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How can we distinguish what is biologically determined from what people merely try to justify through biological myths? A good rule of thumb is ‘Biology enables, Culture forbids.’ Biology is willing to tolerate a very wide spectrum of possibilities. It’s culture that obliges people to realize some possibilities while forbidding others. Biology enables women to have children – some cultures oblige women to realize this possibility. Biology enables men to enjoy sex with one another – some cultures forbid them to realize this possibility. Culture tends to argue that it forbids only that which is unnatural. But from a biological perspective, nothing is unnatural. Whatever is possible is by definition also natural. A truly unnatural behavior, one that goes against the laws of nature, simply cannot exist.
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Yuval Noah Harari (קיצור תולדות האנושות)
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We are not our feelings. We are not our moods. We are not even our thoughts. The very fact that we can think about these things separates us from them and from the animal world. Self-awareness enables us to stand apart and examine even the way we “see” ourselves—our self-paradigm, the most fundamental paradigm of effectiveness. It affects not only our attitudes and behaviors, but also how we see other people.
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Stephen R. Covey (The 7 Habits of Highly Effective People: Powerful Lessons in Personal Change)
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Politicians are propaganda, the people with guns are the enforcers and the media is the enthusiastic lapdog who enables the entire behavior and acts as the verbal abuser against those who deviate from nodding their heads at the vast statues of evil that we inherited.
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Stefan Molyneux
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The Four Noble Truths are pragmatic rather than dogmatic. They suggest a course of action to be followed rather than a set of dogmas to be believed. The four truths are prescriptions for behavior rather than descriptions of reality. The Buddha compares himself to a doctor who offers a course of therapeutic treatment to heal one’s ills. To embark on such a therapy is not designed to bring one any closer to ‘the Truth’ but to enable one’s life to flourish here and now, hopefully leaving a legacy that will continue to have beneficial repercussions after one’s death. (154)
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Stephen Batchelor (Confession of a Buddhist Atheist)
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Secrets are the enablers of antisocial, immoral and destructive behavior.
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Dave Eggers (The Circle)
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I mean—are some men just flawed by nature? Or do we enable their bad behavior, make it worse in a way because we hide it, and don’t demand better from them?
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Lisa Unger (Confessions on the 7:45)
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You’re afraid that you’re ruining relationships by acknowledging reality. As if it’s your responsibility to hide or enable another person’s unacceptable behavior in order to keep your relationship afloat.
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Jackson MacKenzie (Whole Again: Healing Your Heart and Rediscovering Your True Self After Toxic Relationships and Emotional Abuse)
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I thought I had made this discovery: that there are unexpected, constant repetitions in our behavior. The right combination of circumstances had enabled me to observe them. One seldom has the chance to be a clandestine witness of several talks between the same people. But scenes are repeated in life, just as they are in the theatre.
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Adolfo Bioy Casares (The Invention of Morel)
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Whether we are speaking of a flower or an oak tree, of an earthworm or a beautiful bird, of an ape or a person, we will do well, I believe, to recognize that life is an active process, not a passive one. Whether the stimulus arises from within or without, whether the environment is favorable or unfavorable, the behaviors of an organism can be counted on to be in the direction of maintaining, enhancing, and reproducing itself. This is the very nature of the process we call life. This tendency is operative at all times. Indeed, only the presence or absence of this total directional process enables us to tell whether a given organism is alive or dead.
The actualizing tendency can, of course, be thwarted or warped, but it cannot be destroyed without destroying the organism. I remember that in my boyhood, the bin in which we stored our winter's supply of potatoes was in the basement, several feet below a small window. The conditions were unfavorable, but the potatoes would begin to sprout—pale white sprouts, so unlike the healthy green shoots they sent up when planted in the soil in the spring. But these sad, spindly sprouts would grow 2 or 3 feet in length as they reached toward the distant light of the window. The sprouts were, in their bizarre, futile growth, a sort of desperate expression of the directional tendency I have been describing. They would never become plants, never mature, never fulfill their real potential. But under the most adverse circumstances, they were striving to become. Life would not give up, even if it could not flourish. In dealing with clients whose lives have been terribly warped, in working with men and women on the back wards of state hospitals, I often think of those potato sprouts. So unfavorable have been the conditions in which these people have developed that their lives often seem abnormal, twisted, scarcely human. Yet, the directional tendency in them can be trusted. The clue to understanding their behavior is that they are striving, in the only ways that they perceive as available to them, to move toward growth, toward becoming. To healthy persons, the results may seem bizarre and futile, but they are life's desperate attempt to become itself. This potent constructive tendency is an underlying basis of the person-centered approach.
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Carl R. Rogers
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Imagine that while scuba diving, you suddenly see a shark glide into view. Your heart starts to pound and your anxiety skyrockets. You’re terrified, which is a perfectly rational and understandable feeling. Now imagine that your marine biology training enables you to identify it as a Reef Shark, which you know doesn’t prey on anything as large as you. Your anxiety disappears. Instead you feel excited and curious to observe the shark’s behavior.
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Douglas Stone (Difficult Conversations: How to Discuss What Matters Most)
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I think the only choice that will enable us to hold to our vision is one that abandons the concept of naming enemies and adopts a concept familiar to the nonviolent tradition: naming behavior that is oppressive
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Barbara Deming
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It’s not about how women are deficient. It’s more about how men are deficient. Our social deficiencies, lack of perspective, or whatever you want to call it, is what enables us to study one species of dragonfly for twenty years, or sit in front of a computer for a hundred hours a week writing code. This is not the behavior of a well-balanced and healthy person, but it can obviously lead to great advances in synthetic fibers. Or whatever.
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Neal Stephenson (Cryptonomicon)
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But we can’t enable bad behavior in ourselves and others and call it love. We can’t tolerate destructive patterns and call it love. And we can’t pride ourselves on being loyal and longsuffering in our relationships when it’s really perpetuating violations of what God says love is.
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Lysa TerKeurst (Good Boundaries and Goodbyes: Loving Others Without Losing the Best of Who You Are)
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You’re a good friend. Thank you for enabling my bad behavior.” “It’s what friends are for.
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Tiffany Reisz (Her Halloween Treat (Men at Work, #1))
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A person’s outlook on life colors their interpretation of specific events. Human beings’ behavioral and thinking patterns enable people to thrive or cause them to live in despondency and despair.
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Kilroy J. Oldster (Dead Toad Scrolls)
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But weeping with them and rejoicing with them does not mean trying to take control of their out-of-control choices and behaviors. We can forgive them. But we cannot control them. And we should not enable them.
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Lysa TerKeurst (Forgiving What You Can't Forget: Discover How to Move On, Make Peace with Painful Memories, and Create a Life That’s Beautiful Again)
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Since emotions are few and reasons many, the behavior or a crowd can be
more easily predicted than the behavior of one person can. And that, in turn, means that if laws are to be developed that enable the current of history to be predicted, then one must deal with large populations, the larger the better. That might itself be the First Law of Psychohistory, the key to the study of Humanics. Yet.'
R. Giskard Reventlov
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Isaac Asimov (Robots and Empire (Robot, #4))
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Talking to oneself is a recognized means to learn, in fact, self-speak may be the seed concept behind human consciousness. Private conversation that we hold with ourselves might represent the preeminent means to provoke the speaker into thinking (a form of cognitive auto-stimulation), modify behavior, and perhaps even amend the functional architecture of the plastic human brain. Writing out our private talks with oneself enables a person to “see” what they think, a process that invites reflection, ongoing thoughtful discourse with the self, and refinement of our thinking patterns and beliefs. Internal sotto voice conversations with our private-self provide several advantages, but most people find it difficult to maintain self-speak for an extended period. Internal dialogue must compete with external distractions. Writing allows a person to resume a personal dialogue where they left off before interrupted by outside stimuli. A written disquisition also provides a permanent record that a person can examine, amend, supplement, update, or reject.
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Kilroy J. Oldster (Dead Toad Scrolls)
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Time and again, I have asked myself why therapy works for some people while others remain the prisoners of their symptoms despite years of analysis or therapeutic care. In each and every case I examined, I was able to establish that when people found the kind of therapeutic care and companionship that enabled them to discover their own story and give free expression to their indignation at their parents’ behavior, they were able to liberate themselves from the maltreated child’s destructive attachment. As adults they were able to take their lives into their own hands and did not need to hate their parents. The opposite was the case with people whose therapists enjoined them to forgive and forget, actually believing that such forgiveness could have a salutary, curative effect. They remained trapped in the position of small children who believe they love their parents but in fact allow themselves to be controlled all their lives by the internalized parents and ultimately develop some kind of illness that leads to premature death. Such dependency actively fosters the hatred that, though repressed, remains active, and it drives them to direct their aggression at innocent people. We only hate as long as we feel totally powerless. I
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Alice Miller (The Body Never Lies: The Lingering Effects of Hurtful Parenting)
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Finally, methods of control can be direct if a government is able to implement rewards and punishments based on behavior. Such a system treats people as reinforcement learning algorithms, training them to optimize the objective set by the state. The temptation for a government, particularly one with a top-down, engineering mind-set, is to reason as follows: it would be better if everyone behaved well, had a patriotic attitude, and contributed to the progress of the country; technology enables measurement of individual behavior, attitudes, and contributions; therefore, everyone will be better off if we set up a technology-based system of monitoring and control based on rewards and punishments.
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Stuart Russell (Human Compatible: Artificial Intelligence and the Problem of Control)
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Avoid enablers. These are people who make it easy for you to perform your self-destructive behavior. People you go on a smoking break with. People who encourage you to take risks. Your partner, if he or she encourages you to be lazy or feeds you too much food. Try to enlist these people in your reform efforts, and if you can’t, put some distance between you.
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Richard O'Connor (Rewire: Change Your Brain to Break Bad Habits, Overcome Addictions, Conquer Self-Destructive Behavior)
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I'm really not quite as frippery a fellow as you seem to think! I own that in my grasstime I committed a great many follies and extravagances, but, believe me, I've long since out-grown them! I don't think they were any worse than what nine out of ten youngsters commit, but unfortunately I achieved, through certain circumstances, a notoriety which most young men escape. I was born with a natural aptitude for the sporting pursuits you regard with so much distrust, and I inherited, at far too early an age, a fortune which not only enabled me to indulge my tastes in the most expensive manner imaginable, but which made me an object of such interest that everything I did was noted, and talked of. That's heady stuff for greenhorns, you know! There was a time when I gave the gossips plenty to talk about. But do give me credit for having seen the error of my ways!
