I May Not Have Said What I Thought I Was Saying

I don't know about gaming sessions, but #11 is who I play in real life:

Reads a lot of theory. No one knows wtf they're ever talking about.

Yes, that's me. It's why I've spent my whole life working to improve my communication skills, since that's not a natural area of strength for me but I want to be understood. Even so, most of the time when I try I still feel I may not have said what I thought I was saying. That's an actual quote from a work email I wrote this week, by the way, hoping to insure we hadn't had a misunderstanding.

Sometimes I think this is a lofty enough goal:

source

It be gibberish but everything you whisper sounds like poetry.

And speaking of gibberish and not understanding, I love this article, particularly the last paragraph I quote.

Our Brains Were Not Built for This Much Uncertainty

Given that habits and recognizable patterns are kind of its “thing,” the brain evolved to be uncertainty-averse. When things become less predictable — and therefore less controllable — we experience a strong state of threat. You may already know that threat leads to “fight, freeze, or flight” responses in the brain. You may not know that it also leads to decreases in motivation, focus, agility, cooperative behavior, self-control, sense of purpose and meaning, and overall well-being. In addition, threat creates significant impairments in your working memory: You can’t hold as many ideas in your mind to solve problems, nor can you pull as much information from your long-term memory when you need it. Threats of uncertainty literally make us less capable, because dealing with them is just not something our brains evolved to do.

The good news is that, from decades of studying human brains and human behavior, we know quite a bit about how to take the experience of threat from something overwhelming to something manageable. Whether you’re trying to keep yourself motivated and engaged, or you’re a leader trying to help those in your care, here are three strategies based in science that can keep the brain in a good place. . . . 

Set expectations with realistic optimism . . . 

So, when thinking about the changes and uncertainty that the pandemic (and working life in general) will surely bring, set realistically optimistic expectations for yourself and for others. Believe you will get there, and acknowledge to yourself and everyone else that uncertainty involves having to experiment to get things right. It means not everything works right away. It means if we hang in there, eventually it can be better than it is now.

Lift to bigger-picture thinking . . . 

When we think about the larger meaning or purpose that our actions serve (high-level construal), we’re more inspired and motivated and feel greater boosts to self-esteem and well-being. . . . 

Embrace candor . . . 

This sort of everyday candor is hard. People worry about how they come across to others as they share truthful perspectives. They worry that their opinions might not be welcome, or valued. They worry about bruising feelings and damaging relationships. And while these concerns are valid, in practice, the far greater damage is done when people operate in an environment that lacks transparency and empathy. People know when you aren’t telling them everything, and the uncertainty threats that can create are off the charts.

I've been begging my workplace for more candor of this type for a long time, and especially during this pandemic.

(See also: Um, Maybe . . . Kinda . . . I Dunno: Or, Ambiguity; and Doesn't Look Like Anything to Me.)

But enough with earnestness for a bit. Now an interlude of the latest anecdotes about my kids (and pets).

[Older (7)] walks into the house, crying.

"What's wrong?"

"[Younger (6)] hit me in the back a bunch of times. Hard."

"With his hands or with something?"

"With his hands. And I don't know why he did it. . . . Maybe I kicked him too hard . . . "

My wife added in the comments (on Facebook):

The tantrums and fits won't quit today. One lost it because their popsicle was TOO BIG?

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Although, he has told me before that he wants to be President so he could raise teacher salaries and so more guys would become teachers.

[Spouse] had out the label machine recently and [Younger] begged her to make one for himself. He came up for this for the cat tree. Lion's secret diary says I love [Younger].

Lion will bring us his cat toys and ask us to throw them so he can chase--he likes to play fetch. The other night he dropped this in our laps (literally). It should have been stashed away in a container in the basement, so I don't know how he got it. Regardless, I think we should help him roll up a character for our next D&D session.

And:

[Older] and I were on the porch. [Younger] popped through the door. "Does anyone want to help me finish giving Lion a bath?"

"You're giving Lion a bath?"

"Yeah! I've been licking him."

" . . . "

He went back in.

Ten minutes later he came back out and kept spitting to try to get all the fur out of his mouth.

One time in preschool his teacher sent us a message to ask if we'd ever had him checked for salt deficiency. He sometimes tried to lick friends and would randomly start licking himself when it was time to sit and listen. We assured her his health was fine, he just liked pretending he was a cat.

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Stick Dog and friends think Santa dresses like [Younger] - Given no other requirements, these are literally the top two outfits he will choose to wear: ninja and just underwear.

Finally

Overheard from the other room: "Ow! Ow! Ow! Ow!"

Me, without moving: "[Younger], don't destroy your brother; you like having him around."

"[Older] accidentally hurt himself!"

"[Older], don't destroy yourself; you like having him around."

hashtag excellence in parenting

The rest of this post is a odd assortment of "theory I've read," things I've come across recently that intrigued me and that I want to be able to read and refer to again (even though no one will know wtf I mean).

