Jan 9, 2021
Intratemporal Choices & Paid Attention
If caffeine gives you 5–7 optimal hours, don’t waste time convincing someone that vaccines are unrelated to autism
Before engaging in an unnecessary conversation, ask yourself…
Is this 10–20 minute convo a good investment of the time I have left before the Starbucks inside me expires?
Is this interaction providing food for thought for my hungry-hungry-hippocampus to digest?
Article 2 → Interception & Interoceptive Forecasting
Paid Attention: Coffee & Red Bull
Scenario → You get a venti brushed suede machiatto (3 shots) on the way to work. Once the caffeine hits, you knows you have a finite window of time (~5–7 hours) to maximize its value as it relates to your productivity, precision, persistence, attention, etc.
- Assuming the coffee was $5 & lasts for 5 hours ($1 an hour), spending 15 minutes responding to a Twitter troll (hereafter abbreviated npc) who believes that COVID-19 vaccinations will make the Earth flat just cost you money & optimal productivity.
That npc’s nonsense cost you 25 cents & 5 percent of your optimal time.
That’s an interaction that is best reserved for when the coffee wears off & as it would no longer cost you your optimal productivity time or the attention you paid for.
Someone Relevant or an NPC?
Ask yourself…
1. Is this person of any ongoing consequence/relevance to my life?
2. Will I ever see them again?
3. If so, will I see them in a context of consequentiality to me/ my livelihood?
3b. If I only see them at the mailbox, it’s not a context of consequentiality.
Generalizability
Ask yourself…
4. What’s the effect size / generalizability / overall value of improving this person’s understanding? Will they share it with others?
5. Will the knowledge I impart upon them ever be of consequence to some other human they may cross paths with?
6. Are they in any position in which mass broadcast is possible?
6b. If yes, what is the goal state of their potential audience?
Learning (academia)? If possible, it’s worth engaging with this person. We simply can’t have educators telling people the flu vaccine leads to Autism.
World view reinforcement (politician)? This audience doesn’t participate to have their mind changed → ideological/cognitive homogeneity expected.
Entertainment/ Inspiration (celebs/ athletes/ public figures)? If possible, it’s worth engaging with this person given the scope of their platform. Given that it’s highly unlikely they’d ever see your tweet, this would ultimately be a waste of the attention you paid for.
Soul food (religious figure)? This audience doesn’t participate to have their mind changed → theological/cognitive homogeneity expected.
(Sidenote: Ash Wednesday is February 17th)
7. What’s the likelihood that they would regularly cross paths with other humans that I would care about the experiences of?
For example, a biphobe who lives in North Dakota (the state with the fewest bisexual individuals) is unlikely to regularly cross paths with anyone bisexual. Thus, even though I care about the experiences of my LGBTQIAce+ community (with bisexuals being the largest group), a biphobic npc in North Dakota will thankfully never be of consequence.
As such, it’s not worth my paid attention to help him socially evolve via a Twitter conversation at 3:30 in the afternoon.
Indeed, if the entirety of his life has not produced a more evolved individual, what could I possibly hope to accomplish within half an hour filled with remarks of 280 characters or less?
Social Networks & Peer Pressure
8. Bias is bipartisan. Will this person’s new understanding that vaccinations don’t cause Autism remain robust against the influence of their social network/ echo chamber? Or will it prove as ephemeral as the time I wasted discussing it with them in the first place?
9. Will the person decide that sharing the new perspective I’ve imparted upon them will threaten their need for belongingness if their friends are not receptive to it? If so, the most immediate, socially utilitarian solution would be to reject the information.
→ This is socially adaptive for the individual’s health as it preserves social support, even though it is civically & politically maladaptive for public health as it ensures a portion of the public would remain unvaccinated due to believing vaccines cause Autism on our flat earth with zero evidence of climate change.
Covfefe, indeed.
Sidenotes
If you watch anime, just imagine if Goku used his last bit of energy to go into Super Saiyan God mode, only to waste that energy responding to someone on Reddit. He didn’t need blue hair for that.
“Levels of caffeine peak in the blood within about 15–45 minutes of consumption”
It’s still all about Grand Theft Auto & Call of Duty
Attention Economy
UC Irvine Professor Gloria Mark’s research indicates that it can take us about ~23 minutes to get back into our workflow following an interruption.
…and that was before COVID & living through the most digital year of human history in 2020. Suffice it to say, the negative influence of social media, streaming content, & NeoLiberal economics on our attention have likely increased significantly since March 2020.
Leisure Time Inequality
There is attention inequality insofar as everyone only has 24 hours in a day but many spend the majority of their hours working to stay alive for the next 24 hours. Or — perhaps more accurately — working to ensure that those they love don’t have to worry about waking up without a roof over their head or tasty Flintstones vitamins.
Chatting About Nothing…
during your Optimal Time should be avoided, unless it’s with your family, lover, or bff(s). If you see Piper or Chad slide into your DMs on Instagram, those are messages that you can read & respond to later when you’re exhausted because the richness of the content you produce in your response to Chad/Piper is less relevant for your livelihood than the richness of the content you produce for a manuscript you hope to get published in a top tier journal, or the acuity of your grading of students’ essay exams & term papers.
