One part of the problem is that journals still permit you to make unsupported dismissive statements in your literature review, the chapter that's supposed to summarize past research, and these statements are rarely verified by the editor or reader. Retraction Watch calls this problem a dismissive review: retractionwatch.com/2021/03/23/dismissive-reviews-a-cancer-in-the-body-of-knowledge/

You can get a feel for the scale of the problem yourself with some internet searching. Try exact phrases, such as “this is the first study,” “little research,” “few studies” and various similar word combinations.

and

When dismissive reviewers band together, they form a “citation cartel” (and practice what is variously called “citation stacking,” “citation amnesia,” or the like). They may cite each other profusely while declaring the work of others outside their group nonexistent or no good.

You could work around this by requiring what's known as Systematic review, or that the author refer to previously made systematic reviews.

What links here

• The Freakonomics attack
• Science fraud incentives

#autodidacting

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 links here

• Settled science

#emacs

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 [2022-01-28 Fri] 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. ([2023-04-03 Mon]: 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.

(<2024-Oct-20>: I haven't used the list for a long time… nor "sat down to introspect", but I do Focus sometimes, and a super-long walk helps too)

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 desire doing 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 ADHD hyperfocus working to my benefit.

What links here

• Passive thinking
• Unlocking what the subconscious knows
• 2024-02-04
• Zen
• Stuff to meditate on