I often find myself getting drowsy while driving. The most effective thing I know of to do about this is to eat sunflower seeds (in the shell). I suspect this would also work during lectures.
jfm
Karma: 64
I’m dealing with this currently due to mild ongoing sleep-dep. A couple of suggestions. For putting the anxious/panicky emotions into context, I’m going to recommend daily meditation. You might start with Understanding vipassana meditation on this site. For focusing on tasks—this is the hardest for me. The Pomodoro Technique works for me—for a while, before it stops working. But it does help me get over productivity slumps from time to time.
You’d probably be well-served by having a look at Claude Levi-Strauss’s “The Raw and the Cooked”, which looks at quite a lot of binary oppositions (raw/cooked; nature/culture; female/male) in quite a few traditional societies, and how various binary oppositions get tied to the gender binary.
I wonder whether a continual rear-guard action forestalling collapse would be considered “business as usual” or not. I suspect yes, and that someone sufficiently cynical would say this is what is already happening.
I can imagine alternatives that can’t be considered either singularity, collapse, or business-as-usual—a resource-based economy, for example—but I don’t consider them any more likely than either of the first two. Political trends strongly support collapse.
The novel Toolmaker Koan by John McLoughlin doesn’t just feature dinosaurs on the moon, it features a dinosaur generation-ship held in the outer solar system by an alien machine intelligence. A ripping good yarn, and a meditation on the Fermi Paradox.
Natural justice is a pledge of reciprocal benefit, to prevent one man from harming or being harmed by another.
Those animals which are incapable of making binding agreements with one another not to inflict nor suffer harm are without either justice or injustice; and likewise for those peoples who either could not or would not form binding agreements not to inflict nor suffer harm.
There never was such a thing as absolute justice, but only agreements made in mutual dealings among men in whatever places at various times providing against the infliction or suffering of harm.
~ Epicurus, Principal Doctrines
I generally don’t trust karma systems on discussion/comment sites, period. They seem to tend over time to get subverted into one of several different failure modes:
Enforcement of group-think
Status games unrelated to site/discussion content
Mechanical manipulation of karma thresholds for the lulz ^W ^W trolling purposes
I was going to mention examples of each from other sites, but decided that that wasn’t very useful, because it would require familiarity with those sites, and possibly inspire quibbling over particular cases. I haven’t been around Less Wrong long enough to observe how well it works here.
I don’t think it counts as dark side epistemology. As one of the anthropologists opposing the change was quoted in the Psychology Today article as saying, it’s more a matter of cultural anthropology coming to see itself as a kind of esoteric journalism than a rejection of empirical data as such. It’s also part of an ongoing intradisciplinary conflict between cultural anthropology and the other three fields of anthropology: archaeology, biological anthropology, and linguistics. The Chronicle of Higher Education article is a little clearer and less polemical than the PT blog cited, though the author has his own credibility problems.
It’s entirely possible that the end result will be the Society for Anthropological Sciences seceding, and the AAA won’t be the professional association for anthropologists anymore. It’s already the case that archaeologists and biological anthropologists rarely attend the AAA annual meetings.