Michael Stephens

“False beliefs that happen to promote stable societies tend to propagate because people who hold these beliefs tend to life in stable societies, which provide the means be which false beliefs propagate.”

This makes a lot of sense. Maybe we should question more of the things that we are told that may not be correct. For instance, the three great critiques of religion by Marx, Niezche, and Frued all believed that religion was a scam that was out to oppress the general populous. People are fed all the information about their religion before they are really able to rationally think about it, so it is possible to believe that perhaps that is an incorrect belief. If there are that many people with a common incorrect belief than it is likely we have many other simple misbeliefs that we were just taught, and we never really questioned them.

“…But Americans who earn 5 million per year are not much happier than those who earn $10,000 per year, but Americans who earn $100,000 per year.”

Implying that perhaps another false belief that was passed down is that money can equal happiness. It isn’t completely false because you need money to some degree, but it is false in the sense that the more money you make the happier you will be.

“As Adam Smith, the father of modern economics, wrote in 1776: ‘The desire for food is limited in every man by the narrow capacity of building, dress, equipage, and household furniture, seems to have no limit or certain boundary.'”

Humans don’t want to buy an extreme amount of necessities because there is no use in that. Instead humans want to spend enormous amounts of money on things that you will see and know that they spent money on.

Good writing has to be descriptive so that you can visualize what is going on in the text in your mind’s eye, and truly appreciate the piece of writing. Fish would probably argue this point with me. If he were here with me while I was trying to write this essay he would be trying to get me to delete the whole start of this paragraph (he’d probably point out all of my grammar issues too). Fish would want me to say that the piece doesn’t need to be descriptive to be good, that the reader can create meaning without the text being overly descriptive. Fish is correct when he says this. I believe his assertions fully, I just personally believe that readers shouldn’t always have to give meaning to the text they are reading by looking so deeply into it. That is to say, if a book is descriptive on its own and you don’t have to sort of guess or give a meaning to it, then that’s more enjoyable. Fish might say disagree and say that having the room to interpret is more fun, but he would agree that even in the more descriptive writing there are still room for interpretations.

Gloss of Stanley Fish’s Writing (from where we left off in class):

P4: He did the same experiment multiple times with different classes at different universities and it always turned out the same way. So there must be something to the fact that you can make a poem out of almost anything.

P5: Fish asserts that if you pursue finding meaning in any writing with dedication then a meaning will appear simply because of how hard you are looking at the writing.

p6: We have been trained to recognize certain things in poems and you can find some of these things in almost any writing if you try hard enough.

p7: When we read something that intently then we are actually the one’s who give it its meaning.

p8: Fish basically explains in this paragraph that you see whatever you were taught to see, if you were taught to recognize lists then you might see it as a list, if you were taught to see it as a poem you will see the poem.

p9: He concludes that all interpretations are made not found, again pretty much what he said before about us giving it our own meaning.

p10: Students have conventional notions to start breaking down and analyzing things from the beginning which you see is demonstrated with his poem of names.

p11: Fish claims that it doesn’t just have to be writing, that it could be any object viewed in an institution. Basically if someone tells you there is meaning behind something you can look into that something until you find a meaning yourself. It may or may not be the same meaning as the other person but either way there will still be a meaning.

p12: Therefore the meaning behind anything is subjective because everybody sees their own thing, what they want to see.

p13: Now Fish claims that not only do readers create meaning but that meaning creates readers.

p14: The most important part about writing is how it is viewed by the reader and whether or not they will try to ascribe meaning to it.

In my first writing about what makes writing good, I pretty much just summarized everything that I’ve been taught. You know, correct grammar, easy to read, interesting. That may all be true, but now after reading Fish’s essay I see that there is more to it. There has to be a meaning behind the writing that the reader can look into and find. If a reader can find meaning out of five names listed on the board then certainly any real writing you do should be able to incorporate meaning within it. It might be easy to have meaning but its also important. Fish says in his essay that perhaps the readers don’t create the meaning but that the meaning creates the reader. That to me means that writing should have something behind it in order to get people to really read it and appreciate it. They should read whatever you have to say and when they are done with it they should still be contemplating what they read. You have to make the reader want to go back through so they can make sure they didn’t miss any of the meaning. That is the real hard part. Giving writing a little meaning is easy, but giving it enough meaning that the reader really cares to analyze it after they finish reading it, that’s another story. Doing this is how you make great writing though.

