundamentalists is not that we consider them inferior to us, but rather that they themselves secretly consider themselves inferior. This is why our condescending, politically correct assurances that we feel no superiority towards them only make them more furious and feeds their resentment. The problem is not cultural difference (their effort to preserve their identity), but the opposite fact that the fundamentalists are already like us, that secretly they have already internalized our standards and measure themselves by them. (This clearly goes for the Dalai Lama, who justifies Tibetan Buddhism in Western terms of the pursuit of happiness and avoidance of pain.) Paradoxically, what the fundamentalists really lack is precisely a dose of that true “racist” conviction of one’s own superiority.”

Mindset, Compliments, and Success

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Thing to remember for this read: Mindset is the collection of attitudes and processes one uses to evaluate oneself or the circumstances of life.

You probably enjoy a good compliment. I do. I love them. I can be like Sherlock Holmes when it comes to compliments or worse, like Mark Twain:

Compliments make me vain: & when I am vain, I am insolent & overbearing. It is a pity, too, because I love compliments. I love them even when they are not so. My child, I can live on a good compliment two weeks with nothing else to eat. – Mark Twain – Letter to Gertrude Natkin, 2 March 1906

I think that there is a place for compliments and a right way to do it. But the point I wish to make is broader. Check out this quote from CNN:

Studies of seventh grade math students, as well as college students in calculus and computer science, revealed a gender gap in performance, but only for those females who believed math ability was a gift. These are the girls who drop out of the economics classes — and who, as women, may avoid working in areas that require a strong growth mindset, like economics, math and computer science.

Many people find that the way they are complimented, insulted, disciplined, or praised leads them to certain mindsets in life. Check out this example from the AoM website:

I’m above calling my son names – even Yiddish ones – but not always able to resist doling out disappointment, even for tiny mistakes like dropping a hot dog. I felt the words stepping up to the batter’s box in my head.

“Come on!”

“What’s the matter with you?”

“I KNEW that would happen.”

“Charlie…” I started, but my son took my lines and rewrote them.

“I’m sorry.  I’m so stupid!” he said, slamming his tiny fists into his thighs. “I’m an idiot! An idiot!”

I painfully recognized both the tone and the words, like a song from my childhood.

And the CNN article, by Carol Dweck and Rachel Simmons notes the same thing:

Children praised for their effort or strategies — what’s called “process praise” — develop a growth mindset and become more motivated to tinker with a problem than solve it right off the bat.

Starting in infancy, parents tend to give boys more process praise, an advantage that results in a greater desire for challenge, and a growth mindset, later on. In the classroom, teachers give boys more process feedback, inviting them to try new strategies or work harder after a mistake. As a result, boys learn to see challenges and setbacks as things they can tackle with the right plan.

Girls, perhaps seen as well-motivated already, are given fewer messages to try harder or again. They are left to wonder whether their challenges reflect something deeper about their ability.”

Criticizing how young people do things and praising their effort and the steps they take is perhaps more useful than praising their traits, “You’re so smart, you’re so tall, you’re so fit…” But these same strategies are useful for our own self-talk as well. Looking in a mirror and saying, “You’re fat.” Or, “You’re sexy” will not be as useful as going to the gym. Similarly, looking in the mirror of the Scriptures and saying, “I’m good” or “I’m evil” will not be as useful as confessing your sins and choosing this day whom you will serve.”

Anyway, I think that success is largely related to mindset. I tend to have a fixed mindset, probably due to having an allegedly above average IQ (it’s not true, I use this trick to seem smart), but I’ve found myself more easily adapting to situations as I try to use self-talk to commit to growing from experiences rather than to demean or compliment myself based on my apparent abilities.

Music Monday: The Rolling Stones

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When I was younger I really like the song Paint it Black. I now almost never listen to the radio, but right after telling my wife that I liked it as a kid, it came on when I turned the radio on on a lark the next day. Then later that day it came on the radio at the gym. I listened to it when I did my heaviest set on dead lift.

I’m not certain about why I like the song. I think I gravitate toward negative and depressing thoughts, so I found a friend in Mick Jagger. Interestingly, I found out that my sarcastic, over confident, and paroxystic (new word based on paroxysm I guess) dancing style was similar to Jaggger’s after seeing a Stones video in high school. Amongs people who’ve seen it (I don’t dance in public any more), my dance moves are legend. A friend and I once stopped a hardcore show by dancing so intensely that the lead singer gave us a shout-out as all of the weaker, smaller, and less intense metal heads backed away from us in awe or a brief sense of rational self-preservation. Nobody was hurt.

Anyway, I hope this song helps you have a bright start to your day.