chriskelley.org

I saw a few write ups of this study on test anxiety. The study itself uses some pretty technical language (perhaps an artifact of the “scientization” of the humanities), but here is the gist as I understand it:

• The standard theory concerning the cause of test anxiety is that students both value the outcome of the test while at the same time feel they have less control than they would like in getting prepared (i.e. a lack of self efficacy).
• This lack of self efficacy leads to procrastination resulting in a perfect storm / self fulfilling prophecy: I don’t think I will do well because I can’t learn the material and since I can learn the material, why should I bother to study, which of course results in…not learning the material.
• The study found something that I think is a form of CBT called “inquiry-based stress reduction” (IBSR) as an effective means to overcome the feeling of non-effectiveness.

I read through the entire study since it reminded me of how I can feel when facing a big project. I have a perfect idea of what the result should be in my mind, but I struggle to start because I know that no matter how hard I work, whatever gets realized won’t be as perfect. Steven Pressfield called this feeling “resistance” and he correctly observed that you only really feel it for things you care a lot about. I’ve gotten reasonably good at noticing resistance, but I’m interested to try the ideas in this study to give me something to do about it when I do.

The two opening questions seem like CBT classics:

• “Is this thought true?”
• “Can you absolutely know that this thought is true?”.

But the follow-ups are a little more interesting:

• “How do you react, what happens when you have this thought?”
• “Does that thought bring peace or stress to your life?”
• “What images do you see, past or present, as you think this thought?”
• “What physical sensations arise having these thoughts and seeing these pictures?”
• “What emotions arise when you have that thought?”
• Do any obsessions or addictions begin to appear when you have this thought (e.g. alcohol, drugs, shopping, food, and television)?”
• “How do you treat others when you have this thought? How do you treat yourself when you have this thought?”

The house cleaning of the blog continues. I finally went back and fixed the display issues that cropped up in one of my past WordPress upgrades having to do with the display of Latin-1 characters from a UTF-8 database. Followed these instructions and it seems to have worked like a charm.

I also went through and re-organized the categories, simplifying to the things I seem to write on the most: podcasts, books and a catch-all miscellaneous. I also set all of the work related posts I did here in the PLM category to private. I put them here at a time when the business wasn’t blogging, but now that they are I can focus on non-work stuff here, making the purpose a little clearer to everyone – most of all me 😉

Lastly I moved to the new default WordPress template which seems to have some cool things supporting blocks. I may eventually buy or build my own template, but this will do for now.

Love Neil Gaiman and love collaborations with his wife even more.

Listened to the most recent episode of Making Sense on the way into work today. I continue to be fascinated with the guests that Sam Harris finds.

A few things that stuck with me:

• The connection between poetry and good thinking. I am not an expert in poetry, but I do find myself more attracted to it over the last few years, purchasing and browsing through TS Elliot and Wendell Berry collections over the past few years. Part of my interest is that it seems to act for me as a mental reset. When I need to reset on something, I can switch to some good poetry and get the reset I need.
• The idea that your identity is not made up of your beliefs, but actually the attention you pay to those others than you. I think there is a lot to unpack here, but this idea alone has me looking to add David Whyte’s writing. I stopped by my favorite local bookstore on the way home to order a copy of The Three Marriages. Yes I could have gotten it tomorrow from Amazon, but that entirely misses the point.
• The “conversational” nature of reality. The idea that whatever you have in mind for the world will never be fully realized. Nor will whatever the world has in mind for you will be completely realized. What will be realized is the mediation (or a frontier) between the two, just like a conversation.
• The poem he explains and then reads, The Bell and the Blackbird. The story behind the poem with both the bell AND the call of the blackbird BOTH being the most beautiful sound the monk ever heard on the base level is a wonderful allegory on the power of non-dualism, or more simply put the value of avoiding either / or thinking. At a deeper level, when coupled with the story he tells about the meaning of both being the most beautiful sounds he has heard, the idea that you have to choose, but at the same time have no choice ;-), between practicing your skills and getting better and living out your skills in the world and trying to make things happen really spoke to me. Both choices take courage. Both choices mean leaving the other aside for at least a while. Both lead to more beauty in the world.

Which call did you heed today?

Moving to Lightsail is already paying dividends.

