Even though slogging through tough textbooks makes you feel sophisticated and smart, don’t.
Pick an easy textbook. But don't read it in full! Apply 20/80, ruthlessly skim. Read several textbooks at once.
Allow yourself to learn approximate models.
From www.greaterwrong.com/posts/cumc876woKaZLmQs5/lessons-i-ve-learned-from-self-teaching
What are Memacs (and its alternative, Orger)? This puzzled me for a while. The grandiose vision outlined in the Memacs README did not make it clear to me which part of that vision is enabled by Memacs itself.
The short version is that you want to reuse Org-mode's ability to search for datestamps such as across all your files, and surface them to yourself in a view such as Org-agenda's log.
You may not know but when you're sitting there in the agenda buffer, you can hop to the last week, the one before that and so on ad infinitum. You already have a time machine as part of Org.
All that's left to do is to inform Org more about what's happening in your life, not just the TODOs you completed, so that all that other stuff that happened, even away from the computer, will also be visible in the agenda log.
An example is photos. Maybe you want to inform Org about your entire photo library, so that when you look at a specific day like the 6th of June 2018, any photos taken that day will be linked right there.
But photos usually have nothing to do with Org-mode and there is no predefined way to "tell Org about them".
So what do you do? Hack up a script that loops over the entire photo library, and writes a datestamped Org headline for each and every one. It's a little weird if you're used to thinking of headlines as semantic actual headlines for some of document, but it may bother you less if you think of Memacs-produced files as binary blobs that just happen to look like Org markup.
Memacs is just a collection of scripts like these. It's not an Emacs package per se because the author was familiar with Python and there is no need for these scripts to be elisp as there is nothing to do inside Emacs. You run these scripts once a day with a cron job.
I used to say I get a lot of value from meditating because it helps me introspect and think. That puzzled some people, for whom meditating is about something else. Now I distinguish between two modes: introspection, and "true" meditation which I'll call zazen.
This has to do with how you're "supposed" to meditate, like the misconception that you need to achieve a blank mind. Even longtime Zen masters can have heads full of chatter some days, it's more about what you do with that chatter, than about not having any.
And it's recommended in Soto Zen to detach your sense of self from that chatter, let go of the need to follow your thoughts to their conclusion. Take the position of someone watching leaves in the wind. Like leaves in autumn, more thoughts and feelings are always appearing, and they're just as quickly gone again with the wind. You wouldn't get up and run after a specific leaf to see where it's going.
It's important to accept each and every one as they pass by – with a nonverbal "Yes, that's a thought I had. Yes, that's something I felt," otherwise they tend to stick around and exert an invisible power over you.
When I introspect, it's similar to meditating. I take on the same basic attitude towards thoughts. I'll even sit in my usual spot as if to meditate, but more likely in a seiza position (because it's easy for me without prep), and I use no timer. Finally, I target a question or a topic for my thoughts to centre on. The difference from zazen is subtle, but I can encourage my thoughts to go a general direction without being so committed to the outcome that it chokes my creativity. (: actually, this looks similar to Focusing)
But why?
It turns out that when I do this, I think about all sorts of things that had been sitting buried in the far back of my mind, sometimes years or decades old. I remember about things that I should do, and why. I become aware of how I'm spending my day, how I've spent my week, and how I'd prefer to use my lifetime on Earth. I'm aware that other people exist and that I exist, and how my behavior looks to them. If I made a mistake recently, it's only in this state that I may come to a realization about it.
It's a lot easier to think productively when you detach your self from your trains of thought, so that you aren't scared of what they will tell you or of the pain they may evoke.
And shockingly, coming up with solutions doesn't take any active effort – it turns out my subconscious already knows how to solve most problems, it's just been waiting to tell me about it.
And for those solutions it doesn't already know, it's still effortless, because from my conscious perspective all I do is ask the question and wait. After a while of silence, like magic, out of nowhere I start having thoughts that wind up being productive tangents, and then I loop back to the question and have my answer. It's creepy, my brain can do logical reasoning without any captain at the steering wheel.
It may be #ADHD, but I sometimes feel that I spend months not thinking about anything properly, and it's only when I sit down to introspect that I finally think for real.
Unfortunately if it's been a long time I can be scared off doing it, because there'll be a lot of crap coming to the surface. It's like letting the laundry pile up.
I've developed a list called Stuff to meditate on. It's like a todo-list, some items are recurring because I want to introspect on them regularly, and some items are once-offs, questions that may have arisen during a conversation.
I need to introspect regularly, my life does not work without it.
It's funny that when I do proper zazen alone, I may not feel like spending more than one 20-minute session, but when introspecting I can get so absorbed, that I am the problem, I am the solutions, and have no body, and I can sit there for hours without any need to get up. I believe they call it the state of dhiana. Could be an instance of the ADHD hyperfocus working to my benefit: high-five for retard superpowers.
Science by press conference (or science by press release) is the practice by which scientists put an unusual focus on publicizing results of research in the media.[1] The term is usually used disparagingly.[2] It is intended to associate the target with people promoting scientific "findings" of questionable scientific merit who turn to the media for attention when they are unlikely to win the approval of the professional scientific community.
Examples
- In 1989, chemists Stanley Pons and Martin Fleischmann held a press conference to claim they had successfully achieved cold fusion.[3][7] (Highlighting the complexity of defining the term, Pons and Fleischman technically had an accepted paper in press at a peer-reviewed journal at the time of their press conference, though that was not widely acknowledged at the time and the quality of the paper and its review were subsequently criticized.[8])
- In 1998, Andrew Wakefield held a press conference to claim that the MMR vaccine caused autism.[3] In January 2011, an article by Brian Deer and its accompanying editorial in BMJ identified Wakefield's work as an "elaborate fraud".[9][10][11]
- In 2002, a group called Clonaid held a press conference to announce they had successfully achieved human cloning.[3]
- In 2005, the European Ramazzini Foundation of Oncology and Environmental Sciences (ERF) reported their findings from testing aspartame on rats. Their studies were widely criticized and later discounted.[12]
- In September 2012, Gilles-Éric Séralini held a press conference to claim that genetically modified food caused terrible cancers in rats, on the eve of the publication of a scientific paper, a book publication, and a movie release, and in the runup to the vote on the GM food labeling initiative, California Proposition 37. As the Séralini affair unfolded, it was revealed that Séralini required journalists to sign confidentiality agreements in order to receive pre-prints of the paper, to prevent them from discussing the paper with independent scientists.[13] The scientific paper was retracted in 2013.[14]
A common example of science by press conference occurs when the media report that a certain product or activity affects health or safety. For instance, the media frequently report findings that a certain food causes or prevents a disease. These reports sometimes contradict earlier reports. In some cases, it is later learned that a group interested in influencing opinion had a hand in publicizing a specific report.