Peripatetic Reflections on Why We Walk While We Talk and Think Deeply

Paul Minda, a Canadian cognitive psychologist at University of Western Ontario, asked an interesting question on Twitter

Why do people pace around or engage in unguided, unfocused movement when talking on the phone. Does anyone know the answer?

I will focus mainly on a subset of this question, which is: why do we do this type of thing while highly cognitively engaged (e.g., participating in a cognitively demanding conversation, or lecturing).

I like to first try to answer a question myself (drawing as much as I can on my understanding of prior readings) before delving into others’ answers. So here are some “off the cuff” rambling reflections which expand on a series of my Twitter replies to Paul’s tweet. Keep in mind that I don’t specialize in cognitive embodiment. And the following is not rigorous reasoning. Just some (hopefully relevant) thoughts. But I am interested in all things relevant to cognitive productivity, which this is.

Later I might come back to the issue.

Continue reading Peripatetic Reflections on Why We Walk While We Talk and Think Deeply

Instead of Designing a Reading List for 2019, Why Not Resolve to Do This?

It’s that time of the year again, where people review, make resolutions, set goals and plan for the next year. One of the questions that comes up is planning one’s readings.

This blog post is a slightly adapted (but still unpolished) response to a question on the productivity guild, “How do you handle readling lists?”

The concept of an absolute, global “reading list”, which is what most people have in mind when discussing “reading lists” is counter-productive. Continue reading Instead of Designing a Reading List for 2019, Why Not Resolve to Do This?

Not “Just” a Book by Shirley Glass

A friend of mine asked me to expand on my tweets about mnemonics regarding Not “Just Friends”, a book by Shirley P. Glass:

Hence this post.

Continue reading Not “Just” a Book by Shirley Glass

New CogSci Apps Logo: Social Cognitive Productivity

On the CogSci Apps blog, I announced the new CogSci Apps logo! Check it out. It’s a good example of social cognitive productivity: doing knowledge work with a great graphic designer, to create a concrete logo that meets multiple very abstract requirements.

CogSci Apps has a new logo and wordmark

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macOS Mojave Seems to Have Fixed the PDF Rendering Problems I Described Last Year

Last year, I blogged twice about serious PDF rendering issues in macOS High Sierra (first post, second post). The problems were very significant for knowledge workers (and serious university students), because the highest quality information tends to be distributed in PDF. And if it’s not in PDF format, it often ought to be converted to PDF to be annotated and delved deeply.
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A Bit of Art for Value Pluralism

In line with my learning from art project, I try to always think of a set of works of art that are helpfully related to content I develop (or delve). This is to get more out of art than we naturally do. And it can help improve one’s understanding. The task is actually quite difficult, because most brains (including mine) do not naturally index art in this way (but I believe one can deliberately build such indexes in our brains).

Here are a few works of art that came to my mind on the topic of my recent blog post, Psychological Hedonism meets Value Pluralism: An Integrative Design-oriented perspective – CogZest. Continue reading A Bit of Art for Value Pluralism

Overcoming macOS Siri Dictation Problems with the 2018 11″ iPad Pro, 1writer and nvALT

I recently complained about the Siri dictation service on macOS being slow to load, and asked whether the problem remains in RAM with Macs that have 32-GB of RAM. I didn’t get an answer to that question. But I did get an 11″ Nov 2018 iPad Pro, which I now keep beside my desk, on, at all times while I’m working on my Mac (which is in most other respects much better for knowledge intense work than an iPad).

Continue reading Overcoming macOS Siri Dictation Problems with the 2018 11″ iPad Pro, 1writer and nvALT

Psychological Hedonism Meets Value Pluralism: An Integrative Design-oriented Perspective

This week-end, I will present at a humanist meeting on “Psychological Hedonism vs. (integrative design-oriented) value pluralism: architecture-based motivation”. Psychological hedonism claims that “only pleasure or pain motivates us.” (Stanford Encyclopedia of Philosophy). Psychological hedonism is a form of value monism (meaning one ultimate or intrinsic good). Value pluralism is the view that we have multiple, top-level, possibly incommensurable sources of motivation. Integrative design-oriented psychology is a way of understanding whole mind with methods drawn from AI (including artificial general intelligence) and philosophy. Architecture-based motivation is the idea that the mind produces many top level (intrinsic) motivators; it has motive generators.

We won’t deal much with ethical hedonism here.

I argue against psychological hedonism and in favour of value pluralism.

Continue reading Psychological Hedonism Meets Value Pluralism: An Integrative Design-oriented Perspective