Perception: The Interplay of Habit and Attitude

Reading this David Brooks books is an interesting experience.  As you likely know, he's a conservative columnist and I'm a liberal.  Nevertheless, I've actually noted and quoted him a number of times through the years, and noted the themes he'd present in this book around a year ago in post Heard It Here First.  The book is called The Social Animal.

There's a ton of excellent information in the book that corresponds with things I've been reading, thinking, and believing for years.  I'm familiar with much of his source material, in fact, having previously encountered it in other sources; and I hadn't realized this vein of thinking had become so ubiquitous and prevalent, which is nice since I've been blogging about it in various ways for a while now.  I'm just not sure Brooks is the best vehicle to be delivering the information.  As we come from different starting points, he takes the same information and comes to somewhat different conclusions, ramifications, and applications than I do.

But seeing a different perspective on the information is a good thing because it makes me think and broadens mine.  What's given me greater pause is his device for delivering the information.  He's sharing it as a narrative, the life story of two fictional people.  This makes the book highly readable and enjoyable, but it makes it hard to distinguish between the research and Brooks.  His method of citation compounds the issue, because he doesn't note anything in the text itself.  Each entry in his "Notes" section at the back of the book begins by quoting the first five words of the relevant section of his writing so you can go back and track it down later, but it's not marked in any way during the actual reading.

And some of it seems disconnected from anything, either the research or the story; just bits of opinions he's throwing out without much relevance or context.  For instance, the chapter titled "Learning" begins with this:

Popular, good-looking, and athletic children are the subjects of relentless abuse.  While still young and impressionable, they are force-fed a diet of ugly duckling fables to which they cannot possibly relate.  They are compelled to endure endless Disney movies that tell them that true beauty lies inside.  In high school, the most interesting teachers favor the brainy students who are rendered ambitious by social resentments and who have time on Saturday nights to sit at home and develop adult-pleasing interests in Miles Davis or Lou Reed.  After Graduation the popular and good-looking have few role models save for local weathermen and game-show hosts, while the nerds can emulate any number of modern moguls, from Bill Gates to Sergey Brin.  For as it is written, the last shall be first and the geek shall inherit the Earth.

Huh?  Not only is this not cited in the "Notes" in any way, it seems largely unrelated to what follows in his story and out of line with the general research and themes he's sharing, not to mention reality itself.  So it makes me a bit more skeptical about his perspective's ability to convey the information in a helpful way.  Still, I'm getting a lot out of it.

Which leads me to today's thought, what I got out of some of my recent reading.  It was on the topic of self-control, and he draws from some of the same research as the sources I highlighted in the post Thinking About Thinking: A Tip for Success; specifically, the idea of delayed gratification and self regulation.  Brooks writes:

Human decision making has three basic steps.  First, we perceive a situation.  Second, we use the power of reason to calculate whether taking this or that action is in our long-term interest.  Third, we use the power of will to execute our decision.

He then describes how Victorian moralists focused on willpower as the way to resist temptation and make good decisions, which wasn't very effective, and twentieth century character-building models focused on reason, information, and eduction, which also wasn't all that effective.  Focusing on either step two or three of the decision making process will lead to only limited success; far more effective than relying on reason or willpower is starting at the very beginning phase, with how we actually perceive things.

Perception is not a neutral, passive, objective activity, after all.  Who we are and how we are feeling always colors the way we perceive our surroundings and experiences.  A simple example is how when we're happy the world seems a wonderful, vibrant, colorful place full of other happy people and when we're sad it seems grey, dreary, and gloomy.  The example Brooks uses is students are more or less likely to undermine themselves with bad behavior in class based on what baseline assumptions they have when they walk into a classroom for the first time ever, before they learn anything particular about the individual teacher--do they assume teachers should be respected simply because of their positions or do they reserve that respect until they feel it's been earned?  Those who walk in without the assumption of respect are much more likely to perceive teachers negatively and act out in rebellion.

Having learned to see a teacher in a certain way, they would never even consider punching one in the face, except in the realm of faraway fantasy, which they know they will never enact.

