I started to blog something about this new Cal Newport essay, but then I thought: Why? Everyone already knows all this. If you haven’t changed your habits by now, are you likely to do so? Newport is right to say that there is precedent for a widespread transformation of American habits, but the difference between our current situation and the unhealthy-eating-no-exercise 1950s is that those previous bad habits weren’t nearly as addictive as the ones that are consuming human minds today.
Chatbots’ brains don’t have a right hemisphere.
My former professor Don Hirsch, who late in his career turned from literary theory and hermeneutics to education reform, is still writing about education — at the age of 98. I’m trying to decide whether I want him to be my role model….
Jesus did not say, “Blessed are the agentic.” Christianity is not supposed to be primarily a faith for educated strivers. And any revival that doesn’t give the drifting or disaffected a surer reason for belief, that doesn’t lift up the lowly or reach the poor in spirit, would be a revival unworthy of the name.
The Uses of Pessimism by Roger Scruton:
Unscrupulous optimists believe that the difficulties and disorders of humankind can be overcome by some large-scale adjustment: it suffices to devise a new arrangement, a new system, and people will be released from their temporary prison into a realm of success. When it comes to helping others, therefore, all their efforts are put into the abstract scheme for human improvement, and none whatsoever into the personal virtue that might enable them to play the small part that it is given to humans to play in bettering the lot of their fellows. Hope, in their frame of mind, ceases to be a personal virtue, tempering griefs and troubles, teaching patience and sacrifice, and preparing the soul for agape. Instead, it becomes a mechanism for turning problems into solutions and grief into exultation, without pausing to study the accumulated evidence of human nature, which tells us that the only improvement that lies within our control is the improvement of ourselves.
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“Begin”?
I had decided to suspend, and maybe not resume, writing on my big blog, but it’s my intellectual sandbox, the place where I try out ideas to see how they work out. I have missed that. So gradually I’m resuming, and: here’s a post explaining why Plato’s Republic has the wrong title.
James Reason’s Swiss cheese model of failure, which I learned about from this essay.
