The podcast at 150% speed for faster listening. Tools for tracking motives in thought and conversation; tools for reading between the lines with greater comprehension, a word of the week service that translates cutting-edge insights from the life and social sciences for application to everyday life produced by Jeremy Sherman Ph.D., M.P.P. a guy who wonders a lot, researches the origins and nature of doubt, ambiguity, purpose, life, significance and the fundamental patterns that drive our decisions. Sherman also writes a blog for Psychology Today called "Ambigamy: Insights for the deeply romantic and deeply skeptical." http://www.mindreadersdictionary.com en-us Copyright 2008 Fri, 24 May 2013 16:02:38 EST Fri, 24 May 2013 16:02:38 EST http://www.mindreadersdictionary.com mindreadersdictionary@gmail.com (Jeremy Sherman) mindreadersdictionary@gmail.com For reading between the lines with greater comprehension Latest insights from the life and social sciences translated and applied to your everyday life. Advanced social savvy made simple. Tools for tracking motives in thought and conversation. Pragmatics, evolution, psychology, social psychology, economics, politics, environmentalism, ecology, sociology, semiotics, complexity, emergence, philosophy, cybernetics, decision theory--all the good stuff distilled into simple, disarmingly honest, real-world tools for making better decisions and feeling better about the decisions you make. Jeremy Sherman mindreadersdictionary@gmail.com No http://www.mindreadersdictionary.com/what-should-i-do/good-chemistry-valentines-reflections-on-a-bad-but-convenient-metaphor/ http://www.mindreadersdictionary.com/what-should-i-do/good-chemistry-valentines-reflections-on-a-bad-but-convenient-metaphor/?file=492 What does confidence in our opinions indicate about the likelihood that our opinions are correct? Think of confidence as a delectable treat, a cookie rewarded when you have worked hard, or stolen from the cookie jar when you haven't. If you only reward yourself with the satisfying treat for do... Podcasts Fri, 04 Feb 2011 19:42:22 EST mindreadersdictionary@gmail.com No What does confidence in our opinions indicate about the likelihood that our opinions are correct? Think of confidence as a delectable treat, a cookie rewarded when you have worked hard, or stolen f What does confidence in our opinions indicate about the likelihood that our opinions are correct? Think of confidence as a delectable treat, a cookie rewarded when you have worked hard, or stolen from the cookie jar when you haven't. If you only reward yourself with the satisfying treat for doing careful investigation and interpretation, then the more confident you are, the more likely that you're correct. By this "confident-means-true" interpretation, when we say "I really believe that the meeting is on Thursday" the "I really believe" means "It must be true," as in "I did the necessary work to investigate it and thereby earned my confidence." But we can grant ourselves confidence, that delectable treat really any time we want it, subject only to our appetites and limited only by indigestion we might or might not experience when over-indulging in treats we didn't work to earn. So the "confident-means-false" interpretation suggests that the more confident you are, the more you have substituted confidence for thoughtfulness, and more closed-minded, bigoted, wrong-headed, stubborn, pigheaded, blind and ignorant you are. Confidence, which implies both "likely to be right" and "likely to be wrong," is therefore a "contranym," a word that means two opposite things, a word like "clip" which means both "fasten" and "detach." And how do we use this contranym in a sentence? Quite often as a double standard, sentencing others as closed-minded for their confidence while treating ours as a sign that we know what is true. Or to put it in a limerick: Why, is your sureness a sign that you're certainly right, and yet mine is a sign I'm closed-minded biased, and blinded Shouldn't the standards align? 00:02:08 http://www.mindreadersdictionary.com/what-should-i-do/good-chemistry-valentines-reflections-on-a-bad-but-convenient-metaphor/ http://www.mindreadersdictionary.com/what-should-i-do/good-chemistry-valentines-reflections-on-a-bad-but-convenient-metaphor/?file=490 "Ok, from now on I won't be angry at you about that." "I swear from here on out, I'll be more appreciative." "Trust me, starting now I'll stop being irritated all the time." In my experience, an increase in such pledges to feel a certain way "from now on" is a sure sign that a partnership i... Podcasts Sun, 14 Nov 2010 00:44:50 EST mindreadersdictionary@gmail.com No "Ok, from now on I won't be angry at you about that." "I swear from here on out, I'll be more appreciative." "Trust me, starting now I'll stop being irritated all the time." In my experience, "Ok, from now on I won't be angry at you about that." "I swear from here on out, I'll be more appreciative." "Trust me, starting now I'll stop being irritated all the time." In my experience, an increase in such pledges to feel a certain way "from now on" is a sure sign that a partnership is on the rocks. Such pledges are attempts to manually override intuition, and there's only so much hope for overriding intuition. The problem with manual overrides is that they require chronic, 24/7 will power, and will power isn't up to the task. Let me explain with an obvious example first: If my gut intuition is to eat Oreos and I have a pack lying around, I might be able to override my gut early and maybe even often. And still, those Oreos will be gone in no time. The Oreos beckon relentlessly: "Eat me C’mon eat me Oh do eat me Please You know you want to Come on!" Will power responds intermittently: "No...Absolutely not...Definitely no...OK one, but no more...Well, actually just one more, but then that's it for sure...Except OK, one more..." and the Oreos win. Compared to my gut, my will power is a weakling. By extension, in relationship if something is irritating me, then pledging to conscript will power to override my irritation is just not that promising. You can override all the gut impulses some of the time, but not all of the gut impulses all of the time. You may wonder if the gut impulse to eat Oreos has anything to do with intuition. Some of us define intuition as our higher self, the almighty gut that knows the right thing to do all the time. By this definition, if I eat too many Oreo's it's because I'm ignoring my intuition, which knows better. I have friends who claim that the only time they make mistakes is when they ignore their intuition. I don't think that's a realistic or practical definition of intuition. Sure, with selective recollection you can attribute all successes to listening to your gut and all failures to ignoring it, but really our guts, sixths senses or intuitions are a bit more unruly than that. Intuition is best defined as the source of our natural or spontaneous responses. They're not God or God given sources of genius and perfection. Still I don't mean to disparage them either. They're actually admirably keen in their modest wisdom, honed by trial and error in the school of hard knocks--eons of biological evolution, centuries of cultural evolution, and decades of personal learning from direct and vicarious experience. Still, as any student of human folly knows, there's room for improvement. Malcolm Gladwell is one such student of human folly, though you wouldn't necessarily know it judging his big book by its cover: Blink: The power of thinking by not thinking is an exploration of intuition. I suspect that a lot of people bought it because it promised to affirm their sense that their intuitions were God-smart. Their intuition told them that the word "power" in the subtitle was synonymous with genius, and Gladwell does indeed start the book with stories in which gut-sense proved right. By book's end though, it's clear that intuition's test scores are mixed. Power in the title refers to tenacity. Intuition rules. I respect intuition’s modest wisdom and its formidable tenacity. I think there are only two basic ways to reliably control a bad intuition. One is to steer clear of whatever triggers it. I don't bring Oreos into the house, and to some extent I steer clear of things that persistently irritate or anger me. The other is a slower process, not manually overriding intuition but retraining it with convincing evidence. The part of instinct I can retrain we sometimes call second nature. In other words, we can teach intuition-that old dog of ours--new tricks. Retraining intuition is what clinical psychology has been mostly about all along, from addiction management to me 00:05:04 http://www.mindreadersdictionary.com/what-should-i-do/good-chemistry-valentines-reflections-on-a-bad-but-convenient-metaphor/ http://www.mindreadersdictionary.com/what-should-i-do/good-chemistry-valentines-reflections-on-a-bad-but-convenient-metaphor/?file=488 Friends and I gave a ride to a hitchhiking teen last week. The conversation was difficult because we couldn't hear her. Between our aging ears, the rumble of the car and her nearly inaudible mumbles, her ideas just weren't getting through. She had to say everything twice or more. I remember mum... Podcasts Sun, 31 Oct 2010 22:16:46 EST mindreadersdictionary@gmail.com No Friends and I gave a ride to a hitchhiking teen last week. The conversation was difficult because we couldn't hear her. Between our aging ears, the rumble of the car and her nearly inaudible mumbles, Friends and I gave a ride to a hitchhiking teen last week. The conversation was difficult because we couldn't hear her. Between our aging ears, the rumble of the car and her nearly inaudible mumbles, her ideas just weren't getting through. She had to say everything twice or more. I remember mumbling inaudibly at her age. It was how I coped with my fundamental uncertainty. I anticipated myself saying something stupid I'd want to retract. Once your foot is in your mouth though, there’s no getting it out gracefully so I’d speak half-heartedly and half-vocally. People would ask me to repeat myself. The mumbled, inaudible first pass was like a rehearsal, a half-inflated trial balloon floated low and wavery in the strong gusts of adult conversation. Tentativeness is a teen’s right of passage and mumbling is but one of a few strategies for coping with it. Another is to overcome it with brazen, dogmatic, self-certainty as in the teen who compensates for tentativeness by declaring as absolute fact that his parents are loser-idiots. Still another strategy is irony: Put what you say in quotation marks as though it were said by someone else. That way, if what you say turns out to be stupid you can disclaim it. Really, you were just making fun of people who say things like that. Sometime in the last decade irony peaked, was criticized as corrupting a generation of youth, and then fell into disrepute as a trendy, hip, too-easy formula for hovering cynically above and outside reality. Irony was seen as a sub-species of sarcasm, saying the exact opposite of what you really mean, for example saying “My, isn’t this nice!” when you mean it’s awful. With irony, defined this way, you play-act as though you’re some other dork who would say “My, isn’t this nice!” when it’s obvious that, to hip people like you, it’s not nice at all. Irony was seen as a sign of the next generation’s exceptional lack of self-discipline. Why can’t they speak forthrightly the way we do? As such, the criticism was our generation’s contribution to a traditional campaign of frustration with the young, a campaign that goes back at least as far as Plato (429-327 B.C.E.) who is quoted as saying, "The children now love luxury; they have bad manners, contempt for authority; they show disrespect for elders and love chatter in place of exercise.” This is a hard campaign for baby boomers like me to pull off convincingly. In all of history, my generation will go down as the pinnacle of slouchiness. In the service of irresistible convenience we burned roughly half the fossil fuel accumulated over eons. Comparatively, ours was a time of extraordinary freedom and opportunity. Many of us floated trial vocational balloons, decided against them and managed to launch successful second and even third careers, a sign of the extraordinary opportunities we had. We worry for our ambitiously artsy children because we know their opportunities are slimmer than ours. We fear they won’t get a second chance the way we did. Yes, they’ve joined us at the party, enjoying the unprecedented party favors of our fossil fuel and resource rich post-war economy. But we know. We’ll be leaving the party just as the fuel and economy are spent. They’ll be left to clean up after us. They know too, and are confused by their more limited ambiguous options. From this perspective irony or any coping strategy teens might adopt is a natural and appropriate response. Think of how much uncertainty my hitchhiker has to cope with. It’s a hard time to know what to do. Not for some, of course. These days we’re seeing the surge of that other coping strategy, the brazen, absolute, dogmatic self-certainty in fundamentalists of all stripes from Tea Party activists to Hard-line Muslims. The fundamentalists claim to have been provoked to it by 00:07:10 http://www.mindreadersdictionary.com/what-should-i-do/good-chemistry-valentines-reflections-on-a-bad-but-convenient-metaphor/ http://www.mindreadersdictionary.com/what-should-i-do/good-chemistry-valentines-reflections-on-a-bad-but-convenient-metaphor/?file=486 Life is like getting on a boat that is about to sink. D.T. Suzuki "The idea of death, the fear of it, haunts the human animal like nothing else; it is a mainspring of human activity--designed largely to avoid the fatality of death, to overcome it by denying in some way that it is the final des... Podcasts Mon, 27 Sep 2010 17:53:22 EST mindreadersdictionary@gmail.com No Life is like getting on a boat that is about to sink. D.T. Suzuki "The idea of death, the fear of it, haunts the human animal like nothing else; it is a mainspring of human activity--designed la Life is like getting on a boat that is about to sink. D.T. Suzuki "The idea of death, the fear of it, haunts the human animal like nothing else; it is a mainspring of human activity--designed largely to avoid the fatality of death, to overcome it by denying in some way that it is the final destiny of man." Ernest Becker. We are mirror mortals, the first known species with the capacity to imagine the full arc of life and to know in definitive detail that we die.  We get on the boat; we row with great enthusiasm knowing that no matter our destiny, our real destiny is the inky deep.  We invest in our journey, conscious that we must eventually divest. And it isn't just the one death.  Getting on a boat that is about to sink is a fractal experience played out in the arc of minutes, hours, years, eras, epochs and millennia. Every day something dies.  You lose your glasses, your friend snubs you, you realize that the thing that thrilled you yesterday isn’t great after all.  Over the months, too, the people and joys come and go.  Then each of us dies.  Our families die.  Our civilizations fall.  Our species.  The universe itself is terminal. Everything we embrace as exciting and new comes with its time-release aging, decay, and breakdown.  When you buy a pet dog you buy a pet dog’s death. None of this would matter if we never got on the boat.  But here we are. We care. When we fall in love, investing, it’s like a taste of heaven—joy eternal. When we break up, divesting of each other, it’s a little taste of hell—dissolution eternal. The deeper you go in the more it hurts to come out. Whether we choose to divest or divestment is thrust upon us, there it is, the inevitable, looming no matter where we go. This view of life fits with disconcerting snugness.  Because we throw our lot in with the garden, we grieve when we’re cast out of it.  Because we accelerate into what enthuses us, our brakes squeal and our wheels shudder when we are forced to stop.  Union is sweet, disunion is sour.  Yes, no one gets out alive, but also no one gets out without great grief and loss, and here we are, knowing we’ll be evicted eventually. And what can we do about it? I’ve had a hard time with the word “Spiritual.”  Powerful but ill-defined words make me wary.  Since I can’t find much consensus about what it means, I feel at liberty to offer my own definition.  Spirituality is one’s overall strategy for coping with the challenge of investing, knowing that one must eventually divest.  Spirituality is a kind of preparation, a pre-grieving. Defined this way, I see three main spiritual paths, each with myriad variations, but still ultimately just three: Make One Eternal Investment: Build a pillar of belief to hold onto, one thing from which one never divests for all eternity, something that can’t be credibly challenged or tested and proved wanting, something that explains why people leave and people die and why there has to be so much pain and disappointment and letting go, a belief perhaps that explains how it will all make sense by and by or will be made equitable in the world beyond, a belief that makes the world beyond—the eternal realm--one’s primary focus, aiming us toward its purpose ever after and toward the happily ever after that we expect to come from serving its purpose ever after. 2.     Let Go Into Thin slices: Since letting go is the hard part, make a practice of divesting.  Practice divesting by being present in every instant. Excise memory (of what's lost) or projection (to what's in store). Be here now, quieting the hungry ghosts of intellect and conception.  Become one with nature which doesn’t think, theorize, speculate or foresee, but just is.  Return to animal simplicity. In pain, simply say “ouch.” In pleasure simply say “ah.”  Don’t general 00:08:28 http://www.mindreadersdictionary.com/what-should-i-do/good-chemistry-valentines-reflections-on-a-bad-but-convenient-metaphor/ http://www.mindreadersdictionary.com/what-should-i-do/good-chemistry-valentines-reflections-on-a-bad-but-convenient-metaphor/?file=484 Folks, we face a problem I'm wondering if you're willing to think about with me. It's a real challenge, a challenge to morality posed by recent revelations in logic. It turns out we're living in a world that doesn't seem to offer a final logical authority, no highest possible perspective from whi... Podcasts Wed, 22 Sep 2010 23:57:37 EST mindreadersdictionary@gmail.com No Folks, we face a problem I'm wondering if you're willing to think about with me. It's a real challenge, a challenge to morality posed by recent revelations in logic. It turns out we're living in a Folks, we face a problem I'm wondering if you're willing to think about with me. It's a real challenge, a challenge to morality posed by recent revelations in logic. It turns out we're living in a world that doesn't seem to offer a final logical authority, no highest possible perspective from which we can discriminate between right and wrong on all lower levels.  Regardless the standard we might claim is the most all encompassing and ultimate, someone can come along and claim an even more encompassing and ultimate standard. And even if they're wrong there's no way to prove they are without claiming a higher standard that they can again claim to trump with a still higher standard. It leaves us all at risk of being swept up into escalating games of oneupsmanship or, reversing the metaphor, it makes us all prone to falling into bottomless pits, arguing about the proper depth at which to find bedrock foundations of morality that don’t exist or if they do, we can’t agree on them. For every declaration that “X is moral” the declaration can itself be challenged. We crave something solid to rest our assumptions upon, but that something doesn’t exist. We can pretend it exists but it doesn’t. We can surround ourselves with people who believe it exists where we say it does, but it doesn’t.  We know it doesn’t exist, because other people say, “Ah but don’t you see, you’re missing something crucial--a higher principle; a deeper truth that proves you’re wrong.” Of course, the hell with them, right? Except that they’re saying the hell with us.  So where does that get us? This is a particular kind of one-upmanship.  It’s not just “I’m better than you.”  It’s, “I’m better because I’ve got a bigger perspective, a higher overview.  I’m taking more into consideration than you are.” Uplevelsmanship is claiming to be holier than thou by being highly-er than thou. It’s an escalation in power by escalating in perspective.  It’s an arms race in which the build-up is in ladder rungs to look down from critically. I won’t burden you with the logic here. (I have plenty of articles at my site describing the logic, for example here.) Instead I’ll provide some intuitive examples of the general logical problem: 1. You probably know what it’s like to feel regret for not having taken something into consideration: “Ah, if only I had factored in THAT. That changes everything.”  Such regret is a reason to take more into consideration, but can you ever take everything into consideration? If not, where should you draw the line?  How much due diligence is really due?  It depends on the situation. The higher the stakes the more one should take into account, but only up to a point.  Even on the highest stake decisions, you can’t take everything into account. There’s still a chance that you’ll have missed something that changes everything. This is why leaders capable of decisiveness have to be comfortable with ambiguity, the ability to place big bets, knowing as they do it, that they may be missing something that changes everything. 2. I want to hire an investment advisor. I meet a few and I notice that I’m having a hard time figuring out who’s best.  So I decide to hire someone to guide me about which investment adviser to hire.  But even that’s not an easy decision. So I decide I should hire an advisor to advise me on which advisor to advise me on which adviser to hire. But then how do I know who to hire for that? 3. I remember it to this day--the time my parents disagreed about what I should do.  Until that time they had always agreed with each other and I just had to follow their unified advice.  Suddenly, to defer to one was to defy the other.  I had to decide between them.  I asked my friends what I should do. Trouble was some friends said I shoul 00:08:22 http://www.mindreadersdictionary.com/what-should-i-do/good-chemistry-valentines-reflections-on-a-bad-but-convenient-metaphor/ http://www.mindreadersdictionary.com/what-should-i-do/good-chemistry-valentines-reflections-on-a-bad-but-convenient-metaphor/?file=482 IMHO: In my humble opinion--what's the deal with that? What do we ever say that isn't our humble opinion? And yet when we declare "It's raining" do we really mean "I think it's raining" or is raining a fact, and therefore not a matter of humble opinion? In the acronym IMHO, the H is redundant. IM... Podcasts Thu, 16 Sep 2010 19:07:47 EST mindreadersdictionary@gmail.com No IMHO: In my humble opinion--what's the deal with that? What do we ever say that isn't our humble opinion? And yet when we declare "It's raining" do we really mean "I think it's raining" or is raining IMHO: In my humble opinion--what's the deal with that? What do we ever say that isn't our humble opinion? And yet when we declare "It's raining" do we really mean "I think it's raining" or is raining a fact, and therefore not a matter of humble opinion? In the acronym IMHO, the H is redundant. IMO is already humbled, revealing awareness of one's role as an interpreter of evidence, as if to say, "The opinions expressed here are those of the expressor and may not be those of reality itself, the expressor's ultimate employer. And even "In my opinion" is redundant since the evidence that a statement is your opinion is implied by the way it emanates from your pie hole.  You've probably been in one of these exchanges before. A: It’s not a good idea. B: Well, that’s your opinion. A: Of course, it’s my opinion! I’m saying that in my opinion it’s not a good idea! If “in my opinion” is implicit, why would we ever make it explicit?  One reason would be signal receptivity to alternative perspectives.  It can signal that, “this is a conversation, not an argument or a fight.” A:  What did you think of the movie last night? B:  In my opinion it wasn’t very good. A: Ah, well in my opinion it wasn’t bad. I have yet to meet a signal that couldn’t, in some contexts mean the opposite of its literal meaning. A showy signal of accommodation and receptivity can be a way of saying “you’re so aggressive I have to walk on eggshells not to upset you.”  IMHO can signal “I’m the humble one here; you’re the arrogant one.”  I sometimes use IMAO (In my arrogant opinion) to confuse this effect. And notice also that declaring oneself humble is a fairly arrogant act.  In Numbers, one of the five books of Moses (supposedly written by Moses), verse 12:3 reads, “Now Moses was a very humble man, more humble than anyone else on the face of the earth.”  Not arrogant, perhaps if it was dictated to Moses by God, or at least no more arrogant than saying “People say I’m really humble.” Many common phrases have a suspiciously arrogant-sounding self-reported humility. “Excuse me” is a command.  “With all due respect,” implies a claim that amounts to “I’m an authority on how much respect is due to you, and trust me, I know I’m showing you your full due.” Perhaps more accurately we should say “With all due respect, I’ll leave it to you to decide whether I’m showing you due respect when I say…”. One of the cockiest conversationalists I’ve ever met, would pepper her unsolicited advising and pontificating with the caveat, “I reserve the right to be wrong,” as though everything she said would be so compelling we might forget her potential fallibility. Any time we graciously remind and assure people that they are entitled to an alternative perspective, we run the risk of sounding like they don’t. A:  Feel free to disagree with me. B:  (Sarcastically) Why thank you, that is so kind!  I was waiting for your permission. When we preface something with IMHO does that mean everything said before it was not IMHO?  When we say, “Well, frankly speaking” does that mean everything before it wasn’t frank?  When we say, “You look great!” does that mean that you didn’t before? In sum, when is a signal a reminder of an ongoing state and when is it the announcement of the start of a new state. Another possible use of IMHO is to distinguish opinion from fact. When I say, “It’s raining,” I’m stating a fact.  When I say, “It looks dreary outside,” that’s an opinion.  But if it were as straightforward as that, we wouldn’t need to distinguish explicitly. We would all know the difference between fact and opinion.  