How an 18th-Century Philosopher Helped Solve My Midlife Crisis

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When wget is not installed, you want curl -OL http://example.com/ to replace wget http://example.com/.

-O
output to a file, not stdout

-L
follow 301/302 redirects

A great 404 page

Amia Srinivasan reviews “Doing Good Better” | LRB

I found the rally depressing because he says all the right things and so he won’t gain power. He pointed out that it’s not utopian thinking to think that there could be universal free/affordable healthcare in the richest country on the planet.

Edit 11/x/2015: About half way through he started referring to us all as “brothers and sisters” and he talked about “our gay brothers and sister” which was nice. Only one step away from “comrades”!

PQRST is a reading strategy. I’ve made a version for philosophy grad school that I’ve been trying out to improve my reading efficiency. BREAK The main problem with PQRST for philosophy is that thinking up questions to be answered by reading the article is hard as there are almost always just two questions:

• what are the claims of this paper?
• how does it fit into the dialectic?

So here’s my strategy:

1. Preview: read title, abstract (or if absent the first paragraph); look at subheadings; read last paragraph
2. if this generates a question to answer scribble it down, but doesn’t matter if it doesn’t
3. read through once very fast, not allowing myself to stop on the harder parts but making a mental note of them
4. at top of notes pages, space to make five bullet points answering claims and how fits into dialectic
5. then go through and make careful notes on the structure. However, keep two permanent questions and one question-for-this-text and don’t make notes that don’t contribute to this purpose as far as you can figure out (of course knowing whether something is relevant is hard on e.g. the first piece of reading for a topic)
6. then come back at the end and fill in the box at the top after looking over notes again.

Burnout is a process that happens gradually over time. It creeps up on a person through an accumulation of random minor negative thoughts, sporadic lost hopes, and a series of small disappointments in oneself. Burnout is a painful process that includes emotional exhaustion, a loss of pleasure in interpersonal relationships, and a diminished sense of self-worth. Burnout is the result of trying too hard for too long in a situation where the odds are against meeting one’s expectations. People who burn out are intelligent, dedicated people who have high expectations for themselves. —Linda Curci, Caltech Counseling Center

We’re reading Sidgwick’s The Methods of Ethics in a reading group this semester. This is his statement of egoistic hedonism:

According to this the rational agent regards quantity of consequent pleasure and pain to himself as alone important in choosing between alternatives of action; and seeks always the greatest attainable surplus of pleasure over pain—which, without violation of usage, we may designate as his ‘greatest happiness.’ (7th edition, book 1, chapter 7, my emphasis)

Now not many of us think that egoistic hedonism is true of anyone nor should it be. But I thought about what happens when we do consider our own pleasure, and I thought that the surplus of pleasure was much less important than the ratio of pleasure over pain. For focussing on the surplus means that a situation with lots and lots of pain but more pleasure is better than a situation with roughly equal pleasure and pain but both much lower.

Everyone else in the room disagreed.