read+reflect

I'm Mark Bao. I read articles. Then, I summarize them and reflect on them.

[readreflect]

Why all of the attention on how science is broken is actually a good thing for science.

Good article about the problems with science (well, mostly scientific reporting) at the moment. The reproducibility problems we’ve been seeing lately suggest that we need to see science less as single studies and more as a process that is prone to flaws and failure. There are a lot of problems within – peer review, grants, publication costs, university PR exaggerating studies – and the approach we need to take is one that recognizes science as not just single studies but as a longer, slower process. Setting the right expectations, basically.

[readreflect]

- Quantified self and outsourcing willpower, reserving it for the important things - Scales that tell you only when something is wrong - Wolfram's inspiring collection of data: set it and forget it. Finding data-driven evidence. - What is life? Is it the artifacts and narratives we construct?

[readreflect]

It’s rare for people to change what they believe, and if they do it, it’s usually a long process. This week, stories of those very infrequent instances where people’s opinions flip on fundamental things that they believe. Why does it happen in these particular and unusual circumstances? We explain.

Changing people’s perceptions on gay marriage or abortion by having someone who is in those groups to talk to them; talking to your enemy voters and doing controlled studies; problems with generalizability in large scale

Changing criminal behavior using money and incentives to get them back on track, and the real-world problems with that. [Understanding how felons and recovering criminals may be closed off from certain things that may allow them to change, like getting a job that requires some clearance, and seeing what they really want – stability?]

Changing one’s mind about a new place once they find a friend or someone to have an emotional connection to there [an anchor].

[readreflect]

<p>Trying out a new format on read+reflect: one or more bullet points.</p>

<p>• Life Satisfaction = Positive Affect + Engagement (Flow) + Meaning<br/> • Try the “perfect day” exercise: plan out a perfect day<br/> • Gratitude writing exercise<br/> • Positive psychology as getting people from negative or 0 to positive. A psychology for normal people.

[readreflect]

Julian Treasure — How to speak so that people want to listen

Speak with honesty, authenticity, integrity, and love (wishing well to the other person). Use the toolbox of your voice—the register, timbre, prosody, pace, pitch, and volume, combined with warmups, to speak well.

—

Just a great talk. The main take-aways from me:

Avoid negativity or judgment when speaking.

Use the various ways of speaking that you have. Prosody, pace, and volume especially were key ones. This creates a much more varied, much more interesting and engaging speaking experience.

Finally, the way that he exemplified the ideas in his talk right in his talk, by showing how they worked to make it interesting—I love that. Really shows the value of it, really demonstrates it, more than just having a list.

[readreflect]

Mark Manson — The Confidence Conundrum

The Confidence Conundrum: confidence is knowing you’re good at something. But to be good at something, you need to be confident. What do we do with that?

We don’t just try to believe we are good at something—but instead:

The big charade with confidence is that it has nothing to do with the comfort of what we achieve and everything to do with the comfort of what we don’t achieve. People who are confident in business are confident because they’re comfortable with failure.

People who are confident in their social lives are confident because they’re comfortable with rejection.

—

The whole problem with lack of confidence affecting performance in the real-world is that you constantly question and second-guess the reasons you’re not good at whatever it is you’re doing. This cleverly reframes the question to make us realize that. It reminds me of the idea of cultivating negative capability.

[readreflect]

NPR — Invisibilia — The Power Of Categories

Alix and Lulu examine how categories define us — how, if given a chance, humans will jump into one category or another. People need them, want them. This show looks at what categories provide for us.

A few things...

Do we feel more comfortable when we are categorized? What is this need to categorize?

Are we in the beginning of seeing what it's really like to be in a melting pot with discrimination, and will we come to a more nuanced understanding of race in the future? Will we, potentially, tolerate "white-people only country clubs" as much as we do "Indian-only retirement communities"?

[readreflect]

Nathan Heller — The New Yorker — Do Scandinavians Have It All Figured Out? - The New Yorker

Though being challenged in recent times, the Scandinavian model of social welfare works [potentially because it built later on than other nations]. Countries like Sweden believe in an economic model where deregulate markets don't always end up in equilibrium, but rather poorer people will lead to decreased consumption and a declining market. And re: freedom: "How free are you to realize yourself… if your education depends on your parents' wealth?"

As good as their culture is, it suffers from homogeneity, and it's the melting pot of American identity that makes that sort of cultural cohesion difficult. As such, while Americans would love to "wish [the Scandinavian system] on anyone else", Americans really want something different from the "practicality and balance" of the Scandinavian model—something more ambitious—despite not delivering on that ambitious level. "A Boothian observer of the U.S. would notice its capacity to overpromise and underdeliver."

—

Great article about the Scandinavian system. Definitely an interesting take on the American ideal, though I wonder if there's a way to reach that regardless. The ideas on freedom and the free market are clear as well, and probably something that the current discussion with Piketty and inequality and all are a part of.

[readreflect]

Sparring Mind— Should You Compare Yourself to Others?