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Georgette Heyer (The Nonesuch)
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The purpose of setting a goal is not to hit the goal. The real purpose of setting a goal is to develop yourself into the type of person who can achieve your goals, regardless of whether you hit any particular one or not. Some goals you’ll reach, and some you won’t. It is who you become by giving it everything you have until the last moment—regardless of your results—that enables you to develop the mindset and behaviors that will help you achieve bigger and bigger goals for the rest of your life.
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Hal Elrod (The Miracle Equation: The Two Decisions That Turn Your Biggest Goals from Possible, to Probable, to Inevitable)
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You don’t have to be a rocket scientist to see that there is something seriously wrong with this system. Capitalism is a system that puts rich people on a pedestal, legalizes greed, and enables the rich to exploit the poor.
It’s morally wrong.
What kind of a God would support something so immoral? Would Jesus support the exploitation of the poor by the rich? No, of course not.
If you think of yourself as a follower of Christ’s teachings, if you consider yourself a good person, you are morally obligated to be against greed. It’s your duty as a good person to be against exploitation. It’s your moral duty to be against predatory capitalism.
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Oliver Markus Malloy (How to Defeat the Trump Cult: Want to Save Democracy? Share This Book)
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Bill Torbert, that “if you are not aware of how you are part of the problem, you can’t be part of the solution.” By contrast, systems thinking enables people to identify high-leverage interventions based on deep insights into root causes that incorporate their own thinking and behavior.
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David Peter Stroh (Systems Thinking For Social Change: A Practical Guide to Solving Complex Problems, Avoiding Unintended Consequences, and Achieving Lasting Results)
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Enablers are the people who support and defend the narcissist. Narcissists recruit enablers to their side. Enablers are usually called “flying monkeys”, and they enable the narcissist by tolerating their behavior or saving them from the catastrophes they create in their lives. These are the people who say, “She’s your mother; you need to forgive her.
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Caroline Foster (Narcissistic Mothers: How to Handle a Narcissistic Parent and Recover from CPTSD (Adult Children of Narcissists Recovery Book 1))
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Feelings follow correct behaviors, not the other way around. Make right choices to honor God, and your feelings will eventually catch up. And though at first following God this way may appear to make your life harder, it actually does the exact opposite. It makes your attitude more in line with His, thus enabling you to weather whatever comes your way.
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Lysa TerKeurst (What Happens When Women Walk in Faith: Trusting God Takes You to Amazing Places)
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Defaulting to the self in explanations of human behavior enables us to draw an abrupt stop in the chain of causality when trying to understand thoughts and actions.
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Bruce Hood
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Active loyalists do not merely support the president but publicly defend even his most controversial moves. Passive loyalists retreat from public view when scandals erupt but still vote with the president. Critical loyalists try, in a sense, to have it both ways. They may publicly distance themselves from the president's worst behavior, but they do not take any action (for example, voting in Congress) that will weaken, much less bring down, the president. In the face of presidential abuse, any of these responses will enable authoritarianism.
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Steven Levitsky (How Democracies Die: What History Reveals About Our Future)
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Although Darwin’s theory of evolution discusses how the fitter offspring tend to survive, the reality is that whether or not an offspring will survive is mostly a function of chance due to the many possible wrong choices that exist for each right choice. Higher complexity organisms have more behavioral options, which in turn enables them to make more right choices.
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Yaneer Bar-Yam (Making Things Work: Solving Complex Problems in a Complex World)
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Only three of the naturally occurring elements were manufactured in the big bang. The rest were forged in the high-temperature hearts and explosive remains of dying stars, enabling subsequent generations of star systems to incorporate this enrichment, forming planets and, in our case, people.
For many, the Periodic Table of Chemical Elements is a forgotten oddity—a chart of boxes filled with mysterious, cryptic letters last encountered on the wall of high school chemistry class. As the organizing principle for the chemical behavior of all known and yet-to-be-discovered elements in the universe, the table instead ought to be a cultural icon, a testimony to the enterprise of science as an international human adventure conducted in laboratories, particle accelerators, and on the frontier of the cosmos itself.
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Neil deGrasse Tyson (Astrophysics for People in a Hurry)
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chapter, however, the modern perspective is that brains enable minds, and that YOU is your vastly parallel and distributed brain without a central command center. There is no ghost in the machine, no secret stuff that is YOU. That YOU that you are so proud of is a story woven together by your interpreter module to account for as much of your behavior as it can incorporate, and it denies or rationalizes the rest.
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Michael S. Gazzaniga (Who's in Charge?: Free Will and the Science of the Brain)
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I think we’ve entered an era of unintended consequences. Technologies designed to liberate the human mind from mundane tasks and enable us to communicate on a personal, global scale have instead been used to disturb our sleep, destroy our productivity, polarize our politics, and drive us into compulsive behavioral patterns that steal our capacity to engage with others socially. And it does all that while making us feel more productive, but actually lowering the quality of our work.
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Mike McHargue (You're a Miracle (and a Pain in the Ass): Embracing the Emotions, Habits, and Mystery That Make You You)
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The things that reduce the symptoms of mental illness probably are not the same things that reduce the probability of suicidal behaviors. Unfortunately we don’t know which active ingredients of suicide focused treatments enable them to reduce the probability of suicidal behaviors better than status quo treatments. We can however reasonably conclude that suicide focused treatments do a better job at reducing the probability of suicidal behaviors because they act on something other than the symptoms of mental illness.
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Craig J. Bryan (Rethinking Suicide: Why Prevention Fails, and How We Can Do Better)
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According to Levin, the fundamental problem is that both rival parties view social institutions “not as molds that ought to shape their behavior and character but as platforms that allow them greater individual exposure and enable them to hone their personal brands.
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Kevin J. Vanhoozer (Mere Christian Hermeneutics: Transfiguring What It Means to Read the Bible Theologically)
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These sites are especially harmful after the workday is over, where the freedom in your schedule enables them to become central to your leisure time. If you’re waiting in line, or waiting for the plot to pick up in a TV show, or waiting to finish eating a meal, they provide a cognitive crutch to ensure you eliminate any chance of boredom. As I argued in Rule #2, however, such behavior is dangerous, as it weakens your mind’s general ability to resist distraction, making deep work difficult later when you really want to concentrate.
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Cal Newport (Deep Work: Rules for Focused Success in a Distracted World)
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Instead of confronting and exposing those who purposely hurt us, we blame ourselves for allowing them to hurt us. We ignorantly make our empathy the culprit—not their inexcusable acts or intentions —as we unintentionally enable their poor behavior to only thrive and continue.
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Morgan Richard Olivier (The Tears That Taught Me)
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Design thinking enables business people to avoid mistakes of formulating ideas that, in the future, the customers may not be interested, hence putting the business at risk of experiencing losses. Thus, it applies tools from the world of design and shifting the focus to human behavior.
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Hibatullah Jawhar
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How can one tell if a being has free will? If one encounters an alien, how can one tell if it is just a robot or it has a mind of its own? The behavior of a robot would be completely determined, unlike that of a being with free will. Thus one could in principle detect a robot as a being whose actions can be predicted. As we said in Chapter 2, this may be impossibly difficult if the being is large and complex. We cannot even solve exactly the equations for three or more particles interacting with each other. Since an alien the size of a human would contain about a thousand trillion trillion particles even if the alien were a robot, it would be impossible to solve the equations and predict what it would do. We would therefore have to say that any complex being has free will—not as a fundamental feature, but as an effective theory, an admission of our inability to do the calculations that would enable us to predict its actions.
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Stephen Hawking (The Grand Design)
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When you feel the need to escape your problems, to escape from this world, don't make the mistake of resorting to suicide Don't do it! You will hear the empty advice of many scholars in the matter of life and death, who will tell you, "just do it" there is nothing after this, you will only extinguish the light that surrounds you and become part of nothingness itself, so when you hear these words remember this brief review of suicide: When you leave this body after committing one of the worst acts of cowardice that a human being can carry out, you turn off the light, the sound and the sense of reality, you become nothing waiting for the programmers of this game to pick you up from the darkness, subtly erase your memories and enable your return and I emphasize the word subtle because sometimes the intelligence behind this maneuver or automated mechanism is wrong and send human beings wrongly reset to such an extent, that when they fall to earth and are born again, they begin to experience memories of previous lives, in many cases they perceive themselves of the opposite sex, and science attributes this unexplainable phenomenon to genetic and hormonal factors, but you and I know better! And we quickly identified this trigger as a glitch in the Matrix. Then we said! That a higher intelligence or more advanced civilization throws you back into this game for the purpose of experimenting, growing and developing as an advanced consciousness and due to your toxic and destructive behavior you come back again but in another body and another life, but you are still you, then you will carry with you that mark of suicide and cowardice, until you learn not to leave this experience without having learned the lesson of life, without having experienced and surprised by death naturally or by design of destiny. About this first experience you will find very little material associated with this event on the internet, it seems that the public is more reserved, because they perceive themselves and call themselves "awakened" And that is because the system has total control over the algorithm of fame and fortune even over life and death. Now, according to religion and childish fears, which are part of the system's business to keep you asleep, eyes glued to the cellular device all day, it says the following: If you commit this act of sin, you turn off light, sound and sense of reality, and from that moment you begin to experience pain, fear and suffering on alarming scales, and that means they will come for you, a couple of demons and take you to the center of the earth where the weeping and gnashing of teeth is forever, and in that hell tormented by demons you will spend eternity. About this last experience we will find hundreds of millions of people who claim to have escaped from there! And let me tell you that all were captivated by the same deity, one of dubious origin, that feeds on prayers and energetic events, because it is not of our nature, because it knows very well that we are beings of energy, then this deity or empire of darkness receives from the system its food and the system receives from them power, to rule, to administer, to control, to control, to kill, to exclude, to inhibit, to classify, to imprison, to silence, to infect, to contaminate, to depersonalize. So now that you know the two sides of the same coin, which one will your intelligence lean towards! You decide... Heads or tails? From the book Avatars, the system's masterpiece.
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Marcos Orowitz (THE LORD OF TALES: The masterpiece of deceit)
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The mechanisms that enable and govern our behavior today have been shaped by the ecology and behavior of our ancestors across countless generations; the mind/brain can then be studied as an evolved -computational organ-, or more precisely, a collection of specialized organs that perform various kinds of computations.
