mengwong

This post will eventually evolve into a long essay touching on Religion 2.0, adulthood, sustainability, and society.

For now it is a place for me to write down some notes.

Today I watched a couple of friends feed their child. It was important that the child eat the carrots, tomatoes, bread, and everything else on the plate.

This struck me as an interesting cultural practice. In the Paleo tradition, none of those foods are important. Instead, the rule is: if you're not hungry, don't eat. Speaking as a former food refuser myself, it's interesting that mealtimes so often evolve into a test of wills between parent and child – a ritual that is so completely unnecessary and oftentimes harmful. I used to be beaten for not eating certain foods, or not finishing everything on my plate, or not swallowing the last bite, when I honestly couldn't eat any more. (Beaten, to be precise, means caning.)

So we train children to eat things that don't naturally taste good -- that nature didn't intend us to eat. I don't know what this is supposed to accomplish, except perhaps preparing a person for a lifetime of obesity.


Sleep is another cultural construct.

http://constantstateofflux.com/2010/01/18/i-am-awake-again-my-bimodal-sleep-pattern/


I'm beginning to shake off a lot of cultural conditioning and choose differently. For example, I have stopped using soap and shampoo.

This conversion – the conscious choice to reshape one's life – is an old trope. It is at the heart of the Rational Enlightenment.



In the religion space, when it happens to people, they either find religion or discover atheism. William James called those who have been through it, the twice-born.

But I never had the chance to throw off a given religion; my parents raised me atheist and I'm quite happy that way.

My term for it is "Second Culture". We all speak a first language; we may pick up a second language. We all grow up with a first culture; we later choose a second.

Yesterday at lunch Joi Ito gently mocked founders who have trouble hiring talent.

"Where do we find engineers?" distressed entrepreneurs would ask. "The job boards are no good."

"Maybe start with IRC," Joi said. "You want Ruby programmers, try the #ruby channel, duh."

This made total sense. IRC was my entrée to the Perl community, the Unix community, the opensource community, the startup community. To me, Josh Schachter isn't the guy who started Delicious; he's FMH from #memepool. IRC is how I know Vipul (Cloudmark) and Nat (O'Reilly) and Rael (Stikkit, Twitter) and nocarrier (Napster) and coral (Topsy). I've been on IRC since 1992. Lots of friends know me by my IRC nickname.

But some people are afraid of IRC. If the docs say "for more information, join freenode and go on #ruby" they will say, "oh, god, not another technology. I don't want to go to the trouble of researching IRC, downloading a client, learning a new vocabulary, figuring out how to join and leave channels and set a nickname. It takes too much time. Isn't there something easier?"

At TEDxKL one of the talks emphasized that good leaders are good at learning new things: not just declarative knowledge but procedural. In other words, they're good at transforming themselves and learning whatever skills are needed to rise to the occasion. If the job requires that they learn IRC, they do it. It's not a big deal.

But for some people, learning new things is a big deal. For most people, in fact, years of school has taught them that they're stupid, that learning new things is fraught with failure, potentially painful, best avoided. Or maybe they just don't like doing hard things. Maybe they lack motivation.

These people may be very intelligent – like a battery with high voltage – but they also have high internal resistance.



Po Bronson explored this paradox, that intelligent people are often more afraid of new challenges.

What's your internal resistance to learning new things?

Krishnamurti says: Men and women of balance see the true in the false and the false in the true.

How to eat fish? You eat the flesh and spit out the bones.

There is a unique strain of stupidity which flourishes on Usenet, on Slashdot, and on the Internet generally. It is exacerbated by the electronic ease with which one may reply to a message, elide huge portions of quoted matter with which one cannot find fault, and highlight only that portion which is arguable.

It turns people into cavillers and quibblers. Into twits.

This stupidity is so pronounced that it got a special mention in Chris Crawford's piece on Games for Women.

At this point, there's always some twit who points out that there are some women who can run faster than some men. Indeed so, but noting an exception to a generalization does not disprove the generalization; it establishes only that the generalization is not an absolute law.

Three hundred years earlier, Ben Franklin comments:

There was another bookish lad in the town, John Collins by name, with whom I was intimately acquainted. We sometimes disputed, and very fond we were of argument, and very desirous of confuting one another, which disputatious turn, by the way, is apt to become a very bad habit, making people often extremely disagreeable in company by the contradiction that is necessary to bring it into practice; and thence, besides souring and spoiling the conversation, is productive of disgusts and, perhaps enmities where you may have occasion for friendship. I had caught it by reading my father's books of dispute about religion. Persons of good sense, I have since observed, seldom fall into it, except lawyers, university men, and men of all sorts that have been bred at Edinborough.

In school they taught that it is important to be right; that in the search for truth there is no room for etiquette.

It took me a while to learn that etiquette is what makes the search for truth possible.

Now I believe that in 99% of cases -- in every social setting, in other words -- it is better to be agreeable than to be right. (The rest of the time, when you're debating whether to launch the Space Shuttle in freezing weather, groupthink be damned.)