YouSaid · the spoken record

Nancy Sherman

lines on the record: 71
first: 2021-12-14
most recent: 2021-12-14
sittings or episodes: 1
sources: podcast

Every line below is reproduced as it was said and linked to the record it came from. Nothing here is summarised or generated. Directory · Search · Corrections

“Teaching and I often think of that play when I sort of am really hard on myself or feeling particularly ashamed of something that happened or egg on my face a bit and trying to be a little gentler to myself.”
2021-12-14 · The Knowledge Project with Shane Parrish · #126 Nancy Sherman: Soldiers and Stoics · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT
“In my years of working with military men and women coming home and having seen horrible things. And they just don't want to let up on their guilt. And it's excruciating. And sometimes it's the gaze of a loved one or a close, close buddy who is the best person situated to be able to hold up a mirror to them and say You wouldn't accuse me, I'm not accusing you now. And in some ways that's really the role of a very benevolent psychotherapist to be able to allow you to see yourself in a way that you can't see yourself at the moment because the story you're telling is the only one you can tell yourself. But there are other stories that you can listen to, but you can't find the voice yet. You can't find the gaze yet. So there's that moment in a stone.”
2021-12-14 · The Knowledge Project with Shane Parrish · #126 Nancy Sherman: Soldiers and Stoics · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT
“And it's essentially he's got a, the Stoic lesson here is that he's got to take on the perspective of someone else to become his own friend, to find self-compassion. So again, this is listening to another person and it's really hard to hear that other person because all you want to do is be enraged at yourself. Survivor's guilt, essentially. Why should I live? I killed all these other people. I mean, He's suicidal, but he has to be comforted by taking on the perspective of someone else. So he can see himself through someone else's eyes is what he's got to learn. That is so hard to see yourself in the moment of self rage and shame and guilt through a more compassionate lens. I think of this a lot.”
2021-12-14 · The Knowledge Project with Shane Parrish · #126 Nancy Sherman: Soldiers and Stoics · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT
“But his stepmother Juno has played this terribly dirty trick on him, and the trick is that he's going, he's going to kill his loved ones. He kills his family in a blind rage. And when he comes to, he sees, quote, the hordes of ghosts, and he can't believe it was his hand that did it. He needs to be comforted, but he needs to be comforted by opening himself up to someone else. And it's a role of his father and his best friend. And here you have Hercules. You know, it's the model in all of mythology of the strongest, toughest guy who has to accept first what his father says. He says, the deed was not yours, the guilt is not yours, it was your stepmother's. And then his friend says, use your heroic courage to show yourself mercy.”
2021-12-14 · The Knowledge Project with Shane Parrish · #126 Nancy Sherman: Soldiers and Stoics · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT
“A reading about other cultures so different from one's own historical epochs or different areas of the world, that's a very stoic technique of cosmopolitanism. Visualize it, imagine it, and try to get the emotions that would go with that, which could be a kind of a form of empathy, essentially. And then another, I often turn to the tragedies, the Greek and Roman tragedies, but one of them that people don't typically read is Seneca's Hercules Rages. And I think of this in terms of asking others for help. So the idea is this. Hercules, now he's the go-it-alone guy. He's strong in all ways, 12 labors. He has to break through Hades and get to this world after his labors, and it's a homecoming. He's ready to see.”
2021-12-14 · The Knowledge Project with Shane Parrish · #126 Nancy Sherman: Soldiers and Stoics · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT
“Really helped ourselves by media, photojournalism, broadcast journalism, immersed journalists. We get to see the world up close in a way that, of course, the ancients couldn't. They depended on stories coming back.”
2021-12-14 · The Knowledge Project with Shane Parrish · #126 Nancy Sherman: Soldiers and Stoics · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT
“Absolutely. So I do think of that in Stoic lingo. The third thing I use a lot is a visualization practice that's a lesser known stoic has this notion that you're at the center of a whole series of concentric circles and your role is to visualize with commitment and zeal the outer circle and bring it to the inner circle so that the outer group is part of the inner group. It's a way of making them us. And this is a part of cosmopolitanism. If you're going to see yourself as a cooperative member of the universe, of the cosmos, a global citizen, then it's not just about you projecting your ego outward, but it's about understanding what the others have to bring to you. And that, you know, the way the Stoics put it is think of the most distant. The tribe is still close to you and close to your Kiffinkin. That's a very powerful idea.”