Similarly, upright people learn to see other people's property in a way that reduces the temptation to steal.  They learn to see a gun in a way that reduces their temptation to misuse it.  They learn to see young girls in a way that reduces the temptation to abuse them.  They learn to see the truth in a way that reduces the temptation to lie.

As you're probably picking up on, Brooks is considering this under the heading of character education, but the principle can be widely applied to many situations.  One of the research studies was about helping kids resist the temptation to eat a marshmallow by trying to think of it as a picture instead of as a reality.  I also relate it to the post I wrote a few weeks back titled My Philosophy, in which I wrote, "What you choose to see in others is what you project for others to see in you. . . . If you want to be a good person, you must learn to find the goodness in others."

So how do we learn to perceive things in ways that will lead us to the decisions we want?  As I said, I just read this and wanted to capture it before I moved on, but that means I haven't had time to really dwell on it yet and consider if fully.  But here's some of what's rattling around in my brain.

"First we make our habits, then our habits make us."

--Charles C. Noble

"We are what we repeatedly do.  Excellence, then, is not an act, but a habit."

--Aristotle

"Fake it until you make it."

--Alcoholics Anonymous

"One of the most enduring lessons of social psychology is that behavior change often precedes changes in attitude and feelings."

--Timothy Wilson (page 129 of Brooks's book)

"For where your treasure is, there your heart will also be."

--Jesus (Luke 12:34)

I don't have a source, but in one of my seminary classes on social ethics--one in which the professor emphasized how we are "social animals"--the professor told of a study on marriage and what makes one successful.  The thing that correlated most highly with long-lasting marriages was not education or class or values or attitudes, but the act of sharing a quick goodbye and hello kiss each time the couple parted and came back together.  Even if it was a rushed peck, even if it was unrelated to any thoughts or moods, that simple act seemed to be significant.

In all of these, the point is that our actions--our behaviors and habits--shape the way we think and feel and perceive.  Jesus didn't say your heart will guide where you spend your money; he said what you do will guide your heart.  So, if we want to have self-control and make decisions we are happy with, we must control the way we perceive things, and if we want to control the way we perceive things we must develop habits of action that direct our perceptions.

At the end of recent post Do I Think Any True Thoughts, I shared the idea of Ego Depletion.  Actively engaging our brains, whether to make decisions or exercise willpower or anything else, requires a lot of fuel that gets quickly depleted.  When our fuel is depleted, we go into passive mode and do things that don't require us to think or exercise control.  It can lead to overeating or staring brainlessly at the TV or playing Angry Birds or anything else that doesn't require us to control ourselves.

CDL wrote a post in response on the idea of habits.  Because habits are things we do automatically--without thought or effort--they are what we slip into when in depleted passive mode.  But passive habits don't have to be sitting around overeating while watching TV.  They can also be running or working in the garden or reading or just about anything else we want them to be, so long as we take the time to train ourselves enough that they become automatic and thoughtless.

In the same way, we can train ourselves to carry certain attitudes and reactions with us at all times that will shape how we perceive things.  This is the idea that hasn't completely gelled yet, the one I'll have to wait until later to expand.  But Brooks considers it in terms of a particular school his fictional character attends and how it helped her build character:

Life at the Academy meant following a thousand small rules.  Don't start eating until everybody at the cafeteria table is seated.  Always put your paper napkin on your lap first.  Always stand up when a teacher enters the room.  Never chew gum when you are in uniform, even if you're just walking home. . . . 

These thousand little rules became second nature to Erica, as to almost all the students. . . . 

These little routines were almost always about self-discipline in one way or another.  They were about delaying gratification or exercising some small act of self-control.  She didn't really think about them this way.  The rules were just the normal structure of life for a student such as herself.  But they had a pervasive effect on how she lived at school, eventually at home, and even on the tennis court. . . . 

She was using what you might call the Doctrine of Indirect Self-Control.  She was manipulating small things in order to trigger the right responses about the big things.

Intellectual Humility

"Undergrads are useless."