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Marco del Giudice (Evolutionary Psychopathology: A Unified Approach)
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You see the impact of humans on Earth’s environment every day. We are trashing the place: There is plastic along our highways, the smell of a landfill, the carbonic acid (formed when carbon dioxide is dissolved in water) bleaching of coral reefs, the desertification of enormous areas of China and Africa (readily seen in satellite images), and a huge patch of plastic garbage in the Pacific Ocean. All of these are direct evidence of our effect on our world. We are killing off species at the rate of about one per day. It is estimated that humans are driving species to extinction at least a thousand times faster than the otherwise natural rate. Many people naïvely (and some, perhaps, deceptively) argue that loss of species is not that important. After all, we can see in the fossil record that about 99 percent of all the different kinds of living things that have ever lived here are gone forever, and we’re doing just fine today. What’s the big deal if we, as part of the ecosystem, kill off a great many more species of living things? We’ll just kill what we don’t need or notice. The problem with that idea is that although we can, in a sense, know what will become or what became of an individual species, we cannot be sure of what will happen to that species’ native ecosystem. We cannot predict the behavior of the whole, complex, connected system. We cannot know what will go wrong or right. However, we can be absolutely certain that by reducing or destroying biodiversity, our world will be less able to adapt. Our farms will be less productive, our water less clean, and our landscape more barren. We will have fewer genetic resources to draw on for medicines, for industrial processes, for future crops. Biodiversity is a result of the process of evolution, and it is also a safety net that helps keep that process going. In order to pass our own genes into the future and enable our offspring to live long and prosper, we must reverse the current trend and preserve as much biodiversity as possible. If we don’t, we will sooner or later join the fossil record of extinction.
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Bill Nye (Undeniable: Evolution and the Science of Creation)
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When we understand how these underlying pathways trigger, reinforce, or redirect anxiety’s arousal, then we can combat bad anxiety and make conscious decisions that enable us to steer our own path. When we learn to cue in to our own feelings, thoughts, and behaviors, not only can we shift from bad to good anxiety but we can shift our energy, attitude, mindset, and intentions.
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Wendy Suzuki (Good Anxiety: Harnessing the Power of the Most Misunderstood Emotion)
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Cancer, in short, was not merely genetic in its origin; it was genetic in its entirety. Abnormal genes governed all aspects of cancer’s behavior. Cascades of aberrant signals, originating in mutant genes, fanned out within the cancer cell, promoting survival, accelerating growth, enabling mobility, recruiting blood vessels, enhancing nourishment, drawing oxygen—sustaining cancer’s life.
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Siddhartha Mukherjee (The Emperor of All Maladies)
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Time-in and the mindful awareness and presence it creates will enable your brain to literally grow more integrative fibers that create your ability to regulate emotions, attention, thinking, and behavior, and your sense of well-being and connections to others will be optimized. If carefully conducted scientific studies did not reveal this, I myself would look at this list and say, “That is too good to be true!
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Daniel J. Siegel (Brainstorm: The Power and Purpose of the Teenage Brain)
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Before we move on to the stuffer who collects retaliation rocks, I want to address the issue of impossible people. We know that all things are possible with God. But all things are not possible with people who refuse to be led by the Holy Spirit. I’ve had to get really honest about certain people in my life. It isn’t productive or possible to confront them and expect anything good to come from it. If someone has told me over and over through their actions and reactions that they will make my life miserable if I confront them, at some point I have to back away. But I don’t want to stuff and allow bitterness toward them to poison me. So, how do I back away and not stuff? I acknowledge that I can control only myself. I can’t control how another person acts or reacts. Therefore, I shift my focus from trying to fix the other person and the situation to allowing God to reveal some tender truths to me. I typically pray something like this: God, I’m so tired of being hurt. I’m so tired of feeling distracted and discouraged by this situation. Pour Your lavish mercy on my heart and into this hard relationship. Help me to see the obvious hurt they must have in their life that makes them act this way. Help me to have compassion for their pain. Help me to see anything I’m doing or have done that has negatively affected this situation. And please help me to know how to separate myself graciously from this constant source of hurt in my life. It all feels impossible. Oh God, speak to me. Reveal clearly how I can best honor You, even in this. My job isn’t to fix the difficult people in my life or enable them to continue disrespectful or abusive behaviors. My job is to be obedient to God in the way I act and respond to those people.
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Lysa TerKeurst (Unglued: Making Wise Choices in the Midst of Raw Emotions)
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Let’s assume that every commune was started by a group of twenty-five adults who knew, liked, and trusted one another. In other words, let’s assume that every commune started with a high and equal quantity of social capital on day one. What factors enabled some communes to maintain their social capital and generate high levels of prosocial behavior for decades while others degenerated into discord and distrust within the first year?
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Jonathan Haidt (The Righteous Mind: Why Good People are Divided by Politics and Religion)
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What is the proper relationship between dodgy self-absorption and a quest for perceptive understanding of our own journey? Why do we need to determine who we are? Why do I spend hours attempting to evaluate past performance, reconcile exhibited flaws in my personal character, and atone for reprehensible prior behavior? Why cannot a person be satisfied with just being? People tend to spend more time living inside their head than they do confronting reality. Is a person’s constant internal narrative dialogue a form of catharsis? Is a narrative the most apropos method to comprehend what living entails? Do we seek to tell our own stories in order to interpret and organize the reality of the world that surrounds us? Alternatively, is storytelling simply the easiest way for us to apprehend the tenuous notion of the self? Does storytelling enable us to recognize the translucent thread that connects us to the past?
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Kilroy J. Oldster (Dead Toad Scrolls)
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Philosophy is the discipline of human thought that allows us to interpret our experience of ourselves and of the world at large, thereby giving meaning to our existence. While science constructs models of reality that predict the behavior of matter and energy, philosophy asks how those models relate to our condition as conscious entities. Without philosophy, science is merely an enabler of technology; it tells us nothing about the underlying nature of nature.
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Bernardo Kastrup (Brief Peeks Beyond: Critical Essays on Metaphysics, Neuroscience, Free Will, Skepticism and Culture)
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Controversy has always existed among psychiatrists and psychologists about the validity of personality diagnosis. Some believe in the merits of the enterprise and devote their careers to ever greater nosological precision. Others, and among them I include myself, marvel that anyone can take diagnosis seriously, that it can ever be considered more than a simple cluster of symptoms and behavioral traits. Nonetheless, we find ourselves under ever-increasing pressure (from hospitals, insurance companies, governmental agencies) to sum up a person with a diagnostic phrase and a numerical category.
Even the most liberal system of psychiatric nomenclature does violence to the being of another. If we relate to people believing we can categorize them, we will neither identify nor nurture the parts, the vital parts, of the other that transcend category. The enabling relationship always assumes that the other is never fully knowable.
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Irvin D. Yalom (Love's Executioner and Other Tales of Psychotherapy)
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We have no obligation to endure or enable certain types of certain toxic relationships. The Christian ethic muddies these waters because we attach the concept of long-suffering to these damaging connections. We prioritize proximity over health, neglecting good boundaries and adopting a Savior role for which we are ill-equipped.
Who else we'll deal with her?, we say. Meanwhile, neither of you moves towards spiritual growth. She continues toxic patterns and you spiral in frustration, resentment and fatigue.
Come near, dear one, and listen. You are not responsible for the spiritual health of everyone around you. Nor must you weather the recalcitrant behavior of others. It is neither kind nor gracious to enable. We do no favors for an unhealthy friend by silently enduring forever. Watching someone create chaos without accountability is not noble. You won't answer for the destructive habits of an unsafe person. You have a limited amount of time and energy and must steward it well. There is a time to stay the course and a time to walk away.
There's a tipping point when the effort becomes useless, exhausting beyond measure. You can't pour antidote into poison forever and expect it to transform into something safe, something healthy. In some cases, poison is poison and the only sane response is to quit drinking it.
This requires honest self evaluation, wise counselors, the close leadership of the Holy Spirit, and a sober assessment of reality. Ask, is the juice worth the squeeze here. And, sometimes, it is. You might discover signs of possibility through the efforts, or there may be necessary work left and it's too soon to assess. But when an endless amount of blood, sweat and tears leaves a relationship unhealthy, when there is virtually no redemption, when red flags are frantically waved for too long, sometimes the healthiest response is to walk away.
When we are locked in a toxic relationship, spiritual pollution can murder everything tender and Christ-like in us. And a watching world doesn't always witness those private kill shots. Unhealthy relationships can destroy our hope, optimism, gentleness. We can lose our heart and lose our way while pouring endless energy into an abyss that has no bottom. There is a time to put redemption in the hands of God and walk away before destroying your spirit with futile diligence.
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Jen Hatmaker (For the Love: Fighting for Grace in a World of Impossible Standards)
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The disease I have is loving him. They don’t write articles about it or send camera crews to follow us. The disease I have is called codependency, or sometimes enabling, and it isn’t really a disease, though it can feel like one. It’s more like an ill-defined set of tendencies and behaviors, and depending on how badly it’s flaring, it can manifest as a lot of different things—a disorder, a nuisance, an encumbrance, a curse, or sometimes merely a sensibility, a preference, a cast of mind.
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Nina Renata Aron (Good Morning, Destroyer of Men's Souls: A Memoir of Women, Addiction, and Love)
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Google had discovered a way to translate its nonmarket interactions with users into surplus raw material for the fabrication of products aimed at genuine market transactions with its real customers: advertisers.94 The translation of behavioral surplus from outside to inside the market finally enabled Google to convert investment into revenue. The corporation thus created out of thin air and at zero marginal cost an asset class of vital raw materials derived from users’ nonmarket online behavior.
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Shoshana Zuboff (Master or Slave? The Fight for the Soul of Our Information Civilization)
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I must admit that some people are better at being team players, at embracing those five behaviors, than others. They're not born that way, but either through life experiences, work history, or a real commitment to personal development, they come to possess the three underlying virtues that enable them to be ideal team players: they are humble, hungry, and smart. As simple as those words may appear, none of them is exactly what they seem. Understanding the nuances of these virtues is critical for applying them effectively.