Judy Barisonzi

SISYPHUS

After awhile, I no longer remembered

why I was being punished, and after that

I was not sure it was punishment at all. There was enough

to do with checking the weather each morning,

selecting the right clothing—waterproof for rain,

my slatted sun hat for bright afternoons, a heavy shawl

pinned round my shoulders on frosty mornings. Then a bite

to eat, choices there too, oat cakes or bread, honey

or marmalade, so many decisions

before starting the work of the day. And each day

was different. There were small blue flowers

breaking through the cracks when the weather warmed,

huge dusty turtles I had to swerve to avoid,

the occasional passerby, too far for conversation,

but close enough to study the new styles

of hat and jacket, each one’s way of walking,

a shuffling gait, a jaunty step. And then

the rock itself was never the same. My fingers

would penetrate encrustations, caress

slopes worn smooth as powdered skin,

its touch remembered these many years,

dimly remembered, like morning rain

find sparking grains that embedded themselves

in tiny dimples. But always, behind the flux,

keeping confusion in check, that constant cycle,

that slow plod upward, that weight against my chest,

measuring my muscles, my soul, inevitably followed

by a wild mad dash to the bottom, the moment

of joy, of mad release. I was often overwhelmed

by the complexity of it all, and only rarely

had a recollection of something

I had meant to do, a time when I had said

When I reach the top, then … but I could not find

anywhere, in my mind, what I had intended.

—from Rattle #23, Spring 2005

My writing this post is procrastination. I have a work project I should be working on, but I can't quite seem to get myself to jump into it. I do this a lot. Especially with writing. I like to let things percolate as long as possible, then let them pour out of me near the deadline.

The Myth and Magic of Generating New Ideas

These stories suggest that an initial period of concentration—conscious, directed attention—needs to be followed by some amount of unconscious processing. Mathematicians will often speak of the first phase of this process as “worrying” about a problem or idea. It’s a good word, because it evokes anxiety and upset while also conjuring an image of productivity: a dog worrying a bone, chewing at it to get to the marrow—the rich, meaty part of the problem that will lead to its solution. In this view of creative momentum, the key to solving a problem is to take a break from worrying, to move the problem to the back burner, to let the unwatched pot boil.

All problem solvers and problem inventors have had the experience of thinking, and then overthinking, themselves into a dead end. The question we’ve all encountered—and, inevitably, will encounter again—is how to get things moving and keep them moving. That is, how to get unstuck.

For me, the quest for a breakthrough often requires getting myself into literal motion; one small step for Poincaré but a whole sequence of steps for me. I’ll take a long hike, during which my mind has nothing to worry about except putting one foot in front of the other, or I’ll go for a long drive, so that my primary focus is on the road. Maybe it’s the endorphins, or maybe it’s refocussing my attention on some other activity which enables a new idea. Perhaps it is the momentary feeling of being untethered that gives the mind free rein—the space to have a good idea. . . . 

The key [is] a feeling of being free, of forgetting for a moment that we are bound by gravity and logic and convention, of letting the magic happen.

I do my best writing when I'm running, walking, or hiking.

(See also: Exploratory Divination; and No One Will Believe You if You Actually Get It Right.)

This is fascinating to me.

Psychologists Are Learning What Religion Has Known for Years

Much of what psychologists and neuroscientists are finding about how to change people’s beliefs, feelings, and behaviors—how to support them when they grieve, how to help them be more ethical, how to let them find connection and happiness—echoes ideas and techniques that religions have been using for thousands of years.

Science and religion have often been at odds. But if we remove the theology—views about the nature of God, the creation of the universe, and the like—from the day-to-day practice of religious faith, the animosity in the debate evaporates. What we’re left with is a series of rituals, customs, and sentiments that are themselves the results of experiments of sorts. Over thousands of years, these experiments, carried out in the messy thick of life as opposed to sterile labs, have led to the design of what we might call spiritual technologies—tools and processes meant to sooth, move, convince, or otherwise tweak the mind. And studying these technologies has revealed that certain parts of religious practices, even when removed from a spiritual context, are able to influence people’s minds in the measurable ways psychologists often seek. . . . 

Regularly taking part in religious practices lessens anxiety and depression, increases physical health, and even reduces the risk of early death. These benefits don’t come simply from general social contact. There’s something specific to spiritual practices themselves.

The ways these practices leverage mechanisms of our bodies and minds can enhance the joys and reduce the pains of life. Parts of religious mourning rituals incorporate elements science has recently found to reduce grief. Healing rites contain elements that can help our bodies heal themselves simply by strengthening our expectations of a cure. Religions didn’t just find these psychological tweaks and nudges long before scientists arrived on the scene, but often packaged them together in sophisticated ways that the scientific community can learn from.

And it makes a lot of sense.

Treat your people right. Cooperation is self-interest.

CEO Who Gave Employees $70K Minimum Wage Says Revenue Tripled 6 Years Later

"6 years ago today I raised my company's min wage to $70k. Fox News called me a socialist whose employees would be on bread lines," Dan Price, the CEO of Seattle-based credit card processing company Gravity Payments, tweeted Tuesday. "Since then our revenue tripled, we're a Harvard Business School case study & our employees had a 10x boom in homes bought." 

