I suck at golf. Instead of actually learning biology in college, ice cream and golf took priority. I took the class with a friend and my brother, and there was a 3 hour gap between my last class (jazz band) and biology. So me and my buddy would go get some ice cream and then play a few holes. I regret this because firstly, I suck at golf, and secondly, because I wish I'd have learned that stuff - the class was pretty horrible though. The professor had zero explanatory skill and just threw up facts with no connecting thoughts. My memory might be a bit flawed, but I remember it being horrible.
But the golf thing - I suck at video game golf too. In trying to figure out why, I've moved on to another game. And that's that. Actually, I now have 4 games in the queue (Super Smash Bros. Brawl being number 1, Tiger Woods 08, No More Heroes, and Mass Effect). I love smash. I don't think I've ever played a single game more, though Warcraft is a likely contender. But I see this string of games as symptomatic of the real problem - lack of focus.
I don't have problem focusing on little things. It's big things. I can read a 1200 page book in a single sitting if my needs are taken care of. Working on complicated problems and projects through school was never a problem either. That's little stuff: the big stuff is just sojourns into whatever has my fancy at the time. I'm not quite ADD about it either. There's never been one thing in my life that I've had a staying desire to be an expert at.
Anyway - on to my daily attempt at refining my definition of what it is to be a reasonable individual.
I've noticed that in conversation I've been listening less and thinking and talking more, and I think that's a bad thing. I do a lot of on-the-fly reasoning/debating when discussing issues with people; I very rarely have any pre-structured arguments or defenses. It's been satisfying enough so far, and when I go way off the beaten path mistakenly, either they or I catch it pretty quickly. I say that only to try to work out what weight my resources need to go to in discussing things with people. How much of my mental resources need to go into building that argument and how much into processing what's been said? Ideally, I install two processors in my head so each part gets 100%, but I've not figured out how to engineer a brain that does that...yet.
In watching a video with a Sam Harris lecture, he mentioned something about what ideas to attack. He's of the opinion that bad ideas need to be attacked, and I wholeheartedly agree with him. He set it out in a way that weighs the bad ideas, and starts from the ground up. For instance, a large portion of British muslims wanting to live in a society where apostasy is punished by death. That's a really really bad idea. Apostasy does not harm anybody - at all. And they want to kill someone for it. This needs to take precedence over something like racism in the bible belt (large paranthetical: in my experience, faith is at least partially responsible for this - if it were completely a culture thing, it wouldn't make sense that the most racist states also had the most conservative christians; back to a previous post, the bible tells you how to act: love. Racism most definitely doesn't fall under that category; I can't quite place my finger on it, and I've not spent a whole lot of time looking, but I do believe there's a connection with racism and faith; possibly the factionalized* mentality that it creates). The reason it needs to take precedence is because the racism in the bible belt, while ignorant and partially faith-related, is mostly under control - lynching and hate crimes are relatively rare, and are looked down upon when they happen. It's important to be able to make a distinction both for you and the people you talk to.
Maybe I didn't pick the best example there, but I wanted two things that could be pointed to as bad ideas, yet weren't quite on eqal footing. But basically, what I got out of it was the effort needs to go in rooting out bad ideas, the worst ideas, most fervently, and stop attacking the idea of a god so much. As many people see it, atheism is a "faith" that desires universal conversion. While that's not the truth, it does come off that way: everyone should rid themselves of belief in a god. And that comes off as very offensive. I think one of the "seeds of reason" I'm adding to my bag is to ignore the god question and just attack bad ideas. I know in my "conversion" to atheistic thinking, it was slow - my bad ideas just kept going and going until I finally realized that the god thing was one of the bad ideas I was holding on to. It wasn't something that all of a sudden "OMG GOD IS TEH SUXORZ ROFLCOPTER." It was incredibly subtle in my own experience. And I believe part of the reason to be that removal of bad ideas, no matter how long it takes.
*I believe the factionalized mentality comes from any superficial thing that sets you apart from(or together with) other people. In the navy: khaki uniforms (and the ranks that go with them); in religions: I go to THIS church, and they go to THAT church (superficial because the faith is basically the same); on the street: I drive a motorcycle and he drives a motorcycle, we're cool. I'm not saying it's wrong to have these groups of people that create social networks based on similar interests or goals. I'm saying the moment you start putting up walls regarding it, the walls will go up in other sections of your life, whether you want them to or not. As to what would not be a superficial thing that sets people apart, that's rough. I might just believe that anything that creates it is negative, but I'll think more on that later.