Epistemologists--those who study the difference between fact and opinion have not come to agreement on the diffe 00:07:56 http://www.mindreadersdictionary.com/what-should-i-do/good-chemistry-valentines-reflections-on-a-bad-but-convenient-metaphor/ http://www.mindreadersdictionary.com/what-should-i-do/good-chemistry-valentines-reflections-on-a-bad-but-convenient-metaphor/?file=480 I'm grateful for Terry Jones' Koran-burning intolerance. Right wing rhetoric has escalated to the point where more is better, crossing the line into detachment from reality that should still be recognizable to most Americans as proto-fascism, a self-confirming, untestable ideological faith that dema... Podcasts Sat, 11 Sep 2010 21:24:45 EST mindreadersdictionary@gmail.com No I'm grateful for Terry Jones' Koran-burning intolerance. Right wing rhetoric has escalated to the point where more is better, crossing the line into detachment from reality that should still be recogn I'm grateful for Terry Jones' Koran-burning intolerance. Right wing rhetoric has escalated to the point where more is better, crossing the line into detachment from reality that should still be recognizable to most Americans as proto-fascism, a self-confirming, untestable ideological faith that demands that reality goes along with it. Terry Jones is an embarrassment the movement that spawned him. So out of touch, he believed that burning Koran's would win over moderate Muslims, and yet his style is on only inches from that which the Right is leaning into so enthusiastically these days, the rhetoric of crusaders or jihadists. Back in the 60's the CIA would seed peace rallies with hippie-clothed agents acting crazy and violent and ruining the rallies’ reputations. Jones’ is the Right’s own crazy—no need for CIA operatives. And there will be more like him, and there’s still hope that mainstream America will respond with a backlash of civility. Inconsistent with many of my progressive friends though, I agree with Jones about one thing. Jones’ believes we must fight back against Militant Muslim intolerance and violence. He believes as I do that sometimes you have to fight fire with fire, intolerance with intolerance. There’s a tendency among us civil-minded people to believe that one should never exercise intolerance since intolerance is always bad. I operate on the fundamental moral principle that since intolerance is bad, one should be intolerant of intolerance. I know that’s paradoxical, and forces me to admit to the hypocrisy of sometimes being intolerant because I hate intolerance, but that’s why I consider it fundamental. Since the principle can’t be acted upon simplistically, it confronts me with the real and difficult question: Under what circumstances is intolerance appropriate, acceptable and unacceptable? – a question some of my nicer progressive friends sidestep. The saying goes, “Don’t fight with a pig. You both get dirty and the pig likes it.” The pig in question is any bully—a person who fights dirty, imposing incivility, deaf to negotiation or reason. There are three basic pieces of advice about bullies. Depending on who you had for parents your probably heard at least one of these. 1. Ignore him. He’s only doing it for attention. When you ignore bullies, they always go away. 2. Be nice to him. He probably just has low self-esteem. If you’re nice to bullies they always stop bullying. 3. Beat the crap out of him. That’s the only way to get a bully to stop. If you fight them, bullies end up scared of you. If you don’t win, at least they’ll respect you. Either way, if you fight them they always leave you alone. Now that we’re adults we can take the bad news: No one strategy always works to stop a bully, and sometimes none of them work. If Stalin, the world’s biggest bully sent you to Siberia as he did tens of millions of others, it wouldn’t have mattered if you ignored him, were nice to him, or fought him. We owe it to the unsung victims of such bullies not to pretend there’s a surefire recipe for getting bullies to stop, that these victims just failed to employ. We owe them the respect and honor of recognizing how hard it is to know what to do about a bully. Still, say some, getting the bully to leave us alone, isn’t the most important thing. It’s more important to live a moral life. A bully is intolerant but you don’t have to stoop to that. When Newt Gingrich argued that we shouldn’t let a Muslim YMCA be built near the World Trade Center’s ground zero, because, "There are no churches or synagogues in all of Saudi Arabia. In fact no Christian or Jew can even enter Mecca,” many countered that that’s no reason for us to be intolerant. An eye for an eye leaves the whole world blind, therefore we shouldn’t fight the pi 00:10:58 http://www.mindreadersdictionary.com/what-should-i-do/good-chemistry-valentines-reflections-on-a-bad-but-convenient-metaphor/ http://www.mindreadersdictionary.com/what-should-i-do/good-chemistry-valentines-reflections-on-a-bad-but-convenient-metaphor/?file=478 As I've mentioned I'm trying to put my finger on what makes me and others intuit that there are two different psychological sub-cultures of humans. Red vs. Blue, Conservative vs. Liberal, Right vs. Left, religious vs. secular--maybe these divisions are symptomatic of the underlying difference, but t... Podcasts Thu, 02 Sep 2010 15:33:54 EST mindreadersdictionary@gmail.com No As I've mentioned I'm trying to put my finger on what makes me and others intuit that there are two different psychological sub-cultures of humans. Red vs. Blue, Conservative vs. Liberal, Right vs. Le As I've mentioned I'm trying to put my finger on what makes me and others intuit that there are two different psychological sub-cultures of humans. Red vs. Blue, Conservative vs. Liberal, Right vs. Left, religious vs. secular--maybe these divisions are symptomatic of the underlying difference, but they don't seem to get to the bottom of it. I obviously believe I belong to one of these two psychological sub-cultures, and am naturally inclined to think my sub-culture is superior. To counter my chauvinism, I’m looking for an objective way to distinguish the two sub-cultures, some characteristic about which representatives of both sub-cultures would say,  “You’re damn right that’s how I am, and proud of it.” In other words it’s not going to be the usual self-congratulatory “Liberals are more loving,” or “Conservatives are more patriotic.”  The other day I saw a vegan restaurant called “Loving Hut.” Something about the signage implied that love was a defining characteristic of liberal vegetarians.  I see the connection.  Not eating animals is more loving to the animals than eating them. But for the first time I read the connection as a conservative carnivore would: “What, you think you liberals have a corner on love? Just because your lifestyle is loving of someone, it doesn’t mean my lifestyle isn’t loving.  I love my family enough to make sure they get great animal protein.” For the first time I noticed that liberals do what conservatives do.  When conservatives claim the mantel of “patriotism,” arguing, for example that being pro-Iraq-war is patriotic, they imply that patriotism is their distinguishing characteristic, and we liberals don’t buy it.  The distinguishing feature I’m looking for would not be one of these self-congratulatory distinctions.  It would be one we’d all buy, saying, “fair enough, that really is the distinction between our two approaches.” I suspect the distinction is around a trait I’m calling meta-confidence. There’s your interpretation, story, or belief, then there’s your confidence in your interpretation, story or belief, and then there’s your confidence in your confidence--your meta-confidence. “Meta” has come to mean “recursively about” so a meta-blog is a blog about blogging. Meta-confidence is your confidence about your confidence. How sure are you that London is the capital of England?  That’s your confidence level.  If you’re 100% sure that London is the capital of England, how sure are you that it really is?  I mean, can you ever be 100% sure of something and it still not be the case? I’m exploring the possibility is that if your answer is “No.  If I’m sure I’m sure, then it’s true,” then you’re a member of one of the sub-cultures, and if your answer is, “Yes. Being sure I’m sure about something doesn’t necessarily mean it’s true,” then you are a member of the other sub-culture. The capital of England is not the point.  Nor is the point that some people are more confident than others.  Confidence is the source of focus, attention and effort for all of us.  If every day you flip-flop about whether you should pursue the career you’re in, you won’t be in it very long.  Any of us can reach 100% confidence in an interpretation, story or belief. These day’s I’m high on confidence about my choices.  I think I’m on the right path. Last year at this time my confidence was way down (see mid-mid-life crisis) and I’m much more productive this year by the standards I’m confident in.  I’ll go further. I hold the theories I hold with extremely high confidence. I just don’t’ hold my confidence in them with high confidence. Though my confidence is approaching 100% my meta-confidence can’t, won’t and shouldn’t ever approach that. The distinction I’m exploring 00:29:25 http://www.mindreadersdictionary.com/what-should-i-do/good-chemistry-valentines-reflections-on-a-bad-but-convenient-metaphor/ http://www.mindreadersdictionary.com/what-should-i-do/good-chemistry-valentines-reflections-on-a-bad-but-convenient-metaphor/?file=476 "You believe them? Are you out of your mind?! How can you not see through their lies?! It's so obvious your leaders are manipulative. And you just don't get it, do you?" Conservative friends have said that to me about my respect for likes of Obama, Reid, and Boxer, and I've said that to them abou... Podcasts Wed, 01 Sep 2010 00:22:50 EST mindreadersdictionary@gmail.com No "You believe them? Are you out of your mind?! How can you not see through their lies?! It's so obvious your leaders are manipulative. And you just don't get it, do you?" Conservative friends have s "You believe them? Are you out of your mind?! How can you not see through their lies?! It's so obvious your leaders are manipulative. And you just don't get it, do you?" Conservative friends have said that to me about my respect for likes of Obama, Reid, and Boxer, and I've said that to them about their respect for Palin, Beck, and McCain. As America becomes increasingly partisan, I sometimes wonder if we’re not just two separate species.  What distinguishes species is an inability to make children. We’re sort of like that.  It’s hard for us to make brainchildren with each other. I do know partisan couples-- a liberal married to a conservative with kids between them. They can cross breed, just not on political issues.  Our government is like that now. The prospects for bipartisan legislation these days are about as good as the prospects for Israeli/Palestinian peace accords in the past few decades. In evolution the most common source of speciation is allopatry, or geographic separation.  Communities of organisms that don’t co-mingle will tend to drift genetically in different directions and when they’re brought back together they can’t mate. Asian and African elephants were one species that split, migrated, and then adapted to different environments. Now they can’t produce offspring together. There’s cultural allopatry too. I grew up in an almost exclusively liberal intellectual enclave, and here I am a liberal intellectual having trouble interbreeding culturally with conservative anti-intellectuals. If you’ll pardon a cosmic parallel, a variation on allopatry makes the universe go round. Literally.  The reason there’s usable energy to make planets or your washing machine orbit is that things that were once unified (before the big bang) became separate for long enough that when they come back together they don’t just re-unite, they bounce off each other from different angles and at different speeds. The difference is what’s called energy. In general, time apart creates fresh, divergent often, conflicting angles of re-entry.  The technical definition of work has to do with the way contact between two formerly independent things forces both off of their natural or “spontaneous” trajectories.  This explains some of what makes Glenn Beck rub me the wrong way.  Obviously he’s been somewhere else. And sometimes I’m grateful to be rubbed the wrong way, like when a friend brings me a fresh perspective on things. Sometimes diversity is the spice of life.  It’s great to be rubbed the wrong way the right way. Vive la difference that in the long run I’m grateful for, and as for the rest--the differences that rub me wrong the wrong way, the Glenn Becks of the world-- I wish they’d go away. This is one of the most horrifying consequences of human leverage.  In our newly interconnected world, it’s harder to just live and let live.  Our different beliefs have consequences for each other.  Beck and his leveraged effects won’t leave me alone. I’m proud to be a liberal intellectual, but that’s not probably saying much.  That my parents and my former self would be proud of and agree with my current self is about as affirming of my grasp of the truth as advertising is a credible endorsement of a corporation’s products.  I agree with myself. So what?  For the most part, who doesn’t? As George Bernard Shaw said “Patriotism is your conviction that this country is superior to all other countries because you were born in it.”  I’m an intellectual patriot.  I believe my ideas are superior because I was born into them. Most of us don’t fall too far from the tree. You could call it your “inheristance,” the stance you inherited from your place and people of origin. I know people who made an all-out effort to fall as far from the tree of their intellectua 00:07:06 http://www.mindreadersdictionary.com/what-should-i-do/good-chemistry-valentines-reflections-on-a-bad-but-convenient-metaphor/ http://www.mindreadersdictionary.com/what-should-i-do/good-chemistry-valentines-reflections-on-a-bad-but-convenient-metaphor/?file=474 I still have it, the sign my father, an innovative CEO of a large corporation had printed for use at executive meetings. In a 1960s font on yellowed cardboard it reads: What are we talking about? He designed it out of frustration with agenda drift. As a meeting conversation would overheat, sid... Podcasts Thu, 26 Aug 2010 18:24:45 EST mindreadersdictionary@gmail.com No I still have it, the sign my father, an innovative CEO of a large corporation had printed for use at executive meetings. In a 1960s font on yellowed cardboard it reads: What are we talking about? I still have it, the sign my father, an innovative CEO of a large corporation had printed for use at executive meetings. In a 1960s font on yellowed cardboard it reads: What are we talking about? He designed it out of frustration with agenda drift. As a meeting conversation would overheat, sidetracked on some trivial matter, my dad would silently lift the sign off his lap. What are we talking about? He was asking people to step out of their stances within a conversation to notice what the conversation was about and then to compare it to other alternative conversations including whatever was really on the agenda.  The sign was as if to say, "Notice the tree you’re barking up.  If you step back to see the tree, you’ll notice that you’ve lost sight of the forest. If you see the forest, maybe you’ll reprioritize. Maybe the tree you’re barking up is the wrong tree.” I’m sure you can relate to my father’s frustration.  Your agenda item finally gets the floor and some klutz inadvertently boots it into the dusty corner with an over-earnest “Yes, but what about my (petty) concern?” The meeting attendees follow his “concern” like Dug the dog after a squirrel in the movie “Up” and forget it--they’re never coming back to your priority topic. I feel that frustration these days about how climate legislation got tabled and now all we can talk about is the immorality of allowing a Muslim YMCA to open between the Dunkin Donuts, off-track betting parlor and sex clubs two blocks from the former World Trade Center. The more meeting participants; the harder it is to keep the conversation on track. At present the nation’s conversation has the attention discipline of a two-year-old with ADD on LSD wandering the strip in Las Vegas. And you also know what its like to be seen as that klutz, because you’ve been in meetings where the agenda gets within inches of a real high-priority issue, and you do what you can to boot the conversation to what really counts even if others think yours is a petty concern. I feel like that kind of klutz sometimes writing these columns, which are slightly offset from conventional conversation. People complain. They don’t understand why, for example, I always go for the big picture. In my defense, I could counter that these complainers “can’t see the forest for the trees,” as though the big picture perspective is simply and always better. As I argued last week, it isn’t. Sometimes the details are what really count. But as I also argued last week, the big picture on the relationship between big and small pictures is really worth a visit, so that’s what we’re talking about this week, back to hierarchy, the relationship between forest and trees and what’s really involved there. Shifts between bigger and smaller pictures explain an enormous amount of what goes on in our lives--our victories and defeats, what makes us savvy or stupid, insightful or frustrating.  The ability to zoom the lens of one’s attention to the right level of analysis is one of the greatest gifts one can have. For lack of a conventional term, I’ve called it “rung-running skill” the ability to deftly move up and down the rungs of the ladder overlooking your circumstances, to see it from up high and down low, depending on what the situation calls for. We intuit that perspectives are nested in some kind of hierarchy from small too large, but where do nested hierarchies come from?  Simplifying, there are three sources. There’s nature itself. For example, nature produced you, and you are undeniably hierarchical, what with your cells making up your organs making up your body, etc. Second, words.  Our capacity to represent things symbolically frees us to make hierarchy, chiefly by applying symbols to themselves. I can talk about talking, write about writing, think a 00:10:22 http://www.mindreadersdictionary.com/what-should-i-do/good-chemistry-valentines-reflections-on-a-bad-but-convenient-metaphor/ http://www.mindreadersdictionary.com/what-should-i-do/good-chemistry-valentines-reflections-on-a-bad-but-convenient-metaphor/?file=472 We all know what's meant by "can't see the forest for the trees." It's a great turn of phrase reminding us not to lose scope and to keep the big picture in mind. But what are scope and the big picture anyway? The phrase "forest for trees" is especially apt because it originates in forestry and... Podcasts Tue, 17 Aug 2010 18:03:20 EST mindreadersdictionary@gmail.com No We all know what's meant by "can't see the forest for the trees." It's a great turn of phrase reminding us not to lose scope and to keep the big picture in mind. But what are scope and the big pict We all know what's meant by "can't see the forest for the trees." It's a great turn of phrase reminding us not to lose scope and to keep the big picture in mind. But what are scope and the big picture anyway? The phrase "forest for trees" is especially apt because it originates in forestry and therefore biology.  Within biology patterns of hierarchy from small picture to big picture are plainly in play.  It's not just a figment of our imaginations.  Atoms make up molecules, which make up cells, which make up organs, which make up bodies, which make up populations, which make up ecologies. There are scope issues from small picture to big in our everyday lives too.  In thinking about where you’ll vacation, you might take into consideration what you want, what you and your partner want, what your family wants, and if you have been invited to a family reunion what your extended family wants. In thinking about politics, there’s what you, your community, county, state, country and planet want.   In business there’s likewise the costs and benefits for you, your team, your division, your company, your industry, your economy, and the global economy.  In caring for your environment, there’s what protects your home, your street, your state, your country, and the globe. With these examples we see that there aren’t really just two levels--trees and forests. It’s not a duplex, it’s a multi-leveled complex. We teach children to deal with the complexity through songs like “The green grass grows all around.”  Remember?  “There’s a leaf on the twig on the branch on the limb on the tree in the hole…” Taking into account the many levels we could as easily say, “Can’t see the limb for the branches” or “Can’t see the branch for the twigs.”  Instead our intuitions pick out just two levels, call them “trees” and “forest” and argue that the broader of the two is the most relevant.  We use the saying as a way to focus or constrain attention. It’s a way of saying “you’re paying attention to the wrong picture. The big picture is the right picture.” Is the bigger picture always the right perspective?  Some of humanities’ most spectacular failures resulted from ignoring some crucial small-picture detail.  We have sayings to warn against not seeing the trees for the forest too, and these are also ways to focus or constrain attention as if to say “You’re paying attention to the wrong picture. The smaller picture is the right picture.” Concentrate where the rubber hits the road. A stitch in time saves nine. The devil is in the details. Or: For want of a nail the shoe was lost. For want of a shoe the horse was lost. For want of a horse the rider was lost. For want of a rider the battle was lost. For want of a battle the kingdom was lost. And all for the want of a horseshoe nail. So it’s not so simple.  Sometimes we do worse by not seeing forest for trees, and sometimes we do better.  Sometimes we do worse by not seeing the trees for the forest and sometimes we do better.  And that’s just two levels.  With more levels it becomes much more complicated to figure out where to focus. The problem is even one step more complex than that because there are levels on different questions.  Take, for example a decision about whether to have children. Notice the levels issues on the “who, what, where, why, when” and “how” of that question: Who:  Whose preferences matter to the decision—mine, my partnership’s, my family’s, the world’s population? What:  What factors matter to the decision—money, career, love, hobbies, religion, the economy, the environment? Where:  How big an area should I factor into the decision—my own home, my community, the country, the world? Why:  In explaining my decision, how deep into r 00:06:51 http://www.mindreadersdictionary.com/what-should-i-do/good-chemistry-valentines-reflections-on-a-bad-but-convenient-metaphor/ http://www.mindreadersdictionary.com/what-should-i-do/good-chemistry-valentines-reflections-on-a-bad-but-convenient-metaphor/?file=470 Last week I launched but didn't complete an attack on moral principles, arguing that they tend to make us dumber, not smarter. I focused on words I've called "synantonyms" elsewhere. Synantonyms are two words that describe the same behavior, but prescribe opposite responses to the behavior. I ... Podcasts Sat, 07 Aug 2010 20:43:17 EST mindreadersdictionary@gmail.com No Last week I launched but didn't complete an attack on moral principles, arguing that they tend to make us dumber, not smarter. I focused on words I've called "synantonyms" elsewhere. Synantonyms Last week I launched but didn't complete an attack on moral principles, arguing that they tend to make us dumber, not smarter. I focused on words I've called "synantonyms" elsewhere. Synantonyms are two words that describe the same behavior, but prescribe opposite responses to the behavior. I used "clingy" and "committed" as examples. They both describe perseverance, and yet clingy makes it sound bad and committed makes it sound good. Descriptively they’re synonyms; prescriptively they're antonyms. That's why a call them synantonyms. Here are some other synantonyms: Judgmental (bad) and discernment (good) Spineless (bad) vs. flexible (good) Pigheaded (bad) vs steadfast (good) Co-dependent (bad) vs. supportive (good) Addicted (bad) vs. dedicated (good) In denial (bad) vs. Hopeful (good) Pessimistic (bad) vs. optimistic (good) Unrealistic (bad) vs. Ambitious (good) Greedy (bad) vs. Saving for a rainy day (good) Uncaring (bad) vs. Focusing elsewhere (good) Such terms are treated as the meat of morality. I’m arguing that they mask ambiguities at the heart of the human moral dilemma. Our greatest moral challenge is just what you would expect from a creature like us with strong emotions but modest powers to reason about a complex world: When our emotions get strong, we find whatever reasons we need in order to make virtues out of our preferences. We turn, “I don’t like it” into “It’s morally wrong.” We turn “I want it” into “Morality demands that I should have it.” We rationalize too easily for our own long-term good. We pray, “God, grant me one good reason why I’m right,” and He generally grants it. Think about the people you find difficult. Chances are you don’t trust the reasons they give you for what they advocate. You think they rationalize and make up self-serving excuses and reasons, claiming they are being rational when they’re being impulsive. I think this tendency to rationalize is the most serious challenge facing us today. Now that human power has such far-reaching consequences, our margin of error is rapidly shrinking. Even unfettered, reason and science would have a hard time saving us from the trouble we’re in. We really need to find ways to constrain our natural tendency to bend reason and our interpretation of reality to our personal preferences. The harder things get the more emotional we’ll get and the more inclined we’ll be to bend reason. People don’t tend to get more rational in crises, but less. I think about the climate crisis and the lengths people are willing to go to ignore evidence. Environmentalist Rob Watson says, “Mother Nature is just chemistry, biology and physics. That’s all she is. You cannot sweet-talk her. You cannot spin her. You cannot tell her that the oil companies say climate change is a hoax.” The good news is that almost everyone who denies the climate crisis at this late stage is going to get their comeuppance within their lifetimes. The bad news is how. In the hands of rationalizing beings like us, synantonyms—these morally heavy-handed, yet ill-defined words--are dangerous. Synantonyms smuggle a subjective prescription into a supposedly objective description. 