A physics Ph.D. said that in a conversation I was part of a couple of weeks ago.  He said he too was useless as an undergrad, that uselessness is just a fact of being in that particular place in one's life, and the only way to stop being useless is to mature with time and the act of graduating.

He didn't say this explicitly, but I'm sure in the background of the statement was the idea that undergrads just haven't attained enough knowledge and self-awareness to realize how little they actually know, to become curious seekers of learning with the proper humility and modesty.  I've heard it said about both advanced degrees and martial arts black belts, that, even though both are considered marks of mastery and expertise, really all they indicate is that their bearers have finally reached a level that allows them to fully become students and finally begin their learning.  You have to learn quite a lot before you realize that you know almost nothing and are willing to accept just how limited and incomplete your knowledge will always be.

In Another Convergence, I wrote, "One of the areas David Brooks explores repeatedly in The Social Animal is non-linear associations and intuitive connections."  Here's a good representative quote:

This is a different sort of knowledge.  It comes from integrating and synthesizing diverse dynamics.  It is produced over time, by an intelligence that is associational--observing closely, imagining loosely, comparing like to unlike and like to like to find harmonies and rhythms in the unfolding of events.

And, as I was typing it just now, as part of my reflection on what this post is and where it's going, I made another association.  This time I noticed the word "synthesizing" and recalled something I've thought previously.  In Speaking of Supervillians, I wrote that if I could be a superhero my power would be based in my ability to synthesize:

c. Your superhero alter-ego is . . .

The Synthesist
(Bringing together disparate: 1) ideas, to solve problems and mysteries; 2) materials, to address physical issues (MacGyverish); and 3) people, to overcome conflict.) 

I was taking a broader view than Brooks does--mostly because I needed to extend the idea into superhero territory and tangible action--but what he describes is certainly a part of what I was trying to get at, one I try to regularly express in my ramblings here.  The paragraph that immediately follows the one I quoted above goes on to say, in reference to associational and rational thinking:

The modest person uses both methods, and more besides.  The modest person learns not to trust one paradigm.  Most of what he knows accumulates through a long and arduous process of wandering.

I love that image of being a knowledge and wisdom wanderer, and he expands the metaphor after introducing it.  A wanderer, to me, is an open-minded seeker, which is someone I've always tried to be.  Intellectual curiosity combined with an awareness of just how much there is to know and how limited and finite our ability to know--much less actually grasp--all of it really is.  The goal really shouldn't be to master knowledge, which is impossible, but to wander through it and glean as much from it as we can.

Brooks considers all of this in a section with the heading, "Epistemological Modesty."

Epistemological modesty is an attitude toward life.  This attitude is built on the awareness that we don't know ourselves.  Most of what we think and believe is unavailable to conscious review.  We are our own deepest mystery.

Not knowing ourselves, we also have trouble fully understanding others. . . . 

Epistemological modesty is a disposition for action.  The people with this disposition believe that wisdom begins with an awareness of our own ignorance.  We can design habits, arrangements, and procedures that partially compensate for the limits on our knowledge.

That reminds me very strongly of what Dan Ariely says in Predictably Irrational, which I considered extensively in Readers Digest Irrationality and have referenced many times since.  He approaches the idea of rational thinking from the realm of economics, and largely debunks it; he shows how our economic decisions are clearly not rational, but based in emotions and assumptions and other illogical dynamics.  But, he says, we're irrational in predictable ways, so if we can understand those patterns we can at least do something like "design habits, arrangements, and procedures that partially compensate" for the silly things we'll do when faced with economic decisions in the future.

It also reminds me of the title of a blog I discovered recently (which has become I book I hope to read), that I referenced in Do I Think Any True Thoughts? and Perception: The Interplay of Habit and Attitude.  I think the blog's title says it all and should certainly, in my opinion, lead to an attitude of modesty and humility: You Are Not So Smart: A Celebration of Self Delusion.

