In 1907, William James complains that psychologists have ignored the topic of "the energies of men"—that is, the practical stamina available for "running one's mental and moral operations".

Have good frameworks emerged for this in the past century?

jstor.org/stable/2177575
There's "cognitive load", "ego depletion", "self-efficacy", etc… none of these really seem to hit the nail on the head here.
"Everyone is familiar with the phenomenon of feeling more or less alive on different days. Everyone knows on any given day that there are energies slumbering in him which the incitements of that day do not call forth, but which he might display if these were greater."
Buddhist writings on dullness ("laya") are a bit closer…
This was a very interesting overview of work attempting to characterize "mental effort". This article doesn't attempt to explain day-by-day variation, but I may find something like that in the cite tree…

• • •

Missing some Tweet in this thread? You can try to force a refresh
 

Keep Current with Andy Matuschak

Andy Matuschak Profile picture

Stay in touch and get notified when new unrolls are available from this author!

Read all threads

This Thread may be Removed Anytime!

PDF

Twitter may remove this content at anytime! Save it as PDF for later use!

Try unrolling a thread yourself!

how to unroll video
  1. Follow @ThreadReaderApp to mention us!

  2. From a Twitter thread mention us with a keyword "unroll"
@threadreaderapp unroll

Practice here first or read more on our help page!

More from @andy_matuschak

13 Dec
In "Where Is My Flying Car", Hall argues that what we really value in cities isn't necessarily physical density, but *temporal* density—ie low travel time. If all points were 5x further apart, but we move 5x faster, we'd prefer it: everyone could have more space. Is this right? /
One reason I like cities is definitely proximity to services and friends. Dozens of excellent restaurants and people within a thirty minute trip. But I also like running into people randomly, serendipitously. Living in a city is like shaking a fuller snow globe!
Not sure if temporal density is equivalent to physical density for the purposes of serendipity. If I only run into people at destinations, then there'd be no change if everything were spread out: the same people visit the same restaurants. But I run into people while walking!
Read 5 tweets
23 Nov
Thinking about "game tape" for thinking, inspired by @tayroga, @mindy_online, past Twitch streams. I notice that thinking has limited legibility—tape captures only a fraction of what's going on. Which useful categories of feedback are possible? Which blocked by illegibility?
Some useful feedback I've gotten:
- are you being captured by the formal structure you created here, rather than by some real purpose?

- are you spending so much time reviewing those references because the main problem seems to hard, and you're avoiding it?
But I mostly haven't gotten useful feedback. Makes me wonder about the "span" of this format, at least interpersonally.

One barrier is that so much of effective thinking is instinctual: I often can't "justify" why I'm thinking about X; trying to do so too early will cause harm.
Read 8 tweets
14 Nov
Sometimes, singing in tight vocal harmony, certain chords locked just right will produce a hair-raising effect: the air buzzes, the sound gets "fuller," goosebumps, psychosomatic tears. I think it comes from overtone overlaps? Sharing rabbit hole and questions so far:
Unfortunately, it's hard to convey this effect with a recording—it's much stronger if you're producing it. So I guess I'm mostly talking to other vocalists.

The first key bit seems to be that voices can sing in just intonation, i.e. whole number ratios: en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Just_into…
(I'm totally skipping explanation of overtones, temperament, and the harmonic series here… for a wonderful intro, see @vihartvihart's )
Read 13 tweets
5 Nov
Discussing this more with Laura, one thing that surprises me is how few digital authoring envs you'd want to "live in" all day for both prose and visual explanations. Your team can live in Notion, but then no visual expls; or live in Figma, but probably not write there.
OneNote was the only full-featured tool we could think of which seemed well-suited to both text and visual explanations, though it has its own downsides.

We're all still "separating by mode of production", per Tufte…
Yes, one can still embed Figma artboards as blocks inside Notion documents, but that's still separating by mode of production. Means you're unlikely to spontaneously create text<>visual interactions as you'd naturally do on paper / whiteboard.
Read 5 tweets
25 Oct
"Export considered harmful"

Because software rarely operate on "files in folders" anymore, "export" is increasingly the way software exposes data. But usually you don't want a dead snapshot; you want to "use this data elsewhere"—which requires repeatedly exporting & reconciling.
Say I make an app for annotating papers. An old-fashioned way to do this would be to make a desktop app which views PDF files and writes annotations into the file. Now Spotlight can see them; Zotero can display them; etc. But SaaS must "import" the PDF and "export" annotations.
But "export annotations" is not the same as "save annotations" because now if I add more annotations to the PDF, I must export them again, and then reconcile that new export with whatever downstream tools used the old data. This gets much worse in the bi-directional case!
Read 11 tweets
22 Oct
Really exciting talk from @JoelChan86 demonstrates an interface for incrementally generating semi-formal "discourse graphs" (X supports Y, Z informs W) through naturalistic note-taking structures:

The loose structure and incrementalism seem really key!
I've been creating these sorts of relationships informally in my own note-writing processes, and it's been really interesting to see synthesis (sometimes) emerge from the noise.

Not yet sure how useful formal structures ("discourse graphs") are, vs. relatively simple queries.
Probably more formal and machine-readable structures are essential if one aspires to network this work across many scholars, as Joel does.
Read 5 tweets

Did Thread Reader help you today?

Support us! We are indie developers!


This site is made by just two indie developers on a laptop doing marketing, support and development! Read more about the story.

Become a Premium Member ($3/month or $30/year) and get exclusive features!

Become Premium

Too expensive? Make a small donation by buying us coffee ($5) or help with server cost ($10)

Donate via Paypal

Or Donate anonymously using crypto!

Ethereum

0xfe58350B80634f60Fa6Dc149a72b4DFbc17D341E copy

Bitcoin

3ATGMxNzCUFzxpMCHL5sWSt4DVtS8UqXpi copy

Thank you for your support!

Follow Us on Twitter!

:(