180-degree finger pointing: Where I have been hypocritical Let’s turn the tables 180 degrees here and scrutinize my arguments for a change. Isn’t it hypocritical of me to argue for a moral principle that moral principles are bad? In last week’s article I said, “I never met a moral principle I could trust,” in effect “moral principles are bad.” And yet how would I describe my argument if not as a moral principle? Didn’t I trust it? I could say, “Ah, but mine was not a moral principle (since they are bad). I was simply offering a guideline or a suggestion (which are good).” Wouldn’t that be doing exactl 00:31:57 http://www.mindreadersdictionary.com/what-should-i-do/good-chemistry-valentines-reflections-on-a-bad-but-convenient-metaphor/ http://www.mindreadersdictionary.com/what-should-i-do/good-chemistry-valentines-reflections-on-a-bad-but-convenient-metaphor/?file=468 Moral* principles do more harm than good. We apply them self-servingly and selectively. They operate at the wrong level of abstraction, distracting us from the right level. I'm deeply committed to morality but I've never met a moral principle I could trust. I can illustrate this best by example.... Podcasts Wed, 28 Jul 2010 16:35:44 EST mindreadersdictionary@gmail.com No Moral* principles do more harm than good. We apply them self-servingly and selectively. They operate at the wrong level of abstraction, distracting us from the right level. I'm deeply committed to mo Moral* principles do more harm than good. We apply them self-servingly and selectively. They operate at the wrong level of abstraction, distracting us from the right level. I'm deeply committed to morality but I've never met a moral principle I could trust. I can illustrate this best by example. Consider these two moral principles: Don’t cling. Show commitment. What's the difference between clinging and commitment? From what I can tell, they are indistinguishable except that clinging is bad and should never occur and commitment is good and should always occur. Clinging and commitment both describe a preference for keeping something (a law, a policy, a belief, a system, a relationship, a habit etc.) the same rather than changing it. So far I've never found any way to objectively distinguish between an act of clinging and an act of commitment. I’m open to the possibility that I’m missing something so please challenge me: We’d need some litmus test by which observing a preference for keeping something the same, one could reliably sort out the bad (clinging) from the good (commitment). A Buddhist friend suggested that the difference is that clinging is desperate and commitment isn’t. This proposed litmus test pivots on the intensity (desperateness) of desire for something to stay the same, where the more intense, the more clingy, and the more bad, and the less intense, the less clingy, and the more good. The way to kick the tires on a litmus test is by looking for counter-examples. If they come readily it can’t be a reliable litmus test. Think of the parents who desperately want to save their child from a tyrannical government’s death squad. The parents’ desperation feels neither clingy nor bad. The powerful tyrants on the other hand, could intend to kill the child while experiencing a state of calm resolve, no desperation, but not a virtuous “commitment” to the assassination either. The desperation litmus test for distinguishing clinging from commitment doesn’t hold up. The distinctions we draw between clinging and commitment are based on subjective assessments. When we believe that keeping something is bad or will turn out bad, we call it clinging (or any of a number of other pejorative terms—attachment, stubbornness, pigheadedness, etc.) and when we believe that keeping something is good or will turn out good, we call it commitment (or any of a number of other terms with positive connotations—sticking to principle, steadfastness, tradition, etc.). Though in practice, clinging and staying committed amount to the same thing, their connotations are absolute opposites. Since clinging is supposedly always bad and showing commitment is supposedly always good, together they amount to the self-contradictory statement that you should never and always keep things the same. You’ve been in a partnership a long time but lately it’s not feeling good anymore. You wonder whether you should stay in the partnership. One friend says, “Leave. Trying to make it work is just clinging to the past.” Another friend says, “Stay. Just demonstrate commitment.” Both friends imply that they’re reading the situation objectively in a way that dictates a morally principled response. The word “just,” as in “just clinging” or “just demonstrate commitment.” is a powerful word. It means, “ignore all other possibilities.” “Just” implies that the decision is a no-brainer, a decision as easy to make as “should I call this spade a spade?” When I want you to let go of something I can say “don’t cling.” When I want you to hold onto to something, I can say, “stay committed.” I can convincingly cloak my subjective opinion in the garb of objectivity. I can give my confidence levels (my assessment of the probability that I’m right about something) a hi 00:09:01 http://www.mindreadersdictionary.com/what-should-i-do/good-chemistry-valentines-reflections-on-a-bad-but-convenient-metaphor/ http://www.mindreadersdictionary.com/what-should-i-do/good-chemistry-valentines-reflections-on-a-bad-but-convenient-metaphor/?file=466 "I need a workable solution to this problem and I need it now. It has got to be realistic but it also has to spell relief and spell it soon." That's the subtext for all sorts of human endeavor from finishing that project that already has you underpaid, over-budget and behind schedule, to coming u... Podcasts Thu, 22 Jul 2010 23:42:45 EST mindreadersdictionary@gmail.com No "I need a workable solution to this problem and I need it now. It has got to be realistic but it also has to spell relief and spell it soon." That's the subtext for all sorts of human endeavor from "I need a workable solution to this problem and I need it now. It has got to be realistic but it also has to spell relief and spell it soon." That's the subtext for all sorts of human endeavor from finishing that project that already has you underpaid, over-budget and behind schedule, to coming up with the best approach to addressing global warming: We need it right, and we need it right now. Just today, a friend said to me, "Yes, I would like your help thinking this project through, but on one condition. I'm already well along. I can't really afford to rethink it from scratch." I know the feeling well. I get it, for example when I notice, with aversion that an article I've written under deadline has a flaw that would require revisions I'd rather not have to make. So we cut corners. At the gym, I see people counting reps without employing good form. I read articles by other writers who, it seems to me, didn't follow their ideas all the way out. "All the way out" is part of the problem. It's much easier to measure quantity of articles than quantity of thought. But quantifiability isn't the only issue. Expediency is driven by an emotional aversion to the disappointment of facing unexpected hard work. I've written about "speed-reading our critics," reading a review or critical report with eyes that dance gingerly over the feedback like feet hoping across hot coals. All feedback--suggestions for improving things, ideas about more that could be done--feels like an obstacle thrown in your path, like you were rolling downhill toward your goal and suddenly there's a hill you hadn't counted on. I know this feeling most palpably as a sensation I've had when exercising. I'm doing push ups; a friend happens to be watching. I count 38 with a goal of 50 and my friend who has been counting silently says "36." My count is off his by two-two unexpected push ups more to do. There's this surge of overwhelm that runs through my body as I adjust my expectations. The overwhelm leads instantly to questions about my friend's intent. Is that his real count or is he taunting me? Judging only by that taxing sensation, the feedback feels like a put-down. His grin reminds me of the prankster's glee as he looks through the glass door he refuses to unlock when I need to come inside out of the rain. Straining, face down on the floor I look up at him. He's humiliating me on purpose. "I didn't count two of those reps," he says. "They weren't good form." We construct, "Nickel and Paradigms," lightweight, over-simplistic models of how systems work. A lot of our philosophical and spiritual theories seem to qualify as nickel and paradigms--hopefully-good-enough theories that often aren't. Where they don't match reality, we fudge or call it an exception to the rule without further refining our paradigms to include rules for when to expect these exceptions to the rules. We want to have become experts on how things work but that doesn't mean we necessarily want to do what it takes to become those experts. We want to be experts but since becoming one takes much more work than simulating the impression that we're experts, we often take the latter route. We are furious about corporate corner-cutting--BP on the Gulf, the banks, the auto companies. We have an analytical model of such expedience: Some people are just too greedy, too much in a hurry, and their problems always eventually come home to roost. That analytical model is itself a nickel and paradigm. Our analysis of the problem of expedience is itself too expedient. It's not just that some people are expedient; it's at least in part that thoroughness and productivity sometimes work at common purpose and sometimes at cross-purposes. For all of us--not just the greedy few--sometimes an emphasis on immediate productivity trumps thoroughness. And sometimes the lack of thoroughness 00:05:41 http://www.mindreadersdictionary.com/what-should-i-do/good-chemistry-valentines-reflections-on-a-bad-but-convenient-metaphor/ http://www.mindreadersdictionary.com/what-should-i-do/good-chemistry-valentines-reflections-on-a-bad-but-convenient-metaphor/?file=464 It started out well. You and a friend were talking about a topic of interest to you both, sharing your opinions, listening and collaborating on thinking things through. But something went wrong; you don't know exactly what. Now you're arguing, the tension is thick and the stakes are high. He thin... Podcasts Sat, 10 Jul 2010 22:21:06 EST mindreadersdictionary@gmail.com No It started out well. You and a friend were talking about a topic of interest to you both, sharing your opinions, listening and collaborating on thinking things through. But something went wrong; you It started out well. You and a friend were talking about a topic of interest to you both, sharing your opinions, listening and collaborating on thinking things through. But something went wrong; you don't know exactly what. Now you're arguing, the tension is thick and the stakes are high. He thinks you turned it into a power struggle over who's right and--well, frankly you think he did. What exactly happened? Simplifying a lot, try picturing thinking as travel through a maze comprised of branching options. Throughout your life you’ve been walking down corridors coming to intersections and choosing consciously and unconsciously the paths you’ll take. At a fork in the maze a question presents itself. For a while you wonder what to choose, but then you decide, taking one branch or another and the question is behind you. Picture conversation as relating to someone else within the maze. Sometimes you’re conversing over the walls, talking to people who made different choices at the forks and ended up somewhere else: Dana: Hey over there. Ryan: Hi. Dana: I see you became Mormon. Ryan: Yes, I took the religious fork, tried a few options and ended up here. Dana: Cool. What’s it like? Ryan: Pretty satisfying so far. Nice people, great rituals, a sense of purpose. And you? You’re an atheist, right? Dana: Yep, I bypassed the whole religious branch. Ryan: What’s it like down that path? Dana: It’s good. You don’t get the purpose delivered, you have to roll your own, but that suits me fine. Ryan: Cool. Well happy trails. Dana: You too. I wish you the best. I’ll call this Shoptalk. It’s like a conversation between two car lovers comparing notes on their rides without feeling a need to agree that they should have the same cars or tastes. There’s a warmth and respect even at a distance within the maze. You could call it “agreeing to disagree,” but that emphasizes the disagreement. The warmth comes from appreciating that we each get a life and a quest through this maze. We start out in different places and see different parts of the maze. It’s fun to watch other lives and appreciate the varied paths we take. With Shoptalk it’s all good, like running into someone you met on the train to Rome now that you’re in Paris. Dana: Hey, there you are again! Ryan: Zo we meet again my leetle French friend! Dana: I got here Tuesday. You? Ryan: Just today. I stopped in Florence. Dana: There’s great pizza at that place over there on the square. And I loved the Musee D’Orsay. Ryan: I’m only here a day and I’m planning to relax and just hit the Louvre. Dana: Cool, well have a great trip. No pressure to agree on the D’Orsay. It’s sharing notes--not even comparing notes. There’s another kind of conversation I’ll call Affinity and Beyond. You meet someone in the maze, someone who, by whatever paths has ended up in the same corridor as you, facing the same forks and choices: Pat: Hi. Nice to find you here. Casey: You too. Are you doing well? Pat: Yeah, my path seems good so far. And you? Casey: Happy to be here too. So what are you thinking about these options we face? Pat: That is the question, isn’t it? Interested in exploring a little together? Casey: Sure. I’d love some company. I’m leaning toward Path A here. Pat: I’ve thought about that one. We could try it together. My intuitions lead me to think it’s Path B. Casey: Great. We’ll try one and then the other and see which we like best. Pat: I’m really glad we can do this together. Nice to get a second pair of eyes on it and nice also to have your company. Casey: I agree. This will be fun. In this kind of conversation you meet on common ground with common goals and a common quest. The affinities are strong 00:11:10 http://www.mindreadersdictionary.com/what-should-i-do/good-chemistry-valentines-reflections-on-a-bad-but-convenient-metaphor/ http://www.mindreadersdictionary.com/what-should-i-do/good-chemistry-valentines-reflections-on-a-bad-but-convenient-metaphor/?file=462 Last week I wrote critiquing a vaguely-held but nonetheless influential counter-culture faith in win-win solutions solving everything. Today I want to talk about its equivalent in economics and hint at a parallel between new-age niceness and Tea Party libertarianism that will be the subject of a lat... Podcasts Wed, 07 Jul 2010 17:51:23 EST mindreadersdictionary@gmail.com No Last week I wrote critiquing a vaguely-held but nonetheless influential counter-culture faith in win-win solutions solving everything. Today I want to talk about its equivalent in economics and hint a Last week I wrote critiquing a vaguely-held but nonetheless influential counter-culture faith in win-win solutions solving everything. Today I want to talk about its equivalent in economics and hint at a parallel between new-age niceness and Tea Party libertarianism that will be the subject of a later article. Free-market capitalism is a system that generates win-wins until there are no more win-wins to be had, until a market reaches what's called Pareto-optimality, a state in which there is "no more room for a deal," no more transactions that would be seen by both parties as to their advantage. Beyond Pareto-optimality any transaction that would be to one party's advantage would be to another party's disadvantage-in other words, a win-lose. A market is deemed "efficient" when there are no constraints that would hinder reaching this state of maximum win-win fulfillment. A regulated market that restricts the sale of certain unsafe products is called "inefficient." From this free-market perspective, if there's one party that wants to sell heroin, and there's another party that wants to party and is willing to part with money for that heroin, there's room for a win-win deal and it's inefficient to constrain the parties by preventing the transaction. Except for libertarians (free-market extremists), economists are quick to point out that efficiency isn't everything. Society has goals that can't be met by exclusive reliance on win-wins. Though there's a win-win deal in that heroin sale, it's a loss to society overall. Likewise, though the destitute can't pay for food and therefore can't engage in a win-win with the food vendor, society prefers not to have the destitute die of starvation. The incompatibilities between market efficiency and society's goals are called "market imperfections." Governments step in discouraging some activities (heroin sales between consenting adults) and encouraging others (food sales to the destitute) to actually create market inefficiencies that compensate for market imperfections. Governments, in effect, put their thumbs on the scales, discouraging some win-wins and encouraging some win-loses. They have a number of tools at their disposal for doing so. Laws banning the sale of heroin, taxes discouraging the sale of tobacco, laws forcing the sale of medical services to the poor, subsidies like food stamps that give the destitute the wherewithal to purchase food when otherwise they couldn't. One way to think about this is that there aren't really any two party deals. There are always three parties: the two who do the business deal and society. What we really want is win-win-wins, where everyone is happy. There are lots of those. We buy products from folks who want to sell them and society benefits overall. But since not all deals are win-win-win someone has to make sacrifices. I pay taxes--a loss to me--but a win to society. Companies selling dangerous products lose sales because of taxes on their products (sin taxes they're called), a loss to them but again a win to society. I dream of solving everything with win-win-win solutions but in practice there have to be some losses. Another way to think about it is that society is, in part, you and me, representing our better judgment. I want to do deals that benefit me today, but my better judgment doesn't want me to do deals today that hurt me tomorrow even if they'd be wins for me today. So I win when society wins, or rather my better judgment wins even though my immediate preferences lose. In passing I'll note that this is a compromise to the Golden Rule. What I'd have done unto me is that I could win always and following the Golden Rule I wish the same for you. But sometimes we lose anyway. To make the Golden Rule work we have to break the Golden rule sometimes. I call this the Golden Paradox. Government, at its best, can serve as th 00:09:05 http://www.mindreadersdictionary.com/what-should-i-do/good-chemistry-valentines-reflections-on-a-bad-but-convenient-metaphor/ http://www.mindreadersdictionary.com/what-should-i-do/good-chemistry-valentines-reflections-on-a-bad-but-convenient-metaphor/?file=460 What changed my mind was the gun under my 15-year-old son's bed. Loaded. Our son--who we raised on a commune where we believed that love was the way and that everyone could and would realize it if they were only educated in the dharma (spiritual teachings). He traded a prized possession of mine f... Podcasts Sun, 27 Jun 2010 22:52:41 EST mindreadersdictionary@gmail.com No What changed my mind was the gun under my 15-year-old son's bed. Loaded. Our son--who we raised on a commune where we believed that love was the way and that everyone could and would realize it if the What changed my mind was the gun under my 15-year-old son's bed. Loaded. Our son--who we raised on a commune where we believed that love was the way and that everyone could and would realize it if they were only educated in the dharma (spiritual teachings). He traded a prized possession of mine for that gun. When I confiscated it, he got right up in my face and yelled, "Give it back. I paid good money for that!" That's when we decided to hire the private police escorts to climb through his bedroom window at six AM and take him to a treatment center in Idaho. I already had plans to fly a few days later to a spiritual workshop led by Ram Dass, whom I had studied with for years. He began the workshop with a story I had heard many times before, Aikido master Terry Dobson's account of a time he nearly took down a thug on a subway. Just as Dobson was about to subdue the thug by force an old Japanese man in a kimono interrupted, distracting the thug with a cheerful account of how he and his old wife enjoyed tea in their garden together observing their persimmon tree. I reprint the story below. If you haven't read it, I recommend it. Dobson's Aikido teacher had taught that Aikido was the art of reconciliation. "Whoever has the mind to fight has broken his connection with the universe. If you try to dominate people, you are already defeated. " Dobson had always tried to follow that guidance, but only when he saw the little old Japanese man melt the thug's heart did he recognize that "the essence of Aikido is love." This time, having just packed my gun-toting 15-year old off to Idaho by police escort, I found the story hard to swallow. During a break I asked Ram Dass how it applied to my situation. Ram Dass said that the story doesn't mean that you should give everyone everything always. It meant that you should never put anyone out of your heart even though you may have to put him out of your living room. To my mind, that was a fine distinction, probably too fine to make with reliable clarity. Was my son in my heart when I put him out of my living room? My son certainly didn't think so, but then what did he know? But then if I discount his perspective, where's the love in that? But then, he was profoundly unreliable, so maybe the only question was whether I felt that I was banishing him with love in my heart. But then what about people who believe in their hearts that they're banishing you in a loving way when they aren't? What about when a sadist says "it hurts me more than it hurts you"? I mean, lots of questions. The story that had always warmed my heart now seemed slippery. The way I had always heard it, it implied that there was always a win-win option and so you never had to put anyone out of your living room. Statements like "Whoever has the mind to fight has broken his connection with the universe. If you try to dominate people, you are already defeated" seem to condemn me for forcibly evicting my son. Now I was scrutinizing these words more closely than before. What does "having a mind to fight," even mean? And just what are the consequences of breaking one's connection the universe? Does the universe have no fight in it? Had the soldiers who defeated Hitler's armies broken their connection with the universe? If not, did they somehow not have a mind to fight even as they shot and bombed their way through Europe? The story started to sound like gibberish, like nonsense on stilts. The thug's fists unclench as he listens to the old Japanese man's cheerful account about his persimmon tree back home. The thug says, "Yeah, I love persimmons too." Attending that same Ram Dass workshop was a high-ranking DC political insider. I overheard him whisper to his friend an alternative thug-response to the old man's story: "Yeah, well I hate persimmons. Pow!" He had to whisper because in the cozy, warm, smarmy context of 00:12:02 http://www.mindreadersdictionary.com/what-should-i-do/good-chemistry-valentines-reflections-on-a-bad-but-convenient-metaphor/ http://www.mindreadersdictionary.com/what-should-i-do/good-chemistry-valentines-reflections-on-a-bad-but-convenient-metaphor/?file=458 He just insulted you and you feel your blood pressure rise. For a minute, as your body floods with resentment, your chance of staying calm is slim. You take a deep breath. Turning away expressionless, you muster all the spiritual benevolence you can, and for once you don't counter-attack. You say so... Podcasts Tue, 15 Jun 2010 19:26:56 EST mindreadersdictionary@gmail.com No He just insulted you and you feel your blood pressure rise. For a minute, as your body floods with resentment, your chance of staying calm is slim. You take a deep breath. Turning away expressionless, He just insulted you and you feel your blood pressure rise. For a minute, as your body floods with resentment, your chance of staying calm is slim. You take a deep breath. Turning away expressionless, you muster all the spiritual benevolence you can, and for once you don't counter-attack. You say something impressively forgiving and dignified. Do you mean it? Maybe not, but it works. He, braced for a fight, is thrown off balance, and suddenly you feel less threatened, safer in who you are and where you stand. Now, staying calm and forgiving in the encounter gets easier. Resisting that initial pull toward retaliation was hard. At first you were wobbly, but then it becomes effortless. From wobbly to stable--it's the ten-minute equivalent of learning to ride a bicycle. Scenarios like these are important to Cognitive Therapy. They demonstrate that your emotions aren't fixed facts; they're flexible. It's all in how you interpret your situation. Tell a different story and you'll automatically generate a different emotional response. Positive Psychology likewise advocates ways to limber up emotional response. It agrees with Cognitive Therapy; you can change your story to change your emotions. But you can also change your behavior to change your emotions. You can jump start emotions, fake it ‘til you make it, behave differently, and people will respond differently. If you play the calm one in a conflict, an opponent's response often makes it increasingly easy to continue to play the calm one. About this fluidity of interpretation and emotion, there has accumulated a bit of oversimplifying conventional wisdom: In any situation you have complete control and flexibility in how you respond. No matter what's going on, you can choose whether to be angry or calm, resentful or forgiving-it's all up to you. I'll call this the Total Control Theory of emotions. This theory usually comes bundled with an incriminating assumption that there's an obvious right way to be. If you have complete control over whether you're resentful or forgiving, and if forgiveness is the obvious right thing to feel, then, if you're resentful instead of forgiving, you've failed. I don't believe there is an obvious right way to feel. Sure, by word choice, one can give the false impression that there is, but there isn't. Should you be resentful (a negative sounding thing) or forgiving (a positive sounding thing) makes it sound obvious how you should feel. But if you reframe the same situation as a choice between upholding high standards (a positive sounding thing) and failing to respond to substandard behavior (a negative sounding thing) suddenly, it's not so obvious what is the right way to feel. Unlike the Positive Psychologists, I don't believe positivity is always the answer. If you want a thorough exploration of positivity's downside, try Brightsided: How the Relentless Promotion of Positive Thinking Has Undermined America, by Barbara Ehrenreich. Still, we most often hear the "total control" theory of emotions accompanied by advocacy of a particular position: "Stop feeling X, and you can. It is within your power to do so." The Secret is another example. It argues for a supposedly appropriate positive attitude but it also assumes that you have a lot of choice about what you feel. Total Control Theory could also be called the jukebox theory of emotion. You get to pick the tune. And clearly, to some extent you do, or else in the scenario above you couldn't turn a low probability of calm into a high probability of calm. Competing with the Total Control Theory there is another bit of conventional wisdom about emotional control that is also quite prevalent. We could call this the No Control Theory: You feel what you feel and there's nothing you or anyone can do about it. No Control Theory doesn't seem to have proponents who advocate it explicitly. R 00:06:43 http://www.mindreadersdictionary.com/what-should-i-do/good-chemistry-valentines-reflections-on-a-bad-but-convenient-metaphor/ http://www.mindreadersdictionary.com/what-should-i-do/good-chemistry-valentines-reflections-on-a-bad-but-convenient-metaphor/?file=456 Conflict is like a high-strung game of hot potato in which what you're shoving back and forth at each other is self-doubt. In conflict, we don't agree about something and, whether by necessity or sheer doggedness, we can't simply agree to disagree. Something has got to give, preferably our oppone... Podcasts Mon, 07 Jun 2010 22:32:32 EST mindreadersdictionary@gmail.com No Conflict is like a high-strung game of hot potato in which what you're shoving back and forth at each other is self-doubt. In conflict, we don't agree about something and, whether by necessity or s Conflict is like a high-strung game of hot potato in which what you're shoving back and forth at each other is self-doubt. In conflict, we don't agree about something and, whether by necessity or sheer