And, of course, it's the attitude I try to express in interactions with others, in the controlling metaphor at the top of this blog, in posts like Do I Think Any True Thoughts?, and in my basic stance toward life.  Even as I passionately plead for positions that make sense to me, I know I'm doing so as a seeker with just a bit of the knowledge, not as an omniscient expert with the single, definite say on the matter.  I know my emotions and subconscious factors control my perceptions and reactions at least as much as my conscious rationality and studied knowledge.  I know I'm finite and limited and irrational, and so I try to keep from taking myself too seriously or inflating my sense of self-importance.

And I think it sure would be nice--the world might even be a better place--if more people took the same approach.

Another Convergence

One of the areas David Brooks explores repeatedly in The Social Animal is non-linear associations and intuitive connections, so I figure I just have to go ahead and post this.  I was holding onto this quote to decide if I had a use for it or not, when I ran across the graphic that follows.

The quote:

At first, Harold's primary concern was being a good member of his clique.  Social life absorbed his most intense energies.  Fear of exclusion was his primary source of anxiety.  Understanding the shifting rules of the clique was his most demanding cognitive challenge.

The students would burn out if forced to spend their entire day amidst the social intensity of the cafeteria and the hallway.  Fortunately, the school authorities also schedule dormant periods, called classes, during which students can rest their minds and take a break from the pressures of social categorization.  Students correctly understand, though adults appear not to, that socialization is the most intellectually demanding and morally important thing they will do in high school.

I was debating sharing it because I'm still processing just how accurate I feel the statement is and how completely I agree, but there's definitely evidence to support his assertion.  This is being widely shared, but I'll continue the link chain by attributing it to the source from which I discovered it.

Student's Brain Flatlines During Class

In a report designed to prove the feasibility of measuring electrodermal activity on subjects going about their daily life, at least one student showed near brain-death during class.

Am I exaggerating?  Yes.  But, even so, brain patterns during class matched watching TV closer than any other activity on the list.  Studying and homework, lab work, and socializing got more of his attention… sleep was a veritable mental work-out compared to class.

This very fact is one of my biggest criticisms of school and the usual approaches to education, that the experience is predominantly passive and includes huge chunks of waiting and mental inactivity.  However, Brooks's point that schools provide socialization experiences that are important for success in life is one of my main doubts about homeschooling or other options that take students away from those mainstream settings.  So no conclusions yet, just a convergence of related thoughts from different sources.

Imagination: Not Just for Kids

“Dearest dumpling, one day your imagination is going to get you into trouble," whispered his mother.

He would never do that," Pecorino replied. "We're best friends.”

Pecorino's First Concert, by Alan Madison

A quote has been making the rounds lately on the social networks:

I found a few sources that attribute it to sci-fi author Ursula LeGuin, and one had it as part of a longer thought:

The creative adult is the child who survived after the world tried killing them, making them “grown up”. The creative adult is the child who survived the blandness of schooling, the unhelpful words of bad teachers, and the nay-saying ways of the world.

The creative adult is in essence simply that, a child.

I'm sure there are some practical-minded types who read this and think something like, "That's the excuse artistic-types use in an attempt to justify the fact that they don't contribute anything substantial to society or produce anything useful."  And perhaps the defense the quote makes is necessary in the face of this kind of thinking.

But surviving to adulthood with childlike creativity may be more than just an artistic benefit; there may be very practical and useful aspects to it as well.  I'm early in the reading of (well, listening to) David Brooks's book, The Social Animal.  In it, he explores a wealth of recent research about just how social humans are in our very construction and how success as a social being is key to financial security and emotional well-being.  He writes in the introduction:

The research being done today reminds us of the relative importance of emotion over pure reason, social connections over individual choice, character over IQ, emergent, organic systems over linear, mechanistic ones, and the idea that we have multiple selves over the idea that we have a single self.

In chapter 4, the idea of childhood imagination and creativity comes up.  It sounds, in some ways, quite similar to the LeGuin quote, and is his description of a child who will grow up very successful due to his social nature.

We sometimes think that imagination is cognitively easy because children can use it better than adults.  In fact, imagination is arduous and practical.  People who possess imaginative talents can say, "If I were you, I would do this. . . . "  Or they can think, "I'm doing it this way now, but if I tried to do it that way, things might go faster."  These doublescope and counterfactual abilities come in quite handy in real life. . . . 

