The false belief in multi-tasking and the price we pay for believing in it

At New Yorker, "HOW TODAY'S COMPUTERS WEAKEN OUR BRAIN" makes some good points. First of all, humans, though they claim to be good at multi-tasking, are terrible at it.

[Humans are] not very good at achieving extreme states of concentration through sustained attention. It takes great training and effort to maintain attention on one object—in what Buddhists call concentration meditation—because the brain is highly susceptible to both voluntary and involuntary demands on its attention. Second, the brain is not good at conscious multitasking, or trying to pay active attention to more than one thing at once.

I am living proof of this struggle to focus.  When I am writing anything serious, I cloister myself in a room with phone off, door closed, no music.  That's how it must be if I want to write something I'll be proud of.   I can write in bad environments, but the product is often merely passable, not something excellent. The article then makes a strong argument that modern computers mostly exacerbate this problem we have with focusing:

[T]oday’s computers feature programming and writing tools more powerful than anything available in the twentieth century. But, in a different way, each of these tasks would be much harder: on a modern machine, each man would face a more challenging battle with distraction. Kafka might start writing his book and then, like most lawyers, realize he’d better check e-mail; so much for “Das Urteil.” Kerouac might get caught in his Twitter feed, or start blogging about his road trip. Wozniak might have corrected an erroneous Wikipedia entry in the midst of working on Breakout, and wrecked the collaboration that later became Apple.

Kafka, Kerouac, and Wozniak had one advantage over us: they worked on machines that did not readily do more than one thing at a time, easily yielding to our conflicting desires. And, while distraction was surely available—say, by reading the newspaper, or chatting with friends—there was a crucial difference. Today’s machines don’t just allow distraction; they promote it. The Web calls us constantly, like a carnival barker, and the machines, instead of keeping us on task, make it easy to get drawn in—and even add their own distractions to the mix. In short: we have built a generation of “distraction machines” that make great feats of concentrated effort harder instead of easier.

It’s time to create more tools that help us with what our brains are bad at, such as staying on task. They should help us achieve states of extreme concentration and focus, not aid in distraction. We need a new generation of technologies that function more like Kerouac’s scroll or Kafka’s typewriter.

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Hillary Clinton: China was bad when it spied on its own citizens.

Now that we know that the NSA planted spyware on 50,000 networks, and now that we know numerous other revelations thanks to the courage of Edward Snowden, It's time for Hillary Clinton to follow the logic of her criticism of China four years ago. The following excerpt is from the U.K. Guardian:

Less than four years ago Hillary Clinton, chastising China, declared that "countries or individuals that engage in cyber attacks should face consequences and international condemnation. In an interconnected world, an attack on one nation's networks can be an attack on all." Given what we now know to be the "Five Eyes" complete stranglehold on the world's internet infrastructure, how can we possibly reconcile repeated American appeals to internet freedom and condemnation of Chinese internet monitoring with US-sponsored network hacking?

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The danger of too much happiness

At Edge.org, After explaining that "happiness" is a much more nuanced concept that traditionally conceived, June Gruber explains that positive emotion is a often-neglected topic. In fact, she has found is that positive emotions can present danger if not kept "in balance." Based on psychological experiments, Gruber also concludes that there is a danger to making feeling good one's goal.