doggedness, we can't simply agree to disagree. Something has got to give, preferably our opponent's insistence, and so we go at each other trying to erode each other's confidence, questioning each other's plans, interpretations, motives, character, and intelligence-anything to get that stinging doubt out of our hands and into our opponent's. It's a vicious cycle, a doubting-match, as we and our opponents pass the doubt potato ever more aggressively. Naturally there are some standard doubt-deflecting rhetorical moves we can make. I've started to catalog them and list eighteen of them below. By rhetorical I mean they're generic, or content-independent. One can apply them to deflect self-doubt no matter what topic is on the table or what position you take on that topic. Many are meta-moves, ways to act as though you're above the fight, even while continuing to fight. They're the equivalent of saying "I'm done playing," just as you shove the potato into your opponent's hand. They tend have a moral tone, like saying "One shouldn't try to win at hot potato," just as you pass the self-doubt to your opponent, the double-down, doubt-inflicting equivalent of "only losers like you care about winning and losing and, oh, by the way, haha, you lose." Though you might think I don't have a lot of respect for these techniques, in two ways I actually do. First, they are quite formidable. I respect them in that if I were to name the one aspect of human nature most likely to cause our failure as a species (taking down a great many other species with us) it would be our alacrity and fluency at employing these and other techniques for deflecting self-doubt, setting off self-certainty wars. And the second way I respect them I'll save for after the list. Here it is with links to related articles: "But My Intentions Are Good. Don't They Count For Everything?" When criticized for our actions we can change the subject to our intentions, which are un-measurable, and unassailable, and, if not connected to our actions, irrelevant. Nicessism: Imply a moral imperative that one should never say anything disappointing and thereby treat all criticism, constructive or otherwise as a moral violation. "Your Challenge Hurt, Therefore You Must Have Delivered It Wrong." Claim receptivity, but only to those challenges well delivered by one's unattainably high standards. Smugging: Calmly refuse to budge and then when one's challenger gets frustrated change the subject to his hotheaded reaction. This will make him more hotheaded making it easy to call even more attention to his reaction. Youjustifications and Onetruesations: Deny all but one ignominious motive behind a challenger's criticism. For example "You're just trying to put me down." Reciprocally, explain your own behavior as being singly and virtuously motivated. For example, "Look, I was only trying to help." Exempt By Contempt: Claim that since you find a trait disgusting, you must not have that trait. For example: "Me selfish?! Impossible! I hate selfish people!" "How Dare You Compare Me To..." If challenged for behaving as badly as some known manipulators, rather than considering the comparison on its merits, act as though there could be no parallel because there's some assumed world of difference between the behaviors of good people like you, and bad people like them. Litmus Paper Tiger: Profess loudly and actively to holding an absolute moral standard, then ignore it and do anything you like. Selective Literalism: Attack others for their tone, but when you talk, deny tone has anything to do with it. For example, saying, "Look, I merely said..." Freedom of Speech As Subte 00:08:15 http://www.mindreadersdictionary.com/what-should-i-do/good-chemistry-valentines-reflections-on-a-bad-but-convenient-metaphor/ http://www.mindreadersdictionary.com/what-should-i-do/good-chemistry-valentines-reflections-on-a-bad-but-convenient-metaphor/?file=454 About a year ago I wrote an article seeking a non-subjective definition for butthead, an alternative to the subjective definition as anyone with whom I butt heads. This is a central research question for me, which translates to lofty yet practical conundrums about the alternative to buttheadedne... Podcasts Mon, 24 May 2010 22:09:24 EST mindreadersdictionary@gmail.com No About a year ago I wrote an article seeking a non-subjective definition for butthead, an alternative to the subjective definition as anyone with whom I butt heads. This is a central research questio About a year ago I wrote an article seeking a non-subjective definition for butthead, an alternative to the subjective definition as anyone with whom I butt heads. This is a central research question for me, which translates to lofty yet practical conundrums about the alternative to buttheadedness: What is wisdom? What is rationality? And the great existential question: Now that we are forced to admit that there are inescapable differences of opinion about what God or the universe expect of us, how do we figure out who's right in any argument? If you've followed my articles, you'll know that I have particular people with whom I butt heads--Sarah Palin or the latest reincarnation of the right wing (I've called them the "Always Right" wing) for example. Readers who don't have my reaction to these targets challenge me to be more specific about what makes them buttheads. It's a great question, consistent with my quest for an objective definition of butthead, and I'll attempt to answer their question here broadly and in my next article to give some examples. I have a new definition of wisdom and rationality I'm trying out: The ability to actively embody alternative perspectives on a controversial or ambiguous situation, to conscientiously select the perspective to operate from, and to maintain the capacity to actively embody the alternative perspectives even after having selected. Let me unpack this: Actively embody: In practice this translates as the capacity to mirror alternative perspectives. Mirroring is the act of giving full, convincing voice to a perspective independent of whether you subscribe to it. It's like the lawyer's skill for making a case for any argument. A skillful lawyer could, on a dime switch to her opponent's argument, making a strong and compelling case against herself. Mirroring is the best test of empathy I know, the capacity to put yourself in another person's shoes, or to take on another person's perspective, not just giving it lip service, but actively embodying it. Perspective: A "take" on a situation. It could be some particular person's take (for example your opponent's in an argument) but it could also just be any alternative interpretation, story, explanation, or description of what's going on, and as a consequence, what to do about it. Select the perspective to operate from: This is the focus of most definitions of rationality and wisdom: The ability to choose the best alternative perspective. It's skillful "shopping" among perspectives, skillful "bet placing" on how to read a situation. My new definition of wisdom and rationality includes this central issue but shifts to include a focus on how to keep the alternatives in mind, as implied in the oft-quoted (at least by me) from F. Scott Fitzgerald: "The test of a first-rate intelligence is the ability to hold two opposed ideas in the mind at the same time, and still retain the ability to function." Still retaining the ability to function means that you chose a perspective from which to operate even as you keep alternatives in mind. Alternative perspectives on a controversial or ambiguous situation: One can't see all possible alternative perspectives, and one can't always tell what's a controversial or ambiguous situation. Therefore, there will always be errors about which perspectives to keep in mind and which situations call for wise attention. Still, research into groupthink shows that decisions improve when even just one alternative perspective is given voice. Alternative perspectives generate doubt, so what I'm suggesting here all boils down to a question about doubt-management. To act with focus and productivity, we need to get doubt out of the way, but to act appropriately, producing what will prove to have been the right thing to produce and not the wrong thing 00:05:15 http://www.mindreadersdictionary.com/what-should-i-do/good-chemistry-valentines-reflections-on-a-bad-but-convenient-metaphor/ http://www.mindreadersdictionary.com/what-should-i-do/good-chemistry-valentines-reflections-on-a-bad-but-convenient-metaphor/?file=452 Many subscribers didn't get the animation I created as last week's article: Here it is. I'm a practicing jazz musician--practicing because I'm nowhere near as good as I want to be. I didn't start out interested in jazz and getting good, I was interested in rock and getting girls. Rock didn't nece... Podcasts Mon, 10 May 2010 00:10:45 EST mindreadersdictionary@gmail.com No Many subscribers didn't get the animation I created as last week's article: Here it is. I'm a practicing jazz musician--practicing because I'm nowhere near as good as I want to be. I didn't start o Many subscribers didn't get the animation I created as last week's article: Here it is. I'm a practicing jazz musician--practicing because I'm nowhere near as good as I want to be. I didn't start out interested in jazz and getting good, I was interested in rock and getting girls. Rock didn't necessarily take a lot of practice. During my teens I was satisfied playing the same simple riffs over and over through my flatteringly loud bass equipment. My father, a classical oboist and pianist called my electric bass a toy. Earlier he had me play bassoon which had eight keys for the right thumb alone and required making your own reeds with a micrometer-very fussy. He was right. Comparatively speaking, the bass was a toy. Musical equipment just gets easier and easier. Now you don't even have to know any simple riffs to sound like a virtuoso. With electronic keyboards you can rest a finger on any key and a whole band pumps out a steady glorious sound. DJ's claim to be musicians. In the old days people who said, "Yeah, I play music; I play the record player," were kidding. Compared to an electric bass, these new instruments are toys.* Musicians debate what easy access to easier instruments will do to musicianship. We hope these easy instruments won't set a new low standard for musical achievement. We hope instead they'll be like gateway drugs. That's what the flatteringly loud bass equipment did for me. It affirmed me early on, whispering, "You're a pro, you're really doing this," in my ear while I closed my eyes, kicked back my head and wailed away for hours on those same simple riffs. But like a gateway drug it eventually lead me to the harder stuff like bebop and altered dominant scales. Of course for some, the flattering new equipment doesn't have the gateway effect. They're easily impressed by their prowess. They get complacent and don't bother to learn anything more sophisticated, not that there's any reason they should have to. After all, life is short. We should all be so lucky as to experience the pinnacles of human achievement, even if only by simulation. Fake musical instruments, virtual reality games, movies, fiction, even pornography--are we going to begrudge the talentless a chance to pretend to have talent, the timid a vicarious experience of fictional heroism, the homely a chance to experience sex with attractive people? Mahayana Buddhism emerged in India around four hundred years after Buddha lived. The word Mahayana means "great vehicle" in several senses, but the key sense comes from the allegory that justified the pivotal Mahayana update on Buddhas' teachings: A father's house is burning down and his two children are in it. He wants them to run out of the house but they don't see why they should. He entices them out with the promise of little toy wagons, a different one for each child. Excited, the children rush out to their father and the presents but when they arrive their father admits that he didn't have the two little wagons really. He has something better instead, one large wagon, a great vehicle that would carry them both. The traditional interpretation is that the little wagons the father promised were the earlier schools of Buddhist thought to be replaced by Mahayana Buddhism, the great vehicle that would carry all people. Though these earlier schools couldn't take you to nirvana they are to be appreciated for motivating people to take the first step toward Buddhism. They did not deliver as promised but they demonstrated the earlier teacher's "skillful means," which from what I've read sounds like a euphemism for the seductive skill of leading people toward virtue, in effect, selling good gateway drugs, drugs that will eventually lead people into addictions to truly worthy commitments. As with the easier musical instruments that led me eventually to dig deeper into music, the fabled 00:09:07 http://www.mindreadersdictionary.com/what-should-i-do/good-chemistry-valentines-reflections-on-a-bad-but-convenient-metaphor/ http://www.mindreadersdictionary.com/what-should-i-do/good-chemistry-valentines-reflections-on-a-bad-but-convenient-metaphor/?file=449 I'm a sucker for short aphorisms that capture not one, but two opposing design parameters. I love the Serenity Prayer for doing that. Elsewhere, I have applied its basic structure to all sorts of other issues beyond what we can and can't change. I also love Einstein's, "A theory should be as simp... Podcasts Sat, 17 Apr 2010 18:35:53 EST mindreadersdictionary@gmail.com No I'm a sucker for short aphorisms that capture not one, but two opposing design parameters. I love the Serenity Prayer for doing that. Elsewhere, I have applied its basic structure to all sorts of othe I'm a sucker for short aphorisms that capture not one, but two opposing design parameters. I love the Serenity Prayer for doing that. Elsewhere, I have applied its basic structure to all sorts of other issues beyond what we can and can't change. I also love Einstein's, "A theory should be as simple as possible but no simpler" and notice that it could be applied beyond theory, to morality as well. A moral should be as light as possible but no lighter. Or to put it another way, A moral should be as strict as necessary but no stricter. We tend to overlook the no-stricter side of the equation, or else we recognize it, but assume that rules should be no stricter simply because people want to be free. In the abortion debate for example, those of us who oppose strict bans on abortion argue for choice. A woman should be free from un-necessary constraint. This give-me-liberty argument is vulnerable to easy dismissal. Abortion opponents can counter in a parental tone: “Sure you want to be free. Who doesn’t? But grown-ups know you can’t always be free. So grow up, act responsibly and make some sacrifices.” There’s a stronger argument for moral minimalism than that liberty is fun and fun is good. The bigger problem with moral excess is that we can’t afford the luxury of restricting just anything. Un-necessary morals crowd out necessary ones. This I’ll call the pragmatic argument for moral minimalism. You and a friend are building a house. Your boards must be cut to specific lengths if they are going to fit together well, but your friend has another idea. Since it is good and necessary to cut your wood shorter, it should be better still to cut the boards even shorter. An extra inch off of every cut--that would be an earnest gesture toward greater virtue. You go along with your friend and the house is a disaster. I am astonished by how fast our world is changing and how fast our current moral system is steering us toward disaster. I’m not arguing that our moral system is stupid, just outmoded. Our morality was no doubt well suited to another era. Nor am I arguing here for a particular moral revision. I’m just saying that what I do every day in order to meet the approval of my local fellow man--what I do as a citizen of the US in 2010 is looking increasingly out of whack. It causes too much damage at a distance in time and space. Too many people elsewhere are dying as a result of my moral standards—both what my morals include and exclude. In a few decades we will look back ashamed at some of our what morals have wrought. That has me thinking about the design of morals. I imagine a conference--the Universal Moral Constitutional Convention—a design meeting to amend and edit the world’s moral law. Maybe listening in on this imagined conference is the best way to illustrate some moral design issues and conflicts. So here goes. Three wise people (or Gods if you believe they create our morals and we just discover them). Let’s listen in: Minnie: I called this conference because I know we all care about the future. I, for one think that we need to restructure the moral code to make for greater sustainability. The code in its current form is generating problems that are rapidly getting out of hand. I think we’re going to have to add some new moral constraints and remove some old ones. Max: Why remove? Minnie: Well, I mean replace, because some of the rules in there now are in conflict with other rules we need, and some are just excessive. You know people. There’s a limit to how many morals they can follow anyway. So we have to prioritize. Also, it’s really important that we not constrain behavior arbitrarily. People have to keep innovating. Obviously not in all arenas—we probably don’t need more innovation in making weapons of mass destruction. But we don’t k 00:12:48 http://www.mindreadersdictionary.com/what-should-i-do/good-chemistry-valentines-reflections-on-a-bad-but-convenient-metaphor/ http://www.mindreadersdictionary.com/what-should-i-do/good-chemistry-valentines-reflections-on-a-bad-but-convenient-metaphor/?file=450 I'm a sucker for short aphorisms that capture not one, but two opposing design parameters. I love the Serenity Prayer for doing that. Elsewhere, I have applied its basic structure to all sorts of other issues beyond what we can and can't change. I also love Einstein's, "A theory should be as simp... Podcasts Sat, 17 Apr 2010 18:35:53 EST mindreadersdictionary@gmail.com No I'm a sucker for short aphorisms that capture not one, but two opposing design parameters. I love the Serenity Prayer for doing that. Elsewhere, I have applied its basic structure to all sorts of othe I'm a sucker for short aphorisms that capture not one, but two opposing design parameters. I love the Serenity Prayer for doing that. Elsewhere, I have applied its basic structure to all sorts of other issues beyond what we can and can't change. I also love Einstein's, "A theory should be as simple as possible but no simpler" and notice that it could be applied beyond theory, to morality as well. A moral should be as light as possible but no lighter. Or to put it another way, A moral should be as strict as necessary but no stricter. We tend to overlook the no-stricter side of the equation, or else we recognize it, but assume that rules should be no stricter simply because people want to be free. In the abortion debate for example, those of us who oppose strict bans on abortion argue for choice. A woman should be free from un-necessary constraint. This give-me-liberty argument is vulnerable to easy dismissal. Abortion opponents can counter in a parental tone: “Sure you want to be free. Who doesn’t? But grown-ups know you can’t always be free. So grow up, act responsibly and make some sacrifices.” There’s a stronger argument for moral minimalism than that liberty is fun and fun is good. The bigger problem with moral excess is that we can’t afford the luxury of restricting just anything. Un-necessary morals crowd out necessary ones. This I’ll call the pragmatic argument for moral minimalism. You and a friend are building a house. Your boards must be cut to specific lengths if they are going to fit together well, but your friend has another idea. Since it is good and necessary to cut your wood shorter, it should be better still to cut the boards even shorter. An extra inch off of every cut--that would be an earnest gesture toward greater virtue. You go along with your friend and the house is a disaster. I am astonished by how fast our world is changing and how fast our current moral system is steering us toward disaster. I’m not arguing that our moral system is stupid, just outmoded. Our morality was no doubt well suited to another era. Nor am I arguing here for a particular moral revision. I’m just saying that what I do every day in order to meet the approval of my local fellow man--what I do as a citizen of the US in 2010 is looking increasingly out of whack. It causes too much damage at a distance in time and space. Too many people elsewhere are dying as a result of my moral standards—both what my morals include and exclude. In a few decades we will look back ashamed at some of our what morals have wrought. That has me thinking about the design of morals. I imagine a conference--the Universal Moral Constitutional Convention—a design meeting to amend and edit the world’s moral law. Maybe listening in on this imagined conference is the best way to illustrate some moral design issues and conflicts. So here goes. Three wise people (or Gods if you believe they create our morals and we just discover them). Let’s listen in: Minnie: I called this conference because I know we all care about the future. I, for one think that we need to restructure the moral code to make for greater sustainability. The code in its current form is generating problems that are rapidly getting out of hand. I think we’re going to have to add some new moral constraints and remove some old ones. Max: Why remove? Minnie: Well, I mean replace, because some of the rules in there now are in conflict with other rules we need, and some are just excessive. You know people. There’s a limit to how many morals they can follow anyway. So we have to prioritize. Also, it’s really important that we not constrain behavior arbitrarily. People have to keep innovating. Obviously not in all arenas—we probably don’t need more innovation in making weapons of mass destruction. But we don’t k 00:10:03 http://www.mindreadersdictionary.com/what-should-i-do/good-chemistry-valentines-reflections-on-a-bad-but-convenient-metaphor/ http://www.mindreadersdictionary.com/what-should-i-do/good-chemistry-valentines-reflections-on-a-bad-but-convenient-metaphor/?file=448 Reading eclectically is like reading tealeaves. With both you learn something from the randomly juxtaposed constellation of leaves you throw down. These days I seem to be leafing through books on change what works and what doesn't work to motivate it. There was Barbara Ehrenreich's Brightside... Podcasts Mon, 12 Apr 2010 22:51:06 EST mindreadersdictionary@gmail.com No Reading eclectically is like reading tealeaves. With both you learn something from the randomly juxtaposed constellation of leaves you throw down. These days I seem to be leafing through books on Reading eclectically is like reading tealeaves. With both you learn something from the randomly juxtaposed constellation of leaves you throw down. These days I seem to be leafing through books on change what works and what doesn't work to motivate it. There was Barbara Ehrenreich's Brightsided: How the Relentless Promotion of Positive Thinking Has Undermined America, a book after my own naturally curmudgeonly heart. It is a glorious expose' of ways in which the power of positive thinking can make us passive, oblivious, docile and dangerously myopic. Read it for a fascinating history of how the U.S., which started so dour and puritanical, became the positive thinking capital of the world. The pivot point was Mary Baker Eddy, founder of Christian Science. From Christian Science to The Secret, both with their preposterous idea that you can change anything—cure cancer or make multi-millions--if you just put your positive mind to it. Ehrenreich counsels that to bring about real change we have to analyze and identify what’s really wrong. Then there was Switch: How to Change Things When Change Is Hard by Chip and Dan Heath, a book after my own progressivist heart. It argues in favor of positive thinking as a way to compensate for our naturally curmudgeonly hearts. Negativity hinders. You can’t bring about change by analyzing and identifying what’s wrong. Instead, you must identify and build on successes and set passion-fueled positive yet concrete goals. Both books are quite convincing. They tease out my ambivalence about positivity and negativity—carrots and sticks--in producing change, a dilemma after my own inconsistency-probing heart. In between, I’ve been reading a 34-year-old book called Double Bind: The Foundation of the communicational approach to the family. This book is a retrospective on 20 years of research into a 1956 concept developed by Gregory Bateson, one of my mentors. Bateson hypothesized that schizophrenia might develop in children who are repeatedly subjected to inconsistent parental messages of a particular kind he called the double bind. A double bind is a double message and a bind that keeps you from saying it is a double message. It’s a three-way, no-win situation that amounts to you’re damned if you do; you’re damned if you don’t, and you’re damned also if notice that you’re damned either way. In other words, “By jerking you around, I’ll make you feel powerless and if you try to escape my jerking, I’ll make you feel even more powerless.” Bateson came to his hypothesis through case-study evidence and through an abiding fascination with the logic of paradoxes (a fascination I share). The case studies included situations like this: A young man who had fairly well recovered from an acute schizophrenic episode was visited in the hospital by his mother. He was glad to see her and impulsively put his arm around her shoulders whereupon she stiffened. He withdrew his arm and she asked, “Don’t you love me any more? He then blushed, and she said, “Dear, you must not be so easily embarrassed and afraid of your feelings.” The patient was able to stay with her only a few minutes more and following her departure he assaulted an aide and was put in the tubs. Bateson identified the double bind’s three necessary and sufficient conditions: 1. The individual is involved in an intense relationship; that is, a relationship in which he feels it is vitally important that he discriminate accurately what sort of message is being communicated so that he may respond appropriately. 2. And, the individual is caught in a situation in which the other person in the relationship is expressing two orders of message and each of these denies the other. 