How to Be a Human Animal, Chapter 17: Conversations Worth Having

Chapter 17: Conversations Worth Having

Greetings once again, hypothetical newborn baby!  Instead, I'm here once again to teach you another Life Lesson. I had to learn these at the School of Hard Knocks. No, I'm not claiming that you're not as able as me to learn those lessons.  I'm just trying to spare you some pain and frustration.  OK OK!  I admit that this is merely a thought experiment by which I am trying to set forth the most important things I've learned in 65 years. By the way, if you aren’t completely satisfied with these lessons, I’ll refund all of the money you paid for them ! This is Chapter 17 already.  Wow.  Aren't you tired of hearing my voice? No?  OK. Then I'll continue. If you need to review any of the past lessons, can find them all here. 

Today we’re going to talk about conversations. That term doesn’t simply mean talking with someone any more than food is defined as anything you put your mouth. Er, I can already see you drooling at you stare at my car keys. Just settle down now . . . OK, you can suck on your toes while you listen. That’s cool.

There are many types of conversations, but they fall on a continuum from simple factual exchanges on (“Is it raining?” “Yes”) to collaborations in which the parties set out to figure out a complex topic as a joint exercise by celebrating each others’ contributions.

Psychologist Scott Barry Kauffman recently Tweeted:

Imagine what discourse would be like if instead of it being conceptualized as a "match" to see who "wins", discussions were seen as mutual attempts to get at a shared truth or seen as a shared mission to get outside of ourselves and transcend our individual perspectives.

That would be a nice world, the kind I can imagine happening 24/7 at the big house where the philosophers and other "virtuous pagans" hang out just on the other side of Dante's River Acheron. You, however need to live in the world you were handed. You ended up on a Grade A planet in a Grade C era with regard to conversations.

Right now, your interactions will mostly be where some other baby grabs your toy and you cry. Here’s the problem you'll encounter when you get older: Even if you optimistically join a discussion hoping it is of the “Kauffman” variety, that doesn’t guarantee an enlightening and engaging experience. It takes two to tango and many people would rather honk at you (don’t look at ME as I say that!) than celebrate each other’s differing perspectives. Tango is the correct metaphor because, at their best, conversations are like dancing with other people. If either of you are stepping on the others’ feet, neither of you are going to have a good time.

Here's why this era is so fraught for those who want to share complex ideas with others (especially on contentious topics): We live in a time where the so-called news media makes much of its money by stirring up conflict and even hate. It’s the same thing with social media. The companies in charge of these things have decided in their corporate consciences that it's quite simple, actually: no conflict, no money. This has wrecked a pretty decent (though admittedly imperfect) conversational thing we had going on for decades.

Here’s how it so often plays out: Let’s say that you join a conversation in an open frame of mind, interested in freely sharing perspectives on an issue, but the other person is not so inclined. The other person, having been steeped in news media and social media, and now cooked to an extra-fever pitch of loneliness and rage during the pandemic, is committed to scoring points, schooling you and “winning” the discussion. I know, right? Why should there ever be a “winner” to a discussion, but that’s how many people see it these day. And they have plenty of tactic for “winning,” including these: [More . . . ]

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How to Be a Human Animal, Chapter 15: The Danger of Empathy: Exhibit A: The Coddling of Children

Chapter 15: The Danger of Empathy: Exhibit A: The Coddling of Children.

I’m back again to preach to you ad nauseum today, hypothetical newborn baby! I'm here once again to teach you some of the many Life Lessons I was forced to learn at the School of Hard Knocks. My intentions are honorable. I’m here to spare you some suffering, but based on today’s topic I am concerned that you might be better off leaning these lessons on your own, much as I did. BTW, you can find all fifteen lessons in one easy link.

