Category: _Inbox

"Don't criticize, condemn, or complain." - Dale Carnegie

• Criticism is futile because it puts a person on the defensive and usually makes him strive to justify himself.
• Criticism is dangerous, because it wounds a person's precious pride, hurts his sense of importance, and arouses resentment.
• Instead of condemning people, let's try to understand them.
• Let's try to figure out why they do what they do.
• That's a lot more profitable and intriguing than criticism; and it breeds sympathy, tolerance and kindness.
• "To know all is to forgive all."

How To Win Friends And Influence People - Goodreads

Simplify the amount of folders you use by organizing your documents into folders by type, and only creating albums, groupings, or project folders when necessary.

• There are a million and one ways to arrange files and folders on disk.
• Some might argue that spending a moment even thinking about it in the age of desktop search is unnecessary.
• That may be true, but some semblance of order will clear your desktop and your mind and make you "ready for anything."
• Over the years I've come up with a six folder structure for "My Documents" which I create on every computer I use without fail.
• This scheme accommodates every file I might come across, keeps my desktop clear, smoothly fits in with an automated backup system and also makes command line file wrangling a breeze.

Geek To Live: Organizing my documents - Lifehacker

People may often do inconsiderate things when they are in groups, and people who strongly affiliate with one group of people may naturally want to harm outsiders who are not in that group.

• When people get together in groups, unusual things can happen — both good and bad.
• Groups create important social institutions that an individual could not achieve alone, but there can be a darker side to such alliances:
• Belonging to a group makes people more likely to harm others outside the group.
• In a study that recently went online in the journal NeuroImage, the researchers measured brain activity in a part of the brain involved in thinking about oneself.
• They found that in some people, this activity was reduced when the subjects participated in a competition as part of a group, compared with when they competed as individuals.
• Those people were more likely to harm their competitors than people who did not exhibit this decreased brain activity.

When good people do bad things - MIT News Office

Each technology we create is always transforming society and we need to be careful about considering if and when different technologies may be affecting us either negatively or positively.

• A report commissioned by the National Science Foundation and made public today speculates that by the end of this century electronic information technology will have transformed American home, business, manufacturing, school, family and political life.
• The report warned that the new technology would raise difficult issues of privacy and control that will have to be addressed soon to ''maximize its benefits and minimize its threats to society.''
• ...
• The home will double as a place of employment, with men and women conducting much of their work at the computer terminal. This will affect both the architecture and location of the home. It will also blur the distinction between places of residence and places of business, with uncertain effects on zoning, travel patterns and neighborhoods.
• Home-based shopping will permit consumers to control manufacturing directly, ordering exactly what they need for ''production on demand.''
• There will be a shift away from conventional workplace and school socialization. Friends, peer groups and alliances will be determined electronically, creating classes of people based on interests and skills rather than age and social class.

Study Says Technology Could Transform Society - NY Times (1982)

I wonder if it is better and simpler to make sure you always date your notes, and to only take dated notes instead of trying to organize them for reference.