Nick Byrd

Workflow: Week-To-Week Time Data

Last summer I accomplished less than I hoped to accomplish. I want to do better this summer, so I am looking for opportunities to improve productivity. In the last post, I discussed my daily routine. This week, I’m sharing data about my weekly workflow.

1. Tracking Workflow

I use the Hours app to track my hours. Once I start working on something, I clock-in to that project. I clock-out and switch to other tasks throughout the day as needed. Clocking in and out is quick and easy, so I can even log the momentary work-related stuff I do outside of my typical 8-to-5 schedule.

Remind

Record

Report

I like the app. Whenever you start, switch, or end a task, the app gives auditory and visual feedback …it’s weirdly satisfying. Even more satisfying is seeing how much I accomplished at the end of the day.

What I like most is the fact that procrastination feels very different when I am tracking my time. It feels like I am being timed …cuz I am being timed! I find myself more worried about how long I’ve been procrastinating. So I usually procrastinate only for a few minutes at a time.

2. Workflow Data

Once I log hours, I can look at reports within the app or export the data for my own analysis and visualization. So far I have logged data for only three weeks, but I am already learning a few things. Check it out: Continue reading Workflow: Week-To-Week Time Data

4 Ways To Maximize My Daily Routine

Last summer I accomplished less than I had hoped. I want to do better this time around, so I am looking for opportunities to be more productive. The first step involves looking at my daily routine.

Daily Routine: The Ideal

First, I find that I am most productive and satisfied when I fit work into the 8-to-5 (ish) schedule.

Second, I find that I do my best work when I leave the house.

So my best days look like this: I go to the office as early as possible, work as much as I can until around 5, exercise, and then leave.

Achieving The Ideal

Obviously, I have to deviate from Continue reading 4 Ways To Maximize My Daily Routine

Is Philosophical Reflection Ever Inappropriate?

I am sometimes that stereotype of a socially inept philosopher. I fail to realize the difference between hyperbole or sarcasm, on the one hand, and seriousness, on the other hand.¹ I say things that are technically correct, but socially incorrect. And I take casual claims way too seriously. In short, I go into philosophical reflection mode when I’m probably not supposed to:

(X and Y are discussing plans for the weekend.)

[X]: I don’t know, man. That sounds like a bad idea.

[Y]: That’s cuz it is a bad idea!

(Laughter)

(Nick overhears this.)

Me: Uhh, I don’t know about that. Sounding like a bad idea doesn’t make it a bad idea. Surely bad sounding ideas can be—

[X]: Chill out, Nick. No one actually thinks that it’s a bad idea just because is sounds like a bad idea. It’s just a thing people say.

Learning From The Socially Inept Philosopher

Two things about my social ineptitude stand out to me:

My inept responses are often instances of overthinking.
Overthinking seems to prevent me from realizing something that would have otherwise been obvious.

My overthinking seems to be a form of philosophical reflection. And if that is right, then my ineptitude might demonstrate that philosophical reflection is sometimes inappropriate. In what follows I’ll mention two examples of misunderstanding the use of philosophical reflection. This will lead me to a provisional conclusion: philosophical reflection is ill-suited for certain social situations.

The Philosophers’ Mistake

Philosophers spend their days thinking critically. This often involves suspending judgment(s) until they’ve had a chance to reflect. So when philosophers are faced with a claim — even in casual conversation — it would be understandable for the philosopher’s first response to be some form of philosophical reflection (…at least that’s what I tell myself when I am socially inept).

Philosophical reflection is not always bad, of course. Sometimes it’s crucial! It can help us identify Continue reading Is Philosophical Reflection Ever Inappropriate?

Does Ethics Rest On A Mistake? Three Arguments That It Does

There are at least three philosophy papers whose titles ask this question. They all argue that ethics does rest on a mistake. However, they disagree about the mistake and, therefore, about the solution. Below I’ll give a very brief overview of each paper.

Prichard, H. A. (1912). Does Moral Philosophy Rest on a Mistake? Mind, 21(81), 21–37. [HTML, open access]

Answer: yes.
The mistake: thinking that philosophical reasoning confers the motivating force of moral obligation.
Solution: intuitionism — in the same way that we “know” or “have access” to the deductive force of logical entailment or mathematical proof, we have the ability to “know” or “have access” to motivational force of moral obligation.

Gettner, Alan. (1976). “Does moral philosophy rest on a mistake?” The Journal of Value Inquiry, 10(4), 241–252. [Online, behind paywall]

Answer: yes.
The mistake: the method of trying to find moral laws (or treating ethics as a science).
The solution: challenge and supplant this method.

Jones, William Thomas. (1988, March). Does moral philosophy rest on a mistake? Humanities Working Paper, 132. California Institute of Technology, Pasadena, CA [Online, open access]

Answer: yes.
The mistake: thinking that ethics is not fundamentally different from psychology, economics, and anthropology. (Error theory: our philosophical vocabulary led us to make this mistake.)
Solution: treat ethics as co-extensive with psychology, economics, and anthropology.

What Do you think?