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Patrick Lencioni (The Ideal Team Player: How to Recognize and Cultivate The Three Essential Virtues (J-B Lencioni Series))
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Human history is the ancient story of the umbilical conflict between a lone individual versus a cabalistic society. A love-hate relationship defines our personal history with society, where the suppression of individuality for the sake of the collective good battles the notion that the purpose of society is to enable each person to flourish. A conspicuous feature of cultural development involves societies teaching children the sublimation of unacceptable impulses or idealizations, consciously to transform their inappropriate instinctual impulses into socially acceptable actions or behavior. The paradox rest in the concept that in order for any person to flourish they must preserve the spiritual texture of themselves, a process that requires the individual to resist societal restraint, push off against the community, and reject the walls of traditionalism that seek to pen us in. The climatic defining event in a person’s life represents the liberation of the self from crippling conformism, staunchly rebuffing capitulating to the whimsy of the super ego of society.
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Kilroy J. Oldster (Dead Toad Scrolls)
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This will help boundary your role, and keep you from setting up scenarios when you rescue or enable dangerous and/or self-sabotaging behavior. You may need to set hard limits. You may need to protect yourself. This isn’t just for your well-being, but will help you model the importance of doing so to your loved one. Love the entirety of them. Remind them that their trauma doesn’t define them. Allow them consequences of their behavior and celebrate the successes of newer, healthier ways of being. Be the relationship that helps the healing journey.
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Faith G. Harper (Unfuck Your Brain: Using Science to Get Over Anxiety, Depression, Anger, Freak-outs, and Triggers)
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The core components of high EQ are the following: The ability to self-soothe. The key to managing emotion is to allow, acknowledge, and tolerate our intense emotions so that they evaporate, without getting stuck in them or taking actions we’ll later regret. Self-soothing is what enables us to manage our anxiety and upsets, which in turn allows us to work through emotionally charged issues in a constructive way. Emotional self-awareness and acceptance. If we don’t understand the emotions washing over us, they scare us, and we can’t tolerate them. We repress our hurt, fear, or disappointment. Those emotions, no longer regulated by our conscious mind, have a way of popping out unmodulated, as when a preschooler socks his sister or we (as adults) lose our tempers or eat a pint of ice cream. By contrast, children raised in a home in which there are limits on behavior but not on feelings grow up understanding that all emotions are acceptable, a part of being human. That understanding gives them more control over their emotions. Impulse control. Emotional intelligence liberates us from knee-jerk emotional reactions. A child (or adult) with high EQ will act rather than react and problem-solve rather than blame. It doesn’t mean you never get angry or anxious, only that you don’t fly off the handle. As a result, our lives and relationships work better. Empathy. Empathy is the ability to see and feel something from the other’s point of view. When you’re adept at understanding the mental and emotional states of other people, you resolve differences constructively and connect deeply with others. Naturally, empathy makes us better communicators.
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Laura Markham (Peaceful Parent, Happy Kids: How to Stop Yelling and Start Connecting (The Peaceful Parent Series))
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Yet the contents and structures of the unconscious are the result of immemorial existential situations, especially of critical situations, and this is why the unconscious has a religious aura. For every existential crisis once again puts in question both the reality of the world and man's presence in the world. This means that the existential crisis is, finally, "religious," since on the archaic levels of culture *being* and *the sacred* are one. As we saw, it is the experience of the sacred that founds the world, and even the most elementary religion is, above all, an ontology. In other words, in so far as the unconscious is the result of countless existential experiences, it cannot but resemble the various religious universes. For religion is the paradigmatic solution for every existential crisis. It is the paradigmatic solution notb only because it can be indefinately repeated, but also because it is believed to have a transcendental origin and hence is valorised as a revelation received from an *other*, transhuman world. The religious solution not only resolves the crisis but at the same time makes existence "open" to values that are no longer contingent or particular, thus enabling man to transcend personal situations and, finally, gain access to the world of spirit.
This is not the place to develop all the consequences of this close relation between the content and structures of the unconscious on the one hand and the values of religion on the other. We were led to refer to it in order to show in what sense even the most avowedly nonreligious man still, in his deeper being, shares a religiously oriented behavior. But modern man's "private mythologies" -his dreams, reveries, fantasies, and so on- never rise to the ontological status of myths, precisely because they are not experienced by the *whole man* and therefore do not transform a particular situation into a situation that is paradigmatic. In the same way, modern man's anxieties, his experiences in dream or imagination, although "religious" from the point of view of form, do not, as in *homo religiosus*, make part of a *Weltanschauung* and provide the basis for a system of behaviour.
-Mircea Eliade,
The Sacred And The Profane:The Nature of Religion
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Mircea Eliade
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Cultures and religions exist, and are explained, to the extent that they reliably express stucturally enduring relationships among mental states and behaviors and where these material relationships enable a given population of individuals to maintain itself in repeated social interaction within a range of ecological contexts. Cultures and religions are not ontologically distinct “superorganisms” or “independent variables” with precise contents or boundaries. They are no more things in and of themselves, or “natural kinds” with their own special laws, than are cloud or sand patterns. Although
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Scott Atran (In Gods We Trust: The Evolutionary Landscape of Religion (Evolution and Cognition))
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A primary goal of food science is to create products that are more attractive to consumers. Nearly every food in a bag, box, or jar has been enhanced in some way, if only with additional flavoring. Companies spend millions of dollars to discover the most satisfying level of crunch in a potato chip or the perfect amount of fizz in a soda. Entire departments are dedicated to optimizing how a product feels in your mouth—a quality known as orosensation. French fries, for example, are a potent combination—golden brown and crunchy on the outside, light and smooth on the inside. Other processed foods enhance dynamic contrast, which refers to items with a combination of sensations, like crunchy and creamy. Imagine the gooeyness of melted cheese on top of a crispy pizza crust, or the crunch of an Oreo cookie combined with its smooth center. With natural, unprocessed foods, you tend to experience the same sensations over and over—how’s that seventeenth bite of kale taste? After a few minutes, your brain loses interest and you begin to feel full. But foods that are high in dynamic contrast keep the experience novel and interesting, encouraging you to eat more. Ultimately, such strategies enable food scientists to find the “bliss point” for each product—the precise combination of salt, sugar, and fat that excites your brain and keeps you coming back for more. The result, of course, is that you overeat because hyperpalatable foods are more attractive to the human brain. As Stephan Guyenet, a neuroscientist who specializes in eating behavior and obesity, says, “We’ve gotten too good at pushing our own buttons.” The modern food industry, and the overeating habits it has spawned, is just one example of the 2nd Law of Behavior Change: Make it attractive. The more attractive an opportunity is, the more likely it is to become habit-forming.
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James Clear (Atomic Habits: An Easy & Proven Way to Build Good Habits & Break Bad Ones)
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The mind cannot be a blank slate, because blank slates don’t do anything. As long as people had only the haziest concept of what a mind was or how it might work, the metaphor of a blank slate inscribed by the environment did not seem too outrageous. But as soon as one starts to think seriously about what kind of computation enables a system to see, think, speak, and plan, the problem with blank slates becomes all too obvious: they don’t do anything. The inscriptions will sit there forever unless something notices patterns in them, combines them with patterns learned at other times, uses the combinations to scribble new thoughts onto the slate, and reads the results to guide behavior toward goals. Locke recognized this problem and alluded to something called “the understanding,” which looked at the inscriptions on the white paper and carried out the recognizing, reflecting, and associating. But of course explaining how the mind understands by invoking something called “the understanding” is circular. This argument against the Blank Slate was stated pithily by Gottfried Wilhelm Leibniz (1646-1716) in a reply to Locke. Leibniz repeated the empiricist motto “There is nothing in the intellect that was not first in the senses,” then added, “except the intellect itself.”8
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Steven Pinker (The Blank Slate: The Modern Denial of Human Nature)
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The bottom line is that sometimes the most responsible, loving, efficient, and sane thing we can do is let another person have their process. We can set boundaries if their process is making us insane, and we do not have to agree to enable behavior with which we do not agree. Finally, we can accept the ultimate boundary that their life is their own, and they deserve to find their way, knowing that when we intervene, sometimes we stand in the way of exactly the path that will be of greatest value to them. We can disengage to stay sane, trust them to find their way, and walk with them with a lot less anxiety, guilt, and frustration, and just enjoy being their daughter, son, loved one, rather than trying to play a role that isn’t ours to play.
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Carla Cheatham (Hospice Whispers: Stories of Life (Hospice Whispers Series Book 1))
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However, those whose souls are healed by the balm of elegance can find in TDD a way to do well by doing good. TDD is also good for geeks who form emotional attachments to code. One of the great frustrations of my young engineer's life was starting a project with great excitement, then watching the code base decay over time. A year later I wanted nothing more than to dump the now-smelly code and get on to the next project. TDD enables you to gain confidence in the code over time. As tests accumulate (and your testing improves), you gain confidence in the behavior of the system. As you refine the design, more and more changes become possible. My goal is to feel better about a project after a year than I did in the starry-eyed beginning, and TDD helps me achieve this.
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Kent Beck (Test-Driven Development: By Example)
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With drug use related harms, explanatory models are often presented as predictive tools, even though they ‘are [rarely if ever] predictive of consequent behavior’ or outcomes. Hence, we feel confident in asserting at outset, that prohibition based approaches in drug policy lack a sound basis in empirical research (despite sounding logical, i.e. remove drugs or the means of their production and less drugs will be available to users, thus minimising or eliminating harm), and are not animated by well-defined goals, goals that are not only consistent with the ethical and humanitarian aims of public health policy in general, but also with the fundamental principles of democracy) such as empowering or enabling those best placed to act, but by beliefs, assumptions, hypotheses and expectations.
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Daniel Waterman
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It is love itself-not loving behavior, or even the wish or intent to love-that has the power to "always protect, always trust, always hope, put up with anything, and never quit" (1 Corinthians 13:7-8, PAR). Merely trying to act lovingly will lead to despair and to the defeat of love. It will make us angry and hopeless. But taking love itself-God's kind of love-into the depths of our being through the way of spiritual formation will, by contrast, enable us to act lovingly to an extent that will he surprising even to us at first. And this love will then become a constant source of joy and refreshment ment to us and others. Indeed it will, according to the promise, be "a spring of water gushing up to eternal life" (John 4:14, PAR), not an additional burden to carry through life, as the attempt to act lovingly surely would be.