3. And, the individual is unable to comment on the messages being expressed to correct his discrimination of what order 00:08:34 http://www.mindreadersdictionary.com/what-should-i-do/good-chemistry-valentines-reflections-on-a-bad-but-convenient-metaphor/ http://www.mindreadersdictionary.com/what-should-i-do/good-chemistry-valentines-reflections-on-a-bad-but-convenient-metaphor/?file=446 An enthusiastic reader wrote to ask me questions about what makes me tick, "Are you trying to make people think? To make them think a certain way? Do you just enjoy the writing?" All of the above, but on the second question, yes I am a man with a mission. I am a missionary. I'm trying to put a le... Podcasts Wed, 07 Apr 2010 02:56:08 EST mindreadersdictionary@gmail.com No An enthusiastic reader wrote to ask me questions about what makes me tick, "Are you trying to make people think? To make them think a certain way? Do you just enjoy the writing?" All of the above, An enthusiastic reader wrote to ask me questions about what makes me tick, "Are you trying to make people think? To make them think a certain way? Do you just enjoy the writing?" All of the above, but on the second question, yes I am a man with a mission. I am a missionary. I'm trying to put a leash on those Godawful narrow-minded right wing, Sarah Palin, Tea Partying, manipulative tricks we all use, me included. Before my current missionary work, I was your basic idealistic left wing activist moving from issue to issue looking for leverage. I lived for six years on The Farm, the world’s largest hippie commune whose mission statement was “We’re out to save the world.” I ran water development projects for villages in Guatemala. I researched and wrote for Food First and Ashoka Foundation, Fecundity Fund and GBS Foundation. I co-founded 20/20 Vision, a D.C. based peace/environmental organization that lasted for 28 years. I ran the public affairs department for The Body Shop International, invited by its legendary environmentalist founder, Anita Roddick to help “radicalize the company.” I designed political campaigns for Ben and Jerry’s. I was on a mission. Throughout my 20-year first career as an activist, I had a sense that progressivism would just keep on progressing. Sure there would be bumps in the road, but the overwhelming trend would be toward less dogma and more pragmatism, less fear-mongering and more freedom, less waste and more efficient resource management. In my naiveté, I thought the US was free and clear from the lure of fascism, and I didn’t foresee the Republican Party becoming the sneering, ranting know-it-all crazy uncle who won’t stop bullying folks into submission at the family dinner. I didn’t foresee that while he ranted, rallying the nation’s natural-born ranters to his side, the family’s goose would be cooked. In the 80’s there were a few big causes. Now there are so many it is hard to know where to the leverage is. But I know where. I’m a man with a mission at home and abroad, a mission that pertains as much to our daily personal interactions as our global negotiations, a mission to curb a tendency not just in Republicans, but in all of us. Of all the problems we face, here’s the biggest: We humans tend to translate "ouch" into "you're bad," "I want" into "you owe me," "I'm uncomfortable" into "It's all your fault,” “I’m disappointed” into “You’re evil.” In hundreds of ways, specific and vague, forceful and gentle we instantly, automatically, sanctimoniously, self-servingly, and selectively summon moral principles to support our personal preferences. There’s no reason to expect us to be any different. We’re all born as babies and babies have to whine to get attention. For newborns, crying is survival. And there’s no reason to assume that, just by growing up into our meager human power of reason, whining would disappear. We are what you’d get when you cross strong feelings with modest powers of abstract reasoning. You’d get abstract reasoning tripping all over itself in a desperate lurch to support our strong feelings. The Republican Party didn’t start out as the “Always Right” Wing. Buried in the party’s history are a few laudably well-reasoned and substantive principles. Chief among them was a strong commitment to the rational design of a well functioning Republic, a hierarchical hybrid form of government in which individuals, states and the country as a whole share power. Ironically, Edmund Burke, the father of conservativism was on a mission like mine. In reaction to the excesses of the French Revolution he argued that abstract ideas and political theories are dangerously likely to be ill-conceived and self-serving and therefore rarely better guides to the design of governments than the weather-tested syste 00:08:30 http://www.mindreadersdictionary.com/what-should-i-do/good-chemistry-valentines-reflections-on-a-bad-but-convenient-metaphor/ http://www.mindreadersdictionary.com/what-should-i-do/good-chemistry-valentines-reflections-on-a-bad-but-convenient-metaphor/?file=444 The older we get the harder it is to start new lasting romantic relationships. I can explain it by way of an old joke, a fundamental principle, and a new parable. An old joke: A little girl, sitting on her grandpa's lap asked "Did God make me?" "Yes," said her grandpa. "And did God make you ... Podcasts Fri, 19 Mar 2010 00:23:24 EST mindreadersdictionary@gmail.com No The older we get the harder it is to start new lasting romantic relationships. I can explain it by way of an old joke, a fundamental principle, and a new parable. An old joke: A little girl, sit The older we get the harder it is to start new lasting romantic relationships. I can explain it by way of an old joke, a fundamental principle, and a new parable. An old joke: A little girl, sitting on her grandpa's lap asked "Did God make me?" "Yes," said her grandpa. "And did God make you too?" she asked. "Yes," said her Grandpa. She reflected and said, "He's getting better isn't he?" A fundamental principle: In living systems, attachments and dependencies grow. The longer you’ve lived in your community the harder it is to leave.  The longer a creature has been domesticated the harder it is to be released into the wild, the longer you’ve had a cell phone, the harder it is to do without it, the longer you've had a habit, the harder it is to break, and the longer you have been married the more complex your divorce settlement is likely to be. The challenge to long term relationships is not finding the raison d’etre (the function, the reason to be or stay) but the raison d’entre (the reason to enter in the first place). A new parable: God was experimenting.  She had made many fine creatures. Her first were fully programmed at birth.  They were like robots.  She made large numbers of them because, being preprogrammed, they couldn’t adapt.  If they wandered into an environment where their programmed behavior didn’t work, they would die. As long as there were lots of them though, that wasn’t a problem. Her next creatures could learn by trial and error. If they had a close call with something deadly they could learn to avoid that danger in the future.  They could only learn from close calls--near death, not real death experiences--but that made them a lot more adaptable to changes in their environments.   These did well. God was getting better, and more daring too. God decided to see what would happen if he made one with hindsight, foresight and sidesight, the ability to imagine back into the past, forward into the future and really anything on any side, and from any side. It wasn’t just that they could imagine anything. They could sew all of their imaginings together into one big overview of God’s works, really a glimpse of what God herself saw.  This overview would make the creature highly adaptive, able to anticipate danger not just from near death experiences but from weaving all sorts of twos and twos together. For the second time ever--God being the first time--there was a creature that could ask and answer the question “what’s this all about?” The trouble was that there was plenty of danger, behind, in front and on all sides. Being able to see so much at once is not for the faint of heart. God could handle it but that’s because she was above it.  She was the one who set up the game of life this way originally, with things falling apart, and life resisting falling apart but only for a while, a competition in which each creature is both an individual trying to survive in a dangerous environment and the dangerous environment to other creatures. These new ones were creatures who could remember terrible things that had happened to them.  They could foresee their own deaths. They could see threats on every side of them.  It made them anxious, clingy, quirky and even a little more dangerous than the other creatures. It’s true, God’s new breed were better at adapting. They were good at figuring out what was dangerous and steering clear. Indeed, so clear, that they weren’t very good at mating. Their foresight enabled them to anticipate trouble with their fellow anxious quirky creatures. Their hindsight made them remember dating troubles past.  Instinctively they were drawn to each other, but then their imaginings made them shy away. So God started playing around with the variables.  She invented some painkilling, bliss-wakening drugs that would fi 00:06:18 http://www.mindreadersdictionary.com/what-should-i-do/good-chemistry-valentines-reflections-on-a-bad-but-convenient-metaphor/ http://www.mindreadersdictionary.com/what-should-i-do/good-chemistry-valentines-reflections-on-a-bad-but-convenient-metaphor/?file=441 "Every life could be said to be defined by two great love stories. The first -- the story of our quest for sexual love -- is well known and well charted. Its vagaries form the staple of music and literature; it is socially accepted and celebrated. The second -- the story of our quest for love from ... Podcasts Fri, 15 Jan 2010 00:16:51 EST mindreadersdictionary@gmail.com No "Every life could be said to be defined by two great love stories. The first -- the story of our quest for sexual love -- is well known and well charted. Its vagaries form the staple of music and lit "Every life could be said to be defined by two great love stories. The first -- the story of our quest for sexual love -- is well known and well charted. Its vagaries form the staple of music and literature; it is socially accepted and celebrated. The second -- the story of our quest for love from the world -- is a more secret and shameful tale. If mentioned, it tends to be in caustic, mocking terms, as something of interest chiefly to envious or deficient souls, or else the drive for status is interpreted in an economic sense alone. And yet this second love story is no less intense than the first, it is no less complicated, important, or universal, and its setbacks are no less painful. There is heartbreak here, too." Alain de Botton "Status Anxiety." To be loved by the world--what could that mean? I think it's a sense of inner and outer harmony, relief from dissonance within yourself and dissonance between yourself and the outside world. It's a sense that you can both be yourself and be successful by the world's standards. Being loved by the world doesn't have to mean being adored by the world, but still somehow affirmed, or as the biologist Stuart Kauffman put it, a feeling that you are "at home in the universe." This affirmation is not just the thought or realization, "Hey, I'm at home." It's a feeling. I'd go so far as to say it's the feeling of being well adapted--surmisal of the fittest--a sense, even a false one, that you fit your circumstances. In that respect it's a direct extension of what organisms have been evolving toward for over 3.5 billion years. Still, surmisal of the fittest is not just about biological fitness despite what evolutionary psychologists tend to imply. No, it's surmisal of the fittest by whatever standards of fitness have emotional resonance for us these days, not all of which are directly or indirectly in the service of biological reproductive success. Think of how much human behavior is driven by a desire to feel like you're a good person on the side of righteousness, a person with integrity fighting for greater integrity in the world around. That feeling may have nothing to do with having children who survive and reproduce. It can be uncorrelated to the biological urge and can even work at cross-purposes to it, for example in a suicide bomber who dies childless feeling that he has acted with supreme integrity in perfect service of what is truest in the universe. Feeling fitted has both the inner and outer quality--integrated within and integrated with your outside circumstances. The inner feeling is relief from dissonance or doubt, a sense that who you are--your preferences, intentions, and values hold together with simple clarity. This internal consistency is what in the world of the intellect is called coherence. But with feelings it's not necessarily a drive to have a coherent intellect. The coherence that makes us feel loved by the world is just the gut's satisfied feeling of relief when ambivalence, confusion and inner conflict has lifted. Indeed, emotional coherence might be achieved at the expense of intellectual coherence. For example George Bush who many of us found intellectually incoherent felt that he was a man of exceptional integrity. And indeed for most of us, most of the time the feeling of being right takes priority over actually being right. Emotional coherence often trumps intellectual coherence. The feeling of freedom from conflict with your outer circumstances is like what in the world of the intellect we call correspondence. Correspondence is having your theories match sense data and experiential evidence. If I said "eggs don't break when you drop them from second story windows," you would say that lacks correspondence to the audiovisual sense data that comes with the splatting crunching sight and sound of eggs dropped from windows. Again thoug 00:07:01 http://www.mindreadersdictionary.com/what-should-i-do/good-chemistry-valentines-reflections-on-a-bad-but-convenient-metaphor/ http://www.mindreadersdictionary.com/what-should-i-do/good-chemistry-valentines-reflections-on-a-bad-but-convenient-metaphor/?file=439 Life is sweet; life is dangerous. You have to be positive; you have to be careful. Love makes the world go round; people are scary. I'm an ambigamist not just about embracing a partner but every aspect of life. I watch myself and everyone I know wrestle with the tension between open and close... Podcasts Sun, 03 Jan 2010 21:50:14 EST mindreadersdictionary@gmail.com No Life is sweet; life is dangerous. You have to be positive; you have to be careful. Love makes the world go round; people are scary. I'm an ambigamist not just about embracing a partner but ever Life is sweet; life is dangerous. You have to be positive; you have to be careful. Love makes the world go round; people are scary. I'm an ambigamist not just about embracing a partner but every aspect of life. I watch myself and everyone I know wrestle with the tension between open and closed, romance and skepticism, faith and reason, confidence and doubt, tenderness and protectiveness, hope and fear, transcendence and realism, generosity and caution, friendship and business. I don't see any way out of it. I think this kind of tension is the truest fundamental, a fundamental that, alas, isn't a groove you can slide and cozy your way into, but a groove that's a rickety rope bridge we weave as we walk it. How can it not be? Ours is to enjoy life with death in full view. The tension plays out in every arena and at every scale or scope, from how we cope with keeping a spring in our step as we stumble over the day's little obstacles to how we enjoy the world we've created even as it becomes clear that it is creating terrifying climate change. How do you enjoy life when you know the risks? Through a mixture of liberating pleasure and compromising caution. So no, my column isn't just about romantic partnership. But still, that kind of love is a great and practical place to explore this tension. "To love that well, that thou must leave ere long" as Shakespeare put it. Courtship is a microcosm in which we experience a particularly vivid version of the open/closed question that all of life addresses. To survive, organisms' bodies have to answer correctly such questions as Should I join this? Should I stay with this? Should I be open to this? Can I trust this? Am I safe here? And these too, on a different scale are the questions we deal with in courtship. The paradox of life is that it consists of independent individuals that, to survive have to be open, sacrificing some of their individuality. From the simplest single cell organism to the most complex society, sustainability depends on having the right semi-permeable membrane, one that lets in what is good and keeps out what is bad, joins the right partnerships and not the wrong ones. That's what all of life seeks, through some combination of trial and error, biological mechanism, instinct, responsiveness, emotion and in us--the very rarest of cases--through conscious cognitive choice. Lately I've noticed that there are really two types of ambigamists and that I much prefer the company of one of them--the ironic ambigamist--so much so that I'll describe the other as bipolar. Both ironic and bipolar ambigamists oscillate between open and closed, romance and skepticism. But ironic ambigamists never forget that the tension between those two is the truest fundamental. No matter how open or closed they feel in any moment they know and embrace the opposite condition. They own both their openness and closed-ness, even while they're feeling more one way than the other. For ironic ambigamists, the dream partner is someone with whom they can merge their ambivalence. Their partnership is one in which each partner winkingly recognizes that the other is an appropriately skeptical individual, even while both parties do what they can to keep the romance, or at minimum the appearance of safe, certain, romance strong and alive. They joke about life on that edge between being one thing and two, a couple and individuals. They give each other room to breath and forgive each other the disconnects when one is closed and the other is open. In other words they respect the inescapable give and take of partnership. In contrast, bipolar ambigamists, when feeling open can't remember feeling closed, and when feeling closed, can't remember feeling open. So yes they oscillate like any ambigamist, but no, they don't take responsibility for it. If you're feeling romanti 00:06:14 http://www.mindreadersdictionary.com/what-should-i-do/good-chemistry-valentines-reflections-on-a-bad-but-convenient-metaphor/ http://www.mindreadersdictionary.com/what-should-i-do/good-chemistry-valentines-reflections-on-a-bad-but-convenient-metaphor/?file=437 The podcast is back. Click the buttons above to have this article read or sped-read to you. My writing drives some people crazy because I make big jumps from one topic to another. One minute I'm talking romance, the next I'm talking the origins of life. I aim to edit for smooth transitions but t... Podcasts Sat, 26 Dec 2009 23:54:39 EST mindreadersdictionary@gmail.com No The podcast is back. Click the buttons above to have this article read or sped-read to you. My writing drives some people crazy because I make big jumps from one topic to another. One minute I'm ta The podcast is back. Click the buttons above to have this article read or sped-read to you. My writing drives some people crazy because I make big jumps from one topic to another. One minute I'm talking romance, the next I'm talking the origins of life. I aim to edit for smooth transitions but there's a bigger problem than prose styling. I've invested decades in research that trains my mind to follow abstract patterns. I'm doing what the anthropologist Gregory Bateson described as solving for patterns. The details become background; the abstract patterns become foreground. In this article for example, I'll make a connection between love, unemployment, genetics and our changing attitudes about God. Some readers will think I'm comparing apples to oranges to shoelaces but there is method to my madness or at least my colleagues and I think so. You decide for yourself. Abstraction has a bad reputation. I remember once early in this work I described it to a real estate developer friend. He said "sounds very abstract" and I assumed he was being critical. He said no, he meant it positively because "there's nothing so practical as a good abstraction." Pursuit of practical abstractions has a long history. Take the 2,500 year old Tao Te Ching, which Alan Watts once described as an attempt "to know the patterns, structures, and trends of human and natural affairs so well that one uses the least amount of energy dealing with them." In other words, if you recognize patterns with greater accuracy, you make fewer mistakes, which frees you to enjoy life more. Solving for pattern is itself enjoyable. Familiarity with the abstract patterns can make your life more like art, a microcosm for the cosmic. Art exposes the abstract patterns that show up across arenas. Think of the way we savor the calligraphy of music or the metaphors in poetry and fiction. They satisfy a natural human desire for what I'll call pattern sensuality. As a pattern sensualist cultivating pattern fluency, I get to read my life like good fiction. No matter whether I'm winning or losing, hurting or happy, I'm always harvesting abstract insights into the patterns and structures of human and natural affairs. A friend claims I saved her career once by drawing cosmic parallels. She's an intellectual property lawyer and about ten years ago was thinking about quitting because the work was so dry and soulless. I laid out the ways her work addressed one of the meatiest toughest judgment calls in all of life, the question of when to be open. I drew parallels between her work and central themes in evolutionary biology, romance, politics, friendship and warfare. The conversation inspired her. She thanks me to this day. Indeed, here's a Christmas gift offer from me to you. If you find yourself feeling flat about your career, I'd do the same for you. Just respond here with a short description of your work and I'll write you back something about its relevance to profound abstract patterns. I've long wanted to write a series of books on the meaning of life as revealed through different career paths. Accounting as a source of general wisdom--that sort of thing. Still, I don't let my friend's gratitude go to my head. That's because of the pattern I want to talk about today. My cosmic re-description of her law work may have helped her stick with it for a few months at most, but I've watched her over the years and her commitment is less about the meaning of her work than the immediate incentive structure built into her daily interactions. People expect things of her that she succesfully delivers. She is like a reciprocating engine. She produces; clients demand more; she produces; clients demand more. She may occasionally wake up to doubts about her work, but by the time she gets to work, she's just in it. As with all of us her self-motivation is less a p 00:07:33 http://www.mindreadersdictionary.com/what-should-i-do/good-chemistry-valentines-reflections-on-a-bad-but-convenient-metaphor/ http://www.mindreadersdictionary.com/what-should-i-do/good-chemistry-valentines-reflections-on-a-bad-but-convenient-metaphor/?file=430 The podcast is back. Click the buttons above to have this article read or spedread to you. A Holiday gift for someone thoughtful in your life? Consider the New York Times Best-selling graphic novel Logicomix. It's a beautiful story about the death of the 2,400-year-old dream of creating a system... Podcasts Mon, 07 Dec 2009 17:49:08 EST mindreadersdictionary@gmail.com No The podcast is back. Click the buttons above to have this article read or spedread to you. A Holiday gift for someone thoughtful in your life? Consider the New York Times Best-selling graphic nove The podcast is back. Click the buttons above to have this article read or spedread to you. A Holiday gift for someone thoughtful in your life? Consider the New York Times Best-selling graphic novel Logicomix. It's a beautiful story about the death of the 2,400-year-old dream of creating a system of logic that wasn’t founded on the shaky ground of intuitive assumptions. The central character is Bertrand Russell. Though he failed, his Herculean effort did contribute to the invention of the computer. It also led to mathematician Kurt Godel’s major revelation: It wasn’t just Bertie’s logic system that failed. No matter how they’re built, any and all systems of logic will be built on shaky unprovable intuitions. In other words, it is possible to build great sturdy towers of thought, but they’ll all have loose foundations. The philosopher Richard Rorty applies this to everyday life. If some smart alec responded to every assertion you made by asking “yes, but why?”, within the limits of your patience you could reason your way to answers: Why do you work? Because that’s how I earn a living. Why do you earn a living? Because that’s how I pay for the things I need and want. And why do you pay for the things you need and want? Because it’s good to have them. And why is it good to have them? ... At some point you would be unable to explain. Your response would be tautological, in other words circular, where the answer is just a restatement of the question: “It’s good because it’s good!” Rorty calls this your “final vocabulary.” At the edge of your powers of explanation, you’ve got no logical traction. What you say is unfounded and yet final. All you can say is, “It just is.” With Godel’s discovery of logic’s limits, a final vocabulary isn’t optional. We all have one. Every great scientific theory has one. Our thoughts and conversations are thus like explorations around an expanse of blacktop surrounded on all sides by sand. We have traction up to the edge, but if we go over our wheels spin. In this context, a debate can become like a game of chicken, with two people trying to drive each other off the edge. The smart alec asks question after question until you fall onto your final vocabulary. She can then say, “Look at you. You’re a joke. You believe things without a strong foundation. You’re making assumptions!” Socrates is remembered as a humble, inquiring man but he famously confronted self-certain Athenians with their own final vocabularies. By question alone he drove his fellow citizens into the sand. A few of his students became infamous smart alecs. By imitating Socrates, they made others look dumber and themselves look smarter. Two ended up with so much confidence in their own assumptions they became tyrants. Socrates himself meant well. He believed that with more inquiry comes more careful thought. Inquiry is how you build out the blacktop to where you have traction everywhere in all directions. When I say that the dream of building a system of logic not founded on shaky ground is 2,400 year-old, I’m dating it to Socrates. And now that dream is dead. But the smart alec isn’t. Plenty of people still use what I’ll call the ad laxus (against the looseness) fallacy: It’s the smart alec’s fallacious assumption that because she can drive you into your own traction-less final vocabulary, her own reasoning must be solid. You’ve got to watch out for that. Don’t let anyone take you down saying, “You don’t know that for sure.” No one knows anything for sure. And as with all fallacies, this one has an opposite: Just because nothing can be known for sure, it doesn’t necessarily mean your assumptions are as good as hers. In my next article I’ll suggest a way of thinking about how to evaluate ideas 00:04:40 http://www.mindreadersdictionary.com/what-should-i-do/good-chemistry-valentines-reflections-on-a-bad-but-convenient-metaphor/ http://www.mindreadersdictionary.com/what-should-i-do/good-chemistry-valentines-reflections-on-a-bad-but-convenient-metaphor/?file=426 Giving advice is risky business. You lose friends. You get accused of being bossy, nosey, a know-it-all, controlling. It can invite reciprocation, and, if like many of us you are better at dishing out advice than taking it in, that's no fun. People in glass houses shouldn't throw stones. Fortunat... Podcasts Thu, 19 Feb 2009 10:37:20 EST mindreadersdictionary@gmail.com No Giving advice is risky business. You lose friends. You get accused of being bossy, nosey, a know-it-all, controlling. It can invite reciprocation, and, if like many of us you are better at dishing out Giving advice is risky business. You lose friends. You get accused of being bossy, nosey, a know-it-all, controlling. It can invite reciprocation, and, if