One of the things on my wish list for a while now has been to add a SSL cert to my blog. This is a little for the geek factor / knowing how it works, but also since I know search engines give some extra juice to sites with SSL. Since I am not going to post updates to Facebook or Twitter I need all the discovery mechanisms I can get.

On GoDaddy it always seems either (a) too expensive or (b) to convoluted. Following this simple tutorial I was able to get a free cert setup and installed from Let’s Encrypt, a cool project from the EFF. I have to renew it every 90 days, but that’s only a minor hassle for free.

After deactivating all plugins and finding the log files, I determined that the nano instance of Lightsail is just too small to run the Bitnami WordPress image on. I just upgraded to the next largest size that has 1GB of RAM so we’ll see if that solves the database connection / crash errors that have kept this site down for most of the last few weeks.

This will bump my monthly costs from $3.50 to $5 a month, which is still half of what I was paying for GoDaddy hosting. It’s true that I had a few sites running there and can only reasonably expect to run this one on this plan. But those other sites are dormant for now, so I can live with that.

In addition to saving money, I wanted to learn a bit about the amazon cloud, which I have. I also wanted the monthly billing to remind me to post here now and again. I have let this site sit relatively still for a long time as I have focused on other things. My hope is that I can use this site as my social media outlet and much the same way that I am encouraged to read “real” news by subscribing to print periodicals, actually paying for my social media outlet (not to mention having it directly associated to my name) will change how I think and how I behave compared to using the “free” platforms like Facebook and Twitter. Of course, not as many people will see it here…something I have accepted.

I was listening to the most recent episode of The Portal podcast today. The Portal is a project by Eric Weinstein who works for Peter Thiel and is the brother of Bret Weinstein of Evergreen College fame (at least until I heard this podcast…).

I am not sure I get what Eric is trying to do with the Portal, but I like that he is doing it. The first 20 minutes or so of this podcast is almost unlistenable. It gets exponentially better from there. Bret and Eric tell the story together of how Bret?s amazing ideas about evolutionary biology and the implications to the modern pharmaceutical industrial complex.

Here?s what I think I learned: there is a sequence of genes at the end of chromosomes that don?t code for amino acids called telomeres. In cells that reproduce by mitosis (soma, not germ) these telomeres get shorter acting as a sort of countdown that eventually stops and cells don?t reproduce anymore. This is an adaptive ?choice? by cells since the longer they are around, the longer they can get damaged by radiation or other environmental factors. So by being ?born? with a reproduction limit cells limit the chances that they will reproduce abnormally, i.e. as cancer. As Eric puts at one point, our cells die as a way to avoid death. This life thing really is a one way ticket, all the way down to the cellular level. There?s a lot more in the podcast, including the official name for all of this – antagonistic pleiotropy…which is what causes senescence…isn?t science great! – including the big payoff: the result of this fact of evolution when combined with some market forces that drove a breeding protocol at the single source of all lab mice in the US which results in them having extraordinarily long telomeres is that The lab rats we used for all of our drug testing are basically indestructible and cancer proof.

A few other things I learned:

• The natural mechanisms here are amazing to me. The way the world has worked things out is simply something amazing to behold…even if I don?t completely comprehend it. Eric talks about how looking at some mathematical structures is analogous to a religion experience for him. This is close for me. If I had to do it all over again (which I do..at least twice more) I would study evolutionary theory. It simply fascinates me…although I don?t even know really what ?it? is.
• The minds that develop and explore these ideas are similarly amazing to me. I think I understand the mathematical mind as well as the developer mind. But the evolutionary theorist mind is a mystery to me.
• The DISC that Eric has been railing on since his project started might just be real.
• My enneagram type is right on in the description of loving to find new / novel information and share it with other people…I can?t get enough of this and immediately was thinking about all the people I could talk to about it that would find it as fascinating as I did
• I might just also be on the spectrum…or at least a fan of those who are.

Update: well that was a brief respite. Seem to be having some database connection errors so back to trying to figure this out.

The blog has been a bit wonky for the last few weeks since I moved to Amazon. I tried out the basic components and seemed to have some success, but saw what the billing was going to be, so I decided to move to Lightsail, a little simpler service to snag the $3.50 a month deal.

I think things are stable now, although some older posts may still be a bit wonky.

No promises per se, but getting the itch to write publicly more recently, so perhaps that will play out here.