Friday, March 19, 2021

Beautiful waste of time. Brain myths. Faking out academics. Not faking out squirrels.

“The Wastefulness of Beauty”
This is the title of a delightful essay about, well….

I waste the time…. I throw it away in heaps and piles like some spendthrift dandy with zero sense of personal responsibility. Let me count the ways—staring at screens, replaying melodramatic scenes in my mind and ascribing negative outcomes to those who have wronged me, apathy, alcohol, gossip. I am a wasteful person all day but at night transform into a tight-fisted, miserly knave who clutches his pearls so tightly they turn to powder in my fists.

Now, look. I’m not part of some sort of productivity cult that believes the only real value in the world is in creating tangible outcomes that are measured in wealth or reputation. I am not driven. I have very few ambitions. We all waste time. That’s okay. In my mind, the problem isn’t that I’m not productive enough. Quite the opposite, the problem is that, when I waste time, I’m not wasting it well enough. I’m wasting it all wrong.

It ends with this punchy paragraph:

Make art. Make beauty. Toss it away. Trace your name in water. Cast beauty in your wake, a seed that may be forgotten and buried forever or, perhaps, to be retrieved at some future date by hot, warm, nervous hands. Either way, it makes no difference. It’s all love.

What’s Going on Upstairs?
Reading “That Is Not How Your Brain Works: Forget these scientific myths to better understand your brain and yourself” might fall into the category of wasting time well, because in the end, it makes no difference in how I live and breathe. But it is interesting. For example:

Myth number two is that your brain reacts to events in the world. Supposedly, you go through your day with parts of your brain in the off position. Then something happens around you, and those parts switch on and “light up” with activity.

Brains, however, don’t work by stimulus and response. All your neurons are firing at various rates all the time. What are they doing? Busily making predictions. In every moment, your brain uses all its available information (your memory, your situation, the state of your body) to take guesses about what will happen in the next moment. If a guess turns out to be correct, your brain has a head start: It’s already launching your body’s next actions and creating what you see, hear, and feel. If a guess is wrong, the brain can correct itself and hopefully learn to predict better next time. Or sometimes it doesn’t bother correcting the guess, and you might see or hear things that aren’t present or do something that you didn’t consciously intend. All of this prediction and correction happens in the blink of an eye, outside your awareness.

Faking Out Academics
“The Identity Hoaxers” in The Atlantic begins,

The confession, when it came, did not hold back. “For the better part of my adult life, every move I’ve made, every relationship I’ve formed, has been rooted in the napalm toxic soil of lies,” read the Medium post. It was published in September under the name of Jessica A. Krug, a George Washington University professor specializing in Black history. Krug had, she said, variously assumed the identities of “North African Blackness, then US rooted Blackness, then Caribbean rooted Bronx Blackness.” She was actually a white Jewish woman from Kansas. “You absolutely should cancel me,” Krug wrote in her self-dramatizing mea culpa, “and I absolutely cancel myself.”

Krug had cultivated her assumed identity over several years, and used it to speak “authentically” about race in America.

The article (subtitled, “What if people don’t just invent medical symptoms to get attention—what if they feign oppression, too?”) goes on to look at other likeminded hoaxers and wonders why some academics today succumb to this sort of thing.

Failing to Fake Out Squirrels
Let me conclude this edition with a longish (by GR standards, 21:39) video on “Building the Perfect Squirrel Proof Bird Feeder.”  To me, this is another exercise in wasting time properly.  It helps one appreciate the genius of the everyday squirrel—and the God who thought of creating such creatures. As one viewer put it, “Let’s be honest, when we clicked on this video, we never thought it would be this good.” (HT to Barb G—again! Might have to make her an assistant editor.)

Grace and peace,

Mark Galli
markgalli.com