roceasta

Learning how to perform mental arithmetic with the aid of pencil and paper was a way to escape from the grind of farm work. One could get a respectable job as a clerk. However with the advent of electronic cash registers and smartphones a way around this later form of grind has also been found. So no need to make it compulsory. Which isn't to say that people don't choose to practice specific things they personally consider useful. Even gamers do that.

What makes the difference is that video games aren't compulsory. So they represent true play. Which is what makes them educational, unlike a school curriculum, however much it is tweaked. Well, until something more fun than video games arrives on the scene...

Absolutely. The few authors that I love the best are streets ahead of the rest. Reading other authors is for me really just a search for the Next Big Thing. As time marches on, re-reading old favourites rises in value relative to reading new stuff, on average.

>Though our eyes may pass over all of the words and our hands may flip through all of the pages, what we read is never the entire book

The idea that reading is encompassed by the eyes zig-zagging down the page like a raster scan is an example of the 'bucket theory' of the mind, as Karl Popper put it. This is where knowledge supposedly pours into the brain passively via the senses. Which is a fallacy.

>If I read for pure pleasure, what harm is there in forgetting?

This is also the reason I've never seriously tried to speed read. Perhaps I'm mistaken about this, but why wolf down an expensive meal? There's nothing to be lost from optimising pleasure since it derives from the meaning i.e. from the true content.

>When we read, certain notable phrases, concepts and ideas [...] stand out more clearly from the others.

Oh yes. This is the Searchlight Theory of the mind, where our attention is continually homing onto the most interesting or semantically useful bit of whatever we are doing.

A dream with error correction. When error correction is faulty due to being irrational, or asleep, or on certain drugs, all sorts of strange things appear.

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=Pr8s-K_TPCU#t=22s

Heavy drinking and radical indoctrination are optional

They're notionally optional but don't underestimate the effects of social pressure.

In fact, conformity prevails strongly on the academic as well as the social side of university life. People talk about discussion and perspectives but in practice they want and expect accredited professionals to conform and to believe the same things. We don't generally want our doctors, for instance, to be original and creative. (Whereas, by contrast, we can have real discussion here.)

Students want to know whether a given topic will be in the exam or not, and what the right answer is. In the arts/humanities, where fashions tend to prevail, they try hard to give approved answers in original or disguised form. I suppose this isn't surprising, historically speaking. The first universities were religious institutions founded to train priests, to inculcate doctrinal uniformity, stamp out heresies, and so on.

If we judge the rationality of institutions by whether they meet the problems they purport to address then by that standard universities are pretty irrational. In fact I think one of the main functions they serve isn't mentioned very much: getting the kids to leave home.

https://www.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/pmc/articles/PMC2684040/

>By the 1940s and 1950s, physicians and consumers regarded the use of formula as a well known, popular, and safe substitute for breastmilk. Consequently, breastfeeding experienced a steady decline until the 1970s (Fomon, 2001)

http://www.the-rathouse.com/CRContents.html

Reminds me of Daniel Dennett's example of the coffee machine that both makes the coffee and drinks it for you.

that thinking is joyful, fun, glorious

Couldn't agree more. Thinking is the only place where we can be truly free.

not laborious or error prone.

No, mistakes are inevitable. This is actually not such a bad thing because if we weren't capable of committing errors then no progress would be possible.

Yes. The emphasis carries a lot of information in addition to the simple text. I find it hard to do when reading aloud from a book I haven't myself read before. In fact I think it's one reason I tend to pick my personal childhood favourites to read.

Perhaps this is lazy. I wonder if other parents do the same?

cneos.jpl.nasa.gov/ca/

Simply deflect onto the approval-pending lunar crash site! Friendly robots will construct an Ore-some(TM) plant for processing and EM-powering fulfillment to the ZIP code of your choice.

>They can’t conceptualize that there could exist a mind of thoughts and feelings outside their own.

Presumably they don't have a concept of their own mind either. And this is despite being quite sophisticated and hosting a bunch of memes related to things like tool-use:

https://link.springer.com/article/10.1007%2Fs10071-011-0403-...

Whereas primitive humans painted pictures of themselves on cave walls. Which seems like an early attempt to explain themselves to themselves.

If we could then we'd know if the question made sense.

I like David Deutsch's criterion for assessing claims about these issues: if you can't program it, you haven't understood it.

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=J21QuHrIqXg

Objects such as books can contain knowledge without understanding anything because they don't have minds. The design of the fridge embodies knowledge about human needs, for example the need to hand-select food accurately at night. However there is neither understanding nor intuition anywhere inside that cold box about the relationship between the door opening and the light coming on.

Similarly, words, which are a type of meme (the type that can be pronounced) can exploit brains to make copies of themselves, without any understanding of this going on in those same brains.

Btw, none of this implies that animals can't think, or don't have minds, or that we shouldn't honour them. Actually I honour my fridge too...

I don't think it quite shows this. Collies and human toddlers use words (and are used by words) without understanding what they're doing or what the meaning of language is. The understanding comes later, growing over time as we attempt to explain our behaviour to ourselves. (Including reading what other people have to say about language.)

http://www.lowlatentinhibition.org/what-is-lli/

(And those who force themselves to practice are going to get injuries like repetitive strain which are really a kind of 'inner rebellion' against this forcing.)

https://www.nature.com/news/over-half-of-psychology-studies-...

http://www.scottmanning.com/content/communist-body-count/

No. It could at best defer the health costs. We need to stop being passive about this and embrace the idea of (1) life extension technologies for those who want, (2) assisted suicide for those who don't.

When this philosophical shift happens we can get much more serious about life extension research and mental well-being (purpose; reasons to live) and reduce the vast expenditures on palliative care for those who are merely waiting around to die.

This is a metaphor, because real boxers obviously do control their arms.

But substitute certain emotions (e.g. anger, fear) for the arms, emotions with which one is strongly identified, the loss of which causes a greater fear (of disappearing, of death).

>To conclude historically with my own character. I am, or rather was (for that is the style I must now use in speaking of myself, which emboldens me the more to speak my sentiments); I was, I say, a man of mild disposition, of command of temper, of an open, social, and cheerful humour, capable of attachment, but little susceptible of enmity, and of great moderation in all my passions. Even my love of literary fame, my ruling passion, never soured my temper, notwithstanding my frequent disappointments. My company was not unacceptable to the young and careless, as well as to the studious and literary; and as I took a particular pleasure in the company of modest women, I had no reason to be displeased with the reception I met with from them. In a word, though most men, any wise eminent, have found reason to complain of calumny, I never was touched, or even attacked by her baleful tooth: and though I wantonly exposed myself to the rage of both civil and religious factions, they seemed to be disarmed in my behalf of their wonted fury. My friends never had occasion to vindicate any one circumstance of my character and conduct: Not but that the zealots, we may well suppose, would have been glad to invent and propagate any story to my disadvantage, but they could never find any which they thought would wear the face of probability. I cannot say there is no vanity in making this funeral oration of myself, but I hope it is not a misplaced one; and this is a matter of fact which is easily cleared and ascertained.

https://andromeda.rutgers.edu/~jlynch/Texts/humelife.html