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Dallas Willard
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Many people find it helpful to critically examine the past, particularly childhood, to chart their internalization of messages that they were not worthy, not enough, that they were crazy, stupid, monstrous, and so on. Simply learning how we have acquired feelings of worthlessness rarely enables us to change things; it is usually only one stage in the process. I, like so many other people, have found it useful to examine negative thinking and behavioral patterns learned in childhood, particularly those shaping my sense of self and identity. However, this process alone did not ensure self-recovery. It was not enough. I share this because it is far too easy to stay stuck in simply describing, telling one’s story over and over again, which can be a way of holding on to grief about the past or holding on to a narrative that places blame on others.
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bell hooks (All About Love: New Visions)
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After 30 years as a court-ordered and prison psychologist, Newburn has seen up close what happens when schools excuse bad behavior for any reason, including race. Especially race. The liberal is the prototypical appeaser of bad behavior, and for decades, liberals have run public schools in America,” Newburn said. “I've seen firsthand where the most brutal school space-taker (not, "student") will be given scores of chances instead of permanently sending it home for parental repair. After all, the public school potentates believe school thugs are just misunderstood and should be given unending chances to destroy the learning environment. That the teachers are paying the personal price for this thug-enabling system comes not as a shock. It is predictable. I lied: There’s too much of it. I cannot fit it all in just one chapter. Or even two. Or even one book.
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Colin Flaherty ('Don't Make the Black Kids Angry': The hoax of black victimization and those who enable it.)
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Awareness of our conscious thinking patterns and unconscious behavior predilections enables us to examine the defining question of how we began to take certain values for granted. Once we accept that we are a product of our culture, we can begin the act of deliberately redefining our sense of self. By engaging in an intensive cultural investigation and undertaking a studious period of reflective self-examination, and by exercising disciplined behavior, we can alter our character. Using American society as a looking glass allows me to see how a dominating culture sculpted my self-image. This societal mirror reflects me in a either a positive or a perverted manner. Looking both inward and outward, therefore, is an essential step in seeing oneself clearly. An interior and exterior analysis is the critical initiating act in taking charge of the ultimate configuration of our conscious self.
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Kilroy J. Oldster (Dead Toad Scrolls)
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This is the thinking behind Amazon’s anticipatory shopping patent.43 Instead of customers making their own decisions, Amazon decides for them, sending what they want before they know they want it. It is, as one commentator noticed, one more step towards cutting out human agency altogether.44 Pervasive monitoring devices – smartphones, wearables, voice-enabled speakers and smart meters – allow companies to track and manage consumer behaviour. The Harvard business scholar Shoshana Zuboff quotes an unnamed chief data scientist who explains: ‘The goal of everything we do is to change people’s actual behavior at scale . . . we can capture their behaviours and identify good and bad [ones]. Then we develop “treatments” or “data pellets” that select good behaviours.’45 MIT’s Alex Pentland seems more interested in enhancing machines than human understanding. He celebrates the opportunity to deploy sensors and data in order to increase efficiency
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Margaret Heffernan (Uncharted: How to Map the Future)
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The need for challenge and exploration arises mostly out of the blockage of fulfillment of lower level needs, giving rise to a pervading restlessness. Out of this restlessness there arises much pathology as searchers collide with established structuring and functioning of the environment. Out of this restlessness there also arises a small cadre of creative deviants whose insights and inventions have provided the leverage which has enabled man to increase his standard of living and his compassionate concern for his fellows. Our success in being human has so far derived from our honoring deviance more than tradition. Template changing has always gained a slight, though often tenuous, lead over template obeying. Now we must search diligently for those creative deviants from whom alone will come the conceptualizations of an evolutionary designing process which can assure us an open ended future -- toward whose realization we can all participate.
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John B Calhoun
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Yet, we are not Skinner's rats. Even Skinner's rats were not Skinner's rats: the patterns of addictive behavior displayed by rats in the Skinner Box were only displayed by rats in isolation, outside of their normal sociable habitat. For human beings, addictions have subjective meanings, as does depression. Marcus Gilroy-Ware's study of social media suggests that what we encounter in our feeds is hedonic stimulation, various moods and sources of arousal- from outrage porn to food porn to porn- which enable us to manage our emotions. In addition that, however, it's also true that we can become attached to the miseries of online life, a state of perpetual outrage and antagonism. There is a sense in which our online avatar resembles a 'virtual tooth' in the sense described by the German surrealist artist Hans Bellmer. In the grip of a toothache, a common reflex is to make a fist so tight that the fingernails bite into the skin. This 'confuses' and 'bisects' the pain by creating a 'virtual center of excitation,' a virtual tooth that seems to draw blood and nervous energy away from the real center of pain.
If we are in pain, this suggests, self-harming can be a way of displacing it so that it appears lessened- event though the pain hasn't really been reduced, and we still have a toothache. So if we get hooked on a machine that purports to tell us, among other things, how other people see us- or a version of ourselves, a delegated online image- that suggests something has already gone wrong in our relationships with others. The global rise in depression- currently the world's most widespread illness, having risen some 18 per cent since 2005- is worsened for many people by the social industry. There is a particularly strong correlation between depression and the use of Instagram among young people. But social industry platforms didn't invent depression; they exploited it. And to loosen their grip, one would have to explore what has gone wrong elsewhere.
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Richard Seymour (The Twittering Machine: How Capitalism Stole Our Social Life)
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To be effective as a liberation worker--that is, one who is committed to changing systems and institutions characterized by oppression to create greater equity and social justice--a crucial step is the development of a liberatory consciousness. A liberatory consciousness enables humans to live their lives in oppressive systems and institutions with awareness and intentionality, rather than on the basis of the socialization to which they have been subjected. A liberatory consciousness enables humans to maintain an awareness of the dynamics of oppression characterizing society without giving in to despair and hopelessness about that condition, to maintain an awareness of the role played by each individual in the maintenance of the system without blaming them for the roles they play, and at the same time practice intentionality about changing the systems of oppression. A liberatory consciousness enables humans to live "outside" the patterns of thought and behavior learned through the socialization process that helps to perpetuate oppressive systems.
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Barbara J. Love (There at the Dawning: Memories of a Lesbian Feminist)
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What, then, does submission and respect look like for a woman in a dating relationship? Here are some guidelines:
1. A woman should allow the man to initiate the relationship. This does not mean that she does nothing. She helps! If she thinks there is a good possibility for a relationship, she makes herself accessible to him and helps him to make conversation, putting
him at ease and encouraging him as opportunities arise (she does the opposite when she does not have interest in a relationship with a man). A godly woman will not try to manipulate the start of a relationship, but will respond to the interest and approaches of a man in a godly, encouraging way.
2. A godly woman should speak positively and respectfully about her boyfriend, both when with him and when apart.
3. She should give honest attention to his interests and respond to his attention and care by opening up her heart.
4. She should recognize the sexual temptations with which a single man will normally struggle. Knowing this, she will dress attractively but modestly, and will avoid potentially compromising situations. She must resist the temptation to encourage sexual liberties as a way to win his heart.
5. The Christian woman should build up the man with God's Word and give encouragement to godly leadership. She should allow and seek biblical encouragement from the man she is dating.
6. She should make "helping" and "respecting" the watchwords of her behavior toward a man. She should ask herself, "How can I encourage him, especially in his walk with God?" "How can I provide practical helps that are appropriate to the current place in our relationship?" She should share with him in a way that will enable him to care for her heart, asking, "What can I do or say that will help him to understand who I really am, and how can I participate in the things he cares about?"
7. She must remember that this is a brother in the Lord. She should not be afraid to end an unhealthy
relationship, but should seek to do so with charity and grace. Should the relationship not continue forward, the godly woman will ensure that her time with a man will have left him spiritually blessed.
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Richard D. Phillips (Holding Hands, Holding Hearts: Recovering a Biblical View of Christian Dating)
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Egalitarianism among foragers is concerned primarily with preventing a single individual or coalition from dominating (and thereby making life miserable for) the rest of the group. This leads foragers to be vigilant for early warning signs of people who position themselves above others. This includes dominating or bullying individuals (outside the household ot immediate family), bragging, seeking authority too eagerly, ganging up with other members of the group, and otherwise attempting to control others' behavior. Foragers would readily support the motto fo the early American general Christopher Gadsden: "Don't tread on me."
Many of the norms that were common among our forager ancestors are by now deeply embedded in human nature. But these aren't our only norms. Most societies also teach their children norms specific to their society. This ability of societies to adopt different norms is part of what has let humans spread across the Earth, by adopting norms better suited to each local environment.
This "cultural flexibility" also enabled our ancestors to implement the huge behavior changes required to turn hunters and gatherers into farmers and herders, roughly 10,000 years ago. Farmers have norms supporting marriage, war, and property, as well as rough treatment of animals, lower classes, and slaves. To help enforce these new norms, farmers also had stronger norms of social conformity, as well as stronger religions with moralizing gods.
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Kevin Simler (The Elephant in the Brain: Hidden Motives in Everyday Life)
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Making matters worse, the prefrontal cortex, the part of the brain that governs so much of our higher executive function—the ability to plan and to reason, the ability to control impulses and to self-reflect—is still undergoing crucial structural changes during adolescence and continues to do so until human beings are in their mid- or even late twenties. This is not to say that teenagers lack the tools to reason. Just before puberty, the prefrontal cortex undergoes a huge flurry of activity, enabling kids to better grasp abstractions and understand other points of view. (In Darling’s estimation, these new capabilities are why adolescents seem so fond of arguing—they can actually do it, and not half-badly, for the first time.) But their prefrontal cortexes are still adding myelin, the fatty white substance that speeds up neural transmissions and improves neural connections, which means that adolescents still can’t grasp long-term consequences or think through complicated choices like adults can. Their prefrontal cortexes are also still forming and consolidating connections with the more primitive, emotional parts of the brain—known collectively as the limbic system—which means that adolescents don’t yet have the level of self-control that adults do. And they lack wisdom and experience, which means they often spend a lot of time passionately arguing on behalf of ideas that more seasoned adults find inane. “They’re kind of flying by the seat of their pants,” says Casey. “If they’ve had only one experience that’s pretty intense, but they haven’t had any other experiences in this domain, it’s going to drive their behavior.