You were born into a complex adaptive system. Yes, you do have exquisite powers of perception and memory but they are often no match for the complexity of your environment. Hence, the law of unintended consequences: You will often find that your well-intended actions will result in outcomes that are not the ones you intended or foresaw. The result will often be disappointing. We have a saying, “No good deed goes unpunished.” Sometimes, though, you do something and it turns out wildly better than you could ever have hoped. When that happens, you might be tempted to claim that you knew it all along, but that would often be an illustration of the “hindsight bias.” https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Hindsight_bias

To illustrate how things can go unexpectedly awry, I will start by referring to the work of Paul Bloom, who wrote a 2016 book titled: Against Empathy: The Case for Rational Compassion. He defines “empathy” as follows: “Empathy is the act of coming to experience the world as you think someone else does." He further describes empathy as "a spotlight directing attention and aid to where it's needed."  According to Bloom, empathy is an emotion, not a good tool for moral decision-making. “Compassion,” on the other hand, is feeling concern or compassion for someone. Bloom contrasts empathy with "rational compassion," which can productively be used to “make decisions based on considerations of cost and benefits." Empathy, by contrast, has no such protective limitations, meaning that empathy often leads to ill-considered policies. [More . . . ]

Continue ReadingHow to Be a Human Animal, Chapter 15: The Danger of Empathy: Exhibit A: The Coddling of Children

How to Be a Human Animal, Chapter 14: You Have Almost No Understanding of What is Going On.

Chapter 14: You Have Almost No Understanding of What is Going On.

Hello again, hypothetical newborn baby!  I'm here to teach you some of the many Life Lessons I was forced to learn the hard way.  Here are all fourteen lessons in one easy link. 

Let's start off by noting that at this point in your life your parents, your crib, your blanket . . . and me, of course are your entire universe. That's all you've got in front of you, yet you are feeling like there is nothing else that could be worthwhile and there is nothing at all outside of your bedroom door.

Let me tell you about my situation. My toe is hurting.  Nothing major, but it's red and throbbing. When I think about my hurting toe, that thought gets quite big in my consciousness. It almost seems like my throbbing toe is the only thing in the universe.

Here's another example: When I'm thinking about a lawsuit while walking to court through the downtown area, I'm barely aware of anything other than what I'm going to tell the judge when I arrive. I'm not noticing any other people or any cars or that new restaurant going up even though those thing are right in front of me as I walk. Isn’t it weird how our ability to attend to things is so incredibly limited?

Using a technique called conversation shadowing, psychologists Broadbent and Treisman demonstrated that one’s ability to absorb multiple simultaneous conversations is severely limited. Attention is bottlenecked at the site of working memory  during perception. In 1956, George Miller pointed, “[T]he span of absolute judgment and the span of immediate memory impose severe limitations on the amount of information that we are able to receive, process and remember.” George A. Miller, “The Magical Number Seven, Plus or Minus Two: Some Limits on our Capacity for Processing Information." Given that humans have such tiny attentional windows, it is surprising the extent to which we take it for granted that we share the same world. The real world is laughingly beyond our capacity to fathom without rampant simplification. Just because we can say the phrase "the world" doesn't mean we can comprehend more than a trillionth of it at any particular moment.

This is one of the downsides to having a human body. We are incredibly limited in what we can attend to at each moment. That's Part One of a two-part whammy that affects us human animals every hour of every day. This attentional limitation in attention interacts with an equally important phenomenon that I have long thought of as the “illusion of fullness." I'm referring to this: it seems like whatever we are currently seeing or pondering, it's somehow enough for us to feel well-informed when the stream of information we are getting is almost nothing at all.

Morgan House wrote the following in “Ideas that Changed my Life”:

Your personal experiences make up maybe 0.00000001% of what’s happened in the world but maybe 80% of how you think the world works. People believe what they’ve seen happen exponentially more than what they read about has happened to other people, if they read about other people at all. We’re all biased to our own personal history. Everyone. If you’ve lived through hyperinflation, or a 50% bear market, or were born to rich parents, or have been discriminated against, you both understand something that people who haven’t experienced those things never will, but you’ll also likely overestimate the prevalence of those things happening again, or happening to other people.
It's like we see the world through fish-eye lenses. The things that are in front of us look very big, indeed. Yet the things that are not directly in front of us are barely visible or not visible at all. Our perceptual machinery make us (and I’m writing this in a non-judgmental way) extremely self-centered. We are condemned to make severely overconfident and skewed generalizations and to engage in a lifelong adventure of sense-making based on not-nearly-enough awareness about the billion ring circus into which we have been plopped. Each of us is only one out of 8 billion people. You are almost nothing at all in the scheme of things and you are experiencing only the tiniest speck of what is going on, yet it feels like you are sitting in the front row VIP seat to the most important event in the universe.

