Be careful who you choose as your friends, because you tend to imitate them.

Think carefully about who you will spend time with, because you tend to imitate the people around you. That is the message from this article from BBC, "How Your Friends Change Your Habits - For Better or Worse." Excerpt:

“There is good reason to believe that when we use normative behaviour it makes us feel good because we’re connecting with a social group,” says Higgs. “If you are with a new social group, you are more likely to imitate behaviours.”

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Movement is not necessarily progress (though it feels like it)

I've often written that humans are prone to act without a legitimate plan because it seems like Motion is Progress. No one will accuse you of failing to do something if you are doing, literally, something, even if your are acting in ways that are nonsensical, harmful, counterproductive. Motion is Progress is a fallacy. Doing something is often a bad idea. This "syndrome" is explored here by Farnam Street.

Movement offers shelter from failure. When you’re in motion, you feel like you’re doing something. We convince ourselves that as long as we’re in motion, we can’t fail. As long as we’re doing something, anything, failure can’t really find us. Movement feeds our ego. Our evolutionary programming craves the validation of others. In a world that values action and short soundbites, nuanced conversations are hard. Others don’t have time to really listen to your nuanced story as they run to their next meeting. And telling people that you’re doing nothing results in disapproving looks. Movement offers the drug of validation to the outside world. It is far easier to tell others that we’re doing something than doing nothing. And so we do.

Continue ReadingMovement is not necessarily progress (though it feels like it)

How to Reclaim the Hours of Your Life for the Things you Value

I'm really enjoying the writing of time-management writer Laura Vanderkam.  More important, I'm using her ideas to change my life. I discovered Laura on TED. Last week I read her 2018 book, "Off the Clock: Feel Less Busy while Getting More Done."

Laura's first order of business: In order to know how to get more out of life, you need to track your time to learn how you are actually spending your hours. Creating this inventory is critically important because humans are notoriously error-plagued when they attempt to intuitively account for how they use their time. We fool ourselves relentlessly. Laura points to studies showing that we claim to be working far more hours than we actually work. For example, people claiming to work 75 hours per week typically worked only 50 hours per week. I've been tracking my time for more than a week using a free spreadsheet, Google Sheets. My rows consist of 20 categories (sleeping,attorney work, exercising, entertainment, altruism, eating, reading, wasting time on social media, etc). My columns are the days of the week. Fitbit keeps exercise and sleep counts accurate and an insurance company app tells me house much time I'm actually driving. I estimate the other activities, inputting the data several times per day. It only takes a few minutes per day once you set up your spreadsheet.

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More on Political Opinions and Tribal Pressures

At The Atlantic, Jay Van Bavel discusses recent experiments showing that we are not permanently polarized with regard to our political positions. The article is titled, How Political Opinions Change.

In a recent experiment, we showed it is possible to trick people into changing their political views. In fact, we could get some people to adopt opinions that were directly opposite of their original ones. . . . A powerful shaping factor about our social and political worlds is how they are structured by group belonging and identities... We are also far more motivated to reason and argue to protect our own or our group’s views. Indeed, some researchers argue that our reasoning capabilities evolved to serve that very function.
People tend to take more extreme positions of their same viewpoint when challenged with information supporting the opposite view. The trick is to suggest to the person that they actually held the opposite view through false-feedback. The take-away: "people have a pretty high degree of flexibility about their political views once you strip away the things that normally make them defensive."

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Scientific Reasoning, Tribal Reasoning

It's not enough to be a scientifically savvy person, because your scientific savviness can be hijacked by your tribal impulses, leading to such things as intelligent people vigorously arguing that climate change is a hoax. That is the conclusion of Dan Kahan, writing for The Atlantic in "Why Smart People Are Vulnerable to Putting Tribe Before Truth."

Unless accompanied by another science-reasoning trait, the capacities associated with science literacy can actually impede public recognition of the best available evidence and deepen pernicious forms of cultural polarization.

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