One Saturday afternoon, Harold had a few buddies over to the house for a playdate. . . . Each kid would assign himself a role in the master story. . . . They would have elaborate negotiations over what was legitimate to do in the world of pretend, in the shared space they had constructed.  Even in the free-form world of their imaginations, it was apparently still necessary to have rules, and they spent so much time talking about the rules, Rob got the impression that they were more important than the story itself. . . .

After about twenty minutes playing Benjamin Spock and watching the kiddies, Rob got the urge to join in.  He sat down with the boys, grabbed some figures, and joined Harold's team.

This was a big mistake.  It was roughly the equivalent of a normal human being grabbing a basketball and inviting himself to play a pickup game with the Los Angeles Lakers.

Over the course of his adult life, Rob had trained his mind to excel at a certain sort of thinking.  This is the kind that psychologist Jerome Brunner has called "paradigmatic thinking."  This mode of thought is structured by logic and analysis.  It's the language of a legal brief, a business memo, or an academic essay.  It consists of stepping back from a situation to organize facts, to deduce general principles, and to ask questions.

But the game Harold and his buddies were playing relied on a different way of thinking, what Bruner calls the "narrative mode."  Harold and his buddies had now become a team of farmers on a ranch.  They just started doing things on it--riding, roping, building, and playing.  As their stories grew and evolved, it became clear what made sense and what didn't make sense within the line of the story. . . . 

Rob was like a warthog in a frolic of gazelles.  Their imaginations danced while his plodded.  They saw good and evil while he saw plastic and metal.  After five minutes, their emotional intensity produced a dull ache in the back of his head.  He was exhausted trying to keep up.

The "paradigmatic thinking" is, of course, important to have in at least some measure as an adult just for the sake of being responsible and managing life.  But, it seems to me, in becoming more "adult" in our thinking, we would all benefit from holding onto our "narrative mode," our ability to play in the realm of imagination with stories and creative, intuitive, free-flowing connections.  We might do better in life if we don't "grow up" quite so much.

I've heard said that all the loser nerds of the 80s are the successful types now running the world.  Reading that section of Brooks's book strongly reminded me of playing Dungeons & Dragons and other role-playing games.  It's really quite the same process, with each person assuming a role in the story and the group negotiating the narrative together.  I've been calling it "group storytelling" for a long time now when trying to explain the appeal and mechanics of the game to people.

I like the way Mark Barrowcliffe describes it in his book The Elfish Gene: Dungeons, Dragons, and Growing Up Strange.  I first quoted this here.

I think this is the soul of why role-playing games like D&D and EPT were so popular with young boys. They provided a trellis work for the imagination to climb upon and thrive. Unsupported, your day dreams can wither; backed up by rules, pictures, model figures and the input of others, there's no end to the amount of brain space they can consume. . . .

The power of the story, either writing or reading or listening to one, is that the imagination is tied to something that makes it go forward. . . .

D&D is, I believe, something virtually unique and unprecedented in human history. It's a story you can listen to at the same time as telling it. You can be surprised by the plot's twists and turns, but you can surprise too. It's more interactive than any other sort of narrative I can think of. If its subject matter were more serious then it would probably be considered a new art form, and it's probably surprising that nothing beyond murder mystery dinners has ever been evolved from it. This is why D&D is so addictive when it's played right. It's like the best story you've ever read combined with the charge a good storyteller feels as he plays his audience.

I think there's a basic human need to listen to stories, but also to tell them. In D&D you get that tingle you imagine when you think of the ancient storytellers, dusk falling, the camp fire burning and the first line being read. It's not like hearing "In a hole in the ground lived a hobbit," it's like saying it for the first time and to a rapt audience that is dying for your next sentence.

I have finished games feeling physically drained and actually wanted to continue to have my characters buy food at a shop or smoke a pipe in a tavern just to calm down before breaking with the game world entirely. And sometimes even that wasn't enough. The crucial difference between conventional forms of storytelling and D&D is that D&D doesn't have to finish. Ever. It's an open-ended story, and, if you're emotionally engaged with it, the temptation is just to keep going.