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Jennifer Senior (All Joy and No Fun: The Paradox of Modern Parenthood)
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The various ways of creating a culture of innovation that we’ve talked about so far are greatly influenced by the leaders at the top. Leaders can’t dictate culture, but they can nurture it. They can generate the right conditions for creativity and innovation. Metaphorically, they can provide the heat and light and moisture and nutrients for a creative culture to blossom and grow. They can focus the best efforts of talented individuals to build innovative, successful groups. In our work at IDEO, we have been lucky enough to meet frequently with CEOs and visionary leaders from both the private and public sectors. Each has his or her own unique style, of course, but the best all have an ability to identify and activate the capabilities of people on their teams. This trait goes far beyond mere charisma or even intelligence. Certain leaders have a knack for nurturing people around them in a way that enables them to be at their best. One way to describe those leaders is to say they are “multipliers,” a term we picked up from talking to author and executive advisor Liz Wiseman. Drawing on a background in organizational behavior and years of experience as a global human resources executive at Oracle Corporation, Liz interviewed more than 150 leaders on four continents to research her book Multipliers: How the Best Leaders Make Everyone Smarter. Liz observes that all leaders lie somewhere on a continuum between diminishers, who exercise tight control in a way that underutilizes their team’s creative talents, and multipliers, who set challenging goals and then help employees achieve the kind of extraordinary results that they themselves may not have known they were capable of.
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Tom Kelley (Creative Confidence: Unleashing the Creative Potential Within Us All)
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We believe that the caregiver’s capacity to observe the moment-to-moment changes in the child’s mental state is critical in the development of mentalizing capacity. The caregiver’s perception of the child as an intentional being lies at the root of sensitive caregiving, which attachment theorists view as the cornerstone of secure attachment (Ainsworth et al. 1978; Bates, Maslin, and Frankel 1985; Belsky and Isabella 1988; Egeland and Farber 1984; Grossmann, Grossmann, Spangler, Suess, and Unzner 1985; Isabella 1993; Isabella and Belsky 1991). Secure attachment, in its turn, provides the psychosocial basis for acquiring an understanding of mind. The secure infant feels safe in making attributions of mental states to account for the behavior of the caregiver. In contrast the avoidant child shuns to some degree the mental state of the other, while the resistant child focuses on its own state of distress, to the exclusion of close intersubjective exchanges. Disorganized infants may represent a special category: hypervigilant of the caregiver’s behavior, they use all cues available for prediction; they may be acutely sensitized to intentional states and thus may be more ready to construct a mentalized account of the caregiver’s behavior. We would argue (see below) that in such children mentalization may be evident, but it does not have the central role in self-organization that characterizes securely attached children. We believe that what is most important for the development of mentalizing self-organization is the exploration of the mental state of the sensitive caregiver, which enables the child to find in the caregiver’s mind (that is, in the hypothetical representation of her mind that he constructs to explain her behavior toward him) an image of himself as motivated by beliefs, feelings, and intentions. In contrast, what the disorganized child is scanning for so intently is not the representation of his own mental states in the mind of the other, but the mental states of that other that threaten to undermine his own self.
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Peter Fonagy (Affect Regulation, Mentalization, and the Development of the Self [eBook])
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To turn the page to the next chapter of a more satisfying life-as-adventure, these steps that have proved fruitful for me -- when I've actually followed them.
1. Find Your True North to Become More Joyful
First be clear about choosing a goal that rings true. Forget "should" or adopting someone else's goal for you.
2. Picture Being Your Hero
Afraid you will fail? Supplant your fear with a greater motivation. When you are tempted to fall back, picture how you'll feel when you succeed. ." Rather than talking about what you are giving up or how you might fail, reflect upon and discuss the benefits you clearly see.
3. Surround Yourself With Mutual Support Systems
To keep your resolve, surround yourself with those who want you to succeed - and who are also on a path of practice. Agree on shared and individual behaviors that reinforce your mutual support. The authors of Influencer found that is the only way to permanently change.
4. Involve Your Senses To Stay On Your Path
Tie your goal for your new chapter to your frequent experiences. Write it down. Say it out loud. Associate it with things you see, hear, smell, taste and touch every day. Plant sticky messages on your bathroom mirror, your car dashboard and smart device screen. Smell your shampoo and connect it with living that chapter. Brush your teeth and feel the motion towards it.
5. Notice Where You Get Detoured
Notice your pattern of avoidance. What activities get you sidetracked? What time of day or day of the week is it most likely to happen? What else is happening that can numb you into avoidance? What colleagues and friends help or hinder you on your path? Conversely, when are your stronger moments?
6. Plan A Grand Reward
The bigger the change, the larger the reward you deserve. Enable others who supported you, to savor it with you. Since behavior is contagious to the third degree, you don't know which friends, and friends of your friends' friends might be moved, by your example, to also turn the page to the next chapter of the adventure story they were meant to live.
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Kare Anderson (Moving From Me to We)
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This entails certain corollaries on which true individualism once more stands in sharp opposition to the false individualism of the rationalistic type. The first is that the deliberately organized state on the one side, and the individual on the other, far from being regarded as the only realities, which all the intermediate formations and associations are to be deliberately suppressed, as was the aim of the French Revolution, the noncompulsory conventions of social intercourse are considered as essential factors in preserving the orderly working in human society. The second is that the individual, in participating in the social processes, must be ready and willing to adjust himself to changes and to submit to conventions which are not the result of intelligent design, whose justification in the particular instance may be recognizable, and which to him will often appear unintelligible and irrational. I need not say much on the first point. That true individualism affirms the value of the family and all the common efforts of the small community and group, that it believes in local autonomy and voluntary associations, and that indeed its case rests largely on the contention that much for which the coercive action of the state is usually invoked can be done better by voluntary collaboration need not be stressed further. There can be no greater contrast to this than the false individualism which wants to dissolve all these smaller groups into atoms which have no cohesion other than the coercive rules imposed by the state, and which tries to make all social ties prescriptive, instead of using the state mainly as a protection of the individual against the arrogation of coercive powers by the small groups. Quite as important for the functioning of an individualist society as these smaller groupings of men are the traditions and conventions which evolve in a free society and which, without being enforceable, establish flexible but normally observed rules that make the behavior of other people predictable in a high degree. The willingness to submit to such rules, not merely so long as one understands the reason for them but so long as one has no definite reasons to the contrary, is an essential condition for the gradual evolution and improvement of the rules of social intercourse; and the readiness ordinarily to submit to the products of a social process which nobody may understand is also an indispensible condition if it is to be possible to dispense with compulsion. That the existence of common conventions and traditions among a group of people will enable them to work together smoothly and efficiently with much less formal organization and compulsion than a group without such common background, is of course, a commonplace. But the reverse of this, while less familiar, is probably not less true: that coercion can probably only be kept to a minimum in a society where conventions and traditions have made the behavior of man to a large extent predictable.
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Friedrich A. Hayek (Individualism and Economic Order)
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When we are sold perfume, we are accustomed to also being sold the idea of a life we will never have.
Coty's Chypre enabled Guerlain to create Mitsouko; Coty's Emeraude of 1921 was the bedrock on which Shalimar was built and Coty's L'Origan become the godmother of L'heure bleue, also by Guerlain.
Some people dedicate themselves to making life beautiful. With instinctual good taste, magpie tendencies and a flair for color, they weave painfully exquisite tableaux, defining the look of an era. Paul Poiret was one such person. After his success, he went bust in 1929 and had to sell his leftover clothing stock as rags. Swept out of the picture by a new generation of designers, his style too ornate and Aladdinesque, Poiret ended his days as a street painter and died in poverty.
It was Poiret who saw that symbolic nomenclature could turn us into frenzied followers, transforming our desire to own a perfume into desperation.
The beauty industry has always been brilliant at turning insecurities into commercial opportunities.
Readers could buy the cologne to relax during times of anxiety or revive themselves from strain.
Particularly in the 1930s, releases came thick and fast, intended to give the impression of bounty, the provision of beauty to all women in the nation. Giving perfumes as a gift even came under the Soviet definition of kulturnost or "cultured behavior", including to aunts and teachers on International Women's Day.
Mitsouko is a heartening scent to war when alone or rather, when not wanting to feel lonely.
Using fragrance as part of a considered daily ritual, the territorial marking of our possessions and because it offers us a retrospective sense of naughtiness.
You can never tell who is going to be a Nr. 5 wearer. No. 5 has the precision of well-cut clothes and that special appeal which comes from a clean, bare room free of the knick-knacks that would otherwise give away its age. Its versatility may well be connected to its abstraction.
Gardenia perfumes are not usually the more esoteric or intellectual on the shelves but exist for those times when we demand simply to smell gorgeous.
You can depend on the perfume industry to make light of the world's woes. No matter how bad things get, few obstacles can block the shimmer and glitz of a new fragrance.
Perfume became so fashionable as a means of reinvention and recovery that the neurology department at Columbia University experimented with the administration of jasmine and tuberose perfumes, in conjunction with symphony music, to treat anxiety, hysteria and nightmares.
Scent enthusiasts cared less for the nuances of a composition and more for the impact a scent would have in society.
In Ancient Rome, the Stoics were concerned about the use of fragrance by women as a mask for seducing men or as a vehicle of deception. The Roman satirist Juvenal talked of women buying scent with adultery in mind and such fears were still around in the 1940s and they are here with us today. Similarly, in crime fiction, fragrance is often the thing that gives the perpetrator away. Specifically in film noir, scent gets associated with misdemeanors.
With Opium, the drugs tag was simply the bait. What YSL was really marketing, with some genius, was perfume as me time: a daily opportunity to get languid and to care sod-all about anything or anyone else.
