I happened across something written by Gus Van Horn. And it helped me to finally conceptualize a problem I had long been struggling to grasp about politics, voting and political support.

Problem

There is limited political choice and each of the candidates has a platform of values they claim to uphold. People will select a candidate by finding the one that defends at least one value that they hold [^1] or at least do not actively work against. Upon making this selection they then join the fan club and defend[^2] or attempt to ignore all of the bad points to the candidate. I will try and make this clear with the following example.

A person believes in the 2nd amendment right to own a gun. When it comes time to vote they look myopically at their most important concrete value, the right to gun ownership. They then not only vote for the person or party that is for protecting this right, but speak out in favor of them, defend or ignore their wrong ideas, and drop any contradictions. They actively, and often rightly, attack the other parties candidate all the while ignoring the flaws in their own choice. They latch on to their candidate and argue with others with the zealous devotion an Eagles fan describing all the failings of the Cowboys or Giants to one of their faithful.

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This site has languished because there was absolutely no purpose or reason for it. I have spent some time and decided a few reasons for continuing it, and have thus renewed my interest in maintaining and updating it. The below reasons are published here and on the site’s colophon for newcomers to understand the purpose.

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I am planning on resurrecting this site and posting regularly. I have recently been made explicitly aware of the cognitive benefits of writing. So in writing down my thoughts, especially if I intend to stand behind them and have them represent who I am, I am forced to clarify and organize the process behind my thinking.

I have decided that this practice will primarily help me to integrate new ideas. Secondary benefits include improving my ability to communicate and will allow me to have more interesting interactions because it could be based on information I have already thought through.

I have been trying to “get organized” since sometime in high-school when I was probably told to “buckle down.” Nothing seems to have taken very well, however.

The problem that I seem to have is two-fold. First, every time I see a neat discussion or article or book on how to help you do stuff, I read it and get all fired up and start thinking about how to implement that philosphy. Second I am letting the best destroy the good. And I think this is the bigger of the two problems.

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“Ignorance more frequently begets confidence than does knowledge.”

-Charles Darwin

The best thing you can do for your craft is to close the door. This may be a literal door, signing off of IM, closing your email client, or pulling out your internet cable. It may also be metaphoric, especially once you have practiced enough. It is concentrating your focus so severly on what you are doing that nothing else matters. I have received this advice from much of my reading, and from some very successful people. Don’t believe me, who the hell am I? Just try it, try for 5 days, try for 3 hours. Look at the results and honestly compare to your other work.

Practice closing the door.

This attempt at defining how human conciousness works is worth a read: The Multiple Self. It would be interesting to find other thoughts along these lines.

Inspired by my brother’s NFL season preview, I am going to strive to be more concise in my explanations, descriptions and opinion expression. From what I can see it brings more interesting response, and sure you will be misinterpreted, but at least you will know people read what you wrote.

I know many of my work related emails have been skimmed and archived, because, who has the time.

While searching for a story I heard on Morning Edition about depression, so I could make a point about the treatment for depression being just as stressful as some of the stresses thought to cause depression, I found out that NPR has RSS feeds for some of it’s news and programs. Scratch another couple minutes from my daily routine as I will be throwing some of these on my bloglines account right away.

Oh and I couldn’t find the story I was searching for, but basically the woman who wrote a book was talking about how stressful everything is today, since we have so many demands on our time, and the work week has increased and there is a constant pressure to succeed and do more faster and earn more money to buy more crap (Including her book I guess). Then she talked about the way there is no simple magic bullet cure all for depression and it’s not just medication but a whole management regimen where you have to work hard at controlling your depression.

Well as I was listening to this it sounded like there was a lot of pressure to build up this management framework around your depression, which could in turn cause stress as you could wonder why all the hard work you are putting in at controlling your depression isn’t working and how it is possible fail in this mighty quest to control your feelings, and it just seemed like the total wrong direction to go for dealing with depression. I mean why apply the principles of management and work to your problem if applying those very things to other aspects of your life has caused the growth of this problem. It seems to me the solution to many problems in our society is to do something; do anything. And likely that attitude is how the problem came about in the first place.

Now I don’t really know what depression is, or know if I have ever experienced it. But it seems to me that applying the same thinking that caused the condition in the first place is not going to fix it.

I would recommend buying a hammock, and using it.

Yet another thought provoking article from Paul Graham: Great Hackers.

I’ve found that people who are great at something are not so much convinced of their own greatness as mystified at why everyone else seems so incompetent. The people I’ve met who do great work rarely think that they’re doing great work. They generally feel that they’re stupid and lazy, that their brain only works properly one day out of ten, and that it’s only a matter of time until they’re found out.

Yeah, I know anyone who reads my blog already saw this somewhere else, or doesn’t really care to read it. Well I want to be able to find it again. And I haven’t found a good way to do bookmark sharing between many different machines. Maybe a good idea for a firefox plugin.