I have come to my decision about whether to renew my contract teaching English in my elementary school in South Korea. I will renew my contract. However, I will do so along with a new attitude towards my job and towards when it will end.
America dumbs down: a rising tide of anti-intellectual thinking
I really want to know how much this is also true in Britain. It’s hard to judge when I’m rarely around people who haven’t been educated at good universiites.
I’ve got some ideas together to clone Readability v 2.0. continue reading this entry
Here are two ways of looking at getting on with activites that are not one’s paid work, but that require sustained effort over weeks or months to succeed. They seem to be in conflict.
Contemporary workers often say “I’m not trained to handle this,” and feel that this means they have no responsibility for whatever situation they find their colleagues and themselves in. continue reading this entry
The Western idea of feminism doesn’t apply to all cultures. In my understanding, Iranian women are not competing to be like men. It was this discussion of finding a balance—of who they are as women and who they are as men. It’s the equilibrium between the masculine and feminine that creates this perfect world. —Shirin Neshat
What’s the perfect world she’s talking about?
Western art, filmmaking included, begins with the gaze. Visaul pleasure is a form of desire. The word ‘cinema’ derives from the Greek kinema, meaning ‘movement’. Integral to desire is movement—that is, an eternal emotion of movement towards the other.
Unfortunately did not write down name of person who wrote this. In exhibition “This is a Landscape of Desire” by Jesper Just.
What You’ll Wish You’d Known by Paul Graham
The only real difference between adults and high school kids is that adults realize they need to get things done, and high school kids don’t. That realization hits most people around 23.
It’s been hitting me lately. I’m 23.
Why Procrastinators Procrastinate | Wait But Why
How to Beat Procrastination | Wait But Why
This is cool, but I think that the dark forest for the really important things that we should do should be shorter: it’s just the getting started that’s really unpleasant. If it continues to be like that then maybe it shouldn’t be top of our lists, unless it’s some kind of day job.
Get It Done Day and Office 365 help balance life’s demands
This seems like it ought to be a parody. A reddit commenter points out that it’s marketing to executives, who do think like this, which is really sad.
… not that I’m looking to find a ‘life partner’ anytime soon.
6 Healthy Relationship Habits Most People Think Are Toxic | Mark Manson
How to Pick Your Life Partner | Wait But Why
Why Love Is a Neurochemical Roller Coaster | The School of Life
A Dozen Words for Misunderstood | Pacific Standard
The belief in question—that the languages we speak shape the thoughts we think—is known in linguistics as the Sapir-Whorf hypothesis, and among the linguistic establishment, Whorfianism has fallen on very bad times indeed. The hypothesis’ namesakes, Edward Sapir and Benjamin Whorf, have been dead for 70 years, and in my own linguistics classes I rarely heard them invoked except to be ridiculed, like biologists of yore who thought maggots grew spontaneously from rotting meat, or historians who thought the world began 6,000 years ago. What Whorfianism claims, in its strongest form, is that our thoughts are limited and shaped by the specific words and grammar we use. Mayans don’t just speak Mayan; they think Mayan, and therefore they think differently from English speakers. According to Sapir-Whorf, a person’s view of the world is refracted through her language, like a pair of spectacles (not necessarily well-prescribed) superglued to his face.
Would like to study some linguistics; surprised I didn’t come across this stuff in the phil. of language I studied as an undergraduate.
The Buddhist diagnosis of the human condition is exactly what we should expect in light of Darwin’s theory of evolution. Buddhists say that everything is empty in that it is ultimately unsatisfactory. And it’s those whose satisfaction with what they presently have fails to last very long who are more likely to try out new things, such as new people to mate with.
Philosophy is not a field in which piles of small findings later help fundamental advances. Little philosophical puzzles do not usually need rather dissolved by examining the wider fram assumptions, working out what their diverse and far-ranging effects have been, constructing and evaluating alternatives, trying to foresee distant implications. It often involves trying to view quite large areas in new ways, ways that may cut across usual distinctions both within philosophy and outsi de and that may require a broad knowledge across disciplines. —Ruth Millikan
(source)
Buddhism teaches that everything is empty in that it is deeply unsatisfactory. Any satisfaction we derive from something is temporary and we suffer because we delude ourselves into thinking this satisfaction will last when it won’t, experiencing pain when the truth inevitably reveals itself. Our tendency is to again and again think things both good and permanent, despite all our past experience suggesting otherwise.
An imperative to be well, written “Be Well.”, can be read in two ways.
- Treat ‘well’ as an adverb, and then the imperative is one to exist well, that is, in a good way.
- Treat ‘well’ as an adjective and the ‘be’-verb as the way we ascribe adjectives to objects as predicates, rather than the verb of existence. So it’s an imperative to have the adjective ‘well’ apply to oneself.
It’s interesting to think about the extent to which these two are commanding the same thing.