Chip Douglas @Diptchip@qoto.org

More Americans need to participate in local government

https://i.redd.it/z4f4rhpr6ja61.jpg

Me at my first shooting competition. Also me when I started working on cars. Also me when I started making ammunition. Also me when I started programming. It's a good meme

Reminder of something hardly mentioned but very important.

Check what keyboard app you're using on your phone. There's no point in using a secure messaging app if all your texts are written on Gboard.

https://f-droid.org/packages/org.dslul.openboard.inputmethod.latin/

@freemo Thanks for your thoughts.

First, the full report is [here](https://science.sciencemag.org/content/345/6192/75.full).

The full text seems a careful craft to me, though I have no formal training in psychology. In the end, this was published in AAAS Science journal, so no surprise there.

There are few notable observations to extract:
1. the main objective was to investigate the following questions: i) _Do people choose to put themselves in default mode by disengaging from the external world?_ and 2) _And when they are in this mode, is it a pleasing experience?_
2. Their main conclusions is this: **_Most people seem to prefer to be doing something rather than nothing, even if that something is negative._**
3. they cite several studies supporting their similar conclusions to theirs
4. there is a series of experiments culminating with the one with electro-shocks. That seems to just a final fancy twist, but their conclusions are supported well by the previous experiments already.

Personally, I can relate well to the main conclusion of the paper. Just recall observing people waiting for something, be it in a hospital or in public transport. Today, listening to music, or mindless clicking into a smartphone (reading news, tweets, toots, whatever) seems to be the major activity of most under 50 years old in such contexts. But even before the age of smartphones, in 90's it was hard to observe people calmly thinking while waiting. Most people would fidget with something, read, kick into a wall, do whatever just to _kill the time_ (up to a threshold where they would feel embarrassed which would push them into some "normal staring into a nearby wall" for a while before restarting the fidgeting, etc.). Indeed, there are folks one can observe who engage in calm observation of the world and thinking (probably), but when I look around, it's a small minority.

And me personally? As I wrote in the parent piece, I tend to find myself running in circles and ruminating (as they also mention in the article). When I have stuff to deeply think about, when left to my own devices I typically end up frustrated when I do not have a piece of paper to jot down my thoughts, because after a short while I feel like I am not making progress (difficult to keep my whole context in my short memory). The only time I find enjoyable "just thinking" is when I go for a walk and let my mind "wander around". But that is not much thinking, right? Perhaps "entertaining some random thoughts" (maybe it's rather a kind of "meditation" than thinking) would better describe what I do at those times.