2021-12-14 · The Knowledge Project with Shane Parrish · #126 Nancy Sherman: Soldiers and Stoics · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT
“But when it comes to those that are near and dear to me and have their own spheres of agency, I have to know when to back off. This is children, spouses. And that's hard. And I sometimes just have to give myself a little stoic talking to. I'm in charge of me and I have to give some space to others who have equal autonomy as much as I'd like them to follow my dictum.”
2021-12-14 · The Knowledge Project with Shane Parrish · #126 Nancy Sherman: Soldiers and Stoics · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT
“So, one is, as I was mentioning this pre-rehearsing ills and how to get my mother to talk about death. And that wasn't just think about it in advanced mom. It was me realizing that we got to do it together and make a bit of and go light. Stoics are very much about, you know, motions can dig in. And so you have to sometimes go light and not be too strenuous in your approach. And so that's really one. I often try to realize, you know, I want to control a lot more than I can control. Now I am not the kind of Stoic that says accept and acquiesce by any means. I think that's pernicious. I'm very much about exerting my agency and will to change the world as much as I can.”
2021-12-14 · The Knowledge Project with Shane Parrish · #126 Nancy Sherman: Soldiers and Stoics · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT
“Given other larger structures that are in place that hamper the conversation. You know, I often so wish the classroom were a place that I could just broadcast more broadly. And these kinds of conversations, you and I are having do that. But it's not often what we hear in the public fora. And that's a sad fact that we've got our a place that we've got ourselves into. I'm hopeful, and I have to be hopeful, but I do find that we get stuck in certain kinds of memes and certain kinds of sloganeering that just cut off conversation between groups.”
2021-12-14 · The Knowledge Project with Shane Parrish · #126 Nancy Sherman: Soldiers and Stoics · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT
“Money and power, and those aren't necessarily about search for the truth or try to eliminate cognitive bias. It's just dig your heels in in order to continue to perpetuate the power position you had in the past. So it's very hard to disentangle the genuine Engagement That really, really makes a difference socially, and not just in your family or in the relationships or in your immediate community.”
2021-12-14 · The Knowledge Project with Shane Parrish · #126 Nancy Sherman: Soldiers and Stoics · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT
“Yeah, if you're defending a dissertation, that's probably the way to go. Yeah. Another one is very hard to bring different groups together. We belong to self-confirming groups in our demographics of late are confirming that even more. The maps show it that we tend to live in places where people think. More like us than don't. And we tend to associate in those groups. And whether you're on the coasts rather in my country, rather than parts of the south. And those groups also tend to align with even more practices and views that exclude the other. So the partisan politics, which is a massive version of the problem you're talking about, is very, very hard to adjust because then you're back in a story we were having before, which is about glory, ambition.”
2021-12-14 · The Knowledge Project with Shane Parrish · #126 Nancy Sherman: Soldiers and Stoics · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT
“It's a defense. It's definitely a defense. It's definitely a defense. It's hard to knock down that person's defense unless they do it themselves, right? Because that's yet another level of argument that I'm going to get into. So that's therapy. Yeah, absolutely. But I'm just saying that is the way in many worlds the conversations go. Show me, prove it to me. I won't believe it to you until you have knockdown evidence.”
2021-12-14 · The Knowledge Project with Shane Parrish · #126 Nancy Sherman: Soldiers and Stoics · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT
“Think you're absolutely right. That is the way to both learn and also even pivot and be resilient, as we were saying, be adapted to new information that comes in so that you're not just stuck on old ways. There's a few things that you have to get over, though. And one is some of us approach the world as skeptics. Show me the evidence. Prove it to me. I can give you some counterfactuals. That would be the hard cases for that claim that you're making. And even if you're not combative in tone, the way your mind works because of training or culture or all different kinds of background conditions is I won't believe it until you remove sufficient degrees of doubt. That's the way some people's minds work, especially in academia.”
