I would not worry overmuch about the long-term negative effects of your studying for the bar: with the possible exception of the “overly sincere” types who fall very hard for cults and other forms of indoctrination, people have a lot of antibodies to this kind of thing.
You will continue to be entagled with reality after you pass the exam, and you can do things, like read works of social science that carve reality at the joints, to speed up the rate at which your continued entaglement with reality with cancel out any falsehoods you have to cram for now. Specifically, there are works about the law that do carve reality at the joints—Nick Szabo’s online writings IMO fall in that category. Nick has a law degree, by the way, and there is certainly nothing wrong with his ability to perceive reality correctly.
ADDED. The things that are really damaging to a person’s rationality, IMHO, are natural human motivations. When for example you start practicing, if you were to decide to do a lot of trials, and you learned to derive pleasure—to get a real high—from the combative and adversarial part of that, so that the high you got from winning with a slick and misleading angle trumped the high you get from satisfying you curiosity and from refining and finding errors in your model of reality—well, I would worry about that a lot more than your throwing yourself fully into winning on this exam because IMHO the things we derive no pleasure from, but do to achieve some end we care about (like advancing in our career by getting a credential) have a lot less influence on who we turn out to be than things we do because we find them intrinsically rewarding.
One more thing: we should not all make our living as computer programmers. That would make the community less robust than it otherwise would be :)
I would not worry overmuch about the long-term negative effects of your studying for the bar: with the possible exception of the “overly sincere” types who fall very hard for cults and other forms of indoctrination, people have a lot of antibodies to this kind of thing.
You will continue to be entagled with reality after you pass the exam, and you can do things, like read works of social science that carve reality at the joints, to speed up the rate at which your continued entaglement with reality with cancel out any falsehoods you have to cram for now. Specifically, there are works about the law that do carve reality at the joints—Nick Szabo’s online writings IMO fall in that category. Nick has a law degree, by the way, and there is certainly nothing wrong with his ability to perceive reality correctly.
ADDED. The things that are really damaging to a person’s rationality, IMHO, are natural human motivations. When for example you start practicing, if you were to decide to do a lot of trials, and you learned to derive pleasure—to get a real high—from the combative and adversarial part of that, so that the high you got from winning with a slick and misleading angle trumped the high you get from satisfying you curiosity and from refining and finding errors in your model of reality—well, I would worry about that a lot more than your throwing yourself fully into winning on this exam because IMHO the things we derive no pleasure from, but do to achieve some end we care about (like advancing in our career by getting a credential) have a lot less influence on who we turn out to be than things we do because we find them intrinsically rewarding.
One more thing: we should not all make our living as computer programmers. That would make the community less robust than it otherwise would be :)
Thank you! This is really helpful, and I look forward to reading Szabo in August.