Lone Gunman

While willpower and ded­i­ca­tion mat­ter con­sid­er­ably in sus­tain­ing a res­o­lu­tion and reach­ing a desired goal, the per­ceived com­plex­ity of the process can have a big influ­ence on whether we are likely to achieve that goal or not.

This con­clu­sion comes from a study show­ing how the sub­jec­tive “cog­ni­tive com­plex­ity” of a diet was a major fac­tor in whether peo­ple suc­cess­fully man­aged to stick to a diet.

“For peo­ple on a more com­plex diet […] their sub­jec­tive impres­sion of the dif­fi­culty of the diet can lead them to give up on it,” reported Peter Todd, pro­fes­sor in IU’s Depart­ment of Psy­cho­log­i­cal and Brain Sciences.

[…] This effect holds even after con­trol­ling for the influ­ence of impor­tant social-cognitive fac­tors includ­ing self-efficacy, the belief that one is capa­ble of achiev­ing a goal like stick­ing to a diet reg­i­men to con­trol one’s weight.

“Even if you believe you can suc­ceed, think­ing that the diet is cog­ni­tively com­plex can under­mine your efforts.”

This agrees with the con­clu­sions drawn from sep­a­rate research show­ing how some sim­ple tricks to mak­ing suc­cess­ful res­o­lu­tions include reduc­ing our “cog­ni­tive load” and accept­ing the lim­i­ta­tions of willpower.

Willpower, like a bicep, can only exert itself so long before it gives out; it’s an extremely lim­ited men­tal resource.

Given its lim­i­ta­tions, New Year’s res­o­lu­tions are exactly the wrong way to change our behav­ior. […] Instead, we should respect the fee­ble­ness of self-control, and spread our res­o­lu­tions out over the entire year. […] A tired brain, pre­oc­cu­pied with its prob­lems, is going to strug­gle to resist what it wants, even when what it wants isn’t what we need.

In sum­maris­ing the main argu­ments for and against the New Athe­ist argu­ment, Anthony Got­tlieb pro­vides a fairly even (yet far from com­pre­hen­sive) account of the evo­lu­tion of 21st cen­tury atheism.

Through John Wis­dom’s 1944 Para­ble of the Invis­i­ble Gar­dener, Got­tlieb looks at how the argu­ments of “reli­gious apol­o­gists” such as Karen Arm­strong are falling back on argu­ments grounded in unfal­si­fi­able beliefs.

The para­ble of the gar­dener [raises] an unset­tlingly pow­er­ful point about the nature of faith. If you believe some­thing, shouldn’t it be pos­si­ble to say what would make that belief true or false? What is the con­tent of your so-called belief in the exis­tence of a God, or of a gar­dener, if you can­not say what dif­fer­ence his pres­ence or absence would make to the world?

Richard Dawkins on a video for the BBC’s Daily Pol­i­tics dis­cusses the reli­gious and polit­i­cal labelling of chil­dren.

I feel very strongly that it’s wrong to label chil­dren with the opin­ions of their parents.

Nobody minds labelling a child an Eng­lish child, or a French child, or a Dutch child. But you’d think I was mad if I started talk­ing about a post-modernist child, or a Key­ne­sian child, or a mon­e­tarist child, or a lib­eral child, or a con­ser­v­a­tive child.

And yet the whole of our soci­ety quite hap­pily buys into the idea that you can talk about a Catholic child, or a Protes­tant child, or a Mus­lim child, or a Hindu child. That’s surely got to be wrong; to assume that a child will auto­mat­i­cally inherit the opin­ions of its par­ents about the uni­verse, the cos­mos and moral­ity. This must be some­thing that should be rectified.

via @andrewpmsmith

Like linen, buy­ing cash­mere is a mat­ter of dis­cov­er­ing the impor­tant met­rics and dis­card­ing the unnecessary.

The truth about qual­ity cash­mere is much more com­plex than sim­ply look­ing for that pure cash­mere label.

Pure is not an absolute term. The finest cash­mere con­sists only of the whitest, longest, thinnest hair from the under­fleece, whereas lower-quality cash­mere may be either the shorter, coarser hair from the undercoat–typically from the rear end of the ani­mal rather than its belly–or, more dubi­ously, shorter hair that has either not been prop­erly dehaired or, worse still, blended with yak or rab­bit hair. […]

Yet even cheap cash­mere can feel lovely. It’s hard to know, as you queue at the till, whether your bar­gain will pill or sag within days. (Pilling afflicts expen­sive cash­mere too, though it should stop after the first wash.) But there are sub­tle signs of qual­ity, and once you’ve got your eye in, much of the cheaper cash­mere on the mar­ket starts to seem a false economy.

Look for ten­sion in the knit­ting: stretch a sec­tion and it should ping back into shape. Hold it up to the light and you shouldn’t see much sky: para­dox­i­cally, the best cash­mere, though made from the finest hair, has a den­sity to it. Exam­ine its sur­face: fluffi­ness sug­gests the yarn was spun from shorter, weaker fibres and will pill. Be scep­ti­cal about soft­ness, too. Over-milling can make a gar­ment too soft and silky, and there­fore prone to bob­bling and los­ing its shape. More expen­sive cash­mere may be harder to han­dle in the shop, but will ease up with wear and hand-washing. The best cash­mere actu­ally improves with age–so long as the moths don’t get to it.

Remem­ber that numer­i­cal spec­i­fi­ca­tions dras­ti­cally influ­ence our choices: even if they’re mean­ing­less and con­tra­dict our per­sonal expe­ri­ence?

The same goes for thread count, it seems: Tex­tiles expert Mark Scheuer calls it a “mar­ket­ing ploy” and tells you to for­get about it when pur­chas­ing, while Linen­place says it is a met­ric we should consider–just not the most impor­tant one–offering ‘the truth about thread count’ (via Kot­tke):

In a qual­ity prod­uct, the incre­men­tal com­fort value of increas­ing thread count over 300 is very lit­tle. A 300 thread count can feel far supe­rior to a 1000 thread count. Thread count has become a sim­ple met­ric used by mar­ket­ing peo­ple to cap­ture inter­est and impress with high num­bers. The prob­lem with mass pro­duced high thread count sheets is that to keep the price down, impor­tant ele­ments of qual­ity must be sac­ri­ficed, mean­ing in the end the cus­tomer gets a prod­uct with an impres­sive thread count but that prob­a­bly feels no bet­ter (or even worse) than some­thing with a lower thread count.

Toronto-based Au Lit Fine Linens goes one fur­ther, sug­gest­ing that while thread count is impor­tant, where the cot­ton is grown (its qual­ity) and where and how it is woven is what mat­ters most.

Egypt­ian cot­ton is acknowl­edged to be the finest cot­ton in the world, just as the Ital­ians are renowned for their long-standing tra­di­tion of weav­ing. The soft­ness of your sheets depends more on the qual­ity of the fiber, which is why a 220 thread-count sheet can feel softer than a 500 thread-count sheet that uses an infe­rior grade of cot­ton or a twisted thread. (The lower thread-count sheet using Egypt­ian cot­ton and woven in Italy will also last longer than a higher thread-count sheet woven from infe­rior cotton.)

The crux: ignore thread count, buy 100% Egypt­ian cot­ton woven in Italy.