Golden Books™

2022-09-25 09:41:07 ‘‘The only factor becoming scarce in a world of abundance is human attention” – Kevin Kelly in ‘Wired’

In Computer Science, there is a condition called Memory Leak, where a Program, after using a chunk of Memory, doesn't properly free and return it to the Computer. The result will be pieces of memory scattered throughout the RAM inaccessible to the system and dominated by garbage Objects left by the ill-behaved program.

The human brain faces the same issue everyday.
When you have conscious or unconscious cognitive activity about something that you have stopped working on, and definitely are not supposed to think about now, you're experiencing memory leak. That something has taken a cognitive space in your limited attention that it had to return to you.

And there is a term for it, Attention Residue.
More formally Attention Residue, according to Sophie Leroy of University of Minnesota, is the persistence of cognitive activity about Task A even though one stopped working on Task A and currently performs a Task B.
Dr. Leroy conducted a research on a total of 162 individuals on two different studies to find out what factors affect the smooth transition while switching between tasks.
The proposed factors to have an impact on the process are:
- Task Completion
- Time Pressure

The study confirmed the proposition that, apart from finishing Task A before starting Task B, completing the task under high time pressure( limited time window) can play a role to reduce attention residue and attain cognitive closure (the end of cognitive processing obtained through psychological resolve after reaching an end point subjectively evaluated as satisfactory).
In addition, finishing a task, especially in high time pressure, improved the performance on the given task at hand, and resulted in elevated confidence. This confidence can then influence the performance on subsequent tasks.

What this possibly could indicate is, according to Dr. Leroy's own word, that unfinished, and or interrupted tasks are dangerous because they can easily turn to residue beyond our control. And the role of social media and cellphones is a prominent factor that doesn't even need to be explained in this sense. But attention, despite how we ignore its scarcity, is one of the treasures that can shape as much as the personal identity of a person, and by being so, requires a great deal of care.

Why is it so hard to do my work? The challenge of attention residuewhen switching between work tasks
Sophie Leroy Open / Comment

2022-08-30 08:03:15 Instagram Open / Comment

2022-08-26 21:50:46 Happiness is not something that happens. It is not the result of good fortune or random chance. It is not something that money can buy or power command. It does not depend on outside events, but, rather, on how we interpret them. Happiness, in fact, is a condition that must be prepared for, cultivated, and defended privately by each person. People who learn to control inner experience will be able to determine the quality of their lives, which is as close as any of us can come to being happy.

Yet we cannot reach happiness by consciously searching for it. “Ask yourself whether you are happy,” said J. S. Mill, “and you cease to be so.”
It is by being fully involved with every detail of our lives, whether good or bad, that we find happiness, not by trying to look for it directly. Viktor Frankl, the Austrian psychologist, summarized it beautifully in the preface to his book Man’s Search for Meaning: “Don’t aim at success—the more you aim at it and make it a target, the more you are going to miss it. For success, like happiness, cannot be pursued; it must ensue…as the unintended sideeffect of one’s personal dedication to a course greater than oneself.”

Flow
Mihaly Csikszentmihalyi Open / Comment

2022-08-17 22:23:56 Never make the same mistake, little girl,” he murmured, indicating the wagon with his eyes. “If someone shows you compassion, sympathy and dedication, if they surprise you with integrity of character, value it but don’t mistake it for . . . something else." Open / Comment

2022-08-03 21:03:54 Intolerance and superstition has always been the domain of the more stupid amongst the common folk and, I conjecture, will never be uprooted, for they are as eternal as stupidity itself. There, where mountains tower today, one day there will be seas; there where today seas surge, will one day be deserts. But stupidity will remain stupidity.

Blood of Elves - The Witcher Series Open / Comment

2022-07-24 20:33:04 "The answer is that it does not matter what you think, the monster said, because your mind will contradict itself a hundred times each day. You wanted her to go at the same time you were desperate for me to save her. Your mind will believe comforting lies while also knowing the painful truths that make those lies necessary. And your mind will punish you for believing both."

“But how do you fight it?” Conor asked, his voice rough. “How do you fight all the different stuff inside?”

"By speaking the truth, the monster said. As you spoke it just now."
"You do not write your life with words," the monster said. "You write it with actions. What you think is not important. It is only important what you do."

There was a long silence as Conor re-caught his breath.
“So what do I do?” he finally asked.

"You do what you did just now, the monster said. You speak the truth."

“That’s it?”
"You think it is easy?", The monster raised two enormous eyebrows. "You were willing to die rather than speak it."

