A spicy hypothesis raised by this is that socializing too much with children is simply not good for your intellectual development. (I’m not going to test that hypothesis!)
Or, more likely, these children were unusual to begin with. Foucault, for all the weakness in his thinking, understood this pretty well. Strange people can help society to change. But remember, for every odd fellow ten standard deviations up there is another odd fellow ten standard deviations down.
^ Growing pains.
You are both more correct than me, my wording was quite strong because I just felt like a discussion of the importance of a non-sendentary lifestyle for improvements in thinking was completely unadressed on the site. Hopefully someone else can read more carefully and help us to optimize based on our many varied characteristics. Thanks for the emotional dampening!
Playful thinking sets up questions in your brain that you wouldn’t have known how to set up just by explicitly trying to set up questions. A question is a record of a struggle to deal with some context. These questions, like the dozen problems Feynman carries around with him, set you up to connect with new ideas more thoroughly.
Reminds me of Feynman’s story about how a plate got him out of a depressive funk. https://kongar-olondar.bandcamp.com/track/at-cornell-part-2
You’ve reinvented God. Imagine if you could delude yourself into always thinking that someone was watching you. In you believed in God irrationally on rational grounds you might be able get the same effect.
Non-athletic thinkers are myopic. I see at least three very important reasons any rationalist must value exercise.
As someone who has trained extremely hard in distance running, sports in general and athletic conditioning in particular create an intuitive understanding of the fallaciousness of Cartesian Dualism and the accuracy of materialism in the sense that the mind is merely a part of the body.
Physical challenges also force one to understand the limitations of Kahneman’s “system two.” For example, one may know what it means to not start a race too quickly and then “die” (running jargon for running out of steam prematurely), but repeated failures in actual races teach one to realize the limitations of one’s rationality, especially under stress (even if distance running is classified as eustress rather than distress; remember, cortisol levels & arousal are the same in either case).
Conditioning has been shown to increase cognitive performance. This study notes a difference better reaction time in fit adolescents (no causal link, n = 30). This review shows decreased “system 2” aging in physically fit elderly individuals (causality likely, preponderance of evidence). Acute exercise has also been shown to cause immediate improvements in decision making.
In your attempt to sound Rational, you have merely restated the platitude, “would you jump off a bridge if your friends did it?” You claim that you are a follower of efficient markets, but then you say that this was an acceptable exception. Great news, you got lucky this once. Don’t defect again, you overestimate yourself.
If the false positive rate is 5 percent, 50 out of every one thousand will test false positive. An additional person will test true positive. Therefore 51 will test positive. The probability a positive tester being positive is 1 out of 51. Multiply to 2 out of 102, and it becomes clear .02 overestimates the true value of those who would test positive as 2 hundredths is greater than 2 hundred-and-secondths.
Agreed. Unfortunately, I do not have the intellectual acumen to translate this into a playful rant, so I am afraid I must leave this as is.