It takes conscious effort to know what is happening outside of ourselves. This makes it easy to cast ourselves as the heroes of our own story, justifying our routine of putting half of our conscious horsepower to work doing PR, in-person or on Facebook, tooting to everyone who will listen that we are saving the planet by switching to LED bulbs or whatever.

Skip this paragraph if want to continue being the hero of your own story. Human cognitive machinery massively distorts our sense of morality. With very little effort, we can cause any troublesome moral issue to vanish simply by not paying attention to it. In many cases we develop (sometimes consciously at first) deeply ingrained habits of not paying attention to certain aspects of the world, making our immorality conveniently unconscious. Here's a common habit among people who are financially comfortable: Not-thinking that on here on our planet, a child starves to death every 5 seconds. If you have habituated yourself to not-think about this horrible and undeniable fact, it is quite easy to blow a large sums of money in clear conscience on things like haircuts for your poodle, vacations in far-flung places and steady streams of meals at high-priced restaurants. If this troublesome thought ever bubbles up into consciousness, we scrub away all traces of inchoate guilt by reminding ourselves that everyone else we know is behaves much like us and then we run off to purchase some new porch furniture for our vacation home, thus pushing thoughts of child starvation off the tiny stage of attention. If by some chance we experience the prickly thought we are hypocritical, immoral and selfish because we purposely don't think about starving children, we can take care of that troublesome thought too by thinking about something else. We can fix most of our most disturbing thoughts merely by thinking about something else.

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Continue ReadingHow to Be a Human Animal, Chapter 14: You Have Almost No Understanding of What is Going On.

How to be a Human Animal, Chapter 9: Learn How to Do Millions of Little Things

Chapter 9: Learn How to Do Millions of Little Things

OK! I’m back with more advice for a newborn baby. This is my ninth lesson on how to thrive in the complex world. Baby, as you have probably figured out, I’m giving you the advice that I wish I had learned earlier and easier. I’m spoon-feeding you, but not with baby food. I'm feeding you with lessons I learned at the school of hard knocks.

What should you be doing when you are very young? You would think that I would tell you to work hard to do some really big and important things, but I’m going to suggest the opposite: You should get busy learning lots and lots of little things. These countless little things will enable you to accomplish big things decades later.

In the context of natural selection, Richard Dawkins once used the metaphor the problem of scaling the extremely high sheer cliff of Mount Improbable. Here’s how this metaphor came to be. People are amazed at the human eye (as they should be—-see Chapter 7) but they erroneously conclude “It’s impossible that such an amazing thing could evolve! It would be like a human being jumping thousands of feet into the air in order to get to the top of a sheer cliff.” Dawkins then lays out the clear evidence that many extremely simple eyes were actually probable in early life forms. He then describes the steps by which very simple eyes could be improved incrementally, in thousands of ways over millions of generations. There is no need to leap thousands of feet to get to the top of the sheer front cliff of Mount Improbable. That’s because you can drive around to the back side of Mount Improbable where you will find a long inclined hiking path you can use to walk slowly up the hundreds of switchbacks to get to the same high point of the mountain. Thus, there are two different methods to get to the top, one of them impossible (leaping) and the other achievable with determination and time (hiking a longer path of switchbacks).

I’m 65 years old now and I’ve done some a few things that have impressed some other people. Every one of those difficult things took a large number of mundane-seeming and achievable skills and years or decades of time. I learned countless numbers of smallish achievable things that added up over the decades. Things like learning how to read in the first grade, or learning to play a C chord on a guitar, or learning how to use a computer mouse, or learning how a camera aperture works. My “secret weapon” is that I’m a scrapper—I don’t give up. I grind away on something until I figure it out or until I’m exhausted. I’ve learned many things by sheer grit and experimentation. After decades of doing this, I have accumulated a large took kit of skills that can be used for achieving complex things like being a lawyer or composing music or raising children or publishing a book of my digital art. My “secret” is that I have exploited “compounding” to my advantage.

