I was about 27 when I realised what = means. I'd always just kinda taken it to indicate something more like "and then". So 2 + 3 and then you have 5. It blew my mind to understand that = means that what's on each side of the equation is the same, just written differently. I had this epiphany after I finished an MSc. My childhood was somewhat math deficient.
It's amazing how similar we all are and yet can have such drastically different understandings of the world.
I suppose we must all take for granted the ideas we've lived with that we perceive as knowledge. To me it is mind boggling to not see = as equivalence, but that is the way with understandings formed long ago.
An anecdote to give you an idea of a different way of thinking. When I was very young I didn't have any friends and played a lot of games, including quite a few with map builders like warcraft 3 and age of mythology. This was a very early taste of programming.
Because of this however, when we got to learning about equations in school, I already had a more procedural idea of how things work. If I do 2 + 3, something gives me 5. This way of thinking was pretty good for algebraic problems but absolutely demolished my understanding of geometry.I only managed to get over it and understand equivalences in my third year of engineering school because I was doing terrible in the courses.
I'm pretty sure our way of thinking is extremely affected by our early lives and how our young brains optimized themselves to solve ever increasing challenges
Have you checked with your dentist to see whether your jaw joints (where your jaw meets your skull under your ear lobe) are equally strong?
My dentist found that one side wasn't working as well as the other and made me a custom splint (a mouthguard I wear at night) which trains the weaker side to work properly. It looks like the one on the right in this picture [0]. Since then, all of the pains on that side of my neck and upper back have disappeared.
The way you've described your pain seems similar to what I was experiencing, so maybe this information gives you something to go on.
One caveat though: my dentist said that the mouthguard approach doesn't work for everyone (about 30% of people get a result similar to mine) as it relies on fooling your brain in your sleep to train one jaw muscle to be stronger than the other.
Some context on this essay - I've been making my way through Bret Victor's collection of links [0] and started reading diSesssa's Knowledge in Pieces, which opens with this quote:
"Nobody thinks clearly, no matter what they pretend. Thinking's a dizzy business, a matter of catching as many of those foggy glimpses as you can and fitting them together the best you can. That's why people hang on so tight to their beliefs and opinions; because, compared to the haphazard way in which they arrived at, even the goofiest opinion seems wonderfully clear, sane, and self-evident. And if you let it get away from you, then you've got to dive back into that foggy muddle to wangle yourself out another to take its place.”
I didn't recognise the quote, but the author seemed familiar (Dashiell Hammett), so I looked it up and found this fascinating essay on the relationship between how Hammett's detectives thought, how Hammett himself thought, and what changed over the course of his career as his philosophical views shifted from pragmatism to Marxism.
A similar notion, in more elegant language (in my opinion) by Herman Melville in Moby Dick:
Here's food for thought, had Ahab time to think; but Ahab never thinks; he only feels, feels, feels; that's tingling enough for mortal man! to think's audacity;
God only has that right and privilege. Thinking is, or ought to be, a coolness and a calmness; and our poor hearts throb, and our poor brains beat too much for that.
I'm also a big fan of this book, for the same reasons (ADHD management). Understanding the value of setting aside big chunks of time to work deeply and prioritising that time has had an enormous positive impact on how I get things done.
I have tried (legally prescribed) amphetamines. I found without a structure and a plan I would be intensely focused on /something/, but maybe not what was most important every day. And with good time management, diet, and most important, exercise, I didn’t need anything else. So, seconded there on the impact :)
I've had a pretty similar experience. Get exercise, sleep, food and hydration under control, then (in my case) medication helps me make the most of that structure.
I actually just wrote a giant post [1] about what I've learned about managing ADHD so far. It focuses on the core stuff, but I want to follow it up with a breakdown of how books like Deep Work (e.g. Flow; Farsighted; Thinking, Fast and Slow; How Not to be Wrong) have made a difference for me.
In 2015, I went to the International Union for Quaternary Research conference in Nagoya. The Emperor and Empress of Japan attended the opening ceremony. There was security screening, armed guards in suits sat throughout the audience and we were told we couldn't take photos during the ceremony.
This wasn't a large conference and the delegates were either the cargo pants wearing sort of scientists or students. Definitely not the sort of conference you'd expect elderly royalty to take part in. Most of us thought either the emperor or the empress must have had a personal interest in the topic area, but no one I talked to really knew why they were there. This article solves that little mystery for me!
I would like something similar as well. Perhaps some way for friends to only view my history back to the date where I added them as a friend, that way my oldest and closest friends have access to all of our history together and my newest, less familiar friends only have access to the me they've only ever known.
Not very it would seem given that "pipa" does not mean "pipe" in the sense TPB are using it but rather only in the sense of a "pipe for smoking". A pipe in the sense TPB use it would be "rör". But relating the combination "trash" and "pipe for smoking" to their line of reasoning seems at least a little harder/more far fetched.
Wait until the self-hate level is high enough to make me feel unbearably bad about not doing what I want to be doing. Not a very healthy approach.
I've also been trialling the habit of starting tasks so far ahead of time that the deadline feels irrelevant. It's quite liberating and something I would like to keep up.
My housemates and I had to evacuate our apartment building this morning. Our place is on the fourth story so our things should be ok, but we won't be able to get back until Saturday, if not later. After all the thunder, lightning, and rain over the last few days it was a bit surreal to be wading down our street (carrying my pack out of the water and trying not to let the cat drown) on a hot and sunny summer morning.
Well, I'm not an expert or anything so don't take my comments toooo seriously; but the first thing I noticed was that it doesn't look like there's anyway to use your app without signing in via Facebook or Twitter. I'm not likely to do that, especially for an unknown application. I understand it's a social app, so there are good reasons to link it with FB and Twitter, but it would be nice to bypass the signin part in order to see what it's like and whether I like it before committing to a connection with FB/Twitter. Maybe I missed that option, but if so, it wasn't an obvious one.
The point of my comment, I guess, is that if you want more feedback and awareness, maybe you need to make it more accessible?