And just as the boys Brooks describes were constantly negotiating the rules of their shared imaginary world, so are the rules of games like D&D constantly in revision; both the official materials and each particular group's "house rules" are always fluid as those involved try to find the right balance of logical consistency to guide them and openness to imagination and fun.  Some players get shunned for being argumentative "rules lawyers" and it's importance to find a group whose style meshes with your own.

Barrowcliffe provides another good example, which I first shared here:

I spent a lot of time wondering what the gleam on +3 armour looked like or the edge on a flaming sword. When I was having these thoughts, though, I wasn't aware I was purely exercising my imagination. To me, I was involved in a deductive process--like when historians say, "From what we can piece together, we believe the songs of the Vikings would have sounded something like this . . . " I was referring to a world that, in my mind, actually existed and, like my journey home that day or my release from school on a Friday lunchtime, its lack was felt more keenly for it's proximity than its distance.

We had plenty of arguments on this basis in the wargames room--whether the acid from a giant ant would be strong enough to corrode through metal bars, for instance, as one enterprising character attempted to remove himself from a cage by this method.

The conversation would become incredibly detailed, with recourse to periodic tables and encyclopaedias. Of course, the only real answer is that the acid of a giant ant can burn through metal if the referee--the dungeonmaster--says it can. It's his world; he designed it, and, if he wants, the ant's sting can contain specific metal-melting compounds or pure water. We didn't see this at the time, though. We thought we could uncover the reality of the situation through argument.

It is sad to note that, even at this distance of years and without having to look it up, I know formic acid (the stuff in your everyday ant) does not combine with metals and is used in tanning and, crucially, wire stripping. It takes off the insulation but leaves the wire untouched. In high concentrations this would make it burn flesh but not the bars of a cage. This is the sort of stuff I was learning while others were concentrating on how to be nice to a girl.

And, really, in a very broad sense, isn't this what we're doing when we discuss politics and religion, when we gossip and spread rumors, when we create mission and vision statements for our workplaces, when we try to figure out how to live with one another as neighbors and define ourselves as communities--aren't we really just negotiating the rules of our shared games and trying to find groups to be part of whose styles match our own?  How we define reality is up to all of us to figure out together, and it happens in the interplay between us.


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If you've lost touch with imaginative child play there are, of course, many sources for rediscovering it.  One of my recent favorites, though, is Axe Cop.  Here are the reviews I wrote for the first two books:

Axe Cop, vol. 1, by Malachai and Ethan Nicolle:

It seems I’m a bit late to this party since I missed Axe Cop as a webcomic. Nevertheless, I must now have my say: this concept is absolutely genius and the execution is one of the funniest things I’ve ever read.

A few years ago, Ethan Nicolle was playing with his five-year-old brother Malachai and decided it would be fun to take Malachai’s imagined play and illustrate it as a superhero comic. It all started when Malachai took a toy police officer and added a firefighter’s axe. They grabbed another figure and the nearest weapon-like implement at hand—a recorder, which led to Axe Cop’s first partner, Flute Cop—and went to chop off the heads of dinosaurs and other sundry bad guys.

In his book Killing Monsters: Why Children Need Fantasy, Super Heroes, and Make-Believe Violence, Gerard Jones argues that the young use violent fantasies as a way of coping with their real-life powerlessness, smallness, and helplessness—the point is not mutilation and bloodshed but power, a desire to have some kind of ability to control their circumstances: young people [use] fantasies of combat in order to feel stronger, to access their emotions, to take control of their anxieties, to calm themselves down in the face of real violence, to fight their way through emotional challenges and lift themselves to new developmental levels. The violence is pretend in its purest form and in no way reflects any desire to do actual harm; it’s all about wanting to deal with forces beyond their control.

