"bukvich@[EMAIL PROTECTED]
" <bukvich@[EMAIL PROTECTED]
> wrote:
> So, to recapitulate, here is the evidence for all you empiricists. On
> the one side we have the Seligman et al experiments which show
> factually that it pays to be optimistic. On the other side is all the
> studies which show that people with low self-esteem and depression
> have a better grasp of reality. How to choose which way to go?
I don't see an inconsistency between those.
Reality is, three quarters of the earth's surface is ocean. So if you
pick a place at random to be, there's a strong chance you'll be swimming
with the fi****es. But instead you are sitting in air conditioning
because you didn't accept a random reality. You chose one you wanted and
did what it took to get there and stay there.
Reality is, a whole lot of children go to bed hungry because their
parents can't feed them enough. A whole lot of people are malnourished
-- not by choice, from eating McDonald's etc, but because they just
don't have a way to get adequate food. You aren't one of them. You
carefully chose a life that left you in a special reality with respect
to food, not an average life or pot luck.
I don't know your life story so I will make up one that fits a few
details, to illustrate the simple obvious point.
----
Buckie went to a state school. At freshman orientation, the lecturer
said (among other things) "Two thirds of you are going to flunk out this
year. All of you freshmen, look to your left ... look to your right ....
This time next year, two of you will be gone." This was school policy.
They let practically anybody enroll, on the theory that all state
citizens deserved a chance at college. Then they flunked out two thirds
of them no matter how good the median was.
Buckie's friends Abe and Charlie thought about this. They knew the odds
were against them. Realisticly they didn't have an even chance. Abe got
upset about the unfairness of it. He took a philosophy of religion
course and read Job. He raged against God and the university system.
Charlie felt unlucky, but he was comforted when he drank. Sometimes he
met co-eds who felt the same way, and they had fun together. But Buckie
for no good reason was optimistic. He studied hard because he wanted to
get ahead and he thought this was his big chance. And at the end of
freshman year, Buckie passed. Charlie got a job as a plumber's helper
and spent his money in bars. Abe got online at libraries and posted to
newsgroups about the unfairness of life. Buckie made lots of money at a
series of jobs that were in some ways menial but highly technical, work
that was in demand but that few could perform. In good years he had a
short commute and a lot of time to think about whether it's better to be
optimistic or realistic.
> Usually I try and do both because I haven't seen any convincing
> evidence that being wishy-washy is an evolutionary burden. I don't
> believe there is any answer to the question. I have it in my Don
> Quixote file of questions that haunt me that I will never have the
> answer to.
"Be careful what you strive for. You might get it." Is it better to try
to get what you want, or is it better to accept pot luck? How could you
test it, unless you did it for a lifetime both ways and compared?
Ideally you'd do it both ways enough times to get a statistically
significant sample.... "Count no man lucky until after he's dead."
> Is she faithful?
Would you rather know, or would you rather enjoy her company? If you're
concerned whether her children are yours, these days there are DNA
tests.
> Do I have cancer?
That one's complicated, isn't it? If you have cancer and you don't know,
you can continue your pointless existence unimpeded by the cancer until
it makes its presence unignorable. If you have cancer and you find out,
you can do things that might possibly make it go away, or that might
slow its progression without unduly interfering with your life. Or you
might go overboard and make your own life miserable about it, perhaps
doing things that will actually shorten your life and take all the
enjoyment out of it in the meantime. How do you know what will happen?
Then maybe you don't have cancer but you get a false positive test....
Here's what I did. I was working in a medical center and I'd seen a
certain amount of treatment. One morning as I was waking up I massaged
my abdomen and found a peculiar lump. It was about half the size of a
pingpong ball, and I could move it under the relaxed muscles, up almost
to the diaphragm. It was a tumor. I thought about the kind of treatment
I'd get if I was diagnosed with cancer. I decided not to tell anyone. I
just didn't want to deal with those people. Two years later I checked on
it again. It was now much larger, and my life generally was going so
much worse I was ready to get it diagnosed. Ultrasound showed it about
2x3x5". The student health doctor suggested immediate surgery. He was a
retired surgeon himself, doing student health as a sort of
post-retirement hobby. I had thought I was ready to do something, but
faced with immediate surgery, I was not so sure. Particularly when they
absolutely refused to use hypnosis or local anesthesia and let me watch.