2021-12-14 · The Knowledge Project with Shane Parrish · #126 Nancy Sherman: Soldiers and Stoics · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT
“slower emotions work if I'm unwilling to sort of see well maybe there are different tracks in the brain maybe you know stuff that happens up on the cortex is rather different from stuff that happens in the limbic area and maybe that explains something about why we have such fast track emotions and slower more mediated emotions so You know, I'm saying essentially there's the ways of getting out of just confirming evidence or cognitive bias is by going backwards, listening to others, breaking down siloed walls of And infusing some of the conversation with all the juice that goes into getting excited about areas that maybe aren't your own.”
2021-12-14 · The Knowledge Project with Shane Parrish · #126 Nancy Sherman: Soldiers and Stoics · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT
“Cooperative endeavor of all different kinds and that just may involve listening more than talking. It's very hard to listen because we want to be a player in the game. We know this in relationships. We're ready to butt in. So maybe we do sometimes have to curb our emotions. But we need to hear the other side of the story in order to see if there's something that resonates with us or some affront or even some aspect of a cognitive picture that we were really occluded to before. I mean, if I, for example, say I can't really talk to brain scientists because I don't think the mind reduces to the brain. Well, I've lost a lot of really important information about how processing works, how what we were talking about before, fast emotions versus”
2021-12-14 · The Knowledge Project with Shane Parrish · #126 Nancy Sherman: Soldiers and Stoics · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT
“Start building on that knowledge base and it becomes a part of their world. And you can't have that without emotions. I mean, the world that maybe we got somewhere in the turn of the Greeks or Romans gave us or maybe came with the enlightenment that there's the faculty of reason and there's the faculty of emotion and the twain shall never meet. That is so wrong. We know emotions are cognitively loaded. We know that cognition is flat unless it's charged or sparked or an intellectual commitment is just that. The commitment carries a lot of juice. And so you can't easily, I think, break down Some of these prejudices or biases or narrow-mindedness with regard to intellectual endeavors, unless you spark some interest on the other side. I think another one simply is...”
2021-12-14 · The Knowledge Project with Shane Parrish · #126 Nancy Sherman: Soldiers and Stoics · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT
“I'm going to do the hard work or diligence that it takes. The due diligence it takes to get me to sort of understand that. Now, I mean, I face this regularly in the classroom. If I'm really, really boring and I'm trying to teach Kant's ethics, which can be very hard, or even some aspects of Stoicism, which can be terribly dry, I'm not going to get anywhere unless I try to reach the undergraduates at their level and the graduate students at their level. I'm just constantly trying to communicate. So, you know, we're all trying to be decent communicators in order to be able to get people's interest sparked. And if their interest is sparked, they get to be creative. And if they're creative, that leads to other avenues where they...”
2021-12-14 · The Knowledge Project with Shane Parrish · #126 Nancy Sherman: Soldiers and Stoics · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT
“You get involved in something because you have interest or you're passionate about it or you make a commitment and a commitment is an investment. And an investment means I'm going to go the extra mile.”
2021-12-14 · The Knowledge Project with Shane Parrish · #126 Nancy Sherman: Soldiers and Stoics · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT
“We are in bias. So those are two things. The third is that we really ought to know that emotions aren't always our enemy, but are often our friend.”
2021-12-14 · The Knowledge Project with Shane Parrish · #126 Nancy Sherman: Soldiers and Stoics · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT
“into those other areas of expertise unless I'm willing to have pretty decent substantive conversations much like you're having with people that are in areas other than their own and that may involve going to speak to a neurobiologist and the neurobiologist has to be able to talk to me in a language that isn't one that they would speak to in their lab or to someone who can read an FMRI, a functional magnetic resonance imaging. Communication skills are requisite if you're going to get outside the silo and any knowledge is collective, cooperative, not simply built in your area of expertise. And the more narrow the areas of expertise and the more siloed the mediums for distributing that information, the more stuck.”
