Primarily because the book claims to give you tips for getting by on ridiciousl amounts of sleep. I figure if I can get myself down to 4 hours of sleep that might make the book worth it.
I’ve taken like 5 psych courses back in my college days and am in the middle of a career switch to the health field currently, I don’t know how that is recomended, unless your body is naturally designed to sleep shorter hours. My guess is the book is trying to do something like “catch REM cycles”, if that is the case, I don’t see how it’s a good idea. As far as I know the prevailing theory still holds to a “sleep debt”, moreover the mind and immune system will wear down over time. I would recomend running it by your doctor if you are serious about it.
Note: I am not saying to be a pussy about it and listen to everything the doc says, or come up with a lame ass excuse for 8 hrs of sleep a day. I am just saying trying to alter/battle your biology with a long term goal could be an exhausting and losing battle in this situation. Trying not to sleep/ changing ones biological homeostasis while not under obvious neccesity while trying to study can dohellish things to people.
The book has a section on how to control and even extend your REM cycles. So I think thats what the guy is referring to. I could see that as being useful, though I thought the black periods outside of REM were needed for the body as well, primarily mental rest.
william, yah it sounds that’s like the part of the author’s plan (making the little sleep you get quality sleep by some how targeting the REM cycle).
i would not say i’m super serious about the endevour. i’m certainly not looking for a lifestyle change. i was just looking into it because last week from like sunday to thursday i was working on about 2 hours of sleep a night and felt horrible (2 exams and a delieverable due at work). so i wanted to see if there were tips for easing the pain of extended almost-all-nighters.
i will prob give some of his tips a try, but would def abandon if they started to lead to health problems.
lol, well I guess you ought to try out something. If you can catch REM patterns, it isn’t a bad way to make a hellish week easier I suppose. The problem would be if you put too much focus on it and destroy your bodies homeostasis, you are just adding that much more stress.
Also, and this sounds chincy as hell; but a nicehealthy breakfast helps, and laying off of really heavy meals in general. Also, eat an early dinner and go to bed somewhat hungry if you can, or not bloated at least.
haha thans for the tips. I was actually doing good about avoiding heavy meals during the day (to avoid postprandial somnolence–i googled that shit!) but i would ussually gorge right before taking a nap (found it helped me go to sleep faster). but that’s a bad idea? it might explain why i found it so hard to wake up (well that and 2 hours isn’t much sleep at all).
I just finished Robin Dunbar’s How Many Friends Does One Person Need. Which ironically had not much mention of the Dunbar Number, but did pretty much everything else in a whirlwind of short chapters of explanations about things in social life from an evolutionary standpoint. From animal brain size and mammalian polygamy to explaining why people kiss and speculation on religion and theory of mind.
Also finished the first volume of Ulysses S. Grant’s memoirs. This guy seems about the most levelheaded and normal guy that could be president. He was a mathematician and a very reluctant general; always wanted to be a college professor instead. He didn’t even plan on going to West Point. And even has surprisingly a lot of self-knowledge and candidness. For instance, reflecting on the fact that he was never forced to lessons or other work in life by coercion. Or in telling us what a disaster annexing Texas and fighting Mexico was, despite reluctantly fighting in that war.
Besides my interest in Austrolibertarianism, I am a physician with board certification in sleep medicine. First, daytime performance is mainly related to total sleep, not specific sleep stages- thus trying to do something with REM sleep is unlikely to be successful. The purpose for REM sleep is unknown, it looks very similar to awake by brain waves- it used to be called paradoxical sleep. Also, I would strongly advise against sleep restriction. Studies have been done with short term sleep restriction that show, at least in the short term- sleep restriction for 4 hrs a night for a week will prevent a return to baseline cognitive function
but i would ussually gorge right before taking a nap (found it helped me go to sleep faster). but that’s a bad idea? it might explain why i found it so hard to wake up
Yeah that is part of the problem, you go to sleep faster but it becomes a chore to wake up. If you can somehow get yourself “excited” about waking up for breakfast (go gormet on the stuff if you have time), and make your body want to wake up (due to being hungry) it may help.
