From 53048ca5dfe9bcd19c43f076340c09e233a052aa Mon Sep 17 00:00:00 2001 From: Holden Rohrer Date: Tue, 14 Jan 2020 21:25:03 -0500 Subject: terribly disorganized commit of things from the past couple months --- jones-la/persuas.tex | 59 ++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++ jones-la/quick5.tex | 29 ++++++++++++++++++++++++ jones-la/quick6.tex | 31 +++++++++++++++++++++++++ jones-la/rhetorical3.tex | 33 +++++++++++++++++++++++++++ 4 files changed, 152 insertions(+) create mode 100644 jones-la/persuas.tex create mode 100644 jones-la/quick5.tex create mode 100644 jones-la/quick6.tex create mode 100644 jones-la/rhetorical3.tex (limited to 'jones-la') diff --git a/jones-la/persuas.tex b/jones-la/persuas.tex new file mode 100644 index 0000000..b6d8758 --- /dev/null +++ b/jones-la/persuas.tex @@ -0,0 +1,59 @@ +%%Formatting +\font\twelverm=ptmr7t at 12pt +\font\fourteenrm=ptmr7t at 14pt +\twelverm \baselineskip=24pt +\parindent=0.5in + +%%Header +\headline={\headline={Rohrer \pageno}} \nopagenumbers \vsize=9in +{\obeylines\parindent=0in +Holden Rohrer +Jones +AP Lang +4 Nov 2019 +\centerline{\fourteenrm Competition's Bare Utility}\baselineskip=28pt\par} + +%%Content +% Competition is bad? +% Why do people compete if it is so dearly harmful? Proving they're better? The propriety of the challenge? +% Hedonic treadmill: even when not competing, humans grow weary of good things extremely quickly +% Cooperation, or merely a lack of challenge as alternative +% Transcendentalism: Competition shouldn't matter because all that matters is goodness +% Thesis: Competition creates real value in society despite its individual psychological harm. +% Gains from competition: in athletic endeavours, people have gotten faster and better than they ever would have otherwise. +% Intellectually, people want to beat out their peers for the right to the "most relevant" idea, which has created a good portion of science (despite the normative cooperation) +% Political growth + +Humans, by their very nature, want to be good (in the sense of performance). +Life is, in many cases, a search for meaning, and that meaning often derives from being good at something. +People are also social creatures: we deign to be surrounded by others because they ease our natural discomfort and wariness. +Naturally, competition of the athletic, intellectual, and even moral sorts arose within society. +Alfie Kohn recognizes that, psychologically, competition is harmful; no matter where one falls in the hierarchy of competitors, he or she is anxious and unhappy even at the top. +But this doesn't contradict the fact that great gains have been gotten by competition: athletes are stronger and faster than they ever could have been before, scientific intellectualism is bolstered by great individual efforts, and politicians serve more accurately to their constituents because in each of these fields, competitors hold them accountable. +Despite great gains from cooperation, competition has been the best way to derive massive individual productivity gains from the population despite its psychological downsides. + +These individual gains in productivity are useful because society as a whole becomes more able and because that individual can now accomplish significantly more, especially in conjunction with their other talent or other skillful persons. +These gains in productivity from competition also strengthen the ability of competition to drive more innovation and hard work in that field. +It's the idea that ``once someone sees it can be done, everyone will try to do it.'' +In the machine learning field, for example, which is growing extremely quickly because of rapid iterative growth, computers couldn't differentiate between black-and-white handwritten numbers no more than a couple decades ago. +But now, because of growth in that field, every tech company uses Artificial Intelligence to choose what to show the user next and to rapidly classify even highly complex content like video into distinct categories like music, games, or vlogging. + +It might be considered that raising the bar could create some psychological unease, but the social gains are well worth it. +Competition can even be seen as cooperation over a long enough time span. +Racing cars, for example, often develop new technologies like ``fuel injection'' or new materials for the bodies of the cars, and while these are immediately the result of competition, eventually every company takes advantage of these highly benefical innovations and in several cases, applies it to consumer cars. +On a long-term societal scale, competition drives the creation of new technology and improves the quality of whatever field that competition is occurring in. +On a short-term individual scale, however, competition