2021-12-14 · The Knowledge Project with Shane Parrish · #126 Nancy Sherman: Soldiers and Stoics · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT
“One thing is you're right, cognitive bias or confirming evidence is certainly one tendency that we have and that we, I think being aware of the fact that we tend to look for confirming evidence rather than refutation, you might say in an old Karl Popperian way is critically important. The second is that we shouldn't rely on the testimony just of ourselves or of our siloed echo chamber thinking, which is particularly pernicious these days, I think. We need to rely on groups of experts. I can't really do philosophy unless I understand a little bit about biology on occasion or other areas of that go beyond my area of expertise. But I can easily get”
2021-12-14 · The Knowledge Project with Shane Parrish · #126 Nancy Sherman: Soldiers and Stoics · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT
“Particular outcome, absolutely a consequence that you really want to happen. Absolutely. And so the idea here is that you're going to Taken informational inflow, and you're going to know what to do with it. I mean, it's a high demand, but isn't that after all what we do? And what we've been doing it during the pandemic, we are trying to take in the best data we can get from science and constantly update our communication about what we have to do given what we know about science. Is the virus vaccine degrading? At what point does it degrade? We might have said the mask didn't work then, but we now know better. We are constantly updating information so that we can be resilient in the face of new input. I think that's very stoic.”
2021-12-14 · The Knowledge Project with Shane Parrish · #126 Nancy Sherman: Soldiers and Stoics · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT
“You're going to be able to get input quickly and make use of it quickly. I sometimes think of it on the model of, you know, I know drone pilots and I know the Intel officers that give them information and they've got to constantly update these millions of screens in order to get the Autopilots getting the right information quickly. And the Stoics sort of have this idea that you put this little if clause. We're going to do it unless or if it doesn't. And you're going to be really responsive to what the conditions are in that clause such that if things change, you're going to change your intention. That's pretty resilient because back to our earlier conversation, it means you're not going to get stuck on an attachment to a certain object of desire or pleasure or object of loss in the case of...”
2021-12-14 · The Knowledge Project with Shane Parrish · #126 Nancy Sherman: Soldiers and Stoics · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT
“And the gods are infallible, so we should try to be infallible. So what does that mean in terms of resilience? Well, it means that if you're really, really resilient and you're really adaptive, then you have this kind of what they call mental reservation. You would say, I'm going to go for a sale today if it doesn't rain. Now you don't know if it's going to rain or not. We're not listening to the Weatherman's report. But you're going to be able to pivot on a dime if it does, and you're going to pull back on your plans. So you're going to be really nimble or agile. You know, you're not going to be a market timer, but you're going to realize that, you know, past performance doesn't predict future performance. So you're going to be able to, I think of it as refresh your screen really fast.”
2021-12-14 · The Knowledge Project with Shane Parrish · #126 Nancy Sherman: Soldiers and Stoics · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT
“Being able to adapt to your circumstances, but not adapt where you're just a blob that has no spine and quite, you know, doesn't have any backbone, you want to hold on to your character backbone, but you still want to be able to take in the inflow of information in a way that is wise and prudential. So the Stoics, they're very ancient in this regard. They're not modern. So think of Descartes as modern. So Descartes' all about doubt, Cartesian doubt. He's a skeptic. And so we're fallible. Is this a ball of wax in front of me? I don't know. Can I trust my sense? I don't really know. What would it take to confirm that? The Stoics think you should think about infallibleism because they've got us in a world with the gods and humans, all interspersed. We're all in the same cosmos.”
2021-12-14 · The Knowledge Project with Shane Parrish · #126 Nancy Sherman: Soldiers and Stoics · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT
“Yeah, and I'm going to draw on the Stoics for a moment because I think they're pretty brilliant in this regard. So resilience is a word that really means to sort of bounce a bit, to not break, to not break under pressure. And so we think about it psychologically as being adaptive. Not being brittle not being rigid.”
2021-12-14 · The Knowledge Project with Shane Parrish · #126 Nancy Sherman: Soldiers and Stoics · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT
“And also sometimes we raise the wrong persons. It's not just clear because I'm now a woman speaking that you should defer to me on all matters that have to do with my gender, nor if I were black, you know, you should defer to me on all matters because I'm the person of color in the room. We really don't know how I think to sometimes be wise about the roles we wear and sometimes that we wear in very, very deep. For some people not easily changeable ways. You know, some of them are, but some of them aren't.”