Shane Parrish of Farnham Street notes that “Compounding” is a concept commonly used in the realm of finance. It refers to making interest on your interest, a phenomenon familiar to anyone trying to retire. Parrish notes that compounding is also a useful concept when applied to things outside of finance.  In “The Mundanity of Excellence,” Daniel F. Chambliss makes the case that numerous low-level skills can be leveraged into extraordinary achievements. In fact, he reminds us that great talent can happen only when we stand on the shoulders of numerous sub-talents. Excellence is the icing on the cake of mundacity:

Excellence is mundane. Superlative performance is really a confluence of dozens of small skills or activities, each one learned or stumbled upon, which have been carefully drilled into habit and then are fitted together in a synthesized whole. There is nothing extraordinary or superhuman in any one of those actions; only the fact that they are done consistently and correctly, and all together, produce excellence. When a swimmer learns a proper flip turn in the freestyle races, she will swim the race a bit faster; then a streamlined push off from the wall, with the arms squeezed together over the head, and a little faster; then how to place the hands in the water so no air is cupped in them; then how to lift them over the water; then how to lift weights to properly build strength, and how to eat the right foods, and to wear the best suits for racing, and on and on. Each of those tasks seems small in itself, but each allows the athlete to swim a bit faster. And having learned and consistently practiced all of them together, and many more besides, the swimmer may compete in the Olympic Games. The winning of a gold medal is nothing more than the synthesis of a countless number of such little things—even if some of them are done unwittingly or by others, and thus called “luck.”

I completely agree with Shane Parrish and Daniel Chambliss. Anything impressive that I’ve done is the result of 1,000 tiny things I’ve worked on much earlier in my life.That has included numerous little failures as well as work-arounds. I did these things because I have always been curious, energetic and relentless. Frankly, I have never done anything impressive that didn't take more than a decade of work that was then aggregated.

But here is a warning: Compounding can run in the opposite direction too. Enormous failures start with little missteps. Here’s one that is based on a real life story with which I’m familiar: “Hey, my wife had surgery and she has some leftover opioid painkiller. What the hell, I’ll try one and see how I feel.” Fast-forward five years and that person has a long history of sliding into many bad habits. He lost his focus and his will to achieve. He also lost his self-made business, destroyed his relationship with his kids. His only driving passion became his quest to find new ways of getting high.

I’ll end on a high note: One of the biggest ways compounding benefits you is the many small things you do to improve your reputation. As the saying goes, a good reputation is hard to earn and easy to lose. After you’ve spent your entire life trying to be trustworthy, truthful and kind, you’ll find that your reputation opens new doors for you, over and over. It’s easy to forget, though that this “superpower” of a good reputation was something you assembled over decades through truth-telling, hard work and kindness. Similarly, good health is usually the result of hundreds of mundane-seeming habits and routines.

Again, my advice to you is to aim low. Do lots and lots of little things. The world is your playroom. Practice many low-level skills and master them. Decades later you will be able to aggregate these into what other people think of as a super power, even though you know better.

Continue ReadingHow to be a Human Animal, Chapter 9: Learn How to Do Millions of Little Things

How to Be a Human Animal. Chapter 3: The Most Important Fork in the Road: Approach versus Avoidance

Chapter 3: The Most Important Fork in the Road: Approach versus Avoidance

Is the world something to be feared or something to be enjoyed? That is the most important decision you will need to make, day after day. Does the world seem like a scary haunted house or like a big playroom? The stance you take, avoidance versus approach, will have a profound effect, not only on what you accomplish, but on who you turn out to be.

I'll admit that Planet Earth is filled with many dangers, including spiders and snakes, but also automobiles and addictions to dangerous drugs. There are innumerable ways to ruin or lose a life and we are wired to see many of these dangers much more saliently than we see the safe and happy things. Daniel Kahneman teased out this deep instinct with his Prospect Theory. We see risks twice as big as we see benefits.