like many of us you are better at dishing out advice than taking it in, that's no fun. People in glass houses shouldn't throw stones. Fortunately, some rhetorical tricks can make our glass houses shatterproof, at least when we want to give advice to the gullible: ways to prescribe from deep cover, ways of giving advice by stealth, undetectable, at least to the unsuspecting. Here are a few, inspired by that sweepingly crypto-prescriptive and sanctimonious pop-psych best seller "A New Earth" (by Eckhart Tolle) and my conversations about it with friends who argue its case, and then when challenged, deny that it is making one. I don't mean to tell you what you should do, but . . . I can just preface my advice with a claim that I'm not giving any. This technique shouldn't work. We all know that talk is cheap and that it's easy to claim a motive other than the one that drives us. I could say, "I don't mean to kick you," and then give you a hearty boot. What would stay with you is not my declared intent but the bruise. Still, as cheap as talk is, in a pinch I can deny any intent to advise, and some will take me at my word. That should shut them up. Look, I'm merely stating facts . . . We'd love a reliable recipe for right and wrong behavior. Failing that we cling to unreliable ones, including those for distinguishing between right and wrong interventions in other people's lives-between "telling people what to do" (which sounds bad) and "sharing" (which sounds nice and generous). A lot of these have to do with word choice and sentence structure. For example, one recipe would contend that sentences in command form ("stop smoking!") are clearly telling people what to do, whereas declarative statements ("I don't like smoke") or statements of fact ("Smoking one cigarette shortens average life expectancy by seven minutes") are supposedly just sharing. Of course that's not true. A lot of what we say isn't in the words but the context, the timing, the situation, the voice tone, the eyebrows. If, in the context of your smoking a cigarette, I come over, raise my eyebrows, and in a cautionary tone relay some fact about cigarettes and cancer, that's giving advice. With the gullible, I may get away with denying it by claiming that the sentence structure means it wasn't advice. That should shut them up. Look, I merely said . . . The first two ploys illustrate a feature common among crypto-prescripton ploys. Think of them as single-spaced strategies. Like single-spaced formatting, a single-spaced strategy denies any room to read and write between the lines. If challenged ("My, Jeremy, you're awfully bossy!") I can slide away by claiming that all the meaning was in the words themselves, as though my orchestrated tone and gesture are to be completely ignored. "Hey, don't try to read between the lines, I merely said smoking shortens life expectancy (or whatever)." That should shut them up. It's all good . . . Broadly speaking, life can be viewed from two perspectives. One is the personal and local where I want my life to work, or more generously where I want everyone's life to work and so seek out better strategies and actions. The other is more cosmic, the perspective of the great sweep of geological time from which our human thrivings and strivings are "all good"-the grand scheme in which they don't mean very much if anything at all. People who couch their advice in cosmic contexts (spiritual teachers, gurus, self-help authors like me) have an opening therefore to hide their local prescriptions for how to live within a cosmic "it's all good" cover. This is especially handy if you're preaching one of those "don't be judgmental" theories. It's awkwardly hypocritical advising people not 00:06:36 http://www.mindreadersdictionary.com/what-should-i-do/good-chemistry-valentines-reflections-on-a-bad-but-convenient-metaphor/ http://www.mindreadersdictionary.com/what-should-i-do/good-chemistry-valentines-reflections-on-a-bad-but-convenient-metaphor/?file=424 We declare beliefs as though they were things we possess, things that are with us constantly. "I have a belief" is commonly treated as equivalent to "I have a nose." Even sophisticated psychologists talk like this. When they summarize research with "74% of Americans believe that heaven is real," the... Podcasts Thu, 19 Feb 2009 10:35:54 EST mindreadersdictionary@gmail.com No We declare beliefs as though they were things we possess, things that are with us constantly. "I have a belief" is commonly treated as equivalent to "I have a nose." Even sophisticated psychologists t We declare beliefs as though they were things we possess, things that are with us constantly. "I have a belief" is commonly treated as equivalent to "I have a nose." Even sophisticated psychologists talk like this. When they summarize research with "74% of Americans believe that heaven is real," they don't get specific about what they mean, but the implication is much the same as that of "74% of Americans have brown eyes." For all the thought that has gone into epistemology (the philosophy of knowledge-what it means to know or believe something) it's amazing how little has gone into understanding what people are really doing when they know or believe. It can't be quite like having a nose. You have only one nose, and it's on you all the time. To believe something can't mean having only one idea that is on you all the time, even though attempts to think about only one thing 24/7 have been made. Mohammed taught that your to-do list should have only one item: you should think of Allah constantly. In practice, however, a Muslim is required to pray to Allah only five times a day. The problem with regarding beliefs as 24/7 possessions is that consciousness is quite small. If belief meant holding one thought always, no room would be left for thinking. Instead, we might try treating beliefs as similar to policies, so that when we say, "I believe that the government should bail out the banks," or "I believe in God," or even "I love you," in effect we're declaring that every time a topic comes up, we apply a certain policy to it. Policies are not fickle. If policy states that you pay a toll when you cross a certain bridge, then you always pay the toll when you cross that bridge. Believing in God would therefore mean that every time God comes up, you always assume that he's real. Believing that the government should bail out the banks would mean that every time bank bailouts come up, you're always in favor of them. Saying "I love you, John" would mean that every time John comes to mind you always want to support and protect and please him. Policies can be conditional. Pay the toll-but only during rush hour. You could love John-but only when he's not drinking. Still, given the conditions, they remain constant and not fickle. In fact, all policies are conditional. They take the form "If X then do Y," where X is the condition. Pay the toll, but only when going onto this particular bridge. Policies can be changed, and so can beliefs. That's what it means to "change your mind," though Plato (quoting Socrates) points out a problem with learning or changing one's mind. It's known as Meno's Paradox or the paradox of learning, and applied here it goes something like this: If beliefs are like 24/7 constant policies, how can they ever change? If every time bank bailouts come to mind you are completely in favor of them, or every time John comes to mind you are full of love for him, how can the alternative policies-that banks should not be bailed out, or that John is a bum-ever get a foothold? Plato's solution is to claim that all learning and change in belief must be simply recollecting things you already knew and believed. To him, learning what to believe is not a matter of exchanging one belief for another but of peeling back layers of confusion and getting down to what you always already believed. If this were true, rather than ever conceding in a debate you could just say a snide, "Yeah, I know that already." This solution to Meno's Paradox is precarious. It leads Plato into some confusing assertions, like that before we were born, we knew absolutely everything. We then made a mistake and forgot it all. How did we come to know everything in the first place? He vacillates here, sometimes claiming we learned it over many lifetimes, sometimes claiming we just were perfect. In other words, the old boy can't make up his min 00:06:47 http://www.mindreadersdictionary.com/what-should-i-do/good-chemistry-valentines-reflections-on-a-bad-but-convenient-metaphor/ http://www.mindreadersdictionary.com/what-should-i-do/good-chemistry-valentines-reflections-on-a-bad-but-convenient-metaphor/?file=422 When we find ourselves talking past each other, it's useful to keep in mind three different uses we make of conversation: The pursuit of the liked story: We seek the most immediately appealing account available. The pursuit of the likely story: We seek an accurate account of what's going on. ... Podcasts Thu, 19 Feb 2009 10:33:40 EST mindreadersdictionary@gmail.com No When we find ourselves talking past each other, it's useful to keep in mind three different uses we make of conversation: The pursuit of the liked story: We seek the most immediately appealing acco When we find ourselves talking past each other, it's useful to keep in mind three different uses we make of conversation: The pursuit of the liked story: We seek the most immediately appealing account available. The pursuit of the likely story: We seek an accurate account of what's going on. The pursuit of the lucrative story: We seek the account that will serve us best in the long run, productive not just in lucre (money) but in every respect-the story that in the long run will pay off best in happiness and welfare. I say the "pursuit of" because there is uncertainty with each. I might like a story for now but soon realize that things have changed and it's no longer the story I like best. I might think I'm telling the likely story and prove wrong. I might speculate that a story will yield me the best long-term results and end up disappointed with what it yields. These three kinds of stories have a lot of overlap, of course. Often, an immediately appealing account (liked) is also realistic (likely) and productive in the long run (lucrative). For instance, if I like to think I'm a hard-working law student who will be a great success, and that turns out to be an accurate description, and believing it also turns out to pay off in the long run, then I've got a liked, likely, and lucrative story all rolled into one. Sometimes, however, liked, likely, and lucrative stories diverge. If I like to think I'm a great law student but I'm not, then my liked and likely stories diverge. If I like to think I'm destined to the next Clarence Darrow but I can't find a job or afford to hang out my shingle after law school, then my liked and lucrative stories have diverged. When these three kinds of stories diverge, we have to decide which pursuit to emphasize. If you've ever tried to give someone a reality check or had someone trying to give you one, you'll notice that the conversation will swim from one pursuit to another. We tug and coax each other toward reality checks. We resist them, often with good reason. We ask our friends to support us in the beliefs we like. They resist-often with good reason. We shift impulsively between the pursuit of the liked, likely, and lucrative. We blend the stories. We confuse one kind for another. We claim we're being realistic when we're just employing wishful thinking. Far too rarely do we monitor how these three pursuits drive our conversations in conflicting directions. So for practice, let's look at some mismatched combinations: The wife is trying to find out what really went on (likely) with her husband the other night. The husband is trying to forget because it was so awkward and he'd rather feel proud than embarrassed (liked). The CFO is trying to convince the CEO that it would be useful for the long-term health of the company to face reality, (likely) because the company can't go on spending as it has been. The CEO ignores him because his gut tells him that everything is going well (liked). The father has cancer but claims he can lick it. The son wants his dad to face the reality that his prospects of surviving are slim (likely). The father is "in denial," working to enjoy every day by ignoring the prognosis (liked). A woman with a hot temper finds she can reduce her tendency to flare up by embracing a spiritual teacher's claim that the universe rewards a gentle demeanor. It's not a belief that comes easy. She'd rather believe (liked) that her hot temper is a good thing. Still she manages to believe because from what she can tell it's productive in the long run to believe it (lucrative). Her pushy scientist-fanatic friend wants to debate the accuracy of this spiritual teacher's claim (likely). The woman with the temper isn't interested in accuracy so much as in outcomes. Accuracy isn't the point. The point is that this belief bears fruit. Knowing that a can-do a 00:05:51 http://www.mindreadersdictionary.com/what-should-i-do/good-chemistry-valentines-reflections-on-a-bad-but-convenient-metaphor/ http://www.mindreadersdictionary.com/what-should-i-do/good-chemistry-valentines-reflections-on-a-bad-but-convenient-metaphor/?file=420 I'm getting on in years, so it surprises me when I learn something new regarding a commonplace of human interaction. Saying "please" and "thank you" is as commonplace as it gets. We're told from early on that we say them to be nice. Only yesterday (and I wasn't born yesterday) did I recognize why we... Podcasts Thu, 19 Feb 2009 10:31:29 EST mindreadersdictionary@gmail.com No I'm getting on in years, so it surprises me when I learn something new regarding a commonplace of human interaction. Saying "please" and "thank you" is as commonplace as it gets. We're told from early I'm getting on in years, so it surprises me when I learn something new regarding a commonplace of human interaction. Saying "please" and "thank you" is as commonplace as it gets. We're told from early on that we say them to be nice. Only yesterday (and I wasn't born yesterday) did I recognize why we really say them. Consider two scenarios: Scenario one: John visited Sue's house and walked off with her flash drive. Sue asked him to return it, which he did. At that point a balance was restored. John and Sue are even now, or perhaps John still owes Sue for her trouble. Scenario two: John and Sue are deciding what to eat for dinner tonight. John is in the mood for Japanese; Sue wants Mexican. Sue asks John to accommodate her by sacrificing his yen for Japanese, which he does. John has done Sue a favor, for which she feels indebted. In both cases Sue makes a request and John complies, but in the first scenario John's compliance contributes to restoring a balance on something he owes Sue. In the second John has done Sue a favor and is owed something in return. That's a big difference. Misinterpreting such scenarios messes up interpersonal accounting every time. In business and friendship, accounting matters. In business that's obvious. In friendship it matters even if it's not discussed. Friendship is founded on accounting so naturally balanced that neither party need attend to it. But if a friendship's interpersonal accounting gets out of whack, then friends start to wonder whether they really have a friendship, and the accounting comes to the surface to be analyzed, with one party saying things like "Why do I always end up sacrificing for you?" The other party might deny it, saying things like "That's not true. I sacrifice for you too sometimes." And that's the point here. In both business and friendship there's a kind of double-entry bookkeeping going on. Both parties keep track and the relationship stays stable so long as the tracking stays on track. If the separate records on who owes what begin to diverge it is destabilizing. That's where "please" and "thank you" come in. They are designed to signal a favor requested as distinct from a demand for something owed. So if Sue says "please get me the flash drive" and "thank you" when John returns it, Sue could record it as a dept paid and John could record it as a favor done. Likewise if Sue doesn't say "please" when requesting Mexican and "thank you" when John accommodates her, she could record it as a debt paid and John could record it as a favor done. In the first case Sue would be right. In the second John would. In both cases a rift would be forming. In their purest forms, "please" and "thank you" signal that this is a request for a favor, not a demand that a debt be paid. That's what they are designed to represent, even if in practice they end up functioning somewhat differently. They're supposed to be ways of acknowledging that compliance with a request is something of value for which the speaker is at least grateful if not indebted-not something the speaker is entitled to or owed. When we're asking a favor we should say "please" and "thank you." When we're owed a debt we need not and perhaps should not. In fact saying "please" and "thank you" when someone owes you blurs the very distinction these terms are designed to delineate. And yet a couple of counterarguments are worth attention. First, you should err on the side of saying "please" and "thank you" because accommodation and obligation are very vague and relative concepts. The universe owes us nothing. We should be humbly grateful always, in fact, thankful every minute, thankful we weren't born potato bugs. (See Dr. Seuss' wonderful book, Did I ever tell you how lucky you are?) Even as Sue is demanding back the flash drive that John is obligated to return, she is grateful it looks like she's 00:06:04 http://www.mindreadersdictionary.com/what-should-i-do/good-chemistry-valentines-reflections-on-a-bad-but-convenient-metaphor/ http://www.mindreadersdictionary.com/what-should-i-do/good-chemistry-valentines-reflections-on-a-bad-but-convenient-metaphor/?file=418 Once I wrote a book six times, about three hundred pages per draft. Every time I started over, I cried. I took some comfort from knowing that I would stick with the project until it got published and that its success would make the enormous effort worth it. The agent who'd sold the book "One Minu... Podcasts Sun, 01 Feb 2009 14:28:55 EST mindreadersdictionary@gmail.com No Once I wrote a book six times, about three hundred pages per draft. Every time I started over, I cried. I took some comfort from knowing that I would stick with the project until it got published a Once I wrote a book six times, about three hundred pages per draft. Every time I started over, I cried. I took some comfort from knowing that I would stick with the project until it got published and that its success would make the enormous effort worth it. The agent who'd sold the book "One Minute Manager" loved my final draft and took me on as a client. But no publisher would bite. The book was never published. I have no regrets. I learned a lot-both about the subject and about writing. Among the writing skills I learned, the most valuable is the one that keeps me from having to write six drafts of anything any more. Rather than scrapping drafts these days, I can fix them. I know how, and as important, I know that I know how, so crappy drafts don't put me in a panic scrambling for the pristine perfection of a clean slate. Last week I wrote about our self-esteem reserves, the way we monitor them unconsciously, avoiding situations that deplete them to dangerous levels. When we resist feedback it could be that the feedback isn't worth taking in. It could as easily be that we don't feel our self-esteem reserves could take a hit. This week I want to suggest another factor that influences our receptivity to feedback. It's not just how low our reserves are but how fast we can replenish them with genuine improvement. Like me and writing. News that my writing wasn't good enough was much harder to take when I didn't think I could do much about it. Now that I know I can fix it, I can afford to look at its failings. Before, when someone said, "This whole chapter doesn't make much sense," I would think my only choice was to rewrite the entire chapter from scratch, if not the whole book. That's a high price to pay, so I would avoid the feedback. Now I can take that kind of comment in stride, knowing from experience that bad prose can be turned into good prose. The same principle applies to any skill. People who doubt their ability to improve can hardly afford to consider the merit of improving. And it applies to general receptivity about behavior: When you suggest that people consider being more patient, generous, attentive, considerate, or whatever, their receptivity to your suggestion depends largely on their intuition about their prospects of acting successfully upon it. If they don't think they have it in them, why listen? If taken to heart, advice that can't be implemented becomes a kind of torture: Yes I should be more like what you suggest. But can I? I only wish, but alas it's just not in me. To those without confidence that they can change their behavior, it's like being told over and over that they really ought to consider being taller than they are. Thank you very much for your interest in my case, but please-just shut up. It applies to social change, too. In my early thirties I co-founded a peace and environmental organization (now in its 24th year) based on this one idea. At that time peace and environmental groups spent most of their energy trying to convince people that the issues were of dire importance. I noticed that importance was only one-third of what people needed to hear. Without evidence of both practical and effective things to do about the issue, they would walk away. None of us can afford to listen to what's wrong if we don't see anything we can do about it. What I'm talking about here combines two concepts in general psychology. One is self-efficacy, which is Albert Bandura's term for a personal sense of being capable of executing certain tasks, acquired largely by having successfully executed similar tasks. Because by now I've reliably repaired a lot of crappy prose, I have a high expectation that I can do so again. I have self-efficacy regarding editing. The other is learned optimism, Martin Seligman's term for an acquired can-do attitude, which is often taught through the "ABC 00:04:50 http://www.mindreadersdictionary.com/what-should-i-do/good-chemistry-valentines-reflections-on-a-bad-but-convenient-metaphor/ http://www.mindreadersdictionary.com/what-should-i-do/good-chemistry-valentines-reflections-on-a-bad-but-convenient-metaphor/?file=416 You're deadlocked. He thinks it's your problem; you think it's his. You've been going over what happened, how it started and who started it. But neither of you will give an inch. So forget the past. Move on to right now. You're upset. But then he says he is too. You feel really put out, but then he... Podcasts Thu, 29 Jan 2009 13:25:23 EST mindreadersdictionary@gmail.com No You're deadlocked. He thinks it's your problem; you think it's his. You've been going over what happened, how it started and who started it. But neither of you will give an inch. So forget the past. You're deadlocked. He thinks it's your problem; you think it's his. You've been going over what happened, how it started and who started it. But neither of you will give an inch. So forget the past. Move on to right now. You're upset. But then he says he is too. You feel really put out, but then he claims he does too. Well OK, forget right now. The point is to figure out what to do about it. You tell him that with a little gesture he could solve it. He tells you it would be far easier for you to solve it. You say he's stubborn. He says you are. Past, present, future-you've covered it all and you're still nowhere. Is there anything left to talk about? Anything you haven't taken into consideration? There is, and it could be decisive. Call it your reserves. Imagine it as some indicator level on self-esteem-your dignity meter, your egometer, your self-worth gauge. Everyone's got one. The needle fluctuates through the day. Get an enthusiastic e-mail from someone you respect and it goes up. Waste fifteen minutes looking for your lost keys and it goes down. Take a tease to heart and it goes down. Make 'em laugh and it goes up. Little things; big things-over the day and over the years the readings change. You may deny you've got one. You may ignore it, or it may be operating completely in your unconscious, but something in you monitors it. And if the reserves get low you feel a visceral warning, a sense that your reserves can't really take another hit. In a fight the unspoken issue may simply be that one or both of you can't or won't take any more disappointment with yourself. No way. You can't afford it. In debates we act as though all we're ever doing is looking for what's right, what's accurate, what's honest. But we can't be. Below the surface in all exchanges lurk potential threats to our dignity, some of which come at very bad times. She's irritated at some software program your company makes. She has finally gotten through to you in tech support and doesn't mind letting you know that she's frustrated. This software is making her feel like a chump, and that's the last thing she needs right now. In a way, though, she's lucky, because she can justify her frustration without ever admitting that it's not just the software, it's that her reserves are low anyway. She doesn't think about her reserves or yours but just blasts you. But you, this is your first day back at work after a week of coping with the biggest trauma in your life. You're fragile as can be. Sure, she's annoyed about the software, but if she knew the state of your reserves she would be much kinder. Self-esteem reserves aren't the only ones. People have optimism reserves too. If you've been through a lot, you can't really afford more dashed expectations, more terrible news, more stories with downer endings. Friends and I are picking a movie to see together. There's one I've been wanting see, but it's a little gory. One friend is squeamish and disinclined to subject herself to it. I tease her: Why is she such a wimp? Why isn't she braver, like me? If I knew what she's been through, I wouldn't ask-and I surely wouldn't tease. Ignoring her history and the dwindled reserves of optimism she's left with, I look braver. I've had it so easy I don't even know that trauma can thoroughly satiate the appetite for downers. She suggests that we go see some Bollywood import. I scoff at Bollywood movies with their super-saccharine endings. How can people go for such hokey crap? I'm a sophisticate. I want to see movies that deliver the harsh truths. Yeah, well, if I dealt with harsh truths all day like much of Bollywood's third-world audience, maybe I wouldn't have as much appetite for harsh truths. I'd want an escape. As it is, ignoring our respective reserves, I escape into a sense that I'm the one brave enough to stand harsh truths. Religion too. I'm so over such pie-i 00:04:05 http://www.mindreadersdictionary.com/what-should-i-do/good-chemistry-valentines-reflections-on-a-bad-but-convenient-metaphor/ http://www.mindreadersdictionary.com/what-should-i-do/good-chemistry-valentines-reflections-on-a-bad-but-convenient-metaphor/?file=414 You're standing in line for tickets to a concert. Some guy in sunglasses wedges himself into line right in front of you. You're furious. Someone behind you sees your reaction and says, "Relax. He's blind. He doesn't know what he's doing." You suddenly feel ashamed. But then someone else in line says... Podcasts Thu, 22 Jan 2009 11:31:17 EST mindreadersdictionary@gmail.com No You're standing in line for