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Lizzie Ostrom (Perfume: A Century of Scents)
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During this same period of his life Bohm also continued to refine his alternative approach to quantum physics. As he looked more carefully into the meaning of the quantum potential he discovered it had a number of features that implied an even more radical departure from orthodox thinking. One was the importance of wholeness. Classical science had always viewed the state of a system as a whole as merely the result of the interaction of its parts. However, the quantum potential stood this view on its ear and indicated that the behavior of the parts was actually organized by the whole. This not only took Bohr's assertion that subatomic particles are not independent "things, " but are part of an indivisible system one step further, but even suggested that wholeness was in some ways the more primary reality. It also explained how electrons in plasmas (and other specialized states such as superconductivity) could behave like interconnected wholes. As Bohm states, such "electrons are not scattered because, through the action of the quantum potential, the whole system is undergoing a co-ordinated movement more like a ballet dance than like a crowd of unorganized people. " Once again he notes that "such quantum wholeness of activity is closer to the organized unity of functioning of the parts of a living being than it is to the kind of unity that is obtained by putting together the parts of a machine. "6 An even more surprising feature of the quantum potential was its implications for the nature of location. At the level of our everyday lives things have very specific locations, but Bohm's interpretation of quantum physics indicated that at the subquantum level, the level in which the quantum potential operated, location ceased to exist All points in space became equal to all other points in space, and it was meaningless to speak of anything as being separate from anything else. Physicists call this property "nonlocality. " The nonlocal aspect of the quantum potential enabled Bohm to explain the connection between twin particles without violating special relativity's ban against anything traveling faster than the speed of light. To illustrate how, he offers the following analogy: Imagine a fish swimming in an aquarium. Imagine also that you have never seen a fish or an aquarium before and your only knowledge about them comes from two television cameras, one directed at the aquarium's front and the other at its side. When you look at the two television monitors you might mistakenly assume that the fish on the screens are separate entities. After all, because the cameras are set at different angles, each of the images will be slightly different. But as you continue to watch you will eventually realize there is a relationship between the two fish. When one turns, the other makes a slightly different but corresponding turn. When one faces the front, the other faces the side, and so on. If you are unaware of the full scope of the situation, you might wrongly conclude that the fish are instantaneously communicating with one another, but this is not the case. No communication is taking place because at a deeper level of reality, the reality of the aquarium, the two fish are actually one and the same. This, says Bohm, is precisely what is going on between particles such as the two photons emitted when a positronium atom decays (see fig. 8).
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Michael Talbot (The Holographic Universe)
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Technologist Kevin Kelly suggests, “If a thousand lines of letters in UNIX qualifies as a technology, . . . then a thousand lines of letters in English (Hamlet) must qualify as well. They both can change our behavior, alter the course of events, or enable future inventions. A Shakespeare sonnet and a Bach fugue, then, are in the same category as Google’s search engine and the iPod. They are something useful produced by a mind.
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Craig Detweiler (iGods: How Technology Shapes Our Spiritual and Social Lives)
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say v. (says; past and past part.said) 1 [reporting verb] utter words so as to convey information, an opinion, a feeling or intention, or an instruction: [with direct speech] “Thank you,” he said | [with clause] he said the fund stood at $100,000 | [trans.] our parents wouldn't believe a word we said | [with infinitive] he said to come early. (of a text or a symbolic representation) convey specified information or instructions: [with clause] the law says such behavior is an offense. [trans.] enable a listener or reader to learn or understand something by conveying or revealing (information or ideas): I don't want to say too much | FIGURATIVEthe movie's title says it all. [trans.] (of a clock or watch) indicate (a specified time): the clock says ten past two. (be said) be asserted or reported (often used to avoid committing the speaker or writer to the truth of the assertion): [with infinitive] they were said to be training freedom fighters | [with clause] it is said that she lived to be over a hundred. [trans.] (say something for) present a consideration in favor of or excusing (someone or something): all I can say for him is that he's
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Oxford University Press (The New Oxford American Dictionary)
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What tools or technologies you use is irrelevant if the people who must use them hate using them, or if they don’t achieve the outcomes and enable the behaviors we care about. What is important is enabling teams to make changes to their products or services without depending on other teams or systems.
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Nicole Forsgren (Accelerate: The Science of Lean Software and DevOps: Building and Scaling High Performing Technology Organizations)
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1. that the emergence of the nervous system was an indispensable enabler of life in elaborate multicellular organisms; the nervous system has been a servant of whole-organism homeostasis, although its cells also depend on that same homeostasis process for its own survival; this integrated mutuality is most often overlooked in discussions of behavior and cognition; 2. that the nervous system is part of the organism it serves, specifically a part of its body, and that it holds close interactions with that body; that these interactions are of an entirely different nature from those that the nervous system holds with the environment that surrounds the organism; the particularity of this privileged relationship also tends to be overlooked; I will say more on this critical issue in part II; 3. that the extraordinary emergence of the nervous system opened the way for neurally mediated homeostasis—an addition to the chemical/visceral variety; later, after the development of conscious minds capable of feeling and creative intelligence, the way was open for the creation, in the social and cultural space, of complex responses whose existence began as homeostatically inspired but later transcended homeostatic needs and gained considerable autonomy; therein the beginning but not the middle or the end of our cultural lives; even at the highest levels of sociocultural creation, there are vestiges of simple life-related processes present in the most humble exemplars of living organisms, namely, bacteria; 4. that several complex functions of the higher nervous system have their functional roots in simpler operations of the lower devices of the system itself; for this reason, for example, it has not been productive to first look for the grounding of feeling and consciousness in the operations of the cerebral cortex; instead, as discussed in part II, the operation of brain-stem nuclei and of the peripheral nervous system offers better opportunities to identify precursors to feeling and consciousness.
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António Damásio (The Strange Order of Things: Life, Feeling, and the Making of the Cultural Mind)
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Clearly chairs, or CGOs, have a leading part to play in ensuring that governance boards work in the way the new model outlines. As Carver and Oliver say, "We believe that the chair's role is one of the most important keys to unlocking the potential of boards, and we are therefore going to give it considerable attention." I strongly support the importance that the model gives to the chair's role. This book stresses that the board must speak with one voice and that the CEO takes directions only from the board as a whole. The board will speak with one voice only as a result of directors' commitment to do so and the skill of the chair. I doubt that what is required of a person to serve well on any type of board or committee is a natural form of behavior. The key task of a chair is to enable the members of a board to work together effectively and to get the best out of them. This is what the servant achieved in the story on which Robert Greenleaf's concept of the servant-leader is based. Chairs have a major leadership task. It is they who are responsible for turning a collection of competent individuals into an effective team. The new model is demanding of its chairs, and much will depend on them.
Another field in which
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John Carver (Corporate Boards That Create Value: Governing Company Performance from the Boardroom (J-B Carver Board Governance Series Book 26))
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- Love, which is a kind of permission to come closer than ordinary norms of good behavior might usually sanction.
- Back rubs.
- Which enables us to see each other without clothes on, for example, in lust and shame.
- Examining perfections, imperfections.
- Which allows us to say wounding things to each other which would not be kosher under the ordinary rules of civilized discourse.
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Donald Barthelme (Great Days)
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default, HSRP does not reinstate the primary as the active router when it comes back online. To enable this behavior, you must configure the routers to preempt. This means that when a router with a higher priority than the active router comes online, the active router will allow the higher-priority router to become active.
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Gary A. Donahue (Network Warrior)
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The lower brain—including the pons and the brain stem—is primarily responsible for our “subconscious” processes, those many activities which are more complex and integrated than cord reflexes, but of which we are seldom aware. To begin with, many more sequences of simple reflexes are possible if the pons and the stem are left intact with the cord. The lower brain clearly assists the cord in fine-tuning responses, and in arranging them in the appropriate order so that they produce more integrated behavior. The complicated sequences of muscular contraction necessary for sucking and swallowing, for example, are monitored at this level. These are skills with which a human infant is born; their underlying circuits—and even more importantly, the correct sequence of operation of these circuits—is a product of early genetic development, not individual experience and learning. In general, the lower brain seems to share many of the “hard-wired” features of the spinal cord. Axons and synapses form organizational units that appear to be consistent for all individuals of the same species, and their activation produces identical, stereotyped contractions and motions. But the additional complexities of the lower brain appear to enable it to pick and choose more freely among various possible circuits, and to arrange the stereotyped responses with a lot more flexibility than is possible with the cord alone. For instance, it is in the lower brain that information from the semi-circular canals in the inner ear—the sensory organ for gravitational perceptions and balance—is coordinated with the cord’s postural reflexes. A stiff stance can be elicited from these postural reflexes by merely putting pressure on the bottoms of the feet; by adding information concerning gravity and balance to this stance, the same reflex cord circuits may be continually adjusted to compensate for shifts in equilibrium as we tilt the floor upon which the animal is standing, or as we push him this way or that. A rigid fixed posture is made more flexible and at the same time more stable, because compensating adjustments among the simple postural reflexes is now possible. The lower brain coordinates the movements of the eyes, so that they track together. It directs digestive and metabolic processes and glandular secretions, and determines the patterns of circulation by controlling arterial blood pressure. And not only does it give new coordination to separate parts, it influences the system as a whole in ways that cannot be done by the segmental arrangement of the cord.
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Deane Juhan (Job's Body: A Handbook for Bodywork)
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Frozen fright develops as the hostage comes out of shock and begins to perceive the reality of the situation. In frozen fright, hostages are effectively paralyzed, enabling them to focus their cognitive and motor functions solely on survival, with concentration centered on the terrorist. In this state the hostage responds to the captor with cooperative, friendly behavior. As this state continues and the hostages are still not rescued, they will feel overwhelmed and develop traumatic psychological infantilism wherein they respond to the captor with appeasement, submission, ingratiation, cooperation, and empathy. As captivity continues and the hostages are still alive, they will begin to perceive the captor as giving their lives back to them. At this point a hostage develops a pathological transference to the terrorist, wherein the terrorist is seen as the "good guy" and authorities, police, and family, because they have not gotten the hostage out of the situation, are seen as the "bad guys". This transference will persist long after hostages are released because they fear that any expression of negativity toward the captors may invite retaliation.
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Dee L.R. Graham (Loving to Survive: Sexual Terror, Men's Violence, and Women's Lives (Feminist Crosscurrents, 3))
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I wrote this book to help you understand the science-based reasons why it’s not your fault that you’ve failed to stick with exercise and other health-related behaviors, as well as to give you a new, simple framework for sustainable success. Opportunities to move and enjoy physical movement are, quite literally, everywhere. I hope that the information and practical approaches in this book will enable you to find them, choose them, enjoy them, and use them to energize your life for a lifetime.
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Michelle Segar (No Sweat: How the Simple Science of Motivation Can Bring You a Lifetime of Fitness)
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In contrast, technology now exists that would allow a future global totalitarian state to record every phone call, email, web search, webpage view and credit card transaction for every person on Earth, and to monitor everyone’s whereabouts through cell-phone tracking and surveillance cameras with face recognition. Moreover, machine learning technology far short of human-level AGI can efficiently analyze and synthesize these masses of data to identify suspected seditious behavior, enabling potential troublemakers to be neutralized before they have a chance to pose any serious challenge to the state.