We all think that positive emotion is something that should enhance our ability to creatively think about solving problems, that it just opens our repertoire to pick from different possible ideas or strategies. We find, though, that when people actually go beyond a critical threshold—hit a peak and pass that —they actually have a harder time solving problems effectively; they become more rigid or inflexible in their behavioral repertoires. It seems to be the case that too much positive emotion, thinking especially about these high arousal states of excitement and joy, actually leads us to become less creative. Then the piece that I love the most is thinking about what are the action tendencies associated with some of our most common positive emotions. If we think of some of them, especially excitement or enthusiasm, they motivate us importantly to seek out rewards in the environment, to try to obtain them, and once we obtain them, to go about savoring them. In many ways I think it narrows our focus on rewards, how can we find them, attain them, and keep them for as long as possible. What we find is that individuals who experience this sort of heightened magnitude of positive emotion (this is measured in a lot of different ways, using self-report scales, and also with children, parent and teacher-rated observations) out of balance, it causes you to neglect important threats and dangers, and pieces of information in the environment around you. And so as a result we see associations with greater risk taking—engaging in reckless driving, substance abuse, unsafe sexual practices. Some people would argue that this may help explain this one finding: looking at children who were rated in terms of their dispositional cheerfulness, and followed them longitudinally over the lifespan, and what you find is that children who were rated as more highly cheerful actually had a greater mortality risk later in life. There could be many reasons to account for this, but I think one possibility might be, at least tentatively, that there's something about heightened positive emotion beyond a critical threshold that we need to be careful of, and think about keeping in balance. In my lab, we try to study this in the clinical context of individuals suffering from emotional disorders. One entry point that we've begun to look at is among individuals with mania that show some characteristic signs of heightened positive emotion and this appetitive system that's kind of go, go, go towards rewards, and finding (not surprisingly) that these are individuals who engage in all kinds of reckless behavior. They wipe out their bank accounts, they destroy some of the most important social bonds in their lives with their partners through lots of sexual promiscuity. They will report when you talk to them, and I interviewed a lot of these people clinically, that they just felt so good—that nothing else could enter their mind, that it was a one mind that was really all about feeling good, and finding ways to keep that going. I think this first theme, and it's a new theme, needed a lot more empirical attention on it. What it's beginning to suggest is something about human nature that suggests that maybe we need to put aside these conventional notions of trying to maximize positive emotions, and that positive emotion may be in line with many psychological states that are subject to this principal of moderation. We really want to be experiencing things in balance— not too little, or not too much—and in many ways it's also consistent with biological theories, postulating optimal functioning, and moving towards a sense of homeostasis, or equilibrium. . . . . in many cases the more we try not to be unhappy, the more unhappy we seem to be. So it suggests that in many ways this is this paradoxical backfiring, and in many ways that if we want to have affective or psychological goals for ourselves, then we ought not to make that the end focal point in itself, but perhaps to be focusing on other things from which those emotions might emerge.
Follow-up question by Daniel Dennett: There is this question of whether we're making a big mistake in trying to cocoon our children in a world of positive emotions, and shield them from ever really experiencing fear, or loneliness, or boredom, and I wonder has there been research on this.
GRUBER: Your intuition is absolutely right, and there's been some work on this. We've been doing some with a colleague of ours, Michael Norton, that many of you know, looking at this concept of emotional diversity. If you think about it just within a broader sense of ecosystems, diversity is really important for health and survival of that particular system. We started taking this looking at the inner psychological system and what is most important for well-being. And when we talk about well-being, we're talking about not only psychological function, but actually physical health functioning, so we have these large medical reports from people. What we're finding is that it's the diversity of emotional experiences that both cross-sectionally and longitudinally are predicting some of our best outcomes. You want a mixture of things. It's fine to have some joy, but you also want sadness; you want the experience of guilt; you want the experience of loss. All of these things are really important in building a psychological strength to know how to experience these emotions, to know how to cope with them, and to get information from the world around you, too. In terms of how does this relate to raising children, I think as much as you can expose them to different kinds of emotions, and not let any one kind predominate. I think that's what's going to be most critical, the diversity of experiences at the affective level.

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Investigative journalism is being killed off

The remarks by Paul Steiger, ProPublica Founder upon receiving an award from the Committee to Protect Journalists:

What has changed is the position of us, American journalists. We are still far better off than our beleaguered cousins in danger zones abroad, of course. But financially, I don’t need to tell this group of the hammering our industry has taken in the last decade. Publications shrinking or even closing, journalists bought out or laid off, beats shrunk or eliminated. And now, more recently, we are facing new barriers to our ability to do our jobs – denial of access and silencing of sources. For the starkest comparison, I urge any of you who haven’t already done so to read last month’s report, commissioned by CPJ and written by Len Downie, former editor of the Washington Post. It lays out in chilling detail how an administration that took office promising to be the most transparent in history instead has carried out the most intrusive surveillance of reporters ever attempted. It also has made the most concerted effort at least since the plumbers and the enemies lists of the Nixon Administration to intimidate officials in Washington from ever talking to a reporter. Consider this: As we now know from the Snowden documents, investigators seeking to trace the source of a leak can go back and discover anyone in government who has talked by phone or email with the reporter who broke the story. Match that against the list of all who had access to the leaked info and voila!

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