We have been wired to assume the worst. A snapped twig in the darkness of the forest might be a puppy, but the body’s operating assumption is to run because the joy of finding a puppy whereas the danger of a grizzly bear can kill you. We are wired to run at all of Life’s snapped twigs and metaphorical snapped twigs. Those twigs are everywhere, leading many people to curl up in a fetal position, afraid to leave their houses.

Psychologist Jonathan Haidt characterizes this choice of Approach versus Avoidance as “the fundamental question of life.” This attitude affects almost everything we do, including how we approach education.

As soon as life began moving, as soon as you get little tails on bacteria, you have to have some mechanism for deciding this way or that? Approach or avoid? And all of the rest of the billion years of brain evolution is just commentary on that question.And so the human brain has these gigantic tracts of neurons on the front left cortex, specialized for approach. And then a frontal cortex specialized for avoid. And so all sorts of things go with this. So when we’re in explorer mode, some features of it are, we’re more, we’re curious. We take risks. You might feel like a kid in a candy shop with all these different things to explore. You think for yourself. And the model of a student in this mindset would be whoever grows the most by graduation, or whoever learns the most by graduation wins. If that’s your attitude, boy, are you going to profit from being in college for four years.

Conversely, if you spent most of your college years with your front, right cortex activated, because you’re told everyone’s against you, everyone hates you, you’ll never get ahead. It’s always been this way. Then it always will be this way. If that’s what you believe, you’re in defend mode, threat mode, and then you don’t trust people. Your goal is not to be curious. It’s to be safe. You’re afraid of things. And you think about books in terms of certain speakers in terms of danger versus safety. You see threats everywhere and you will cling to your team. And your motto is: If we defeat them, then we win. And that’s the incoherence that has been with us since 2015. We had an influx of students who were playing a very different game where everything was danger and conflict. And no, that’s not what a university [is]. You’ve misunderstood what we’re about and why you’re here. And so it’s been a tragic waste.

So what is your decision this moment and every other moment yet to come? Are you going to be an explorer, seeking out new worlds with uncertainty and risk? Or are you going to obsessively try to be “safe,” meaning that you will hide away and tremble as life passes you by?

Explorers often fail, they know it and they still explore. They know that failure usually doesn’t hurt you or kill you. They know that failure is a teaching tool and a way to build strong character. Long before Carol Dweck wrote about “growth mindsets,” the famous explorers felt it in their bones. They knew that human animals are antifragile, even though they didn’t know that word: they knew that they would thrive in the world because it is filled with stressors, shocks, volatility, noise, mistakes, faults, attacks, or failures. They understood Nietzsche’s point that “what doesn’t destroy you often makes you stronger.” They fe;t the wisdom of the Stoics in their bones: “The Obstacle is the way.” They would agree with Woody Allen’s observation that showing up is 80 percent of life.

There is one thing that does makes Explorers tremble: The thought that after they die, someone would carve this epitaph on their tombstone: “Here lies _____ ______ , who was afraid to leave the house.”

But what if you are afraid? What if you worry that you will get laughed at or humiliated, or criticized or called a name, much less that you might get hurt or even die? Heroes feel all of these things. There is nothing incompatible about being afraid and simultaneously being a hero. Heroes and explorers make themselves move forward even when they are scared. One of my favorite illustrations of this was noted by Nietzsche:

Sometimes during a battle he could not help trembling. Then he talked to his body as one talks to a servant. He said to it: “You tremble, carcass; but if you knew where I am taking you right now, you would tremble a lot more.”
Nietzsche cited (in The Gay Science, Intro Book V) this quote as an illustration of his own conception of fearlessness (attributed to Henri de la Tour d’Auvergne, Vicomte de Turenne (1611-75) a great French general).

So go hither and explore the world! Try new things. Plan to get knocked down, criticized and ridiculed. And then get up again and again. Channel Cool Hand Luke. Never ever give up.

Continue ReadingHow to Be a Human Animal. Chapter 3: The Most Important Fork in the Road: Approach versus Avoidance