Gregory Ciotti argues that we should compare ourselves to others—partly because we need to see greatness to perform it ourselves—but when we do so, we need to compare not the result but rather the craft. Comparisons should not demotivate—they should show us what is good, and raise the bar for us without going on one extreme (demotivating ourselves) or the other (

—

Great stuff. I've always felt like the stoic approach that is common in 'zen'-ish thinking and recent personal development stuff creates a fantasy world. We have to face the realities, but we need to be more resilient. What's the thing that we can do to compare ourselves and get better, without demotivating ourselves? Thinking about craft and not exactly result is a great way... craft gives us a way to think about how to do something, a way forward, whereas comparing results is one-dimensional—almost always "I didn't do this, so I suck".

[readreflect]

New power, Heimans argues, is the more collaborative, networked, transparent and open form of power that we see manifested in Occupy, Airbnb, Kickstarter, and other networks. They differ from the closed, top-down systems of power. These networks can redefine how we act and relate to governments and organizations, by creating a more collaborative, open, and people-driven society and government.

—

Cool talk and good message. He also worries about how new power networks can act for harm, which I think is very true. The issue sis that a lot of these networks can’t control for quality. The egalitarian nature of them, e.g. Occupy, can erode quality and may necessitate a centralized power, or some distributed assurance of quality, to maintain coherence. Good talk though.

[readreflect]

Michael Sacasas — What Do We Want, Really?

I was in Amish country last week. Several times a day I heard the clip-clop of horse hooves and the whirring of buggy wheels coming down the street and then receding into the distance--a rather soo...

Often, we genuinely believe something—like wanting to eat better or that we need to revive character in the modern age—but we rarely face and take on the consequences of doing so.

—

Really interesting and well-written article. The key thing is that we rarely think about the trade-offs of actions. Ted Cruz in narrative-control does this in the inverse fashion: he understands the trade-offs of making a landmark federal law, and reinterprets that in the context of states’ rights.

We need to think of trade-offs. In psychology, this is huge: we have cognitive biases, but they’re almost all beneficial in that they dramatically decrease cognitive load. And then we need to see what side or what balance we fall on, and carefully understand our convictions and actual values.

[readreflect]

read+reflect is temporarily going summary-only so I can get my head back in the game.

There's a difference between work and practice. Work: playing basketball, performing music. Practice: practicing layups, practicing notes. How do you do this for something like writing?

Complicated skills are really just a collection of many simple skills moving together. Learning any complex skill, then, is a process of simultaneously learning many simple skills. Most of those simple skills could be learned fairly easily if taught in isolation. The problem is that they are frequently entangled together and can’t be separated.

Reduce the degrees of freedom: isolate one thing/skill. Then:

Re-do the skill with past work (e.g. research in writing), or

Do the work, then re-do the skill part in that work

Limiting the degrees of freedom is a way of holding the performance of all the competing skills fixed, so all your attention can be devoted to the unfixed element.

[readreflect]

…we dropped everything and traveled the world together through 14 different countries over a 6 month period. Everyone kept asking me, “How is that possible?” and “How can you afford to do that?” and I would ask them, “Who told you it was impossible?” and “How can you afford not to?”

“The Possibility of the Impossible” by Rob Phillips https://medium.com/p/57d142cc3dd3

[readreflect]

Putin isn't as brilliant a strategist as some may put him out to be. His gains in Ukraine, in aggregate, are few, and three main things resulted: 1) a renewed interest in NATO security of Eastern Europe, 2) a tarnished Russian image especially due to the MH17 incident that makes Russia feared but not respected (Russia as a protector of state sovereignty is now a laughingstock), and 3) economic pressures from both outside (sanctions that affect Russia's economy and make it inward-facing, such as Europe's renewed interest in securing their natural gas e.g. from US not Russia) and inside (Russian entrepreneurs and executives who are now being sanctioned that are putting pressure on the Kremlin.) It's undone so much of Russia's image-building and whatnot such as Sochi. — Very interesting. The situation seems to have definitely backfired, especially since it has scared Western nations and tarnished its image. Economic factors could be fulcrums/wedges, which I think is the most salient point here. If Russia wants to succeed, its economy must, and that forces them to at least comply with the international order since the West still holds the cards. Might not be good in the long run, but if it prevents rogue states from doing these outlandish actions, maybe that's necessary.

[readreflect]

Russia is no longer trying to change its population and mold it. A dictatorship is necessary for this, since voting and democracy assume the self-interest and self-determination is necessary. Thus lack of dualism means democracy might be able to possible.

[readreflect]

Where is the real cost and complexity in a system coming from?

[readreflect]

"...the inevitable responsible party is the person who bears the consequences of what is done." The responsible party is who the consequences happen to. It's really about incentives. Who really is incentivized to win in a situation? If you're a doctor, yes, they have an incentive to help you, but at the end of the line, you are incentivized to keep yourself healthy. If you're a bar, are you incentivized to keep your patrons relatively coherent? We need to make ourselves the responsible party and see ourselves as such when necessary. And act accordingly. Many of us seem to detach ourselves from that, maybe as a defense mechanism. We try to hold others responsible and some like that, if their incentives are out of line with our own. Might be something to write about later.