Or even videotape it from a reasonable distance. If somebody was going
to cut me open again I wanted to see, but they had an unstated objection
to anybody watching who might possibly witness for malpractice
litigation. My physician told me that he was pretty sure it was due to a
fish bone. You eat a fish bone, the bone slips through the intestinal
wall, and you build up a lot of tissue around it, resulting in a tumor
in the omentum. Kind of like a pearl but grosser. I pointed out that the
published literature said that never happened. He said that he had taken
out a number of tumors with fish bones in them. Still, there was a
chance it was cancerous and I should get it taken out while I was sure
my insurance covered it. I decided not to. It didn't seem worth the
risk. Various of my bosses felt I was being unreasonable. One of them
was getting a hysterectomy at about that time. "You're not using it
anyway and it will only cause trouble later." I did some mental
exercises directing my immune system against the thing, on the
assumption that they would probably be harmless. Of course there was the
chance it was a useful organ that just popped up because I needed it. My
quick lit search had shown that the MDs usually didn't consider that
possibility unless it was two symmetric tumors. Why would I need an
extra organ? I had started using popcorn salt in place of table salt
some months before I first noticed it, since I liked the taste. I looked
again at the ingredient list and threw away the box. Just in case, not a
lot to lose....
Some years later another MD prescribed a CAT scan. The thing was
calcified, and she thought it was no danger. She said I could get it
taken out or not, my choice. I left it in. It causes a little trouble
with a few yoga exercises but nothing else yet.
> Is it true that a third of American women have been diddled in their
> home and a quarter of them have been raped?
Who knows? It depends on the randomness of the samples and the
reliability of the responders. So, do you want to interact much with a
woman bho thinks she's been raped? There are plenty of them around if
you do. Do you want to interact with a woman who doesn't think she's
been raped? There are lots of those too. Sometimes they have the same
symptoms. Is it that the ones who think they haven't been raped are
repressing the memories? Are some of the women who think they've been
raped suffering from false memories? Do the symptoms come from something
else? It's a big world. Bad things happen in it sometimes. Hard to get
much exactness about the numbers. You get some choices for your life.
Would you like to be sympathetic and useful to apparent rape victims who
might be grateful for your assistance? Would you like to be attractive
to capable women who don't appear to have anything wrong with them?
Choose what you want for your life and you might find it. You might
fail. You might not like your choice when you get it. You can't get 100%
reliable statistics about the big world but to some extent you can
choose which part of reality you experience.
> Did William Casey collude with King Fahd to
> flood the oil market in the 1980's and destroy my world view in the
> process as inconsequential collateral damage in the geopolitical
> struggle?
Strong reason to think so, apart from the destroying your world view
part. But there's a chance it was all a coincidence, I guess.
> Would you rather be happy and stupid or smart and miserable?
Once you choose, how do you make your choice real? If you prefer to be
smart and miserable, it's clear you can make yourself miserable but how
do you make yourself smarter? If you choose to be stupid and happy, how
do you keep yourself happy while you make yourself stupider? Doesn't
your ability to do the first decrease the better you do the second?
> (Actually I am 95% sure she isn't faithful; I just put that in there
> for literary elan')
Do you want her to be? Have you given her incentives? What about her
identity needs, does her sense of identity demand she be faithful to
you, or does it demand that she keep some independence, or what? Would
you know? That's the single most im****tant factor. Then there's
excitement. Can you somehow make it more exciting for her to be faithful
to you than to have secret affairs? And then security is a lower
priority. Would she feel more secure being faithful to you, or more
secure having some alternatives available?
> Anyway she says the problem with most trance activity is it's not only
> not higher consciousness but it's false consciousness.
Does she say what the difference is?
> Which I think
> is her value system being a little corrupted by protestant work ethics
> (she is a _jungian_ after all, although jung didn't work for his
> fortune he married it) and the idea that if it doesn't pay it's a
> waste of time. Talk about your false consciousness. But she was really
> adamant about what I could be doing which would really be worth my
> while with all the time I am sitting in my recliner chair observing my
> breath going in and out, which she considers totally silly.
Apart from her judgement, the idea might be worth looking at. Like, if
the central thing is breathing, you might get quicker or even better
results with some sort of biofeedback. You pay for some equipment which
you can easily afford, and as a result it gets easier to observe your
results and easier to train. If you buy the right stuff. It might be a
win.
But then, maybe there are big side benefits she doesn't know about. I
read about japanese(?) psychiatrists who treated some of their guilty
patients by giving them big bowls full of tiny beads in mixed colors.
They made them separate out the beads by color, one bead at a time. The
immediate obvious benefit was practice at hand-eye coordination and
such. And of course the beads got sorted. But the patients felt they'd
been properly punished and didn't need further punishment, etc. How they
thought about it was more im****tant than the minutia of what they did.
If you spend a lot of breathing time halfway-thinking about a variety of
other things, that might be a big deal. Or it might not. She shouldn't
be sure she understands what you get out of it, unless it somehow
benefits her to make that mistake.
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