certainly creates some degree of anxiety, but that anxiety is well worth it and even desirable. +Boredom is a common experience because without stress, without anxiety, people feel unmotivated. +While in certain cases, motivation can be derived internally, that motivation still consists (in many cases) of a need or deep desire to expand one's abilities or to achieve a specific task. +Perpetual anxiety is not a state to be fought against but rather an ultimate goal (in moderation, of course). + +Success being dependent on absolute measures means that the metrics quickly become outdated, and if they aren't, those metrics must be based in competition. +The growth of musicians over time demonstrates this clearly. +A number of judges looked at students coming out of Juilliard compared to the work of classical masters like Bach or Beethoven and found that the skill levels of either were highly comparable and the Juilliard students won out in some cases. +This is because innovation and competition drive humanity to become better, and while musicians don't compete against eachother in the sense that a sprinter or a baseballer does, they at least compete against past musicians. +It is a violinist's calling to improve their own stature compared to ``the bar'' of the day, which moves with the average quality of a musician and thus derives a pseudo-competitive atmosphere. + +Regardless of the field, competition requires individuals become better, which helps their field and in turn society improve as a necessary result. +Cooperation is a natural aftereffect of this competition because people are not wholly unwilling to share their secrets to success, but even when success is fully dependent on the failure of others, the anxiety experienced by one or several individuals is not enough to outweigh the growth visible to the group. + +\bye diff --git a/jones-la/quick5.tex b/jones-la/quick5.tex new file mode 100644 index 0000000..9e5530c --- /dev/null +++ b/jones-la/quick5.tex @@ -0,0 +1,29 @@ +\input mla8.tex +%\emergencystretch=1in +%\parskip=4pt plus 2pt minus 2pt + +\numberfirstpage +\clas{AP Lang} +\name{Holden} \last{Rohrer} +\prof{Jones} +\header +\title{Quick Write 5: Is ``doing nothing'' a good use of your time?} + +In the most concrete sense, doing nothing wastes time, definitionally. +Almost always, one could complete another task in the same duration, so to do nothing is to neglect that task. +But human psychology and physiology don't corroborate this simple idea. +Instead, sleep or rest (a necessary ``doing nothing'' component of daily life) reinvigorate to make up for their own ``poor use of time.'' +But what's commonly meant by ``doing nothing'' isn't sleep; as discoveries about the value of sleep continue to rise, proponents of ``sleep less, work more'' dwindle. +Instead, opponents of unproductiveness and inefficiency manage their time so as to maximize working time---considering leisure to be the greatest waste of time. + +Modern life affords a number of easy leisure activities, mostly digital, comprising movies, television, and mindless social media scrolling. +All of these are seen as a waste of time because of their opportunity cost, but their role in maintaining restfulness is notable: to do any of these is to rest because one is mostly inactive. +And, of course, one could be doing something ``productive'' in the same time, but it is critical to recognize the value of breaks, at minimum. +``Down-time'' (a time in which to do nothing) contributes to the overall efficiency of any person, so leisure must be considered valuable by those most willing to stifle it. + +In fact, a more disciplined form of inactivity is practiced by some of the most successful people in the world: meditation. +The sense of relaxation meditation synthesises is far greater than any of the easy leisure activities listed above, and for good reason. +Doing nothing, in its purest form, is a good use of time in the same way that sleep is a good use of time. +And in its more common, relaxed forms, doing nothing has many of the same benefits---if those are only because of the absence of stressful work. + +\bye diff --git a/jones-la/quick6.tex b/jones-la/quick6.tex new file mode 100644 index 0000000..cc6244f --- /dev/null +++ b/jones-la/quick6.tex @@ -0,0 +1,31 @@ +\input mla8.tex +%\emergencystretch=1in +%\parskip=4pt plus 2pt minus 2pt + +\numberfirstpage +\clas{AP Lang} +\name{Holden} \last{Rohrer} +\prof{Jones} +\header +\title{Quick Write 1: Charity as Transaction} + +The transaction is the simplest economic unit: some persons want what the other has in exchange for what they currently have, and the exchange occurs. +In the barest sense, charity is also a transaction. +One exchanges money or food or clothing for a