2021-12-14 · The Knowledge Project with Shane Parrish · #126 Nancy Sherman: Soldiers and Stoics · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT
“Because as I say, it's magnified on a uniform. In fact, I was just saying I was at the Naval Academy and I forgot how to read all the stripes. I forgot, oh, this one's an ensign and this one is a cat and the guy was a Navy captain which translates into a marine colonel and he was moreover a seal and I didn't read that I didn't pick up all the signs and insignias. And that was a sort of a major faux pas on my part. You know, you're supposed to be able to read really fast, almost across a room where you stand relative to that person because after all, that person could lead you in battle. So it has its place. It gets abused so quickly. And it also becomes deferential. You know, we have bad notions of deference to whom we need to defer authority.”
2021-12-14 · The Knowledge Project with Shane Parrish · #126 Nancy Sherman: Soldiers and Stoics · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT
“Well, yeah, so you go back to the idea that we do live in social worlds and, you know, the early Greek Roman philosop And we have all these roles or persona that we wear. And many of those roles do involve status. And many of those roles that involve status involve power. And many of the roles that involve status that involve power involve authority over other people. Rightly so or not. And that gets abused very, very quickly. It means there are inside groups and outside groups. It means that there are wealth divisions that come with power and authority. There are divides across gender. There are divides across race, ethnicity, and it's magnified in the military. The military thrives on hierarchy. You can have a military organization without rank because you don't know who to follow. And the rank is conspicuous.”
2021-12-14 · The Knowledge Project with Shane Parrish · #126 Nancy Sherman: Soldiers and Stoics · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT
“Person in an old, but that's a kind of old fashioned meaning of vulnerable. Often it means, oh, that person has a lot of rank. That person got a lot of medals”
2021-12-14 · The Knowledge Project with Shane Parrish · #126 Nancy Sherman: Soldiers and Stoics · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT
“It's not that it's what's inside, and that's your virtue. And it will have its own kind of honor. It's the honor befitting virtue. And that really is, you know, that's an incredibly important lesson right now. It is very hard in a world-driven by how many likes you have on a Facebook page or how many followers you have if you're a social media person. remember that these metrics are not really a measure of your worth your worth has to do with something much different so the story really is that goodness is virtue or virtue is wisdom and that something like honor glory are very derivative in the best case they follow on your virtue you know like you're virtue is honorable you might say that's an honorable”
2021-12-14 · The Knowledge Project with Shane Parrish · #126 Nancy Sherman: Soldiers and Stoics · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT
“The Greek word for honor is the same word as prize. It's not how many prizes you have or how thick the band of stripes and metals is on your breastplate if you're an officer. And it's very conspicuous. You can see it across a room and you just read status right off of how many epaulets or how many stripes the person has.”
2021-12-14 · The Knowledge Project with Shane Parrish · #126 Nancy Sherman: Soldiers and Stoics · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT
“Absolutely. So the traditional rag bag of goods in a Greek world would be honor, pleasure, wisdom, virtue. And then someone like Aristotle will say, well, which one really is it? And he'll go with virtue and wisdom. And he'll say, you know, honor depends on other people. And they may give it to you on false grounds. You may not have earned it. Same with glory. It's again situational. It depends on other people. And it may not be rooted in the right kinds of grounds. So even if traditionally, and remember, the Greeks are coming out of the world of Homer where your valor and your honor is everything, he'll say, no, those that archaic story about honor and glory got it wrong. It's really not how many”
2021-12-14 · The Knowledge Project with Shane Parrish · #126 Nancy Sherman: Soldiers and Stoics · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT
“You know, the Greeks are very worried about honor and glory of all the accolades that come with it. When all those decorations can get you or think of fan mail can really be the be-all and end all your popularity.”
2021-12-14 · The Knowledge Project with Shane Parrish · #126 Nancy Sherman: Soldiers and Stoics · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT
“They're situationally situated exactly right. Whereas virtue is never situationally good. It is always good. And they want to draw that stripe brightly, so brightly they will actually say your virtue as the good is the only one that matters for happiness. The other things are play supporting roles or they're a supporting cast and they'll give you a complicated story about how that works. And actually they even say, I don't think it's radical, but it sounds radical to some years. Being good or being virtuous really is a matter of just being wise. It's knowing how to make the wise choices in the world, especially when the demands are really tough. Or as I was saying before, when weakness of will might push you in this way or the desire for glory.”