Does ethics rest on a mistake? If not, then where did these papers go wrong?
If ethics rests on a mistake, what is the mistake?
Is there a solution? If so, what is it?

Interview with ACI Scholarly Blog Index

I recently answered some questions from Traci Hector at ACI Scholarly Blog Index. More about the interview and about ACI below.

What We Talked About

My experience of studying religion.
Why philosophy led me to ‪cognitive science.
How intuition is related to beliefs about god and science.
Computational corpus linguistics and how philosophers use it.
How I use blogging and ‎social media‬ for my research.
My thoughts on podcasts.
About blogging as an academic.

The full interview is here: http://aci.info/2016/04/27/aci-interview-with-scholarly-blogger-phd-candidate-nick-byrd/

About ACI Scholarly Blog Index

…an editorially created and curated index of scholarly social media. Authors are selected for inclusion based on their academic credentials as well as the scope and quality of their writing. Metadata, taxonomies, and proprietary Author Profile Cards are appended to each publication. An elegantly sophisticated search interface easily surfaces highly relevant articles. Post-search filtering allows researchers to further hone in on appropriate articles. ACI Scholarly Blog Index is free to use.

Check out ACI Scholarly Blog Index at acindex.com

Where to follow ACI:

Twitter @aciblogindex

Facebook facebook.com/aci.info

LinkedIn linkedin.com/company/4859067

Google+ plus.google.com/+AciInfogroup

Peer-review: on what basis should we reject papers?

When you peer-review a paper, you can make one of a few basic recommendations to the editor. One option is this: do not publish the paper.

So what criteria should you use to make such a recommendation? In this post, I argue that some criteria are better than others.

1. Is the paper convincing?

A friend of mine mentioned this criterion the other day: “…[philosophy] papers ought to be convincing.” Call this the Convince Me standard or CM.

Maybe you think that CM sounds like a reasonable standard for peer-review. I don’t. Continue reading Peer-review: on what basis should we reject papers?

Podcasts …for research?

In a recent APA blog post historian of philosophy and pun-loving podcaster, Peter Adamson, floated the idea of using podcasts for teaching. Sounds like a good idea, sure. In this post, I’d like to focus on the idea of using podcasts for research. As I see it, podcasts could be AMAZING for research! Yeah, like, all-caps amazing! Continue reading Podcasts …for research?

What do philosophers do, anyway?

Lots of people ask me this question. Students. Friends. My mom!

I spend a lot of time with philosophers, so you might think that I have a good answer to this question. Alas, my answer usually sucks. You can find some of my worst answers to this question over at The American Philosophical Association (APA) Blog: “You’re a philosopher, eh? What do philosophers do?”

I’ve also shared my general thoughts on how to answer this question in that post. But if you want really good advice on how to answer this question, check out what philosophers are saying in the comments.

Excerpt

Let me be the first to admit that I’m doing it wrong. My philosophy pitch is…well, boring. And my delivery is awful. When someone asks me about what I do, my first (and now-automatic) response is a sigh.

What can I say? When people so reliably respond to philosophy with confusion or condescension, I become a little insecure. Unfortunately, insecurity doesn’t help. It just makes my next philosophy pitch even worse. I need to break the negative cycle.

Special thanks to philosopher Skye Cleary for connecting me to the APA blog.

Featured image: “Philosophy” from dakine kane, CC BY 2.0, cropped, adjusted color

Text-To-Speech for Speed Reading & More

My job requires lots of reading. But sometimes I read very slowly. Other times my body is occupied doing something that precludes the ability to read from a book or an electronic display. So I have been looking for ways to fit in more reading and to read faster. Text-to-speech technology provides the means to do this. So I use text-to-speech for speed reading, for multi-task reading, for and a few other things. In this post, I will (a) talk you about the best PDF-to-speech app that I have found and (b) talk about how I use text-to-speech more generally.

1. PDF-to-speech

Most computers, tablets, and smartphones can read text aloud in one way or another. However, until recently, I have not found text-to-speech software that can do both of the following:

Speak the whole document start-to-finish. Every new page seems to trip up the software, so I have to restart the speech playback at the beginning of every new page.
Ignore header and footer text. If the software can do 1, then it gets sidetracked by the text in the headers and footers every time it advances to the next page (e.g., copyright notices and page numbers; see figure 1 below).

Continue reading Text-To-Speech for Speed Reading & More

Quote: Why consequentialists probably care about virtue and character.

… people who knowingly delight in the product of abject misery are worse people. People who can take no pleasure in such things are clearly better people. To the extent that we must partake in necessary evils (if it’s true that we must) then we are clearly better people when we emphasize their necessity, rather than rejoicing in their benefits to us. For example, if I really did have to murder two people to spare a thousand, it would certainly be the right thing to do. But if I rejoiced in the act, anticipated and looked forward to it, licked my lips and drooled at the thought of it, I would be worse than if I bore the deed in unwilling, solemn discontent. Whatever is left of ethics by denying this bears so little resemblance to our moral intuitions, we may as well abandon it all together.

—Joseph Fraley