In the revision of my essay I focused mainly on not telling the story of my experiment as much. I focused on making bigger connections to social norms in the world. I tried to continue to ask questions and to keep the reader engaged. That was really the biggest thing I wanted to do with the revised version of this essay. I wanted to get the reader to think deeper into social norms while keeping a good flow and having them be engaged. I also tried to work in a couple of sources because the first draft lacked any sources. Even though I wanted to work in sources, I also wanted to be the main voice of the article so I made sure not to over-quote. One thing that I didn’t really work too hard on was the intro. This is because my intro was voted the best in the class and I quite liked it as well. All I did was modify it a little bit to talk about social norms so I could go in that direction with the essay.

In my paper about the experiment I conducted in my apartment I need to get the reader thinking more. I need my paper to be interesting and substantial enough to make readers see connections and think further about the social norms that I am testing. I need to address how a social norm is created and also do social norms ever disappear and sort of dye out. I am pretty sure if I went to my roommates family homes you would not find the same mess that had been my apartment. So what got them away from that. Why are they okay with this social norm now being ignored and I literally cannot ignore it. I also need to conduct the result back to deeper questions to make the reader think. How do people treat others when they ignore social norms. In my apartment its physical punishment but in society that isn’t always allowed. Perhaps in society there are consequences as well it just doesn’t involve bodily harm. Could I implement some of those, maybe less harsh punishments into my apartment, or is violence the only thing that will work for us? If I address/pose all these questions in my revision as well as revise the other things I said I would in my 2.9 post my essay will be some of my best writing ever (not that that’s saying much).

For the revision of my essay I want to get away from the narrative. I told too much of the story behind my experiment in the first draft of my paper. In the rewrite of my paper I want to make sure to include information about other experiments that are similar to mine in some way. This will help me tell less of the story of my experiment because I will have to get into the details of other experiments and I only have so many pages that I can write without the paper getting long and boring. I want to sort of take some of the style of the essay that we read over in class the other day in that, the experiment was only foreshadowed and not directly discussed until about ten paragraphs in. Another thing that I want to do in my final paper is give you more of my insight on the experiment and how the experiment and the results made me feel. Also now that time has gone by since the experiment was conducted I want the essay to touch on whether or not the experiment had lasting effects in my apartment. To be honest my paper right now is not great. It is a boring five page story about an experiment. Once I make these revisions, my paper will improve immensly.

I enjoyed the peer review we did today in class. I thought writing the letters was a fun way to get good critiques from peers. Reading through some of my classmates essays I saw a lot of use of external sources and I think my paper could definitely use at least one external source. I learned techniques from the papers I was critiquing and I enjoyed providing feedback relatively informally. I got good critiques from my classmates to make my essay less like a story and add more review and feedback on the experiment. When I review my paper I will be sure to keep these critiques in mind and I think it will make my final draft a lot better.

The mountain of dishes in the sink. The gross bathrooms. The stained carpet. All of it cleaned by yours truly. And kept clean too. At least for the two weeks of the experiment. Even though I had three roommates fighting against me at every step. This effort on my part was immense to keep up with the filth. I felt like a maid. A maid to a bunch of slobs at that. So why did I do it? I wanted to learn, if perhaps I could influence at least one of the slobs to be slightly less slovenly. Perhaps if I led by example and kept things clean (if I could handle the task), they would clean too. Or then again there was always the other possibility. That I was setting too good of an example. That they wouldn’t clean anything and keep expecting me to continue to do it (surely I couldn’t keep it up forever).

At first there was nothing. Or at least almost nothing. The only response was the occasional thank you. It wasn’t even a regular thing. Pretty much, only when they saw me cleaning something is when they would say thank you. It was pretty depressing really. In most apartments it probably wouldn’t be too much work. However, in my apartment it was a lot of extra work to only get a handful of “thank yous” here and there.

I wanted more from this experiment. So far it was turning out to be a dud. I wasn’t doing all this cleaning to find out how good my roommates’ manners’ were. I wanted this experiment to help make things a little cleanlier around the apartment. I didn’t want to be the only one who would ever clean in the apartment. I wanted to inspire my peers.

Still I kept toiling though. For a couple more days I traded chores for kind words and smiles. I kept the apartment clean for my own sanity. Did all the bictchwork in what seemed like a hopeless attempt to change my roommates’ ways. Surely they continued to appreciate it. I seemed to get thank yous more often once they figured out who was doing most of the cleaning. But too me the thank yous just weren’t enough. The thank yous weren’t why I was doing this work.

The thank yous did help however. The fact that they said thanks at all shows the appreciation for the fact that at least one of us is cleaning. Then when they started to increase the amount they were saying thank you I knew they had to really appreciate the way things were starting to be kept clean around the apartment. But how could I get them to help out? That really was the sole purpose of this experiment. To find a way to make everybody pitch in and keep the apartment clean.

