Rabbit-Holing Responsible for Some Divorces

“We really expect our romantic partners to have this shared reality — a similar view or understanding of the world to ours,” Van Duyn said. “It is much more important in romantic relationships than in other types of relationships because we are more dependent and interwoven in our day-to-day lives with our partners. Scholars have found that this shared sense of reality is really important for the success and happiness of romantic partnerships because it fosters closeness.” Partners...

 The Bible Commands That God Exist Only in the Word

In studying the Bible as a young man, I found intimations of the idea that forms of media favor particular kinds of content and therefore are capable of taking command of a culture. I refer specifically to the Decalogue, the Second Commandment of which prohibits the Israelites from making concrete images of anything. "Thou shalt not make unto thee any graven image, any likeness of any thing that is in heaven above, or that is in the earth beneath, or that is in the water beneath the earth....

 Symbols as Abstractions and Zen

Men feel themselves to be victims or puppets of their experience because they separate "themselves" from their minds, thinking that the nature of the mind-body is something involuntarily thrust upon "them." They think that they did not ask to be born, did not ask to be "given" a sensitive organism to be frustrated by alternating pleasure and pain. But Zen asks us to find out "who" it is that '1las" this mind, and "who" it was that did not ask to be born before father and mother conceived us. ...

 Greed is Less Destructive Than Fanaticism

It was a basic Confucian principle that "it is man who makes truth great, not truth which makes man great." For this reason, "humanness" or ''human-heartedness" ( fen a ) was always felt to be superior to "righteousness" ( i b ), since man himself is greater than any idea which he may invent. There are times when men's passions are much more trustworthy than their principles. Since opposed principles, or ideologies, are irreconcilable, wars fought over principle will be wars of mutual annihil...

 Abstraction is a Necessity for Communication

The English words "man," "fish," "star," "Hower," ·run," "grow," all denote classes of objects or events which may be recognized as members of their class by very simple attributes, abstracted from the total complexity of the things themselves. Abstraction is thus almost a necessity for communication, since it enables us to represent our experiences with simple and rapidly made "grasps" of the mind. When we say that we can think only of one thing at a time, this is like saying that the Paci...

 The Car Example for OOP

The `Car extends Vehicle` or `Duck extends Bird` type of tutorial obscures more than it illuminates. In good OO programming, we don’t make class hierarchies in order to satisfy our inner Linnaeus. We make class hierarchies in order to simplify the code by allowing different parts of it to be changed independently of each other, and to eliminate duplication (which comes to the same thing). Without any context as to what the code needs to accomplish, you can’t make a judgment about whether...

 Belief Discovers No New Qualities

SINCE therefore belief implies a conception, and yet is something more; and since it adds no new idea to the conception; it follows, that it is a different MANNER of conceiving an object; something that is distinguishable to the feeling, and depends not upon our will, as all our ideas do. My mind runs by habit from the visible object of one ball moving towards another, to the usual effect of motion in the second ball. It not only conceives that motion, but feels something different in the con...

 Get Away from the Metaphorical Understanding of Meaning

Propositions are supposed to be idealizations, rather like numbers or vectors or some other abstract formulation. It looks at first very powerful, and for some purposes it’s very useful. But it takes you away from enlightenment because it gives you this false sense that you haven’t understood something really until you’ve figured out how to articulate, how to point to, how to identify the proposition that a particular meaningful event has. No. There are all kinds of meaningful events th...

 Gamification Racing/Grid Movement

Ms. Spooner, a long-time game player, realizes that the Racing/Grid Movement mechanic is the right choice for her students because it is particularly good at helping to assess highly granular pieces of content or skills. She envisions a game in which her students are divided into two- or threeperson teams. She wants these students to be able to identify and produce three different things: (1) the pitch of particular notes, (2) the sounds of distinct instruments, and (3) the work of particular...