Btw, Student, I recall you asking on free banking literature. I’ve already posted this once here on the main frb thread, but since I’m desparate to have people read it, I thought I would link to it here for you: “The Theory of Free Banking”. The “short macroeconomic note” you can ignore, as it’s not a position that any important endorses in the free banking school, but the core of it is a straight paraphrasing of what Selgin writes in his book.
Instead of reading An Enquiry Concerning the Principles of Morals just yet, I read Hume’s A Dissertation on the Passions (the latter is only 36 pages long). I’m very glad that I did. It is a natural follow-up to An Enquiry Concerning the Human Understanding, and a natural preface to Enquiry… Morals. Hume’s theory of morals is largely built on his theory of passions, which in turn is largely built on his theory of the understanding. That is why his Treatise of Human Nature devotes an entire book to each of those topics in that order reversed. However, his Treatise was not intially well-received by the philosophical community (he said it dropped “still-born” from the presses). So he tried to make his case again (this time with more art and directness) with his Enquiries (Understanding and Morals). However, Treatise Book II, on the passions, did not get a similar rewrite until later in his Dissertation on the Passions. And that was not published until after his death (he was still editing it near the end of his life). So it has become Hume’s most neglected work. That is a shame, because the Dissertation is much more compact and forceful than Book II of the Treatise, and anyone who reads neither the Treatise nor the Dissertation will have a huge gaping hole in his understanding of Hume’s philosophy, because his theory of the passions provides the connecting link between his theory of the understanding and his theory of morals.
I recommend anyone taking up reading Hume to…
Start with An Enquiry Concerning Human Understanding
Read either A Dissertation on the Passions or Book II of A Treatise of Human Nature (preferably the former)
Next one should read either An Enquiry Concerning the Principles of Morals or Book III of Treatise.
Regarding #2 above, the possibe problem with reading the Dissertation is its rarity. You can find it in paper form conjoined with the Natural History of Religionat Amazon. But as far as free electronic copies, I was only able to find it at the Open Library, and not in the most readable formats. The raw scan is written with the old convention of using what looks like a “f” for the inital “s” of every word (which you can also see in the original Declaration of Independence), which makes it somewhat difficult to read. And the epub version is a plain, unedited image-to-text conversion, so that is even harder to read, with all the errors. I ended up just reading the raw PDF scan on my computer screen, which was okay, because, again it’s only 36 pages.
Regarding #3 above, it would be easy to suppose that Enquiry… Morals would be a better introduction to Hume’s theory of morals than Book III of the Treatise, because perhaps it is similiarly more forceful. However I can’t say for certain either way yet, because I haven’t read the former yet (that’s up next). However, according to Hazlitt in The Foundations of Morality, Hume’s excellent formulation of rule utilitarianism is much more fragmentary and incomplete in the Enquiry than it is in the Treatise. So Book III of the Treatise might be best after all.
Don’t ask me why I randomly decided to put so much thought into this…
“The Trojan War” by Olivia Coolidge. This sums up the War from the marriage of Thetis to the return of Odysseus, it has pictures, goes over a few of the Greek tragides (Trojan Woman, Philoctetes). Good for kids between 5/6 - 13
“Gods and Heroes of Ancient Greece” by Gustav Shwab. This is the single best simplified prose anthology I am aware of, and great for any kid. An adult could probably even get use out of its very detailed prose of the Trojan War, in which almost the complete Iliad and Odyssey are in, but in simplified prose form. I grew up on this book.
I have on order the Richard Lattimore (my favorite Hellenistic translator by far) translation of The New Testemant which will supposedly show the very visceral, unpretnetious, and in some cases very simplistic language the texts were written in.
