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For Jeff (Leah too if she wants), we live in a busy world. What is the best way we can start doing, maybe for a few hours a week, slow/boring work in our communities?

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> "Success, therefore, is not about the episodic, momentary victories, though they do play a role. It is about the longer view of incremental steps that produce sustained progress. That, such clinicians argue, is what making a difference really looks like. In fact, it is what making a difference looks like in a range of endeavors." (quote from article)

I think that, from childhood, I was implicitly taught to imagine that all time should be "chiros time" ...that "chronos time" was shoved to the side as "unimportant"...

...Never in those words, of course, but once introduced to the concepts.. I realized that the list of heroes and exploits and success stories that I'd accumulated was "all over" the more "chiros" aspect; not the long, slow (sometimes dull) build-up... that leads to having the character needed to endure a trial, or that cements the depth of relationships needed for a family (or org) to wade through a crisis together.

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...but that's not a question!

My question(s) look something like this: 1. Are art/fiction more inherently leaning toward portraying kairos* time? 2. What about re-telling non-fic stories - won't kairos time usually be prominent to keep our readers' interest? (alternately, what are examples - or genres/descriptors - of non-fic that portray chronos time movingly?) 3. Throughout our culture, do we gravitate to these stories b/c we hope to build up a collection of "life hacks" to make us succeed at decisive moments, instead of the "long, slow, deliberate haul"? (re-phrase that last question, maybe? anything tangential!)

(above, I wasn't trying to use scare-quotes; they were b/c I couldn't italicize the Greek words "kairos" and "chronos" in a way that would be reliably show up.)

* Oops - sorry to people whose eyes I have burned with my blatant misspelling of the word "kairos" up there!

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I would like to ask Mr. Jeff Spross, how should I reconcile the wonderful impact of primary care on extending lives etc with Robin Hanson and his assertions, that medicine as an aggregate does not do much good, or at least it is supposedly hard to demonstrate by numbers. Hanson admits, there is good evidence on some of the medical interventions, but rarely on the whole healthcare. What cancels out the benefits ? Or is Hanson wrong ?

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