sense of philanthropy and the knowledge that some good has occurred on one's behalf. +Economies introduce a flaw into standard transactions which isn't an issue in this sort of transaction, wealth inequality. + +In most cases, this flaw is reasonable. +Someone with more wealth can righteously buy more things than someone with less. +But in the case of charity, every participant, regardless their wealth, can participate. +This is because a philanthropic exchange does not require a specific amount of giving or good to be done. +An ordinary person giving \$100 is far more charitable than Jeff Bezos' million because charity is scalable and personal. + +But the instant that a ``real'' incentive is created, like bonus points on a test or a final, it stops being charity in two ways. +The first is the most direct---charity requires philanthropy, which is contradicted by a transaction. +Buying, whether with canned goods or US dollars, a grade or a prize which could not be otherwise (fungibly) obtained is ruinous. +It is, firstly, not scalable (meaning it is not charity) because some metric must be used to measure how much a person ``should'' give, which is easily corrupted by wealth inequality. +Second, the transaction itself is intrinsically unfair. +Certain incentives, like tax breaks, provide something fungible like money which merely offsets the cost of charitability (in effect, the donation is ``matched'' by whomever gives the incentive) +Others, which are not fungible, like grades are necessarily highly transactional and improper incentives. + +\bye diff --git a/jones-la/rhetorical3.tex b/jones-la/rhetorical3.tex new file mode 100644 index 0000000..8eaf522 --- /dev/null +++ b/jones-la/rhetorical3.tex @@ -0,0 +1,33 @@ +\input mla8.tex +\emergencystretch=1in +\parskip=4pt plus 2pt minus 2pt + +\numberfirstpage +\clas{AP Lang} +\name{Holden} \last{Rohrer} +\prof{Jones} +\header +\title{Analysis of {\it A Case of Mental Courage}} + +In journalist and philosopher David Brooks’ investigation of contemporary American culture’s weakness ``A Case of Mental Courage,'' he prescribes intentional thoughtfulness to the often frivolous and unfocused modern philosophy. +By labeling specific examples of mental strength or frailty and using language related to honor or righteousness, Brooks identifies a quasi-religious change in Western culture to an audience that lacks ``conscious[ness] of [its] severe mental shortcomings.'' + +He starts chronologically, with an early $19^{\rm th}$ century novelist Fanny Burney who practiced the virtues consciousness of self and ``mental character.'' +Brooks uses words like ``arduous,'' ``resolved,'' and ``heroism'' as comments on her ordeal of a mastectomy without anesthesia. +His diction emphasizes the idea that her mastectomy (and writing about it) has character---while it doesn't demonstrate any specific high moral practice like charity, the self-sacrifice (the mental strength she used) is equally valuable and respectable. +Brooks talks about how she suffered through a ``mental boot camp'' which is commendable because it developed her ``ability to face unpleasant thoughts.'' + +After providing such a respectable example, Brooks transitions to the modern day. +He observes her action as somewhat of a cultural artifact. +Because the church and other institutions, at the time, held people ``to be inherently sinful,'' work was believed to be essential to a moral and proper life, so people were more willing to ``conquer mental laziness.'' +When moving to description of modern American and Western culture, Brooks criticizes limited ``talk of sin and frailty,'' blaming capitalism for this change. + +Brooks notes institional changes like the media attempting to ``please customers,'' and accuses ``the competition for eyeballs'' of developing this. +He describes the change as inarduousness and a lack of skepticism, trying to appeal to a sense of goodness and discouraging these institutional changes that he thinks emblematic of the culture through that. +He lists off ``natural weaknesses'' that are prevalent in today's society: confirmation bias, cognitive miserliness, herd thinking, and he uses them to criticise the people. +Since capitalism has displaced the church's role as the organizational unit of society, Americans don't need to consider their own shortcomings, and he uses similarly strong language to specify these issues. +He reuses the terms ``mental flabbiness'' or ``mental character'' throughout the article to identify the specific issues and provides a singular point of focus for his writing. +But he also associates these with the specific vices of modern culture to create the idea that Americans should act more like Burney or some of the people Brooks interviews. + + +\bye -- cgit