Any recommendations on learning to "think clearly"? I feel like this is something I struggle quite a bit with and haven't found any good resources on improving it other than "sleep" and "exercise", which I'm not lacking in.
Unironically, that's what school is supposed to be for.
There's keeping the engine well maintained (the sleep and exercise part, for example) and there's driving the engine down new paths and honing you driving technique. You work on the latter by exposing yourself to novel and interesting arguments (interesting philosophy or argumentative non-fiction, for example) and then working through the argument again with counter-arguments in mind. I would not recommend pop-sci books for this, because their arguments and writing tends to be quite flabby.
I'd actually recommend something like RG Collingwood's "The Principles of Art" which is a relatively plain English example of well written philosophy:
You will disagree with him. The point is to understand how and why you disagree with him and to explain that clearly, not only to yourself but others as well. Thinking clearly is about responding and communicating clearly while displaying a sure and succinct understanding of the problem at hand.
You can apply that to everything you read or are confronted with, but the key thing to realize is that "thinking clearly" is something you practice. There is no one trick --- it's an approach.
I took piano lessons as a kid and learned how to play pretty well, but really hated the lessons, so I convinced my parents to let me stop. Now as a parent myself with two young kids, I regret that decision pretty often.
Now I'm wondering how much pressure I should put on my kids to learn music, or if I should simply expose them to it and let them decide for themselves how much they'd like to get into it.
I was never forced. I was given the opportunity. I can give no reasoning for this but I would say it taught me to conentrate but still to let it flow from my fingers at the same time. Performing in a relaxed state of mind. Also playing live (very rare). It made me more creative and that's not limited to music. I dealt differently with making mistakes. They happen. Part of the game. How does success feel? Try to bring on some very hard Bach piece and you know it. And also humbleness that someone like Bach could compose such fine music. Finely tuned attention to details. Finding pleasure in how a single note is struck and then fades into silence. You can struck it in ten different ways. Still being part of a team / band despite performing on your own. Discovering more and more music and admiring the effort that went into making the music. This list is endless...
It's hard to say. There are lots of things we make kids do that are good for them that they'd never want to do on their own, like go to school, do their homework, eat their vegetables.
And with something like music, it takes a lot of unpleasant effort and hard work initially before it hits a point where you really can start enjoying it. But kids would never have experienced such payoffs before, so having faith in perservering seems impossible. So one could argue that forcing a kid to commit and invest until they see the payoff, is the only way they can make a truly informed decision.
Or we can have faith that kids are a lot more mature and wise than we think. And maybe they've already seen all the way into the future and the end result. Or there is a different passion that they'd rather pursue.
Nice explanation. Thanks for the link. How does someone recognize when stock (and 140% of it) is being shorted? i.e. how did they see this opportunity?
Like others have said, no book will cover it all, which is why I am recommending a daily newsletter: https://dailydad.com/
Sometimes the advice is really good, other times it's repetitive, often I don't even read it. But I like getting a reminder each day that I should be present with my kids, work can wait, I should put down my phone and just be with my kids and let them have all of my attention.
I'm not sold on the validity of it all, but it's something to think about.
Here's the important bit:
"According to Hinde, when a baby suckles at its mother's breast, a vacuum is created. Within that vacuum, the infant's saliva is sucked back into the mother's nipple, where receptors in her mammary gland read its signals. This "baby spit backwash," as she delightfully describes it, contains information about the baby's immune status. Everything scientists know about physiology indicates that baby spit backwash is one of the ways that breast milk adjusts its immunological composition. If the mammary gland receptors detect the presence of pathogens, they compel the mother's body to produce antibodies to fight it, and those antibodies travel through breast milk back into the baby's body, where they target the infection.
At the same time that it is medicine, breast milk is a private conversation between mother and child. While my daughter lacks words, breast-feeding makes it possible for her to tell me exactly what she needs. The messages we are sending each other are literally made of ourselves, and they tell us about what is going on in our lives at that very moment."
It would certainly be interesting to see how often the mother was producing antibodies for things that the father wasn't (more mundane infection vectors are one of the ideas presented at my link, if baby, mother and father are all sick, you don't have much evidence of the saliva being important).