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Max Tegmark (Life 3.0: Being Human in the Age of Artificial Intelligence)
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Sex and love with robots. A bit amazing, fantastic, inconceivable, nevertheless, imaginable and scientifically explainable. Nowadays you can disclaim this idea because of a scientific fiction, but you cannot argue that it is completely incredible and contradicts human sexuality and romantic experience. As it is known, whatever you experience, you experience due to what is going on in the brain. Your physical contact with the partner’s body is nothing more than merely a physiological act, sending signals to the brain. Without the signals that cause neurochemical activity in the brain, your sexual contact cannot give you any sexual experience on its own. Your brain has been automatically programmed before this contact concerning which kind of natural design of the partner’s body can send more intense signals to your brain, which, in turn, enable it to experience stronger sexual pleasure. The direct cause of your sexual experience is your brain program, your sexual partner’s body, from which you derive sexual pleasure, is just indirect cause of it. Orgasm occurs in the brain, but not in any part of the body. Now imagine higher technological progress than ours. High bioengineering allows us to construct artificial robots similar to us — which have artificial ‘flesh and blood’ that is indistinguishable by your sense organs. When you get in physical contact with her ‘body’, your brain program could discern nothing artificial there. The same input signals, as if there is nothing artificial, and the brain would automatically begin to satisfy its sexual desires. However, there would be a fundamental difference — an artificial partner would exist absolutely adequate to your will. Visually, ‘she’ would be the living embodiment of your dreams. Neuroengineering would allow us to construct ‘her’ brain and through it also her conscious mind and personality, as you would like them to be. An ideal personality for you. It would be like that you say to do something and she would do, or you say don’t, and she wouldn’t. However, there wouldn’t be any direct control. You would control only her brain program, her unconscious and conscious mind, delete unwished episodes from her brain. She wouldn’t know that she is a robot, as you couldn’t know, if you were a robot. She would think that she is the same as you, having free will, being capable of thinking, feeling, expressing herself, controlling her behavior, and so on, and so forth. It would be possible to program her brain against leaving or killing you, so in that context you future would be guaranteed. The ideal personality, the ideal physical appearance — welcome to heaven, but only for those who have a lot of money. Unfortunately, even in the cyber-future, those who would be short of money would have to content themselves with biosocial robots in hell, as most of us do now.
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Elmar Hussein
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The anterior, or front, section is the prefrontal cortex and is responsible for the so-called executive functions of the brain, including knowing rules, making plans, and enabling short-term memory. This “scratch pad” memory lasts seconds or tens of seconds and helps us to remember phone numbers long enough to dial them and tells us, without looking, where we set our drink while we’re eating or playing poker. The prefrontal cortex is the brain region most important for the elaboration of personality and character, and the control of impulse, obsessions, and antisocial behavior.
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James Fallon (The Psychopath Inside: A Neuroscientist's Personal Journey into the Dark Side of the Brain)
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After Steve’s death I received letters of condolence from people all over the world. I would like to thank everyone who sent such thoughtful sympathy. Your kind words and support gave me the strength to write this book and so much more. Carolyn Male is one of those dear people who expressed her thoughts and feelings after we lost Steve. It was incredibly touching and special, and I wanted to express my appreciation and gratitude. I’m happy to share it with you.
It is with a still-heavy heart that I rise this evening to speak about the life and death of one of the greatest conservationists of our time: Steve Irwin. Many people describe Steve Irwin as a larrikin, inspirational, spontaneous. For me, the best way I can describe Steve Irwin is formidable. He would stand and fight, and was not to be defeated when it came to looking after our environment. When he wanted to get things done--whether that meant his expansion plans for the zoo, providing aid for animals affected by the tsunami and the cyclones, organizing scientific research, or buying land to conserve its environmental and habitat values--he just did it, and woe betide anyone who stood in his way. I am not sure I have ever met anyone else who was so determined to get the conservation message out across the globe, and I believe he achieved his aim. What I admired most about him was that he lived the conservation message every day of his life.
Steve’s parents, Bob and Lyn, passed on their love of the Australian bush and their passion for rescuing and rehabilitating wildlife. Steve took their passion and turned it into a worldwide crusade. The founding of Wildlife Warriors Worldwide in 2002 provided Steve and Terri with another vehicle to raise awareness of conservation by allowing individuals to become personally involved in protecting injured, threatened, or endangered wildlife. It also has generated a working fund that helps with the wildlife hospital on the zoo premises and supports work with endangered species in Asia and Africa.
Research was always high on Steve’s agenda, and his work has enabled a far greater understanding of crocodile behavior, population, and movement patterns. Working with the Queensland Parks and Wildlife Service and the University of Queensland, Steve was an integral part of the world’s first Crocs in Space research program. His work will live on and inform us for many, many years to come.
Our hearts go out to his family and the Australia Zoo family. It must be difficult to work at the zoo every day with his larger-than-life persona still very much evident. Everyone must still be waiting for him to walk through the gate. His presence is everywhere, and I hope it lives on in the hearts and minds of generations of wildlife warriors to come. We have lost a great man in Steve Irwin. It is a great loss to the conservation movement. My heart and the hearts of everyone here goes out to his family.
Carolyn Male, Member for Glass House, Queensland, Australia
October 11, 2006
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Terri Irwin (Steve & Me)
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Socially anxious people of any age are likely to deny their problem, to assert, “I’m perfectly happy. I don’t need friends.” As a parent, it is your job to step back and look objectively at the situation. If your child—of whatever age—sees no one of his own peer group except at school or on the job, then there is a problem. What you’re seeing is avoidance: Of course the person appears content when there is no possibility of humiliation, rejection, or scrutiny, the three things he most wishes to avoid. He or she doesn’t want friends? Don’t buy it.
It’s up to you to take action. The older your socially anxious child gets, the more difficult it will be to change his behavior. If you are waiting for the “phase” to end, you will wait forever. If you are waiting for a day when your resistant child of whatever age will become more reasonable and agree to get help with anxiety on his own, you may wait forever. Keep your expectations reasonable, and know that your own commitment to nurture your child toward independence is what will correct the situation. You want the best for your child, and the best includes experiencing the pleasures of friendship and romantic love. Nurture independence, don’t enable unhealthy dependence.
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Jonathan Berent (Beyond Shyness: How to Conquer Social Anxieties)
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understand that everyone’s behaviors are on the same continuum of responses, it is easier to see we are more like each other than different from each other. This book enables all of us to understand the nature of our individual differences (particularly in relation to our responses to sensory experiences), which in turn makes us more interesting to each other. You may know the guy with the silent garage door opener, and this book will help you understand his need for quiet, making your relationship more successful and satisfying for both of you.
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Winnie Dunn (Living Sensationally: Understanding Your Senses)
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There is a very important lesson for human evolution hidden in figures 9.3 and 12.1. At the cortical level, the three levels of processing are special to the human. Rolls has discussed the evidence that rodents do not have these successive levels; in fact, they have only a tiny area equivalent to the OFC for Level 2 processing. Experiments have reported that in the rodent, sensory identification and reward evaluation are combined and occur even before reaching the cortex. This means that the cortical processing of independent streams of sensory input at successive levels of behavioral analysis is a primate, and perhaps most highly developed human, invention. It is of adaptive value in enabling humans to carry out a more detailed analysis of food and drink flavors. Humans thereby are able to differentiate themselves to a greater degree in terms of flavor preferences. It supports the proposal in Neurogastronomy that humans are more adapted for flavor perception than are other species. It also supports our hypothesis that wine tasting takes advantage of this ability, developed for survival in selecting foods, and uses it to discriminate and enjoy the flavors of wine.
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Gordon M. Shepherd (Neuroenology: How the Brain Creates the Taste of Wine)
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MEN AND WOMEN
About 65 percent of the calls I receive from around the country are from men or from parents concerned about their adolescent or adult sons. Does this mean that most of the people who suffer from social anxiety are men? Are women for the most part immune to social anxiety? My more informal research says no. My theory—not to be sexist—is that society expects more from men, despite recent gains in equality for women. Men are under far more pressure to succeed, both in their careers and in their social lives, than women are. Women can be considered “shy,” “demure,” “quiet”—all stereotypically feminine characteristics and all characteristics that can mask social anxiety, which can perpetuate overprotective and enabling behavior.
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Jonathan Berent (Beyond Shyness: How to Conquer Social Anxieties)
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Cizek had used art as the point of entry of his thinking into a whole new world of education—an avenue that had never occurred to me. He realized that children by nature are capable of real, indeed often great, art; that artistic activity is natural for them; and that adult interference in the natural development of children as artists was detrimental to that development. From that starting point, he made a leap into the entire realm of education and child development, concluding that the natural, unhindered growth of children enables them to reach their full potential as human beings, and that adult interference in general is more of a liability than an asset in this process of growth. That leap, from art to all domains of maturation, was an intuitive one for Cizek and his followers. It was not until I read the article referred to in the opening paragraph of this section that I not only gained an understanding of the real basis for Cizek’s intuitive leap, but I also achieved a new and enriching perspective on the nature of education, one that I had hitherto hardly noticed. The key is the observation that certain activities are universal, transcultural, and therefore related to the very essence of being a human. Even more significant and telling—and here once again Cizek hit upon the truth, albeit not consciously—is the fact that these same activities are engaged in by children from the earliest age, and therefore are not, indeed cannot be, the products of sociocultural influences. This places these activities in the realm of biological evolution rather than the realm of cultural history.50 And because these three activities—making music, decorating things, and talking—are the outcome of hundreds of millions of years of evolution, they must represent in and of themselves an important aspect of the exalted place humans occupy in the natural world. In other words, these activities not only represent the outcome of evolution, but they also represent important features that account for the specific place that the Homo sapiens species occupies in the natural order. To allow children—and indeed adults—to engage in these three activities to their heart’s desire is to allow them to realize their fullest potential as human beings. External interference in their exercise, although perhaps sometimes justifiable for social reasons (man is, after all, a social animal too, another aspect of evolution), always involves some diminishing of their ability to become what they by nature are inclined to be. Once this is realized, it is almost impossible to comprehend the enthusiasm with which educators and child development specialists advocate systems for coercing children, against their clear inclination and will, to curtail these activities in favor of an externally imposed adult agenda. Although there might have been some economic justification for such curtailment in the industrial age, there is no longer the slightest pretext of an advantage gained through the suppression of the natural, evolved behavior of children. In
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Russell L. Ackoff (Turning Learning Right Side Up: Putting Education Back on Track)