I finished Kirzner’s The Economic Point of View last night. By the way, I suggest the book to anyone interested in the epistemological origins of praxeology. Kirzner covers, mostly, what economists have thought their science dealt with, ranging from early beliefs that economics was a science which studied wealth, or the attainment of wealth, to the study of exchange, money, et cetera, with two great chapters on Robbins’s contributions and then Mises’s praxeology. While he doesn’t really go into praxeology in terms of its applicability as a methodology, the chapter serves the purpose of explaining why the axiom of purposeful human action is important and why it was chosen as the axiom from which to deduce the rest of economic theory. It’s a great book, and the new Liberty Fund edition includes the rationality debate between Becker and Kirzner, which is interesting.
With that book finished, I’m moving on to Lawrence R. Klein’s The Keynesian Revolution. I’m reading this in preperation to reading Keynes’s The General Theory, cover to cover, which is the seventh book on my “short-term reading list” (number four is DeLong’s The End of Influence, but I tried reading it a bit last night, and I’m not sure I can bring myself to do it; first was Human Action, second was Time and Money, and third was Kirzner’s book — more progress than what I usually make).
Jonathan, could you write a short review of End of Influence whenever you can?
Brad DeLong perhaps sees himself as a nonideological economist, because he recently showed a speech where he said that even though he is a “card carrying neoliberal”, he feels that economics justifies certain interventions - that is to say that economics has led him to conclusions the opposite of his political beliefs.
Whereas you have said that End of Influence is more politics than economics. It sounds suspiciously similar to Paul Krugman’s political manifesto Conscience of a Liberal, which just talks about “income inequality” and addressing it as a problem, without ever explaining the premise that it is a bad thing that some people have more money than others.
Well, I read the introduction last night, and they (Cohen and DeLong) open by writing,
During, World War I, the world’s long-reigning superpower, Great Britain, faced a disturbing development: Just when the nation really needed it, Britain no longer had the money. The money had shifted to the United States, where it accumulated for the next sixty years, and then began to drain away.
I can’t comment with absolute accuracy, but it seems as if Cohen’s and DeLong’s thesis is that money is what allows countries shape global political policy. There is some praise for neoliberal economic policies in the introduction, but it seems to me that their thesis is mercantilistic. It wasn’t money which caused the transfer of status as world power from Great Britain to the United States, it was the fact that the United States was a greater industrial power. It seems to either conflate money and wealth, or confuse the purpose of money in relation to the amount of global wealth.
But, I’ll have to read the book. I might read it in between lectures or something.
Just finished Enquiry Concerning the Principles of Morals. While Hazlitt was right that his treatment of rule utilitarianism is better organized in Book III of A Treatise, in just about every other regard Enquiry is far superior (and anyway, reading Hazlitt’s discussion of Hume’s rule utilitarianism in Foundations of Morality would nicely fill in that lacuna). What a book! I was reminded of Gerard Casey talking about how whenever he reads Human Action, he is so stimulated that he has to take breaks to walk around the room. This book had the same effect on me. This book is not of antiquarian interest only. Modern discourse is so wanting of an undertanding of its lessons, that it is absolutely cutting edge. I would rank it as one of the top 5 most important book to read in the social sciences, up there with Human Action, Theory and History, Man, Economy, and State, and Foundations of Morality. The version available from Adelaide (in both HTML and EPUB) is much easier to read than the version at the Online Library of Liberty.
Now on to the lengthy, but pleasant, task of reading the 660 pages of the OLL’s edition of Hume’s Essays, Moral, Political, and Literary, which contains the essays that first made him famous (even though they have since become overshadowed by his initially-ignored more abstract works, and are not today widely read).
Same here. I’ve read the Treatise and most of the Essays, but only recently learned about the Principles of Morals, and was unaware of A Dissertation on the Passions. And Liberty Fund’s Essays is really under 600 pages, and the text and spacing are fairly large. It won’t take as long as you might think.