In the end I could find no alternative solution. When my roommates didn’t follow what was my attempt to lead by example, I had to find another way to change their habits. I couldn’t come up with any clever new twists to add to the experiment that would change any of the results I was getting. So instead I had to be a little less subtle. For lack of better any better ideas.

What I decided to do was to let one of my roommates in on the experiment. I knew this could mess up everything I had worked for. But what choice did I have? What I was doing was clearly not ever going to create change and nothing else came to mind on how to inspire these people to clean. Could the roommate I had chosen just tell the rest of the apartment that I had been treating them as some type of lab rats? Surely he could if he took offense and that would ruin everything I had done so far. Therefore I had to make my choice of roommates carefully.

I had three options to choose from and I had to be sure to choose well. I thought about which roommate would be the most reasonable. Who wanted things to be clean like I did? Well surely everyone, but one of them must want it more than others. I thought about things for a bit. Real deep like, it was pretty intense. Then I had it! Eric. My roommate, the one who sleeps in the same room as me. I could get him to sympathize with my cause.

I figured if I would be able to convince any of them to help then it would be my roommate. Also Eric seemed to be the roommate who noticed the most when I cleaned things. Perhaps this was just coincidental and he was just around a lot when I was doing the cleaning, and he simply said his thanks. Or perhaps he was just the best mannered out of the group. I could’ve believed either of those. But I chose not to. Well really I didn’t have a choice. I needed some way to move this experiment along. I put my faith in the fact that Eric had a wish for cleanliness too.

I let Eric in on the plan. I explained to him why I had suddenly became the Consuela of our apartment. That was the easy part. He didn’t even think to tell the rest of the apartment as I had thought he might. He didn’t care if they knew. He didn’t care that I hadn’t told him about it. He just wanted me to keep cleaning. Eric realized that telling the rest of the apartment would probably end the experiment. He also knew that with the death of the experiment surely the cleanliness of the apartment would die as well.

The hard part was getting him in on it. Of course he understood why. Why I was doing it. Why I needed his help. He got all that. That didn’t make him want to help any more though. For each of my proposals asking for his help to change our roommates’ ways, I was met with a sarcastic proposal of his own. “But why don’t you just keep cleaning?” The apartment has been clean lately, we don’t need to change anything.

Just what I had feared in the beginning of the experiment. Eric was so used to me cleaning at this point that he simply expected me to keep going. Especially once I told him it was for an experiment. I was asking for his help but all he had really heard was that I needed to keep things clean around the apartment for almost another full week. I couldn’t let his thinking stay like that. He needed to be persuaded somehow.

In the end I pretty much guilted him into it. I kept reminding him of the end result that I wanted to achieve. Also I reminded him that I would still be cleaning too. Really all he had to do was clean here and there, preferably in front of the other roommates. It could even just be his own dishes, I explained to him. He finally agreed. I think he was planning on agreeing the whole time and had just making me work for it. He told me he would do it for the extent of the experiment.

Mixed results there. I got the help that I wanted and needed for this experiment. However now the experiment seemed to be over even though it was only halfway through. Maybe letting one of the studied specimen in on the plan wasn’t the best idea after all. Now the one other person who knows about the experiment is going to clean for a week and that’s it. Just because I asked him to help me with my school project. No other reason. If he really cared he’d keep cleaning after it was over. I don’t think he was planning on doing that however. I’d have to come up with a way to combat this later if I wanted this experiment to be truly successful.

Letting Eric in on the experiment changed the outcome of the experiment dramatically. It only took one day after Eric was cleaning up his own messes for me to notice the same thing start to happen with Shray. With Gavin, it took a little longer. Maybe he didn’t notice the switch from me doing everything, to everyone cleaning their own stuff. Maybe he just wanted to pretend like he didn’t notice and receive a few more days of maid service by myself. Either way it took Gavin about three days to after Eric started cleaning, for him to pick up after himself.

This was it. This was the dream. The experiment had filled its purpose. But for how long? Eric had been cleaning for 4 days already. That put a time limit of about two days on everyone cleaning their own stuff and just having an overall clean apartment. Because in two days Eric knew the experiment would be over and so would be his duties to clean. But once he stopped, surely the others would stop as well. I needed to prevent this from happening. I needed to make sure all this time and effort paid off with the reward of a clean apartment.

It is said to take three weeks to form a habit. Well great. Only problem was I had 48 hours not three weeks. How could I make sure everything didn’t unravel almost as soon as it had started working? I could have another talk with Eric and try to get him to keep it up after the experiment. Maybe I could even convince him that I extended the experiment to four years. Perhaps not. I don’t think he would have been so gullible to go along with that. I needed a different solution. Not only that but I needed it fast. My solution was part of the experiment so I really only had one day. One day to implement a solution and one more day to see and record the results.