"Always invest in people," he added. . . . 

The CEO has appeared on various financial cable news channels in recent years to spread his business philosophy of spending more on employees rather than cutting expenses and trimming fat. . . . 

"Babies had by staff grew 10x *70% of employees paid down debt *Homes bought by employees grew 10x *401(k) contributions grew 155%," he tweeted. "76% of employees are engaged at work, 2x the national average *Customer attrition fell to 25% below nat'l average *We expanded to a new Boise office & enacted $70k min wage there *Our highest-paid employee makes 4x our lowest-paid employee, down from 33x." 

I remember when this happened, and am so excited it has turned out well.

Finally, a couple of things related to libraries.

The title is clickbait, but the article is reasonable and interesting. Though I do side with the author and choose not to read ebooks.

Ebooks Are an Abomination

Agreeing that books are a thing you read is easy enough. But what it means to read, what the experience of reading requires and entails, and what makes it pleasurable or not, is not so easy to pin down. . . . 

Reading is a relatively useless term. It describes a broad array of literacy practices, ranging from casually scanning social-media posts to perusing magazine articles such as this one to poring over the most difficult technical manuals or the lithest storytelling. You read instructions on elevators, prompts in banking apps, directions on highway signs. Metaphorically, you read situations, people’s faces, the proverbial room. What any individual infers about their hopes and dreams for an e-reader derives from their understanding of reading in the first place. You can’t have books without bookiness.

Bookiness. That’s the word Glenn Fleishman, a technology writer and longtime bookmaker, uses to describe the situation. “It’s the essence that makes someone feel like they’re using a book,” he told me. Like pornography or sandwiches, you know bookiness when you see it. Or feel it? Either way, most people can’t identify what it is in the abstract.

Two thousand years after the codex and 500 after the Gutenberg press, the book persists. If something better were to come along, you’d expect it to have done so by now. In other words, as far as technologies go, the book endures for very good reason. Books work. . . . 

When it comes to the gathering of words and images pressed first to pages and then between covers, the book has remained largely the same. That puts books on par with other super-inventions of human civilization, including roads, mills, cement, turbines, glass, and the mathematical concept of zero. . . . 

A particular reader’s receptivity to ebooks, then, depends on the degree to which these objects conform to, or at least fail to flout, one’s idea of bookiness. But if you look back at the list of features that underlie that idea, ebooks embrace surprisingly few of them. . . . 

Ebook devices are extremely compatible with an idea of bookiness that values holding and carrying a potentially large number of books at once; that prefers direct flow from start to finish over random access; that reads for the meaning and force of the words as text first, if not primarily; and that isn’t concerned with the use of books as stores of reader-added information or as memory palaces. Some of the reading that corresponds particularly well with this conception of bookiness includes fiction in general and genre fiction—such as mysteries, sci-fi, young-adult fiction, and romance—in particular.

As it happens, these are exactly the kinds of books that have thrived on Amazon’s Kindle platform. . . . 

This might also explain why the great fears that the publishing industry had about ebooks never came to pass . . . Ebooks never took over the book market; instead, they took over a large part of it and then sales tapered off. . . . 

I guess I have my answer, then: I hate ebooks because I don’t read much genre fiction, but I read a lot of scholarly and trade nonfiction. I also buy a lot of books on art, architecture, and design, whose subjects work best—or feel most bookish—when they are large-format, open-spread, and richly illustrated. As a somewhat haughty book person, I also can’t quite wrap my spleen around every book looking and feeling the same, like they do on an ebook reader. For me, bookiness partly entails the uniqueness of each volume—its cover, shape, typography, and layout.

Bookiness is an excellent term.

(See also: Of eBooks, Memory, and the Power of Tactility.)

This one speaks for itself.

Charlie and Lola Author Lauren Child Says Children’s Books Should Be Taken Seriously

In considering work created for children – from books to illustration, art and music and more – to be lesser, we are undervaluing what it means to be a child. . . . 

“There’s not enough understanding of how sophisticated picture books can be,” said Child, who supported the project. “If we don’t understand that, then we don’t understand how amazingly sophisticated children are and that they think very deeply and powerfully about things. And we do them a disservice if we don’t see this.”

Speaking to the Guardian, Child pointed to Martin Amis’s comment that he would only write a children’s book if he “had a serious brain injury”, because “I would never write about someone that forced me to write at a lower register than what I can write.”

“I think he’s so wide of the mark. That’s such an odd thing to think – that you’re dumbing down when writing children’s books – you’re not at all. The sophistication of thought has to be there, the meaning has to be there,” Child said. “When you write for children, or illustrate for children, it’s just reviewed in the most basic terms, as if you didn’t really think as deeply as you would if you’re writing for adults. I find that very strange. What you’re thinking about – in your narrative; in the beauty of the work and how you’re designing it, the way you put it together – there’s just as much thought put into it, and meaning.” . . . 

She writes in her manifesto that, as children, we recognise that our thoughts and ideas are as valid as anyone else’s, but that we are “taught to unlearn” this as adults.

Children are fully human.