Action Figure Daniel

Category: Reading

  • “The Organized Mind” by Daniel J Levitin

    • Memory has a retrieval problem, not a storage problem
    • Our brains organize things but not prioritize them
    • Highly successful people have systems in place to relieve their mind of random distractions
    • The brain is always looks for difference
      • Attentional filtering excludes the common
    • Imagining something helps us hone our senses to find the thing
    • We can use order (for example, a physical boundary) to predetermine security and safeness
    • We have “rehearsal loops” to keep things that we need to remember, remembered
      • Writing things down releases that effort
    • Languages evolved to categorize things
    • Applying a category is more important than the category names
    • It is difficult to make decisions with a lack is information
    • Women’s cortisol levels jump when confronted with clutter
    • Improve organization to make the time you spend more meaningful
    • We can gather things to make ourselves more efficient later
    • There is a literal comfort in belonging
    • Online marriages tend to end in fewer divorces
    • We see individuals in the “in group” as being distinctive and people of the “out group” as being all the same
    • We notice correlations but not lack there of
    • The optimal number of pieces of information is 5, we generally do okay until 10
    • “A man with one watch always knows what time it is. A man with two never knows.”

  • “Nature’s Best Hope” by Douglas W Tallaway

    • “Animals live in nature and nature is somewhere else”
    • Nature should be saved where it is but not where people are
      • Wilson Robert MacArthur
      • The Diversity of Life
    • Half of the US’s biodiversity is East of the Mississippi
    • Art shifted from religion to nature as nature started disappearing
    • Current policies are maligned because they focus on saving small, isolated habitats instead of ecosystems
    • “Islands are where species go to die”
    • Size and isolation matter
    • Forest edges are more dangerous than internal sections
    • Isolation gives forests more edges and fewer interiors
    • Lawn maintenance uses as much fertilizer as the whole agricultural industry
    • 60% of western water usage is for lawn
    • We could not tolerate intruders because resources were so constrained
    • Tribalism was important to survival
    • Humans prefer short grass
    • Intergression is where the foreign plant breeds with a near native plant
    • Insects are very picky eaters
    • Specie diversity is important for ecosystems
    • Nestlings typically eat full meals 30-40 times a day
    • Meet the needs of the specialists and the generalists will follow
    • Think of turf as an area rug, not wall-to-wall carpet

  • “The Nature of Oaks” by Douglas W Tallaway

    • Oak trees support more life than any other tree
    • Oaks and jays complement each other well
    • Oak trees “mast” where they periodically surge in acorn production, then produce fewer the next year
    • Then tends to greatly reduce the predators
    • “What dislodges a caterpillar is surprise, not force”
    • Weevils are the broadest genus of animal in the world

  • “Screaming on the Inside” by Jessica Grose

    • As work shifted to industry, women stayed at home, but idleness is devil’s work so “motherhood” became their work
    • Being able to administer pain killers shifted birthing from midwives to hospitals
    • Self-care time was added on top of existing expectations
    • Redefining GDP to only include transactions where cash changes hands diminished the role of women in society
    • Bringing advertisers to blogs stripped them of controversy
    • The migration from blogs to Instagram shifted the emphasis to visuals

  • “Winners Takes All” by Anand Giridharadas

    • Much of today’s “social change” is about steering changes away from solutions that harm the wealthy
    • Entering the world of money to address the problems caused by money
    • Ask what has been done before asking what can be done
    • “Win-win” is about solving problems without addressing root causes
    • Americans are more productive than ever, but that productivity is captured by the elite
    • Connecting networks (like Uber and Facebook) are a double standard if they can dictate terms and disavow control
    • Voices of the critics are neglected while we embrace the voices that “ride the wave”
    • “Thought leader”
      • Focus on the victim, not the perpetrator
      • Personalize the political
        • Learn to zoom in and tell narratives
    • Beliefs naturally shift in accord with interests
    • The powerful benefit the most from lawlessness
    • We are often trying to solve our problems with the same tools that made them
    • Never ask the wealthy to do less harm
    • Carnegie argued that the rich should be allowed to make as much money as possible, any way possible, and then give away that money better than the poor would
    • Some where’s vs Every where’s
      • Some where’s motivate us to action and hide the scale of the problems
    • Globalist have “correct” answers that are arrived at by consensus not democracy
    • Politics is meant to create ideas that are easy to like but difficult to love
    • Globalization is, in part, trying to bypass or compensate for local politics that are not working
    • Private investments can crowd out public funding
    • “You should do it because it is the right thing to do, but it is not enough to do the right thing, so it is also good business”
    • “I can speak in the name of my child, but other people are not your children”