2021-12-14 · The Knowledge Project with Shane Parrish · #126 Nancy Sherman: Soldiers and Stoics · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT
“Called goods and that may be Aristotle or Plato, the predecessors also called goods. I'm going to give them a different word. I won't even use the word external goods as opposed to inner or psychic goods. I'll call them indifference. Well, that's an awful word because it immediately to an English speaker's ear it sounds like indifference, which sounds like apathy, but it isn't. For them it means, yeah, you should prefer them and some are going to be much more according to nature than others, and they're going to be much more natural, like health over disease, having your friends versus losing your friends in an untimely way, peace rather than war. But still because those kinds of goods aren't always good, because sometimes war is just.”
2021-12-14 · The Knowledge Project with Shane Parrish · #126 Nancy Sherman: Soldiers and Stoics · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT
“A great question. So the ancient Greeks and Romans really thought of virtue. That's a Roman Latin word as excellence, the Greek word is arite and it means excellence. And another word for it is excellence of your character is really goodness of your character. So we think of goods more broadly as goods such as health, goods like wealth, goods such as shelter, food means of living, et cetera. The Stoics following Socrates made this critical move and they essentially said I'm going to define goods as very narrow and they're going to be just the state of your character, the goodness of your character, which essentially is your virtuous or excellent character. Those other things that are colloquial.”
2021-12-14 · The Knowledge Project with Shane Parrish · #126 Nancy Sherman: Soldiers and Stoics · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT
“It comes at high costs, obviously, and some of us are better at sticking to our guns. You might say than others. But it's certainly a goal, and I think it's totally cheapened these days in most of our walks because we're driven by popularity, fans, money. So that's one thing that I think really matters. To remember, goodness matters, and it matters in the public sphere. It matters in the private sphere. I often think we're modeling. I model in the classroom all the time. I model in my family all the time. I try to model online if I'm interacting in social media. And that by modeling, I don't mean theatrics or performance. I'm trying to express”
2021-12-14 · The Knowledge Project with Shane Parrish · #126 Nancy Sherman: Soldiers and Stoics · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT
“Philosophy to reduce stress. So the Stoics are really about reducing perturbation. That's their word or disturbance. And so they, let me give you two possibilities. They have a radical idea, and that is you should just really hold on to your good character and build it because virtue is sufficient for flourishing and for happiness and they'll give you all different ways in which you can describe the things that are outside your virtue, your relationships, your health, your wealth, political regime, all of that, as things that matter they're to be preferred, but they shouldn't make or break your happiness because the only thing that really matters is virtue. That's pretty stringent. It has something really valuable in it, and that is we should hold on to our goodness and realize that we're at peril when we sell it.”
2021-12-14 · The Knowledge Project with Shane Parrish · #126 Nancy Sherman: Soldiers and Stoics · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT
“Fast strong input and what's the reaction to the fast strong input? I think the best of philosophy suggests that when you are seeing the world, it has so many facets and you have to keep a pretty complex picture in your head. We are bad at keeping complex pictures in our head. And I don't think media these days helps us either.”
2021-12-14 · The Knowledge Project with Shane Parrish · #126 Nancy Sherman: Soldiers and Stoics · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT
“How you're representing it. So philosophers are pretty good at thinking about not just one-off moments, but the whole picture. And much modern philosophy has really been about not just the slice at that moment, but all the different ends that go into making up the appeal of a certain moment for you. And I think that's what sometimes you have to keep in mind. We tend to just sort of think impulse.”
2021-12-14 · The Knowledge Project with Shane Parrish · #126 Nancy Sherman: Soldiers and Stoics · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT
“About this relationship, or what is so hurtful? And he actually says you have two perceptions at that moment. And they compete with each other. One perception is, you know, it's great. It's fantastic. Another one is it's deleterious to my health. And it's about keeping one forward and the other one behind. I think a lot of it is that you have to have a fuller story about why the one that you think is really the better representation of the situation should Trump. So it's not just, we often think about strength of desire, and I think that's wrong. You know, my desire for that next drink is much stronger than my desire for refraining. But it's not simply the strength. It has to do with the whole picture. What else hangs in that picture that has to do with...”