tickets to a concert. Some guy in sunglasses wedges himself into line right in front of you. You're furious. Someone behind you sees your reaction and says, "Relax. He's bl You're standing in line for tickets to a concert. Some guy in sunglasses wedges himself into line right in front of you. You're furious. Someone behind you sees your reaction and says, "Relax. He's blind. He doesn't know what he's doing." You suddenly feel ashamed. But then someone else in line says, "He's not blind. I've seen him here before. He pretends he's blind so he can cut in line." Your fury surges again. Someone else in line says, "Yeah, he's pretending-but I've known his family for years. He can't help it. He's a psychopath." Psychopathy is a disease that doesn't look like a disease. It's easily mistaken for unfettered inconsiderateness. Our ambivalent reaction to it, combining sympathy and rage, reveals a fundamental tension in our beliefs about justice. We hold people responsible for their actions, when technically speaking they aren't. You didn't make you. You didn't pick every part of your personality from some catalog. And yet you'll nonetheless pay the price and reap the rewards that come from being you. It's exculpation without exoneration-technically you can be assigned no guilt for being you (you're exculpated), but that does not free you from responsibility for being you (you're not exonerated). What do you do about the guy in line? Well, exculpation without exoneration, it's not his fault-but he'll pay anyway. You force him to the back of the line. And suppose someone asks, "How can you do that to someone whose actions are not under his control? You can say, "Easy. My actions aren't under my control either. I didn't choose to become someone who prosecutes justice any more than he chose to be someone who violates it." As Kurt Vonnegut put it: We do doodly do What we must muddly must Muddly do muddly do Until we bust bodily bust. Yes, everybody is doing what comes naturally. It's all good, or anyway, it is what it is. And that's true at the grandest of all scales. Stepping back from this life and time, looking at the great earth spinning in its orbit, we can see all of nature's relations, the predators and the prey, the exploiters and the exploited, and say, "It's all good." But we don't live at that scale. We live within our sense of justice. At this scale we can't simply forgive all cruelty. "Yes, well, that axe murderer killed my dearest loved ones, but after all, he couldn't help it, poor thing." Practically speaking, we all wonder sometimes whether to show sympathy for the devil. The philosopher Thomas Hobbes argued that humans are greedy, competitive, and dangerous, and at the root of this aggressive behavior is fear. Yes, fear-fear in each of us that we won't have enough, fear arising in response to our fragility. The meanest among us is at core a frail, timid creature running scared. Stopping to reflect, it's not hard to feel sorry for anyone and everyone. We all know we ourselves are going to die. Even the nastiest gangsters are stuck with the unfortunate predicament of life, caring for and loving things that will inevitably be taken from them. Well, sympathy for them; sympathy for ourselves. No one deserves special accommodation, or all of us do, which makes it not special. If we're all fearful and prone to lash out, then it's a level playing field. But, more realistically, there are degrees of fear, and degrees of translating fear into Hobbesian nastiness. Suppose you're in a close relationship with someone who seems especially mean, and therefore (according to Hobbes) especially fearful, much more so than you, which makes you feel both sorry for him and incensed at him, because he indulges in behaviors you would not (or is it need not?) indulge in yourself. Here you're really torn, half-sympathetic, half-vengeful; half selfless, half self-protective. And he's no help. He won't admit his meanness originates in fear. He practically directs you to treat him as a na 00:04:57 http://www.mindreadersdictionary.com/what-should-i-do/good-chemistry-valentines-reflections-on-a-bad-but-convenient-metaphor/ http://www.mindreadersdictionary.com/what-should-i-do/good-chemistry-valentines-reflections-on-a-bad-but-convenient-metaphor/?file=412 Minds notice differences. When things stay the same, minds tune out by a process psychologists call habituation. Physical pain is the exception. In most cases we don't get used to chronic pain. Physical pain has to be inescapably vivid in order to convince us to do what's necessary to alleviate i... Podcasts Sun, 11 Jan 2009 20:45:15 EST mindreadersdictionary@gmail.com No Minds notice differences. When things stay the same, minds tune out by a process psychologists call habituation. Physical pain is the exception. In most cases we don't get used to chronic pain. Phy Minds notice differences. When things stay the same, minds tune out by a process psychologists call habituation. Physical pain is the exception. In most cases we don't get used to chronic pain. Physical pain has to be inescapably vivid in order to convince us to do what's necessary to alleviate it. Sometimes there is nothing we can or even need do to alleviate it. Then, alas, it's like a blaring false alarm we can neither turn off nor tune out. (See Suffering and Insensitivity.) With all sensation but physical pain, it is nearly impossible to pay attention to what doesn't change. We habituate to background noises, to smells, to the spot on the carpet that's always there. In a perception experiment, a subject's head is held perfectly still in a comfortable vise and medications are used to temporarily paralyze eye muscles. Within a few minutes of staring out at perfect stillness, the subject sees nothing at all; the visual field goes blank because the brain won't register that which doesn't change. Without the temporary paralysis, the subject would still be able to see in the stillness, naturally compensating for the unchanging scene with subtle, twitching eye movements. The scene doesn't change but the eye does. Human sensory apparatus operates by the eye-of-the-beholder rule: If the scene is monotonous, make it seem novel by changing how you look at it. We habituate to habits much as we do to sensations. Anything repeated tends to become automatic. Cognitive scientists have argued for years that human consciousness is like a computer. But evidence suggests that it's the unconscious that's computer-like: operating by habits, instincts, and skills learned so completely that they require no conscious attention at all. Consciousness is the process by which we generate new automatic unconscious behaviors. Consciousness is in the jadedness-generating business, producing rote habits as efficiently as it can. It is always trying to offload as much as possible into the realm of the ignorable and automatic. It does so because attention has got to be prioritized. There's way too much one could attend to. Attention is a drinking straw drawing from a flood. Our bodies systematically ignore that which is likely to make the least difference. That background computer hum you don't hear right now? It's worth ignoring so you can focus elsewhere. Of course, jadedness is also considered a bad thing. We campaign against it, trying to stay alert, aware, and grateful for the commonplace. One place we see people campaigning to stay alert to the unchanging is in meditation. The meditation instructor tells you to pay attention to your breath for an hour a day. Another is work. The inspirational speaker tells you to stay excited about your eight hours a day as a Wal-Mart checkout clerk. Another is marriage, at least in the romantic view. Never lose the spark. Continue to find your partner fascinating though you will be with each other forever. I remember, when courting my wife, making an eye-of-the-beholder pledge to her: "If I should ever should stop seeing the spark in you, the fault will be in my eyes, not in you." That pledge, and her equivalent pledge to me, carried us for years. About 10 years in we added the "Moonie clause" : If you join the Moonies, it's not my eyes, it's you. Of course, in meditation, work, and marriage no two days are exactly the same, so you're not going to go blind from constancy. But how to keep the spark alive is a big question worth addressing as pragmatically as possible. The meditator's goal is to focus nonstop, but in practice most meditators will tell you that meditation is not a constant state but a cycling one, a repeated cycle of focusing, losing focus, noticing the lost focus, and refocusing. Noticing that you've lost focus makes breathing novel again. If you want to avoid losing focus on 00:05:12 http://www.mindreadersdictionary.com/what-should-i-do/good-chemistry-valentines-reflections-on-a-bad-but-convenient-metaphor/ http://www.mindreadersdictionary.com/what-should-i-do/good-chemistry-valentines-reflections-on-a-bad-but-convenient-metaphor/?file=410 In every love relationship I've ever had, my partner and I sooner or later discover a way in which we are quicksand to each other. You know how with quicksand the more you try to save yourself the faster you sink? It's like that, only we do it to each other. Here's an example of how it works: Whe... Podcasts Wed, 07 Jan 2009 20:30:27 EST mindreadersdictionary@gmail.com No In every love relationship I've ever had, my partner and I sooner or later discover a way in which we are quicksand to each other. You know how with quicksand the more you try to save yourself the fas In every love relationship I've ever had, my partner and I sooner or later discover a way in which we are quicksand to each other. You know how with quicksand the more you try to save yourself the faster you sink? It's like that, only we do it to each other. Here's an example of how it works: When I feel stress I tend to want to talk, to work things out, and being unable to do it can cause me more stress. If my partner is someone who prefers quiet when stressed and gets more stressed when deprived of the quiet she wants, all is well until it isn't. Whatever thing-little or big, real or imagined-causes the initial stress will make me want to talk more and my partner to talk less. My talk causes her more stress, which makes her want to talk still less. Her silence causes me more stress, which makes me want to talk still more. The more she does what she thinks will improve her situation (silence) the more she sinks into the stress of my reaction (talk) and vice versa. Such reciprocal quicksands take many forms. They're like wheels that become increasingly wobbly the more out of true they are. For example, if one partner is even slightly more into the other, the imbalance can grow. Alan wants more time with Beth. The less Beth is available the more Alan worries that he's losing her. The more anxious Alan gets, the less time Beth wants to spend with him. They're fine so long as nothing triggers an imbalance, but once it does, the problem snowballs, accelerating an accumulation of difficulty. The technical name for these reciprocal quicksands is positive feedback loops. I prefer to call them amplifying feedback loops, because people tend to think of positive as good, and these feedback loops can as easily be bad as good. We call the bad ones vicious cycles and the good ones virtuous cycles. As the story goes, when someone asked Einstein what he considered the universe's most amazing phenomenon, he instantly replied, "Compound interest." He wasn't merely talking finance. Compound interest, broadly defined, is what we call it when a system's product is capable of producing more product and is fed back into the system. Thus if the money in your bank account makes money that gets added into the bank account, the system overall will generate money at an accelerating rate. Similarly, my partner's stress and my stress being fed back into our relationship to generate more stress would be an example of compound interest on stress. Population booms (kids making kids), autocatalysis (catalysts making more catalysts), avalanches (sliding snow making more snow slide), the rich getting richer (profits making profits), the poor getting poorer (disadvantage breeding disadvantage)-these are all examples of systems with compound interest and the resulting amplifying feedback loops. We don't pay these feedback loops nearly enough attention. In couples, how they're attended to can make or break the relationship. Many relationships end simply because the couple never expected to have such feedback loops. They assume that good relationships don't have them, so the loop means their chemistry is bad. Many relationships end because one partner misinterprets the loop as the other partner's fault and failing. For example, that's what I'd be doing if I were to say to my partner, "When I'm already feeling stressed you seem to go out of your way to cause me greater stress. You must have it in for me. I don't have this problem with other people, so it must be you." Many end because the other partner feels unjustly blamed. And many end with both partners blaming each other for the feedback loop that formed between them. Indeed, many partnerships should end because their feedback loops have gone totally out of control. Sometimes the chemistry really is insurmountably bad. But often a little preventive maintenance would have tamed the loop befo 00:07:46 http://www.mindreadersdictionary.com/what-should-i-do/good-chemistry-valentines-reflections-on-a-bad-but-convenient-metaphor/ http://www.mindreadersdictionary.com/what-should-i-do/good-chemistry-valentines-reflections-on-a-bad-but-convenient-metaphor/?file=408 1. A friend of mine once sought a teaching position at a somewhat New Age spiritual college. He's a Buddhist and also a scholar with high standards. In a job interview with the dean he asked, "What's your attitude about rigor?" "You mean rigor mortis?" the dean asked, conveying an assumption that... Podcasts Sat, 27 Dec 2008 16:53:57 EST mindreadersdictionary@gmail.com No 1. A friend of mine once sought a teaching position at a somewhat New Age spiritual college. He's a Buddhist and also a scholar with high standards. In a job interview with the dean he asked, "What's 1. A friend of mine once sought a teaching position at a somewhat New Age spiritual college. He's a Buddhist and also a scholar with high standards. In a job interview with the dean he asked, "What's your attitude about rigor?" "You mean rigor mortis?" the dean asked, conveying an assumption that rigor killed the spirit. Without thinking my friend said, "I really mean intimacy." The dean softened. Intimacy was close to her heart, and to the school's. My friend told me this story to illustrate finding common ground with someone through his intuitive discovery of just the right term. Rigor as intimacy was true to both his heart and the dean's. I took a different lesson from the story. I think they found something they mistook for common ground through two opposite interpretations of the same term. My friend was talking about making ideas fit the evidence better (with more rigor) and thus coming to greater intimacy with reality. The dean heard him as talking about personal intimacy, which is often the opposite of rigor. Given the fragility of human hearts, personal intimacy is generally a product of how kind, generous, affirming, and approving we are of each other. By contrast, the rigor that leads to intimacy with reality often entails disappointing or hurting people by confronting them with factors they prefer not to consider. Intimacy can mean a snug fit to reality. Intimacy can mean a snug fit with a person. Sometimes those two meanings converge and sometimes they diverge. When they diverge you face a choice of being true to your interpretation of reality (rigor, honesty, realism), or true to the other party in your relationship (kindness, love, loyalty). At such times the question becomes whether you should speak your truth or refrain from speaking it. Which is the more loving thing to do? Since this is a central theme in my work I end up talking about it with lots of people. I find some seem irritated by the idea that there could be an incompatibility and tough choice here. They seek to explain away the dilemma with some harmonized always-do-X solution, but I've never found such a solution that works. 2. I was partnered for about four years to a woman far more diplomatic than I am, and our divergent tendencies became a hot topic between us. At dinner parties, when outspoken guests made bold assertions I disagreed with, I would challenge them. The guests and I would end up having long heated debates that were fun for me but not for my partner. On the drive home, she would ask me why I bothered, arguing that it's much kinder to humor people like that than to confront them. She wasn't defending their arguments. She usually disagreed with these other guests as much as I did. She just didn't see any advantage to engaging with them. This girlfriend and I would end up having debates on the merits of debates. Since we loved each other lots, the debates were constructive. We were both able to recognize that regardless of whether confrontation was appropriate, it was not at all clear which strategy was the more loving and generous. Though, on the face of it her diplomacy seemed more generous, she acknowledged that in humoring people she deemed too stubborn to be worth talking to, she was reducing her intimacy with them. By challenging these guests on their opinions I was more unkind in the short term, putting them on the spot, disappointing them by not agreeing with them, but I was nonetheless implying that I took them seriously and honored their pursuit of accuracy and long-term progress in hammering out ideas that more intimately fit reality. Humoring can be deeply disrespectful. It can indicate a decision that someone is so hopelessly out of touch that it's not worth wasting your breath. On the other hand, it can be deeply respectful to honor someone wherever they are on their journey. Conversely, co 00:07:03 http://www.mindreadersdictionary.com/what-should-i-do/good-chemistry-valentines-reflections-on-a-bad-but-convenient-metaphor/ http://www.mindreadersdictionary.com/what-should-i-do/good-chemistry-valentines-reflections-on-a-bad-but-convenient-metaphor/?file=406 One day when I was young and working as head of public affairs for a big, publicly traded, environmentally conscious retailer, I suddenly felt morally compromised by the company's flagship campaign, which it had me running. I wrote an angry letter to the CEO and board complaining about the campaign,... Podcasts Thu, 11 Dec 2008 13:09:26 EST mindreadersdictionary@gmail.com No One day when I was young and working as head of public affairs for a big, publicly traded, environmentally conscious retailer, I suddenly felt morally compromised by the company's flagship campaign, w One day when I was young and working as head of public affairs for a big, publicly traded, environmentally conscious retailer, I suddenly felt morally compromised by the company's flagship campaign, which it had me running. I wrote an angry letter to the CEO and board complaining about the campaign, exposing it as disingenuous and unworthy of my or the company's attention. The company was famous for its campaigns. The press tracked and celebrated it as a pioneer in corporate conscientiousness-and plenty of skeptics were always looking for a chance to knock it off its high horse. Had the letter fallen into the wrong hands, it could have caused the company real trouble. At first I was proud of the letter. I had spoken truth to power. But when the CEO summoned me to his office, I got anxious. The problem with such letters is that the recipients get a chance to respond. For people like me who dish it out better than they take it in, the retaliation can hurt. The CEO had been a street fighter in Glasgow in his youth. He had been my friend as well as my boss, otherwise maybe I wouldn't have written the letter. Anticipating his reaction, I thought maybe the letter would end our friendship. My stomach clenched as I took the elevator to his office. He sat me down. I braced myself. He seemed remarkably calm, considering. He brought out some materials from another campaign we were working on. He asked my opinions. We discussed some bland strategic questions. I was relieved. The letter apparently had caused no damage. I was safe. When the meeting ended I said goodbye. As I reached for the door knob he called after me, his voice turned to ice. "Don't you ever fucking send a letter like that again," was all he said. These past few weeks I've been writing about choosing your battles, and especially about keeping your cool and prevailing in the ones that count. We are counseled to be generous, to avoid confrontation, to be tolerant and not quick to temper, to turn the other cheek. That's fine advice, but at least for me it doesn't carry much practical weight. I don't know anyone who doesn't agree with it when reflecting upon it in a calm state. In a confrontation, however, for me and for others, it vaporizes. Advice you can only heed when you don't need it isn't worth much. And I'm not sure it's a bad thing that it vaporizes. Yes, I'll sign off on the implications of such admonitions as "an eye for an eye leaves the whole world blind." Figuratively that one rings true, but really, if someone deliberately blinded me or (worse) blinded my child, I wouldn't want to heed it, declaring peace because lord knows I wouldn't want to contribute to the world's blindness. Few would-and I think few should. No, the real question is how to keep the world from going blind given that we quite understandably and justifiably do practice an eye for an eye. A lot of what it takes is patience enough to investigate whether a crime really took place and if so to make the punishment fit it. The whole world isn't blinded by punishment, it's blinded by reckless escalations at the hands of people who can't stop to think. As I've admitted, I'd like a longer fuse than I've got. Not an infinite fuse-I don't subscribe to infinite patience. If Obama is a role model for me, it's not the aspect where he seems to transcend all battles but the one where he picks his battles really well. I would like to become slower reacting, more patient, less quick to conclude that fighting is what a situation calls for. I get some mileage out of remembering to be kind and generous, though often when I'm feeling assaulted and humiliated already by someone, cultivating my inner gentleman just fans the flames. It ends up feeling like cultivating my inner chump instead. I just get angrier. I don't want to pretend the world is safe for surrenderers. If every ma 00:05:31 http://www.mindreadersdictionary.com/what-should-i-do/good-chemistry-valentines-reflections-on-a-bad-but-convenient-metaphor/ http://www.mindreadersdictionary.com/what-should-i-do/good-chemistry-valentines-reflections-on-a-bad-but-convenient-metaphor/?file=404 Last week I said I envied Obama's patience in conflict, and this week as promised brings more about what it takes to display that sort of poise. This discussion also keys into two of the main themes that run through my thinking and writing. One is that the foundation of good behavior is built not... Podcasts Thu, 04 Dec 2008 19:03:16 EST mindreadersdictionary@gmail.com No Last week I said I envied Obama's patience in conflict, and this week as promised brings more about what it takes to display that sort of poise. This discussion also keys into two of the main theme Last week I said I envied Obama's patience in conflict, and this week as promised brings more about what it takes to display that sort of poise. This discussion also keys into two of the main themes that run through my thinking and writing. One is that the foundation of good behavior is built not from moral principles but from moral dilemmas. No simple, one-truth-fits-all recipes exist. Niceness, honesty, generosity—such virtues are vices in many contexts. The other theme has to do with the nature of disagreements. In all of them there’s a conflict within which two positions are at odds, from which arises a third position, an outside perspective about the conflict. Breakthrough thinkers from Plato through Gregory Bateson have identified dynamic relationships among these three states (see Triads, Rung Running) and the ways they play out in our lives—and also in life more broadly. These three positions are at the base of the new science of emergence theory, a necessary complement to evolutionary theory in our understanding of how life evolves and indeed how it arose in the first place. High abstraction aside, let me apply this triadic relationship to everyday conflict. First take this example: Mom: You kids stop fighting. Tim: But she started it. Sue: No I didn’t, he did. Mom: I don’t care. I want it to stop. Tim and Sue represent two sides within a conflict. Their mother is outside expressing her desires about the fight overall: two positions within it and one position about it. Combine triads like this one and you get trees, branching out to form all sorts of complex relationships. For example, what if more voices enter the scene? Dad: Honey, let them go at it. It’s OK—squabbling is a healthy part of growing up. Mom: Well it bothers me, and I’d like them to stop. Grandma: You know you two shouldn’t be arguing about this in front of the children. Grandpa: Dear, they’re the parents. They’re perfectly capable of figuring out how to handle their own children. . . . A conflict between the kids, and about it, a conflict between the parents and about it, a conflict between the grandparents about the conflict between the parents. The complexities just keep sprouting. Getting back to my role model—Obama stays cool in the face of conflict, picking his battles so carefully that to some he seems to transcend all battles. I’d like to emulate him, but I’m more hotheaded than he seems to be. When I feel attacked, my body takes me into battle faster than is good for me. So what can a guy like me do about that? When it comes to the conflict triad, Obama’s natural inclination is to play a role more like the mother or father than one of the kids. Like the mother, he warns that the conflict (say, between Red states and Blue states) could be harmful. Like the father he also seems to recognize that contention is part of the democratic system. It’s good for us. Me, I naturally tend to identify with my position within an argument. I engage in conflicts easily, sometimes with negative effects. I say “sometimes,” because true to my first theme, I don’t think this one has a one-truth-fits-all recipe, either. Some people say it does: always turn the other cheek, always be nice, allow us our differences, be tolerant, live and let live. But none of us can live by such moral principles. Instead we deal with the moral dilemma about when to engage within the conflict and when to comment about it. We all pick our battles. And how do we pick? Often impulsively. That’s what I’d like less of in myself. At our best we pick the battles that proved worth fighting tomorrow. That is, ideally we defend positions within the conflicts that will in the long run have proved both worth winning and winnable. And since the definitive authority of future consequence isn’t available today, we ar 00:03:50 http://www.mindreadersdictionary.com/what-should-i-do/good-chemistry-valentines-reflections-on-a-bad-but-convenient-metaphor/ http://www.mindreadersdictionary.com/what-should-i-do/good-chemistry-valentines-reflections-on-a-bad-but-convenient-metaphor/?file=402 Sure-fire recipes are wonderful things, and the history of civilization can be read as the search for and discovery of such recipes. Unfortunately, it can also be read as a long line of claims to have discovered allegedly sure-fire recipes that turn out to be not so sure-fire after all. Every d... Podcasts Mon, 24 Nov 2008 17:27:30 EST mindreadersdictionary@gmail.com No Sure-fire recipes are wonderful things, and the history of civilization can be read as the search for and discovery of such recipes. Unfortunately, it can also be read as a long line of claims to ha Sure-fire recipes are wonderful things, and the history of civilization can be read as the search for and discovery of such recipes. Unfortunately, it can also be read as a long line of claims to have discovered allegedly sure-fire recipes that turn out to be not so sure-fire after all. Every day we experience the influence of such claims in what I call “methodoxy”: an orthodox commitment to a method or recipe for social conduct that supposedly is always both virtuous and effective but in reality isn’t. Take such common debating assertions as “Please don’t interrupt me,” “Don’t finish my sentence for me,” or “Don’t assume you know what I feel.” These are conveyed as though citing a rule that the righteous never interrupt, finish sentences, or presume to say what others feel. It’s not a true rule, though. Doing any of these things is often perfectly welcome. Only sometimes do they trigger this claim of universal unrighteousness. Methodoxy might be warranted in some cases, but I have yet to find any. In fact, I have yet to find a single recipe for virtuous communication that can’t backfire or be abused--most certainly not “If you can’t say anything nice, don’t say anything at all.” Think how easily it can be used as an excuse for not speaking up when someone is being wronged. Think how grateful we are to the historical heroes who said things that at the time were not considered nice. Then there are those who say that even if you don’t have anything nice to say, you can still say it so long as you say it nicely, and that there is a nice way to say anything. I count myself as part of this camp--even though, as noted (see The Tact Game), I don’t believe in its premise as an absolute, either. All seven of the supposedly nice ways to say anything I describe today have been promoted as sure-fire, though none of them really is. I think I know why. Their erratic success record stems from the ambivalence we feel about honesty and kindness. These qualities sound like good things, but they can be dreadful. People’s honest opinions about us can feel and even be harsh, disappointing, and cruel. Genuine kindness can feel manipulative, patronizing, and disrespectful--and much of what people think they mean as kindness can really be manipulative, patronizing, and disrespectful. Dishonesty and unkindness are no fun, but honesty and kindness aren’t always fun either. And the trade-offs are often inescapable. Sometimes what’s honest feels unkind and vice versa. As a result any of the following recipes can feel either too blunt or too manipulative depending on context. Nonetheless, one or another of them may be the best choice you’ve got for the situation you face. So here they are, the unreliable sure-fire methods for speaking your mind: 1. Simple and direct: Just say what’s on your mind. “Rinse the dishes before you put them in the dishwasher.” This approach can come across as either refreshing and disarming or assaultive and harsh: “Wow, that was cold. You made no effort to make me feel OK about your critique.” 