Doc Ott’s Apologia Blog

Around us each day in every venue, there are problems. Problems at work, at home, in our government, etc. If you think to hard about them all, you will gets seriously stressed out. Effectively managing those problems must first come by deciding which problems you are going to expend life energy to help solve. I have figured out that there are only 4 groupings of problems, all nested. Let us pick my work for example.

Group 1:All the problems at work.
Lots of problems, staffing issues, budgetary issues, policy problems, this is all of them.

Group 2:All the problems at work that I care about.
Ones that effect me in my day to day operations. I wish these would get fixed.

Group 3:All the problems at work that I care about and I am willing to spend life energy on.
A smaller group, for sure. I am passionate about these and am willing to help to fix it. Sure I might be willing to talk to people and help them with the issue, but if I think my actions will not be implemented or undone, it is a waste of my time and energy.

Group 4:All the problems at work that I care about, am willing to work on, and that I truly believe my efforts will help solve the problem.
An even smaller group. Basically, it is those problems that I know my efforts will be fruitful, and not quashed by something or someone else.

Now comes the tough part, ignoring groups 1-3. That group 3 is very tempting, especially for a teacher/problem solver like me. Before you get involved or start thinking about any problem you see, you have to figure out which group it lies in. If it does not fall in group 4, let it go. Don’t let it get you down, because nothing you do will help.
You will find your stress level going down as you spend your energy working on those group 4 projects which hopefully get fixed, cheering you up.
If you have no problems in group 4, you are stress free, if you have the right attitude.
This goes for any level of community, work, home, local civic groups, state and federal politics, anything. Try it, you might find yourself much happier. Let me know if it works for you.

Here is another great artcile from Steve Pavlina. It is a similar (but much better worded) discusssion I gave about sheep in my Awakening. A good read for those of us who are allready Eagles…
Are You a Bear or an Eagle?

On Dec 20, 2005 I went sailing. Now granted, it was 80 degrees and sunny in Jamaica, where I was, but it was still pretty neat.
If you believe in my ‘Today is Your Last” mentality, you will not be surprised if I told you that yesterday (Jan 8,2006) I went kayaking. This time, however, it was on the Grand River, here in Michigan.
I woke up Sunday and noticed it was a balmy 40 degrees and windy outside. Having ran 12 miles on Saturday, I was taking the day off from heavy exercise. I decided to put on my wet suit (and some other layers) and go out on the river. There was still ice on the lakes in the area, but the river (which was very high and moving quite fast) was wide open. I was very careful to not fall in and I did not even wear any gloves. After about 2 hours I reached my car and got out, only to be greeted with a nasty wind that chilled me. It didn’t seem that cold when I was on the river, but I might have just ignored it then as I was truly enjoying myself.
I think I have now boated (sailing or kayaking) in every month of the year except February. Lets see how the weather holds, shall we? Gotta love that global warming!

So if you read my ideas about convincing someone of something, how every argument has two sides, or if you have ever been on the business end of me bashing your ideas, you can see that why I think I would have made a good student of Socrates. I found the below excerpt from this
summary of Socrates and his thoughts :

…Socrates’ method of philosophical inquiry consisted in questioning people on the positions they asserted and working them through questions into a contradiction, thus proving to them that their original assertion was wrong. Socrates himself never takes a position; in The Apology he radically and skeptically claims to know nothing at all except that he knows nothing. Socrates and Plato refer to this method of questioning as elenchus , which means something like “cross-examination” The Socratic elenchus eventually gave rise to dialectic, the idea that truth needs to be pursued by modifying one’s position through questioning and conflict with opposing ideas. It is this idea of the truth being pursued, rather than discovered, that characterizes Socratic thought and much of our world view today. The Western notion of dialectic is somewhat Socratic in nature in that it is conceived of as an ongoing process. Although Socrates in The Apology claims to have discovered no other truth than that he knows no truth, the Socrates of Plato’s other earlier dialogues is of the opinion that truth is somehow attainable through this process of elenchus .

I, however think I know stuff. I need to change that part.

I am starting to really like the idea of using the Socratic method more often. In short (from wikipedia)

In this method, a series of questions are posed to help a person or group to determine their underlying beliefs and the extent of their knowledge. The Socratic method is a negative method of hypothesis elimination, in that better hypotheses are found by steadily identifying and eliminating those which lead to contradictions. It was designed to force one to examine his own beliefs and the validity of such beliefs.

Is it a bad thing to have a mentor who has been dead for more than 2400 years?

This is just a taste of a much longer article that I want to write, but I want to get it down roughly here…
For thousands of years (think Socrates, Plato) ‘higher education’ was a place were the wisest of people came and literally sat at the feet of the wise men who contemplated the world and made advances in philosophy, science, and the arts. Those who came to these academies (Plato’s was the first real university per se) were the upper crust of society.
For the rest of us, we learned what we need to from our parents and other local elders. For thousands of years, humans died within miles of the place they were born. Almost everyone was a farmer, and learned the art of farming from their parents. No need for language, science, or mathematics because milking cows and planting seed did not require a such rounded education.
In the early 1800’s, the industrial revolution started lots of things, including formal education. With technology, fewer people had to farm the land, so we could train people for new jobs (different from what their parents were doing) so they went off to school. People moved into more cities and interacted with more of the world. A base knowledge of education was required to be a productive member of society. First is was K-5, then K-8, then K-12. Soon after formal education started, major universities (many in the US starting as teachers colleges) sprang up like daisies. At many of these schools (known as research-I schools) the millennia old style of young wise people coming and studying with the older wise people occurred. At Harvard, Stanford, MIT, the people who were discovering how the world worked were teaching the future scholars (leaders, teachers) all their knowledge so the students could start from there and move society on. Freshman classes containing 1000 students follow this model even today.
Two things have happened simultaneously to disrupt the 2000 year old University model 1)K-12 not being enough and 2) the internet
In today’s society, having only a HS diploma is considered a pretty crappy education. You need a college degree these days to get any sort of high paying job. It’s just a reality. College is now becoming a 13th and 14th grade if you will, but it is stuck in the old model. Compare the learning environment between a 12th grade social studies class in a small HS in rural Michigan in one year to a theater style lecture hall with 1200 students (no joke) in a History 101 class the next year. Those two systems are so completely different; many students have a hard time with the transition.
The internet has removed the universities as houses of intellectuals and information. If you wanted to be a historian, you read books (written by academics) and took college classes to become a historian. With the internet, that education can be received in a completely different way, requiring nothing from the college. If I want to learn about life in Russia, I would rather go read the local news from Pravda or read a blog from someone who lives there. Governments can no longer hide information like they used to. There are so many places to get information, why get it from an academic? ahh, because of that damn degree…
Degrees are what we need to get a job. It’s our proof that we slogged through the flawed educational system and can get a job. Even those degrees are becoming meaningless in some cases, take computer technology. If you have a 4 year degree in computer science, some would say you are 4 years behind and might as well be 30 years behind. People who hire IT professionals these days don’t give a hoot about your degree, they want experience.
These two things are intertwined. As people start getting their education from elsewhere (enrollment drops), employers will start recognizing that and put less emphasis degree attainment. (enrollment drops some more)
The universities are even helping it by posting lectures as podcasts on the ‘net for anyone to hear. We are even starting down a road where the traditional college textbook is no longer needed as every piece of information in it can be attained (for free) on the internet.
This can be discussed at some length. Maybe I will take a sabbatical and write a book about it�

It makes a lot of sense if you think about it, really.

The recipe for success: get happy and you will get ahead in life

Anyone who has ever met me knows that I am very happy person most of the time. I try very hard to not hang around people who are always depressed or complaining. It tends to bring me down, so I just avoid them. Life is too short. Live it up!

This is a nice article about the conflict betweenSpirituality and Intelligence

Is there an inherent conflict between spirituality and intelligence? Are they perpetually at odds with each other? Must we choose to embrace either spirituality or rationality but never both at the same time?

Several years ago I would have said yes to these questions. But today I see that this conflict is nothing but an illusion.

It is almost the shortest day of the year, the weather is cold and blustery in Michigan, yet I have been sailing the last 3 days and yesterday got a sunburn.
Well, I am in Jamaica.
So far I have had a great time, enjoying each day slowly as if sucking on a ripe fruit. The air is beautiful, winds steady, and no cares in the world seem to exist. Yesterday we went sailing and according to my GPS-enabled watch, our max speed was 10.5 MPH.
Today we head to the other side of the island to swim with the dolphins and climb ‘the’ falls.
Ya know, I could get used to this vacation thing…

Here is a cool site on religious tolerance, which includes a lot of stuff about each individual faith, their similairities and differences. A wonderful reasource for me when writing my book.

So today I take off for a week long trip with my lovely bride (alone) to Jamaica to celebrate 10 years of marriage. It has been a long time since I left the confines of the US and I am looking forward to the experience. I am also looking forward to running on the beach in 80 degree weather in late December. I will not have my computer with me, but I plan on writing the outline to two books that I want to write. One on Religion, the other on Higher Education. We’ll see how far I get.