A Monster Calls
Patrick Ness Open / Comment

2022-07-17 18:26:01 Key Takeaways from the Chapter "Making Smaller Circles" - The Art of Learning

"My search for the essential principles lying at the hearts of and connecting chess, the martial arts, and in a broader sense the learning process, was inspired to a certain extent by Robert Pirsig’s Zen and the Art of Motorcycle Maintenance. I’ll never forget a scene that would guide my approach to learning for years to come. The protagonist of Pirsig’s story, a brilliant if eccentric man named Phaedrus, is teaching a rhetoric student who is all jammed up when given the assignment to write a five-hundred-word story about her town. She can’t write a word. The town seems so small, so incidental—what could possibly be interesting enough to write about? Phaedrus liberates the girl from her writer’s block by changing the assignment. He asks her to write about the front of the opera house outside her classroom on a small street in a small neighborhood of that same dull town. She should begin with the upper-left hand brick. At first the student is incredulous, but then a torrent of creativity unleashes and she can’t stop writing. The next day she comes to class with twenty inspired pages."

The heart of pursuit for excellence lies in the theme depth over breadth. Understanding the essence, and plunging to the deep mystery behind the scenes is very mandatory to mix ourselves with our subjects and feel it inside.

Taking the author's experience on how he mastered chess, given that he started to learn formally by keeping two or three pieces on the board and playing game endings rather than remembering classic game opening techniques, one can clearly see how he had the chance to understand the true potential of each pieces individually before using them together for a strategic attack.
In every skill set, it's mandatory to break each component to the tiniest detail, go in depth through it and get a clear understanding of its essence. One should avoid unnecessary abstractions and cover ups, which usually happen for the sake of saving time or get to the results quickly, if they want to truly master what they desire. The author summarizes this in the following words,

"I believe this little anecdote has the potential to distinguish success from failure in the pursuit of excellence. The theme is depth over breadth. The learning principle is to plunge into the detailed mystery of the micro in order to understand what makes the macro tick. Our obstacle is that we live in an attention-deficit culture. We are bombarded with more and more information on television, radio, cell phones, video games, the Internet. The constant supply of stimulus has the potential to turn us into addicts, always hungering for something new and prefabricated to keep us entertained. When nothing exciting is going on, we might get bored, distracted, separated from the moment. So we look for new entertainment, surf channels, flip through magazines. If caught in these rhythms, we are like tiny current-bound surface fish, floating along a two-dimensional world without any sense for the gorgeous abyss below. When these societally induced tendencies translate into the learning process, they have devastating effect."

* * * Open / Comment

2022-07-10 15:14:12 It’s worth saying: just because you are quiet doesn’t mean that you are without pride. Privately thinking you’re better than others is still pride. It’s still dangerous. “That on which you so pride yourself will be your ruin,” Montaigne had inscribed on the beam of his ceiling. It’s a quote from the playwright Menander, and it ends with “you who think yourself to be someone.”

The Danger of Early Pride
Ego is the Enemy Open / Comment

2022-07-06 10:40:44 Investment in Loss

The author narrates his mastery of the Push Hands classes in his Tai Chi journey. After receiving an invitation from his master William C. Chen, Josh says that he was of two minds before he agreed to join the class. The thing is the Tai Chi beginner class he's been taking has been a practice in which he can feel peaceful and wonderful alone, after a rough patch of the Chess Championship road he's been on since his childhood.

On the other hand, he pushes himself to level up the challenge, and maintain what he has in the class in even an increased pressure with an opponent. Besides, he explains, Tai Chi is not a clash with the opponent but an art to flow and bend with their energy, which can be an interesting opportunity to master complete relaxation under intensified situations.

After he started the class, Josh writes that he was completely astonished and puzzled by how his master and the other advanced students dissolved and defied his attacks with a little effort. It took him a long journey of being tossed around and fly and smash against walls before he even knew what was happening. The idea is, as he explains, to resist an incoming attack without resisting, which sounds absurd even to speak. Unless you have experienced it, you'll probably never get it only by knowing.

He continues his classes with deeper and rigorous exercises. He explains how he kept a wide eye for every new bit of information(verbal or physical) that he didn't know before. His master is an expert at teaching that their communication was very implicit and deep, without the need for exchange of words. Other students, even if they started the class long before him, couldn't advance because they were stuck in their own ego and habit. Rather than absorbing what's around them, they'd try to prove themselves correct as they stood their grounds. They haven't given themselves a chance to invest in loss, to make mistakes, to get beaten up as they got disappointed when they do. Josh explains how he got used to the blows of one particular strong opponent. He couldn't even see let alone dodge the other's attacks that it took him months to finally to neutralize the attacks. His fear of the shots was dead as he just took them when they came.

In conclusion, Josh states that it's fundamental to have such incremental approach to learning. You'll need to make mistakes and lose before you even get to know what you're doing. You should focus on gradual progressing, by increasing pressure and challenge, in which inevitably comes a losing and getting tossed.

The Art of Learning, Josh Watzkin Open / Comment

2022-07-06 10:40:22 Recently, I have been reading this book. It has great insights on how to tackle new things and enjoy learning by making it an interesting experience. Here is a summary from one chapter titled, Investment in Loss. Open / Comment