2021-12-14 · The Knowledge Project with Shane Parrish · #126 Nancy Sherman: Soldiers and Stoics · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT
“So Aristotle really thinks that you, I mean he's going to call a spade a spade one of the ways in which he thinks that you have to level with yourself is when you're weak willed, whether it's refraining from something you know is unhealthy or getting out of an abusive relationship. And so he actually asks you to think about the ways in which you're picturing that moment when you're confronted with how you're going to see a situation, which will hinge on that plan you have to get out of the relationship. Do you see the person then and there as their former selves with all the attractive parts that you had thought about? Or can you keep up front in the front of your screen essentially the idea of what is so abusive?”
2021-12-14 · The Knowledge Project with Shane Parrish · #126 Nancy Sherman: Soldiers and Stoics · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT
“So now I'm not suggesting the Stoics themselves give you these little tips for rapport building. But I think when you're thinking about how to deal with some of the most frightening things in our life, losing a business or losing loved ones, a relationship ending, not being blindsided is what the Stoics try to offer you. And they try to give you ways of not being blindsided. And they actually use the phrase dwell in the future.”
2021-12-14 · The Knowledge Project with Shane Parrish · #126 Nancy Sherman: Soldiers and Stoics · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT
“They complained about the food. They complained about this, but never talked shop about depth. So I thought I was going to have to really figure out how we were going to broach this touchy subject, difficult subject. So I said to her, mom, just remind me, when we signed you up for this home, did we sign you up for the immortality plan? Because if we did, it's going to be really expensive. Now my mother knew Nichols and dimes, and she grew up in the depression. I knew I had her attention. And this became our little dance, our joke. And so like anything in a relationship where you're negotiating hard subjects and you're coming at it from different sides, finding the synchrony or the dance is critical. And I really do think that helped.”
2021-12-14 · The Knowledge Project with Shane Parrish · #126 Nancy Sherman: Soldiers and Stoics · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT
“don't live forever. So prepare yourself for your death or the death of your loved ones. Now again, it comes off in the worst small estoic, like harsh, austere, far too stern as a way to control your emotion of uncontrolled grief. But my mother was turning ninety seven and hadn't yet mentioned death, and I thought this was a problem as the person in charge of her healthcare. She was still very with it. She read two or three novels a week. But, you know, the subject of death never came up, nor did it ever come up at her dining room table, which had three other women similarly senior.”
2021-12-14 · The Knowledge Project with Shane Parrish · #126 Nancy Sherman: Soldiers and Stoics · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT
“First, I'll start with just some Stoic ones because I think they're very good at that. So one of them is this notion that you anticipate pretty visually some of the dangers that could befall you, that you're dreading. So they call it pre-rehearse the ills. You dwell a little bit in the future and they graduate it, and I do this sometimes from breaking a piece of pottery in your kitchen to getting really annoyed at yourself or your spouse who did it, to think about that in advance so that you're not upended if it happens. Third one the stakes get pretty high death You may not want to think about death you may not want to think about the death of your beloved”
2021-12-14 · The Knowledge Project with Shane Parrish · #126 Nancy Sherman: Soldiers and Stoics · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT
“are not about chatting away in your head, but rather the opposite, not chatting in your head, kind of emptying it so various kinds of mindful practices where you know a mantra may be the thing that allows you to empty your head. That's not particularly ancient Greco Roman. That's much more in the Eastern tradition. But I think a combination of them is not a bad idea. I'm not at all thinking about bioenhancers to get us into a better moral place. But I think we've got some tools that are in front of us already.”
2021-12-14 · The Knowledge Project with Shane Parrish · #126 Nancy Sherman: Soldiers and Stoics · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT
“I think there are. I mean, two things come to mind. One is stoic and then one isn't. One of the Stoic ideas is you press the pause button or you insert some space between the initial input and the reaction. And so they give you some time, they think. You can buy yourself some time between, say, well, you know, all the biases we carry in our head that lead to pretty unreflective responses, whether we're talking about police brutality or sectarian violence. They think that if you can kind of slow down the initial impulse a little bit, you buy yourself a little bit of time. Now you may have to have some of those responses stored up from another time, you know, and that would be where your journaling comes in. The other side of this is to turn to Eastern practices, which”
2021-12-14 · The Knowledge Project with Shane Parrish · #126 Nancy Sherman: Soldiers and Stoics · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT