Paul Wakfer wrote:

> Olafur Pall Olafsson wrote:

>> Paul Wakfer wrote:

> Hi Olafur,
>
> After finishing this reply and reading it to Kitty, she suggested that
> the analysis that we have done in parts of it would be of benefit to
> readers of MoreLife Yahoo. So would you please post the text of this
> message (and your reply, if you wish to make one) to the MoreLife group.
> I will then edit in any necessary previous text to make it fully clear,
> make prefacing remarks about how it arose and clean up the
> formatting.

Cleaning it up looks like a tough job, the message looks
pretty messy. I tried using the reply function in the Yahoo Mail
program and then copying the message but the new inline did not get
copied so I decided to add "Olafur:" in front of my new reply as you
can see.

[Your problem is that you have the message composition option in Yahoo mail set
to color and graphics (html) instead of text. If you set it to text mode then
replies will automatically get the ">" character in front of each line and,
being a standard character, this can be copied from one message to another. I
generally compose all messages for groups, particularly for newsgroups, in text
mode because it is the standard that works for everyone. In any case, I fixed
the formatting and removed your "Olafur:" since it is now unnecessary. --Paul]


>>> I monitor sle [the sci.life-extension newsgroup] quite thoroughly
>>> (just don't comment much any more), so I
>>> had read the original thread which I agreed with.

>> I assume you read all my posts at sle and if you don't comment that
>> either means you basically agree with me or don't have time to reply, or
>> in rare cases lack sufficient knowledge in the area under discussion
>> and the time to aquire it.

> Yes. I read everything you write there and often chuckle at how much you
> sound like me about some things you write. If I see any logic or
> information errors, I will comment. But I sometimes miss the latter
> because I either do not have access to the papers, no longer wish to
> take the time for more thorough investigation, or have not been
> following the molecular biology details. As I stated a while ago (to
> someone, I forget who) I am now only attempting to keep up with the
> practical end results on myself and Kitty. Ideally it would be best to
> know all the theory, because that would help me to better determine what
> is best to practice and might help even to determine novel approaches.
> However, time is limited so I cannot do everything that is *possible* to
> maximize my chances at extended lifespan, I can only do what I consider
> to be best with the available time that I have.

To be successful in slowing down the aging process the only
thing you really have to know is which interventions work and which
ones don't, you don't have to know why or how so I understand that
you decide to use your limited time on the practical end results.

> This lack of time has
> always been a source of frustration with me, but I have learned to be
> more at ease with it as I have matured in wisdom. In addition, as a
> recreation (ie learning for fun), I find mathematics, physics and
> philosophy to be much more enjoyable than the extreme complexity and
> *arbitrariness* of human physiology, molecular biochemistry and
> genetics. I think it is very certain that the trial and error method of
> evolution has not generated an optimal design.

I also have limited interest in human physiology and therefore I
usually do not read anything about life-extension unless I see how
it can possibly be put to practical use.

[However, it is necessary to have some major basic understanding of human
physiology in order to correctly interpret many research findings. This is the
area in which many otherwise highly intelligent and knowledgeable posters on
sci.life-extension are greatly lacking. As part of my work to prepare myself in
the entire area of human health and life extension, I did study both physiology
and biochemistry in some detail. --Paul]


Paul Wakfer wrote:

> Olafur Pall Olafsson wrote:

>> Paul Wakfer wrote:

>>> Olafur Pall Olafsson wrote:

>>>> Paul Wakfer wrote:

>>>>> Olafur Pall Olafsson wrote:

>>>>>> Paul Wakfer wrote:

[Note: I had asked Olafur to send me 3 full papers to which he has access and I
had written the following: --Paul]


>>>>>>> These are all small enough that you can send them one at a time
>>>>>>> as email attachments.

>>>>>> Ok I attached them.

>>>>> I managed to get them all in, but did you not notice or understand my
>>>>> text above where I stated "send them one at a time"? I wanted them as
>>>>> three separate emails to prevent problems with slow downloading
>>>>> sometimes not completing.

>>>> Honestly I somehow managed to completely miss that although I did
>>>> read that sentence of course. I'll keep this in mind next time.

>>> I had no doubt of your "honesty".

>> I realise now that using the word honestly wasn't just unnecessary, it
>> actually implied that I am dishonest at times I do not use that word. A
>> bit like saying "this time I'm being honest". But I don't remember ever
>> being dishonest with you so using this word was not appropriate.

> Yes, it implied that you sometimes might fully understand a
> reasonable request or a responsibility and still do the contrary,
> perhaps without even admitting that you understood in the first place.
> Some people do such things, but I never thought for a second that you did.

I don't do such things. I have done such things a few times
in the past though when I was less mature.

[Me too when I was very young, as did everyone I expect. Learning that doing
such things is not in one's best interest is part of growing up to be a
responsible adult. Anyone who has not learned this is not really a fully matured
human being. --Paul]


> BTW, your statement: "But I don't remember ever being dishonest with
> you" made both I and Kitty chuckle, because the "with you" also
> "colored" the phrase so that it could be read as implying that you
> sometimes are dishonest with other people! Is this an admission that you
> really meant to make? (I doubt it is either such an admission or that it
> is even true.)

You're right, it is not an admission I intended to make. I
consider myself an honest person. But speaking of honesty I would be
lying if I said I was always 100% honest with people. There are
times where I try avoiding the truth and don't talk completely
straight out when asked about something,

[It is perfectly acceptable to not volunteer information that you do not think
is necessary or helpful, particularly when having necessary dealings with people
who you are quite sure will not understand or are in a position of some coercive
or monopoly power over you. Of course, for this same reason you will want to
keep your dealings with such people to an absolute minimum. This is part of the
nature of what I call a "tiny perfect" relationship. --Paul]


and in rare cases I might even lie.

[Which is completely acceptable when you are relating to someone with coercive
or monopoly power over you. It is only not correct (not in your best interest
long range) when you are dealing with someone in a fully voluntary relationship.
--Paul]


But I
never enter a conversation with the intention of lying to the person,
there are just some cases in which I end up being asked about
something I really don't want to talk about. These are cases in
which I feel so uncomfortable telling the truth (usually because I'm
ashamed of it) that I try avoiding it and in worst cases I lie.

[Olafur, you have no "duty" to answer answer a question from someone. You need
to learn how to say "no, I do not wish to answer that question or to talk about
it". OTOH, you also need to think about anything about which you feel ashamed,
so that you can understand why you should not feel that way. Everyone makes
mistakes of many kinds. It is important to acknowledge them, to learn from them,
to forgive yourself and to terminate any shame. You cannot continue to live with
shame. --Paul]

[I'm readying a new essay for uploading to the Self-SIP Focus on Freedom
section. Part of it includes:
"Errors in judgment and damage caused to others by a child (or adult) are facts
of reality which attempts to conceal will not cause to somehow "disappear". (One
can not “unring a bell”.) What can add to the assessment by others of an
individual under those circumstances is the restitution action that was taken –
was it completed to the satisfaction of the person harmed? When all
circumstances are available for scrutiny, others would even be able to decide if
the restitution amount was appropriate in their own estimation, and they could
socially preference against someone whose demands were excessive. The full
history of a person – the negatives included, especially when they served the
individual hirself as a means of gaining knowledge and wisdom - can be learning
tools for others, young, old and in between." **Kitty]


> Kitty wonders whether the Icelandic language is simpler and less prone
> to such misunderstood word usages.

Yes it definitely is simpler in that regard.

> Your original sentence would have not implied anything odd if you had
> used a different word for "honestly" as:
>
> "Actually I somehow managed to completely miss that although I did read
> that sentence of course."
>
> This states the validity of what happened without any relationship to
> your moral behaviour.


>>> I thought that either there was
>>> something about the phrase that I used that you did not follow or you
>>> had read too quickly and missed it - which you did.

>> After thinking about this I have come to the conclusion that it was a
>> combination of the following factors that caused me to miss this:
>>
>> 1) I read the phrase quickly.

> That is a major problem for most people today, as opposed to decades ago
> when the amount of information directly available to people daily was
> much less. Far too many people are reading too shallowly and thereby
> missing a great deal.

I usually read things very carefully but I sometimes fall in
the trap of reading too quickly.

>> 2) By using the word "can" in your phrase you did not specifically state
>> that I "should" send you the files one at a time just that I "could" do
>> it. Although it is quite obvious what you meant the fact that there are
>> two ways of understanding this definitely is one of the reasons I did
>> miss it.

> The reason why I did not use "should" is because I have an aversion to
> telling anyone what they should or should not do.

I too try to avoid using the word "should" because by using
it I am implying that I somehow know what is right or wrong for the
person while the fact is that there is no right and wrong when
talking about human behaviour, such statements are always a matter
of subjective opinion.

[This is close to being valid, but not quite. All human value judgments and
decisions based on them are essentially subjective to the particular human
involved. However, there are a few axioms of behavior which are inherent to
being a human being in the sense that to not accept them is contrary to the
essential nature of being human. The most important of these is that the goal of
life is maximizing one's lifetime happiness. Another is that the method by which
that goal is achieved is by the maximally effective use of one's mental
faculties. Therefore, it is permissible to tell another person "you should want
to maximize your lifetime happiness and you should reason and think most
effectively in order to do so". It is only not reasonable to prescribe details
about what specific behaviors will or will not make them happy. --Paul]


> However, upon
> reexamining my sentence, I now see what I did wrong (or at least did not
> do well) which caused you to misread. I put the two requests in the
> wrong order. The sentence would better have been written as.
>
> "These are all small enough that you can send them as email
> attachments, one at a time."

This one is better but it still has that problem with the
word "can". So I might have missed your point if you had worded it
this way.

> Also since the "can" does not really refer to you, but instead to my
> system's receiving capabilities, the sentence would be better still as:
>
> "These are all small enough that I can receive them as separated email
> attachments. So please send each one as an attachment to a different
> email."

This one makes it very clear what you mean. I definitely
wouldn't have missed your point if you had worded it this way.

> Once again communication has been sabotaged by haste (on my part as well
> as yours). Do you know the very wise phrase "haste makes waste"? Well
> this has been a prime example - except that by our further analysis, we
> have, hopefully, learned to be more careful in future, both in
> constructing sentences and in reading them.

I've heard the phrase "haste makes waste" somewhere before but
I didn't know what it meant at the time since I didn't recognise the
word haste. But now I realize (without looking it up) that it is
derived from the word "hasten" which I recognise. And I have
defiantly learned to be more careful in the future as a result of
this discussion.

[Good. But I think you meant to write "definitely" rather than "defiantly". But
then being defiant is always good too :) --Paul]


> The problem with the construction of sentences that cannot be
> misunderstood is that in order to do this it seems that one needs to be
> able to anticipate all of the possible ways in which a sentence can be
> misunderstood, However, while there is only one right way (the meaning
> that was intended by the writer), there are probably dozens of wrong
> ways - many of which are very hard to imagine. I find this very
> frustrating, and I sometimes despair of every being able to communicate
> my ideas so that many people will understand them (I never even imagine
> that *most* will),

This is a problem with all languages today but Icelandic is
far better than English in this regard.

[I am beginning to think that although English is supposed to be a highly
beneficial language for composition because of having so many words with subtley
different nuances of meaning, for the the same reason English is highly prone to
misunderstandings. Moreover, I think this is getting worse because people are
both sloppily and intentionally misusing various words and, thus, giving many
words meanings that they never had before and are actually unrelated or even
quite contrary to the root meaning of the words. The kind of thing which in the
novel "1984" was called "doublespeak" is now becoming the norm, particularly in
social/political communications. --Paul]


>> 3) Our recent discussion on attaching versus uploading files made me
>> focus so much on your mention of sending the files as an
>> "attachment" that I missed the rest of it. As soon as I had finished
>> reading the sentence my focus was all on the attachment part, the rest
>> of the phrase sort of went straight to my sub-contious mind.

>That is also partly because the phrase about attachment was put last,
>and therefore is what you most easily remembered, That is why the first
>alteration above of my original sentence might have worked.

Yes I think that definitely played a role too in this case.

> BTW, I notice that you spelled "sub-conscious" incorrectly above. This
> is probably because you are pronouncing it wrongly in your mind. The
> first part of "conscious" is not pronounced like the first part of
> "content", but instead the "sci" is pronounced like the word "she", so
> the whole word is pronounced "con - she - us" although some people
> shorten it to "con - sh - us".

Actually I am well aware of how to pronounce it since I've
heard it several times on TV. This is usually the case when I spell
a word incorrectly in English, I know how it sounds I just don't know
how to spell it. The problem here is that in English it isn't always
easy to tell how a word is spelled by the way it's pronounced. In
Icelandic on the other hand this is much easier. Take f.ex. the
letter "a". There is a big difference in the way it sounds in the
words "asparagus", "apple" and "ape". But in Icelandic the
letter "a" always sounds almost exactly the same. It sounds very
close to the "a" in "asparagus". The same is the case with all the
other vowels in Icelandic, they all sound almost exactly the same in
every word they appear in. This is just one example of how
Icelandic is simpler than English in regards to pronunciation of
words.

I would like to mention that I use visual memory a lot when I'm
writing in English. If I'm writing something I normally speak it in
English in my mind and then proceed to write it. If I don't know how
to spell a word I just try writing it anyways. Then using my visual
memory I can often tell if the word is spelled wrong by simply
looking at it.

[Actually, this is not uncommon. I think most people do this to a certain
extent. I remember when I was in high school, I had such good visual memory that
I remembered French vocabulary by photographically recalling the images of the
pages on which it sat in the text. I used similar techniques with some things in
university, but generally not with math or science where I learned early on that
the only long-term way to learn anything was by practicing using it sufficiently
that it commited itself to an integrated place in my brain. --Paul]


If I wrote the word incorrectly my visual memory usually tells
me something is wrong with that word but I don't know what is wrong
with it I just know that this is not the way it's spelled. This can
be very frustrating as you can imagine. A trick I often use when
this happens is to search for the word on Yahoo.com. Take f.ex. the
word "subcontious" which is incorrect as you said. If I search for
it on Yahoo not only do I only get 663 hits but at the top of the
search results the notion "Did you mean: subconscious" appears
indicating that the word is incorrect and that "subconscious" might
be the word I was looking for. If I on the other hand search for
the word "subconscious" I get 7100000 hits and no alternative
suggestion. This alternative word suggestion feature of the Yahoo
search engine has often helped me find how the word I'm after is
spelled since often I have the pronunciation in my head but not the
spelling.

[Yes, Google search does the same thing. Also our unabridged Merriam Webster
dictionary (costs a small subscription fee yearly) also does the same thing. In
addition, if you use an email reader with a good spell checker it will tell you
the appropriate spelling or suggest alternates. I find it really annoying that
Yahoo does not have a spell checker for their group message composition. --Paul]


>>> As it worked out
>>> there was no problem because my ISP was working well at the time that I
>>> received the big email. I have now read them all and got what I wanted
>>> from them.

[The good news is that Kitty and I now have in Arizona a wireless broadband
system which is actually faster than DSL. So finally we can do everything that
we need on the Internet while receiving continuous streaming dance or classical
music at the same time. And it only costs $30 monthly for only the six months we
are in AZ. Now if only there is something similar available in Canada when we
get back there next April, we will be all set. --Paul]

[Yes, it's really great to be listening to Energy98 via http://shoutcast.com and
sometimes good dance stations from Europe while working online. ;>)

One last thought on this thread between Paul and Olafur that Paul and I
discussed at the time - if the two of them did not have such high regard for
each other based on knowing each other well and having much the same values,
such miscommunication of instructions could have escalated into annoyance by one
or both. This sort of failure to understand what has been said or written is
often the trigger of an annoyance episode (and more) between people who really
do not know each other well, no matter how long they have dealt with each other.
**Kitty]