Jeffrey Alexander Martin

I've considered doing a PhD. They take years and are expensive. I have an interesting project idea though. Here I'll include what the proposal could look like, an email I wrote to a businessman about it, and an email I wrote to a professor about it. PhD Research Proposal Title: A Value-Based Framework for Analyzing Autobiographies: Mapping Meaning and Motivation in the Lives of Influential Individuals or Autobiographical Personality Analysis: An Axiological Framework for Analyzing Writing About the Self Abstract This research proposes a novel framework for the systematic analysis of autobiographies and memoirs through the lens of value theory, social psychology, and computational linguistics. Drawing on Viktor Frankl’s fourfold structure of creative, experiential, encounteral, and attitudinal values, this project aims to develop a scalable methodology for mapping the motivational structures of historical and contemporary figures. The study will integrate theories of meaning-mak...

Humanity is obsessed with the end of the world. Will the world end with a bang like a meteor, asteroid, volcano, or bombs? Will it end with robots and AI taking over? Will it end with a deadly and infectious bioweapon? All of these are possible, but I think it's just as likely it will end in a whimper. I gave ChatGPT 18 articles and books to read from John B. Calhoun on his studies on population. This is what the AI summarizes for the future of humanity: Overview This document synthesizes the key insights, experimental findings, and long-range predictions of ethologist John B. Calhoun across his published works from 1962 to 1993. It is designed to teach a reader unfamiliar with Calhoun's work how his theories of behavior under crowding relate to possible trajectories of human society—especially in regard to population dynamics, role differentiation, and extinction risk. 1. Core Experiments and Findings      Mouse Utopias and the "Behavioral Sink"      In hi...

People have worried about population growth because of the depletion of resources. It turns out that population growth was something to worry about, but not because of the depletion of resources, because of the social, mental, and spiritual collapse that goes with it. In 1751 Benjamin Franklin wrote 'Observations Concerning the Increase of Mankind, Peopling of Countries, etc.' about population growth in the American colonies. The population grows fast when the resources are available. This helped inspire Thomas Malthus to write 'An Essay on the Principle of Population' in 1798. Essentially, populations of animals grow to the extent they can according to the resources available. As the supply and demand of things like food and space equalize then larger amounts of strife and struggle keep the population from expanding. Sometimes there can be a major increase that wipes out the resources, which then wipes out the population, but more often there's an approximate balan...

A number of years ago I read 'Escape From Freedom' by Erich Fromm. The longer I think about it, the more I realize how important and fundamental the problems that Fromm lays out in that book are. "It is the thesis of this book," Fromm states in the forward, "that modern man, freed from the bonds of preindividualistic society, which simultaneously gave him security and limited him, has not gained freedom in the positive sense of the realization of his individual self; that is, the expression of his intellectual, emotional and sensuous potentialities. Freedom, though it has brought him independence and rationality, has made him isolated and, thereby, anxious and powerless. This isolation is unbearable and the alternatives he is confronted with are either to escape from the burden of this freedom into new dependencies and submission, or to advance to the full realization of positive freedom which is based upon the uniqueness and individuality of man." This is a...

My default perspective of people is that they're nice. That doesn't particularly hold true if you compare things to history, or other cultures, or even all of my own experience. I've had my life threatened many times, I've been shot at, had someone try to stab me, been successfully poisoned in Africa, have had money stolen, been lied to and betrayed, been lied about, and I've been conned a few times. I've largely ignored this contradiction because I didn't know how to reconcile it. But, the last 16 months have held it in my awareness so consistently that I need to confront my ideas about the niceness of people. Today is a good example. I decided to go for a walk at Lake Harbor Park to clear my head. It's been a drizzly day, which I like. With an overcast sky blocking out the sun, the park wasn't too busy, which I also like. I took a trail that isn't the most popular. You walk up a small incline of sand, and then turn down a narrow ravine wit...

Morality is one of the greatest confrontations people have, both with themselves and with others. Albert Bandura is one of the greatest psychologists of morality in history. In his paper "Selective Moral Disengagement in the Exercise of Moral Agency" the first line of the abstract reads, "Moral agency has dual aspects manifested in both the power to refrain from behaving inhumanely and the proactive power to behave humanely." Bandura focused on identifying the eight different ways that people morally disengage. Those are the things that we have to work on avoiding. But, in addition to that there needs to be the things that we are aiming for. There's a reverse to each of the eight things that Bandura identified, and in addition to avoiding moral disengagement, which rightly brings self-condemnation, we must also pursue moral engagement. Moral Justification This is the basic idea that the ends justify the means. If the end is justice we cannot r...

My aunt Deb died a few weeks ago. I received an email the very next day from my friend Don. I'm in a writing group with him and his wife Jean. And he asked me about grief. Here's part of the email. - - - - - - - Hi Jeff, Interesting to browse through your comments on grief, thanks. Question: can one grief about the present, case in point, can we grief that we are stuck in a lockdown on account of a damn little virus that is killing some of us. Given your implied sense of time relativity, I’d guess that grieving the present situation is possible. Today certainly means the future we were anticipating is different. We’ve already had our trip to the Netherlands canceled, after planning on it for more than a year. - - - - - - - Obviously the trip to Europe is most likely annoying, but not a major emotional issue like the loss of a life. Although emotions are complex things, and it's hard to know what's going to hit people the hardest. Across all of these situ...

It's a dangerous thing to read the comments on your writing. It's dangerous to your mental health. We often take comments that we receive online as if it were people talking to us. And, it's different. People are often willing to be insulting and threatening online when they wouldn't be in person. Even if that's not happening, it's difficult to communicate tone and such in writing, so things that would come across differently in person are lost when done in writing. But, sometimes it's great to read comments. I've been debating things online for the last couple of decades. I've benefited from some of the discussions, but being able to ignore comments, or to read them and then not respond, is an even better skill. Public comments are unique because there can be different intentions. Some people are honestly engaging with you and asking sincere questions or making sincere comments. In those cases I try to respond in kind. Then there are all of...