Attention, however, intrinsically is a way in which, not a thing: it is intrinsically a relationship, not a brute fact. It is a ‘howness’, a something between, an aspect of consciousness itself, not a ‘whatness’, a thing in itself, an object of consciousness. It brings into being a world and, with it, depending on its nature, a set of values.
“Studies have shown that 90% of error in thinking is due to error in perception. If you can change your perception, you can change your emotion and this can lead to new ideas. Logic will never change emotion or perception.”
--Edward DeBono
“People prefer their sources of information to be highly correlated. Then all the messages you get are consistent with each other and you’re comfortable."
— Daniel Kahneman
One way to spot a poor thinker is to see how many of their decisions boomerang back to them. If poor thinkers make poor decisions it stands to reason those decisions will eventually create more problems. More problems consume more time, leaving them even less time to think about new problems.
The time used to correct poor thinking comes from the time that could be used for good thinking.
Good thinkers understand a simple truth: you can’t make good decisions without good thinking and good thinking requires time.
Good thinking is expensive but poor thinking costs a fortune.
--Farnum Street blog
The relevant sense of reasonable, and the phrase reasonable doubt, appeared in the sixteenth-century Scholastic, Suarez, while the reasonable man has an ancestor in the steady man of medieval canon law: If a man and woman are surprised by her father and compelled to marry, the man’s consent is null and the marriage void if the fear inflicted on him is such as would coerce a “steady man.”
History is the knowledge of an infinite whole whose parts, repeating the plan of the whole in their structure, are only known by reference to their context. But since this context is always incomplete, we can never know a single part as it actually is.
Most Westerners who travel in India find rickshaws discomforting. Although I have used them a lot over the years, in part because I sometimes feel safer to have company in strange parts of Indian cities, I have always found the experience morally jarring. Westerners tend to be big and heavy compared to Indians, and rickshaw drivers often have to use almost all their strength to move their machines with one of us on board. It seems reprehensible to sit in relative comfort on the back of a rickshaw while a nearly destitute person pedals one around for a few rupees. On the other hand, those rupees are vitally important for the driver, and it seems just as reprehensible to walk to spare oneself guilt.
N.B. This captures my feeling as well. We rarely used human-powered rickshaws, but when we did, I felt both uncomfortable but gratified to have given this man [sic] something (generous] towards his daily bread.
[Alfred] Adler must be regarded as the fatherfigure of the new generation in psychology: [Victor] Frankl, [Abraham] Maslow, [Medard] Boss. What he called ‘the affirmative unfolding of the organism’ was, in fact, a recognition of the basic evolutionary drive of human beings, that man is an evolutionary animal, and that neurosis is the frustration of this evolutionary drive. In dealing with neurosis, Adler was less concerned to trace its roots in the patient’s childhood than to understand its meaning, what it was driving towards.
Heidegger, like Hemingway, claims that man only knows himself in the face of death or crisis (‘only a bullfighter lives his life all the way up’)—we may recollect, for example, Anna Karenina’s recognition, as she flings herself under a train, that death is the last thing she wants. This is the basis of their negative judgement on human life: that even the most intelligent of us are blinded by triviality until crisis shocks us awake (and by then it is usually too late).
The Chilean people had made a mistake in electing Allende—actually only a plurality of Chileans had been mistaken. Given what he knew, what he expected, and what he feared, Henry Kissinger was not going to let the mere fact of a free election stand in his way of dealing with a potential threat to the United States. “I don’t see why we have to stand by and watch a country go Communist because of the irresponsibility of its own people.” The statement looks a lot different if one has the rise of Adolf Hitler in mind.
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