Ask Yourself…
“Will this conversation matter in a year? In 5 years?
Does it facilitate growth in my most relevant interests?
Is it providing food for thought for my hungry-hungry-hippocampus to digest?
Is this interaction worth losing some of the minutes I have left to live?”
Avoid Going to Sleep Too Soon
It’s important to avoid falling asleep too soon after a long day.
You need some time to be consciously awake for conscious enjoyment… otherwise you wake up having had no sense of decompression or mindfulness before it’s time to get started again.
Fear of Wasting Time (Excerpts)
By Marina Mindful Miss Apr 26, 2019·
“…aware of my own looming mortality, I constantly feel like I don’t have enough time…
…cleaning my apartment, shaving my legs, putting on makeup in the morning, commuting to work. I just want to do these things once and be done with it. Crossing them off my list doesn’t bring me any sense of satisfaction, because I know I will never be done with these tasks…”
“…I’m afraid of dying before becoming successful or doing something meaningful…”
“…the limited free time I do have needs to be spent in the most strategically productive manner possible. I can’t have bad or “off” days, I can’t be sick…”
“…I don’t have enough time to contribute to each of these baskets equally…”
“…how I define tasks as productive or a good use of my time. I usually need my work to have tangible results in order to feel fulfilled. I need my tasks to have an end date, a conclusion…”
Why? “Knowledge? Success? Freedom? Meaning? Contentment? Enlightenment?” For what purpose?
(This piece is part of the 5 Ways to Be More Introverted series)
Our childhood is as the fertile soil, nurturing the roots of who we’re becoming. The soil becomes less & less malleable with age. As such, our tree may grow some unique branches in adulthood, but the roots underlie the core of who we are.
Interoceptive Awareness & Forecasting
Interoception is knowing/interpreting/understanding how your body feels.
The peer-reviewed definition of it, per Price & Hooven (2018), is,
“interoceptive awareness involves the processing of inner sensations so that they become available to conscious awareness (Cameron, 2001)”
and
“Interoception is the perception of sensations from inside the body and includes the perception of physical sensations related to internal organ function such as heart beat, respiration, satiety, as well as the autonomic nervous system activity related to emotions (Vaitl, 1996; Cameron, 2001; Craig, 2002; Barrett et al., 2004)”
Interoceptive Forecasting is anticipating/knowing (from experience perhaps) how you’re going to feel later & using that information to determine how to allocate your time in the present.
The simplest example of how everyone engages in this process is when we consider
→ how sleepy we’re getting
→ the latency between our last energetic moment & sleepiness-awareness
→ we determine at what time we’ll likely be too sleepy to continue on some cognitively demanding task & try to get as much of it done in the remaining time we’ve calculated for ourselves as we can
Thus, if our 2 remaining tasks at 8pm are to complete a term paper & hang up clothes, it makes more sense to complete the term paper first & then hang up our clothes as that’s a task that can be completed on zombie autopilot mode.
If you recently had a coffee/ red bull/ etc, don’t waste it hanging up clothes. Use that to complete your term paper.
I’m confident Constructive Conservatives & Progressive Democrats will endeavor to heal our Democratic Republic
#aMorePerfectUnion
Once again…
Cover your nose; a mask isn’t a chinguard.
The nose is a more infective viral vehicle than the mouth.
“Aerosol deposition and fomite mechanical delivery deposition modeling suggest that aerosols containing virus inhaled by naive subjects achieve the highest density of deposition in the nose (Booth et al., 2005, Farzal et al., 2019, Teunis et al., 2010).
Notably, the nose contained the highest percentage of ACE2-expressing ciliated cells in the proximal airways.
The relatively high ACE2 expression in nasal specimens and the parallel high infectivity of the human nasal epithelial cells suggests the nasal cavity is a fertile site for early SARS-CoV-2 infection.” — Hou et al., 2020
So Facebook asked me if I recommend the USA. I said…
We’re blessed to be the most diverse nation in the world & thus we are all connected to someone who is different from us; whether it’s the economy at the macro level or the workplace/ classroom/ mall at the micro level.
Ethnically American
- We are a nation of immigrants We build bridges, not walls. The rich diversity of our individual lives defines us collectively as Americans.
Cultural diversity defines America’s national integrity. Assimilation into Americanism requires acceptance of cultural pluralism. That is at the core of our ethnicity; what it means to be ethnically American
Recovering from DT & The Seditious Sixth
- The unprecedented enabling of division/hatred over the past 4 years frayed much of our social fabric.
The outcome ➡️ DT (Domestic Terrorists) attacking our nation’s capital in the worst strike against the heart of our country since 1812.
Thankfully, the outcome of the #Hindsight2020 Election was a declaration to the world that it’s morning in post-nightmare America 🇺🇸
#PresidentBiden & #MVPKamala will inspire a revival of American life. Though it won’t happen overnight, we will continue to narrow the gap between who we currently are & the America that we aspire to be.
We, the United States of America, the world’s global nation, a Democratic Republic experiment in self-government with people from all possible backgrounds, becomes #aMorePerfectUnion each time our ideals demonstrate our inclusive adaptability to an ever-changing world.