2. Kidding: Tease about the behavior you want changed. “You must think the dishwasher keeps food safe for human consumption, because next time we use these plates we’re going to be eating leftovers that you didn’t rinse off them.” Effective if you’re addressing someone who can find a way to laugh with you; mean-spirited if you’re not. “You think laughing at me is going to win me over to your perspective?!” 3. “I” message: Don’t speak with authority and moralize, just say how the behavior makes you feel. “When you don’t rinse the dishes before putting them in the dishwasher, I feel disappointed.” This kind of statement can feel very honest, humble, and authentic--or it can seem disingenuous and like beating around the bush: " 00:05:00 http://www.mindreadersdictionary.com/what-should-i-do/good-chemistry-valentines-reflections-on-a-bad-but-convenient-metaphor/ http://www.mindreadersdictionary.com/what-should-i-do/good-chemistry-valentines-reflections-on-a-bad-but-convenient-metaphor/?file=400 I left a band recently. I had my reasons but wasn't sure whether to share them on exit. I didn't want to be dishonest. I can remember times when people gave me vacuous excuses for parting with me. Here I had invested heavily in a relationship and they were too stingy to let me in on the moral of the... Podcasts Sun, 09 Nov 2008 09:55:04 EST mindreadersdictionary@gmail.com No I left a band recently. I had my reasons but wasn't sure whether to share them on exit. I didn't want to be dishonest. I can remember times when people gave me vacuous excuses for parting with me. Her I left a band recently. I had my reasons but wasn't sure whether to share them on exit. I didn't want to be dishonest. I can remember times when people gave me vacuous excuses for parting with me. Here I had invested heavily in a relationship and they were too stingy to let me in on the moral of the story, the feedback from which I could learn how to do better in relationships or at least how to pick more compatible partners. It's insulting when someone thinks you can't handle honest feedback. But then it's also no fun to be subjected to someone's unsolicited remarks as they're walking out the door. "I'm leaving you because I've determined that you're hopelessly X" just adds insult to the departure's injury. When we're in relationships we overlook their flaws, but when working up the nerve to leave it's natural to notice and even exaggerate those flaws. Your perceptions of the flaws will be at a peak when you declare you're leaving. If your announcement comes as a surprise, the people you're leaving will still be in preserve-the-relationship mode, and it's bad form to just stun them with a litany of flaws. You catch your soon-to-be-former partners off guard. What are they going to do? They can't just switch gears in an instant. Besides, if you go first listing the flaws, they'll just sound defensive if they respond in kind. And do you really want to hear their interpretation of the flaws? Especially when you're leaving anyway? Why open the can of worms? It should be black or white. Either you invest in the collaboration and get to share your feelings about the flaws, or you leave the collaboration and keep your feelings about its flaws to yourself. In other words, we're either a "we," in which case what "we" want means you're entitled to voice your opinion, or we are each a separate "me," in which case what you want is none of my business. I made an assessment that expressing my feelings wouldn't change anything, so I left the band without saying why. Sometimes such assessments are wrong, of course. You find out later that you left rashly. They were open to your feedback after all. They tell you outright that they would have wanted to make it work rather than see you leave. Of course sometimes they say that but don't really mean it. What they're actually doing is giving you the feedback that you're flawed for having exited--employing one of the many easy parting shots available to them. That's one reason to keep the lid on the worm can and slip away without giving feedback. Sometimes we declare outright that we're not going to give parting feedback, which is itself a kind of feedback. "I'm leaving. I've got my reasons. But I'm not going to waste my breath sharing them with you." It's a kind of telling/not telling. Check out the double message in the Bob Dylan classic, "Don't think twice, it's all right." The same is suggested by such shorthand comments as, "Oh, fine," or "Whatever," or "I'm not even going to argue with you." Any of these can be an honest declaration or an arsonist's match tossed into the building upon exit. I don't think there's a simple recipe for dealing with communications at the end of a relationship. All approaches are potential trouble. Any "I'll give you space" can be an underhanded way of leaving in a huff. Any "It isn't you, it's me" can be the departer's way of telling you you're too weak to handle the feedback. Any "I'm leaving and I'll be honest as to why . . . " can be a parting shot meant to add insult to injury. Maybe the most compassionate approach is for all parties involved to remember that endings are intrinsically awkward. Relationships are best when the parties are 100% invested, so we tend to maintain the appearance of full investment even when it starts to slip. But eventually the percentage of investment drops far enough to motivate exit, producing a surprise 00:04:23 conflict,criticism,diplomacy,ending relationships,exits,feedback,kindness,negotiation,niceness,quitting,strategy,tolerance http://www.mindreadersdictionary.com/what-should-i-do/good-chemistry-valentines-reflections-on-a-bad-but-convenient-metaphor/ http://www.mindreadersdictionary.com/what-should-i-do/good-chemistry-valentines-reflections-on-a-bad-but-convenient-metaphor/?file=398 Last week New Yorker columnist George Packer noted that while Sarah Palin's syntax is mangled, more significantly it lacks verbs. It's mostly nouns. Maverick, hockey mom, Joe sixpack, elitist, terrorist, small-town people--lots of heavily loaded nouns. Loaded nouns and the adjectives that modif... Podcasts Wed, 22 Oct 2008 19:31:05 EST mindreadersdictionary@gmail.com No Last week New Yorker columnist George Packer noted that while Sarah Palin's syntax is mangled, more significantly it lacks verbs. It's mostly nouns. Maverick, hockey mom, Joe sixpack, elitist, terro Last week New Yorker columnist George Packer noted that while Sarah Palin's syntax is mangled, more significantly it lacks verbs. It's mostly nouns. Maverick, hockey mom, Joe sixpack, elitist, terrorist, small-town people--lots of heavily loaded nouns. Loaded nouns and the adjectives that modify them are part of everyone's vocabulary, but in recent decades--under the influence of Karl Rove and a general Republican emphasis on sounding practical--conservatives have leaned heavily upon them. This year's election is turning out to be something of a referendum on radical nounism, which looks to be going down if not out. In the current economic crisis people want to know what the candidates will do. For the first time in decades, noun-intensive rhetoric isn't winning votes. We intuit that nouns are what practical people focus on. They're what make the world feel solid. Nothing is more solid than a thing. Feel that table in front of you. It's a hard thing, a hard truth. Using nouns, especially loaded ones, to describe people is the simplest way to telegraph your view of which ones to trust and which not to trust A person is a thing, either a good thing or a bad thing depending on what nouns we assign. "Mavericks" are good things so you can trust anyone who is a maverick. That's being plainspoken, calling a spade a spade. "Elitists" and "talkers" are bad things, so you can't trust them. That's a solid hard truth too. Noun-heavy communication tends to rely on passive verbs, "is, am, to be" chief among them. I'm reminded of the two versions of "is" in Spanish: "ser" and "estar." Both mean "is, are, am, to be" but the difference is for how long. I am Jeremy in the permanent sense, so to say that in Spanish I would use the verb "ser." I am at home in the less permanent sense. To say that I would use the verb "estar." How permanent is the "is" Palin uses to anoint the ones she likes and tar the ones she doesn't? She's talking permanent. A maverick is a maverick for life. Lucky people (like me) tend to accumulate assumptions that we're a Special Protected Subspecies (n. somehow permanently immune to bad luck). During the recent economic shocks a lot of formerly fortunate Americans are experiencing a cosmic wedgie on those assumptions. Conservatism, like progressivism, is at root an inescapably important half-truth. Conservatism, true to its nouny tendencies, is at core the argument for permanence--that "what is should be." Progressivism is the argument that "what isn't should be." Of course each is true, but not to the exclusion of the other. If conservatism were absolutely true nothing would ever change. If progressivism were absolutely true everything would change always. Enthusiasts for either half-truth sometimes argue in absolute terms, but in practice neither lives by those terms. Conservatives face the daunting task of selecting which of the many standards held at some place and time to argue must be conserved. Usually, it's whatever strategy is conducive to their preferred perma-good. Progressives likewise have to decide which change to advocate. They tend to emphasize the changes that would bring them closer to their preferred perma-good too. Conservatism and nounism resonate with our quest for the permanently good. Post-9/11 studies by Dr. Sheldon Solomon and Dr. Tom Pyszczynski found that people became more supportive of Bush's conservative agenda when reminded that they will eventually die. They also found that people's confidence levels (their estimate of their likelihood of being right about some factual guess) go up in front of funeral homes. It's like that line from Dylan Thomas--"Do not go gently into that dark night. Rage rage against the dying of the light." How? By declaring things solid; by leaning into nounism. I think what's happened in the past few decades is that the natural human tendency 00:07:20 emergence,language,name calling,nouns,Palin,permanence,reification,republicans http://www.mindreadersdictionary.com/what-should-i-do/good-chemistry-valentines-reflections-on-a-bad-but-convenient-metaphor/ http://www.mindreadersdictionary.com/what-should-i-do/good-chemistry-valentines-reflections-on-a-bad-but-convenient-metaphor/?file=396 A few months before Katrina, I caught one of the early Mardi Gras parades in a rural town outside New Orleans. Race relations there seemed different from those here in Northern California. Blacks were more outgoing and friendly to whites, and yet there also seemed to be more racial segregation. At t... Podcasts Wed, 22 Oct 2008 19:29:02 EST mindreadersdictionary@gmail.com No A few months before Katrina, I caught one of the early Mardi Gras parades in a rural town outside New Orleans. Race relations there seemed different from those here in Northern California. Blacks were A few months before Katrina, I caught one of the early Mardi Gras parades in a rural town outside New Orleans. Race relations there seemed different from those here in Northern California. Blacks were more outgoing and friendly to whites, and yet there also seemed to be more racial segregation. At the parade, the floats and teams were strictly segregated. The only integration I saw was a few clusters of black and white teens. I watched a policeman go out of his way to harass a black youth who was hanging out with some white girls. As I was heading back to my car I saw one group by a 7-11 and thought to ask them directly about the state of race relations. A white girl spoke for them all, "Oh, it's getting better. The police still give you a hard time but it's not bad." I thanked her and walked toward my car feeling pleased and hopeful; it was good to hear from a like-minded youth who was transcending past bigotries. The girl called me back. "You say you're from San Francisco?" she asked. "Are they still letting gays marry there? 'Cause I think that's so disgusting." OK, not entirely like-minded. She had learned a lesson about bigotry, but she hadn't generalized it. Me, I've seen enough instances of destructive bigotry to extrapolate to a universal pattern. Bigotry against blacks, Jews, the Irish, the Italians, the Chinese, gays--I get it--no bigotry is acceptable. What you don't do to blacks you don't do to gays either. In this election I'm hoping a disenchanted nation will do some careful generalizing. Too much focus on Bush and Cheney's bad character distracts us from questions about what makes them bad. If we conclude that they're just bad apples, then what's to stop equally counterproductive people with different names and faces from taking their places? Everyone says, "People who don't learn the lessons of history are forced to repeat it," but if that statement doesn't miss the point completely, it just barely grazes it. Sure, we should try to learn lessons--but the real question is which lessons, what generalizations? From Stalin and Hitler should we generalize to no more leaders with mustaches? No more short people? What we want, of course, is to generalize lessons from history that end up paying off in the future. Unfortunately, although that's a great goal, it's useless as a rule of thumb. The future isn't here yet, so you can't use it directly to guide your generalizations. "Son, my advice to you is buy low, sell high, and always learn today what worked tomorrow." Still, our society's accelerated progress over the past few centuries is largely a product of culture realizing that right generalization is the name of the game. Science and engineering are largely attempts to systematize the process of effective generalization. In the hope of promoting that process, however slightly, here are a few generalizations about generalization applied to the coming election. Undergeneralizing: Sometimes we fail to learn because we fail to generalize at all. Bush voters who now criticize the president tend to defend their votes. Yes, Bush turned out to be a lemon, an exception to the otherwise fine products of the conservative movement. Gore, Kerry, and the whole liberal agenda would have been much worse. McCain will fix things. Abu Ghraib? A few bad low-level soldiers. There's nothing to learn, no generalization to be drawn. When McCain said the economic problem was caused by greedy people on Wall street and that the answer was to fire the head of the SEC, he sounded like unsophisticated leftists I knew in the '70s. The problem is a few greedy people leading big corporations. Replace them with un-greedy people like me and it will all be groovy. Overgeneralizing: Litmus-test radicals think they've found the one or two factors from which you can generalize to everything you need to know about a can 00:06:02 http://www.mindreadersdictionary.com/what-should-i-do/good-chemistry-valentines-reflections-on-a-bad-but-convenient-metaphor/ http://www.mindreadersdictionary.com/what-should-i-do/good-chemistry-valentines-reflections-on-a-bad-but-convenient-metaphor/?file=394 Our election is 13 days away. If you're bothered by my political focus lately, please know I'll be back to the usual soon. This election is proving to be a referendum on the central tenets of Mindreaders Dictionary. I can't resist making the connections. I watch this election from several ... Podcasts Wed, 22 Oct 2008 18:07:09 EST mindreadersdictionary@gmail.com No Our election is 13 days away. If you're bothered by my political focus lately, please know I'll be back to the usual soon. This election is proving to be a referendum on the central tenets of Min Our election is 13 days away. If you're bothered by my political focus lately, please know I'll be back to the usual soon. This election is proving to be a referendum on the central tenets of Mindreaders Dictionary. I can't resist making the connections. I watch this election from several perspectives. Among them: Mine: What I want (this perspective comes easiest). Theirs: What something like half the American voters seem to want (at least for strategic reasons it's useful to track this, given the chance that They may win). Ours: What people need today and in the future (that is, what people everywhere will end up wishing we did). My perspective probably shades my interpretation of Theirs and Ours more than I know. One thing about Our perspective, with its focus on long-term and wide-ranging consequences: It's the one that depends most on reading reality right. The truth will out. As our economy is teaching us lately, being unrealistic generally has bad long-term consequences. Even the most unrealistic ideas can seem to work in the short run, but not in the long. Back in 2002, journalist Ronald Suskind interviewed Bush's chief propagandist, Karl Rove. Suskind writes: "Rove said that guys like me were ‘in what we call the reality-based community', which he defined as people ‘who believe that solutions emerge from your judicious study of discernible reality'. I nodded and murmured something about enlightenment principles and empiricism. ‘That's not the way the world really works anymore,' Rove continued. ‘We're an empire now, and when we act, we create our own reality. And while you're studying that reality--judiciously, as you will--we'll act again, creating other new realities, which you can study too, and that's how things will sort out. We're history's actors . . . and you, all of you, will be left to just study what we do." Rove makes a fascinating point. In reality, perception is reality. According to Rove, the people who realize this are realists. Wasting time on judicious study of reality is just being unrealistic. Confusing, isn't it? Wouldn't realists pay less attention to perception than to reality? Is it more realistic to be realistic or to be realistic about people's lack of realism? To clear up the confusion, just recognize two definitions of reality. "Reality" in quotation marks can be defined as anything that changes behavior. The time right now is 8:00 pm and I'll have to leave to meet my family in a half hour. So "8:00" is real in that it makes a difference to my behavior. The more something changes behavior the more real that something is. The concepts of democracy, happiness, poverty, fashion, communism, science--these are all real in this sense. So too are reincarnation, Hell, Santa Claus, and the Tooth Fairy. They too have changed a lot of behavior and are thus very "real" by this practical definition. If you find it troubling to call the Tooth Fairy real, you are not alone. Like pretty much everyone except the severely psychotic, you demonstrate a commitment to a second definition of reality, a sense that perception isn't everything--there's a realer real than our impressions. As Aldous Huxley said, "Facts do not cease to exist because they are ignored." The long-term object of the game might be making "reality" match reality. And we make progress at this. Few people today think Zeus is real. We acknowledge that Zeus was "real," but since he was more like the Tooth Fairy than he was like poverty, belief in him eventually waned. Sometimes we collapse "reality" into reality. We assume that what we perceive must be what's really out there. We believe it when we see it, as though the eyes never lie or as though the eyes are merely crystal-clear windows through which the nature of the world is projected directly into the mind (see Eliminate the Middle Man 00:07:02 epistemology,facts,pragmatism,reality,republicans,rove,self-serving http://www.mindreadersdictionary.com/what-should-i-do/good-chemistry-valentines-reflections-on-a-bad-but-convenient-metaphor/ http://www.mindreadersdictionary.com/what-should-i-do/good-chemistry-valentines-reflections-on-a-bad-but-convenient-metaphor/?file=392 The Tower of Babel is daunting, and people who consider themselves practical and down-to-earth often try to keep the discussion on the ground floor saying things like this: "Come on, people. We don't have a lot of time. Let's just make this decision and get on with it." Notice that this comm... Podcasts Mon, 06 Oct 2008 10:24:06 EST mindreadersdictionary@gmail.com No The Tower of Babel is daunting, and people who consider themselves practical and down-to-earth often try to keep the discussion on the ground floor saying things like this: "Come on, people. We d The Tower of Babel is daunting, and people who consider themselves practical and down-to-earth often try to keep the discussion on the ground floor saying things like this: "Come on, people. We don't have a lot of time. Let's just make this decision and get on with it." Notice that this comment isn't made on the ground floor; it's actually up a level. In effect, it says, "We should make the decision by some unspecified process that I happen to like," which can make teammates a little nervous. That nervousness reveals another dimension of the levels ambiguity. Deciding versus deciding how to decide. That's one way to look at the levels involved. Another way is to look at the relationship between (on one level) what's in the individual's best interest and (one level up) what's in the group's best interest. Think of it as the tension between the roles of advocate and judge. Advocates argue for what they want; judges decide what's best for everyone. The roles are best kept apart or else you've got the foxes guarding the henhouse-advocates pretending to be judicially unbiased: "Excuse me, folks, but wouldn't the most prudent and equitable decision process be for me to evaluate everyone's suggestions, write up a final report, and copy you in on what I send to the boss?" Confusing the roles can also cause the reverse problem-not wanting to be overbearing, some advocates hold back on behalf of group process (hens replacing the wolves?), much to the group's ultimate disadvantage: "Look, I'm sorry. Yes, I thought it was a bad idea when it was floated in the meeting, but I didn't want to impose my will on everyone. For the sake of consensus I didn't speak up." Confusing the roles, however, is precisely what happens in a team with no decision-making process. Who's advocate and who's judge? Well, we are, whatever that means. But these levels problems don't just arise with floundering teams. They're a challenge we face in all group decisions. Making good decisions entails taking into consideration the strong opinions of individuals. That's democracy. But it also entails ultimately reaching some kind of agreement about what's right for the group overall. That's unity. Both are virtues. Both have their place, but it's hard to know exactly which places these are when the process for making the decision isn't spelled out in advance. And it's not just group decision making, either. These same issues arise when you sit down to make a decision alone. It's the fundamental tension between deciding and decided. Deciding calls for receptivity, openness to the variety of positions available. In contrast, being decided calls for closure, a focus on the one approach that is best overall, all things considered, and then ignoring other options so as to follow through on your decision. Deciding is yin. Decided is yang. These incompatible states are necessary to all decision-making process. It's just hard to know where to draw the wavy line between them. Recognizing that both deciding and decided have their crucial but different places in decision making frames the issue in productive ways. I call it the spin-doctor's Hippocratic oath: When deciding, be open. Unspin. Use the power of neutral thinking. Weigh all the options equally. When you've decided, be closed. Spin assertively. Use the power of positive thinking to promote hope and faith in your chosen option, talking about how it's right and all the other options are wrong. When deciding, a group should be receptive and uncertain. When decided, the group should be unreceptive and certain. This applies to judges as well. For the sake of the group consider the case open-mindedly, but once you've made your decision, close your mind. Notice that for an individual within a group-in other words, for an advocate, the rule is reversed. When the group is deciding, that's 00:05:23