Well by now the charade is up. You all know my solutions aren’t always the cleverest, like how I had to bring Eric in on the experiment for lack of a better plan. This solution was pretty much the same in its bluntness. What had I decided? I had decided to propose a rule to all of my roommates. We clean up after ourselves and we never stack dishes in the sink (this had been our biggest problem). We clean them right away and that’s that.

What if we don’t clean them right away though? That was what I was asked almost immediately into proposing this rule. Well shit. I hadn’t thought that through. What consequence would make these people continue to clean? It didn’t matter in the end anyway. I wasn’t the one who came up with the solution. Shray did. Shray came up with the most viable solution there is to any college guys. What was his answer? We’ll fight you of course. Anybody who puts dishes in the sink will be fought by the other three roommates. Seems a little extreme. A bit drastic for someone to potentially be hospitalized over a dirty fork. However I endorsed the rule right away.

This little conversation made me think that perhaps I had brought the wrong roommate in on the experiment. Shray seemed pretty concentrated on keeping the apartment clean now that it was clean. Shray was pretty much the reason the experiment worked out anyway. So maybe it was actually good that I kept him on the outside. Either way at least I had another roommate literally fighting for my cause.

I wasn’t afraid of being fought. I was the only one cleaning for over a week until I asked for Eric’s help. If I could keep up with everybody’s dishes than surely I could clean my own when I’m done with them. So if we needed threats to keep the rest of the apartment doing their own dishes, then I guess that’s just the way that it will be. Still better than me cleaning everything.

So that’s that. We’ve had this rule in place for a day now. So far nobody has been attacked for any dirty dishes but I can’t imagine that that will remain true. I wonder if the rules will change after the first bloody nose or dented wall. I hope not. The stupid rule doesn’t matter to me. But if that consequence will keep people cleaning, then it works for me. It would be a nice end to the experiment. Even if they aren’t keeping the whole apartment clean. If they just keep the sink clean, I can manage to vacuum and do most everything else at least occasionally. And if we keep up the teamwork (if you can call it teamwork) we can live in a place that is not covered in filth, and that makes this experiment successful. Our social norms apparently aren’t social norms. How do we solve that? Well apparently violence does fix some things.

The experiment that I am conducting for this class involves what to most people would be considered social norms. You know things like cleaning up after yourself after you eat, not leaving pots on the stove and dishes on the living room table, and not leaving trash strewn about the place – things that to most people come second nature but to my roommates is almost impossible. What I am doing for this experiment is instead of just telling/asking them to clean up after themselves (a tactic that didn’t work at all), I’d model the way and lead by example by keeping the apartment clean. I was hoping that this behavior would inspire them to keep things cleaner themselves and that hopefully our apartment would become at least a little neater. I started this experiment on Saturday by cleaning the entire kitchen and the bathroom located in my room. In the following couple of days I vacuumed and picked up around the whole apartment and kept things as organized as anything had been since we had moved in. And the results so far? Pretty much as you would think, no one else has picked up on the habits of cleaning they are simply appreciative that someone finally has been cleaning. I think if I keep up this experiment in this manner than they will simply allow me to keep cleaning up after them and it wouldn’t be a very eventful experiment. Instead, I plan on modifying my experiment. My new plan is to let one of my more sympathetic roommates in on the experiment. I am going to try to convince one of my roommates to start cleaning around the apartment as well, and then we will see whether two people cleaning in an apartment of four is enough to make a difference. Hopefully with two of us leading by example the others will catch on and keep things clean as well. That would make this a truly successful experiment in correcting what should be social norms for my roommates but sadly are not.

This guide discusses the different ways of thinking of the mind and body. The author discusses people thinking of the brain as a separate entity from the body but that can’t be entirely true. Even if the brain isn’t as connected as we necessarily think it is with our body, it is still definitely connected. This article explains that some people started to view the mind as like a computer program and the physical brain was the hardware to run it. I think if you are going to make this comparison you should broaden it to say that the whole body is the computer and the mind is the coding. The mind tells all the “programs” of your body what to do. It controls everything from what comes out of your mouth to how you move your arms and legs. That is why I think that the better metaphor is that the body is the computer and the brain can still be the hardware, it is just the hardware that reads the coding that tells all the other programs on the computer what to do. I think this also translates a little more literally as obviously you do have a lot of coding actually in your brain, your DNA. This is just my spin-off on the way the article said that some people were viewing brains.