So in Malachai’s fantasies we see plenty of violence, but all in the quest for more power to vanquish scary bad guys. And because he is only five, we get none of the worries with logic or consistency or reality that too often limit the imaginations of older writers (as Dav Pilkey talks about with Ook and Gluk: Kung-Fu Cavemen from the Future), with wild and hilarious results. Axe Cop doesn’t just have a pet T. Rex, he has a pet T. Rex that breathes fire, has a super-duper fast bite, wears cop glasses and a cop badge shaped like himself, has robot-machine-gun arms, feeds on bad guys, can fly to catch bad guys on the moon and sun, and has spikes that only stab you if you are bad (and whose worst enemy is a lamp that comes alive early in the morning). Axe Cop is constantly holding tryouts for more partners to make himself more powerful and even gets a part-time job at a fruit stand so he can afford to buy more guns. When he encounters a giant robot with two swords and one eye that is too big for head-chopping with an axe, Axe Cop from nowhere pulls out a baby with a magical unicorn horn to throw at the robot’s eye and explode its head. Axe Cop doesn’t just chop off the heads of bad guys, he also shoots them, blows them up, poisons them, and uses any other form of death-dealing Malachai can imagine. He also never rests because he spends each night sneaking into bad guys’ houses to kill them in their sleep. But don’t worry, there’s a morality to it all—if he could do anything he wanted, he would make a bomb that only kills bad guys and would make sure to turn all the aliens evil before killing them all, so that no one undeserving has to die.

Ethan takes these wild imaginings and brings them to life splendidly. His illustrations are fun and he does his best to accurately portray Malachai’s intentions without parody or satire, so they end up more “realistic” than cartoonish or stylized. If only all five-year-olds had someone like Malachai to bring their imaginations to life this way, because the opportunity to share in them is a joyful delight.

Axe Cop: Bad Guy Earth, by Malachai and Ethan Nicolle:

I don't think I can adequately convey how much I love Axe Cop, from concept to execution. It really is a window into the mind of child at play, having fun with imagination and stories, with no concern for logic or the absurdities that result. I laugh often and the entire time I'm reading I'm smiling, feeling the freedom of childhood.

On the very first page, we get:

Axe cop saw a cup of water sitting at the next table. So he drank it . . . and it screamed. "Hey, stop that!! You just drank my friend's brain!!" It turned out that Mr. Hammer and Mr. Cup were having breakfast, and Axe Cop had accidentally drunk Mr. Cup's brain.

The rest of the book is much more focused on good guys and bad guys and fighting action, but equally inventive and ludicrous. There's time travel and space travel, bad guys who turn into giants and steal the entire army in the middle of the night, vikings, aliens, pirates, monsters, zombies, animals, wrestlers, and ghost knights, magical unicorn horns, alternate identities, an entire planet of people turned into talking animals that never existed on earth, and so much more. And this: Then a lion chasing a pig ran in front of the truck. They hit the lion and it died. Then the pig ate it. It turned into super lion pig. And this: All the chickens' brains popped out. The brains turned into bad guys. They had robotic body parts and swords. They killed the farmer and then chased a cow. Their eyes were cameras.

If you're not familiar with Axe Cop, it's written by a six-year-old and drawn by his thirty-year-old brother. They get out Malachai's toys and play and tell stories. Ethan records them, then does his best to illustrate what happened. Malachai provides input and corrections until they come up with a final product. Ethan does a brilliant job, and explains their process in more detail at the end of the book.

Unlike the first Axe Cop book, which was a collection of short stories and incidents, this is one sustained narrative that centers on a pair of evildoers stealing one of Axe Cop's machines, altering it, and turning everyone on earth into a bad guy. With, of course, an epic battle to end all battles at the climax and a satisfying conclusion. It's most fun.

So Tired of Being Called "Negative"

Because it's not everyone who calls me negative, only a certain type who I find empty-headed and Pollyanna in their positivity, who believe the answer to everything is a simple optimistic attitude that all will be good if we are just excited enough about it.  I've said over and over that I ask questions, play devil's advocate, and consider things from all angles because I want to make things work, and part of making things work is knowing what the issues are going to be so we are ready to address them.

It seems I'm not crazy for feeling this way, but supported by years of scientific study.  This article describes exactly that process, that in order to achieve goals it is essential to first understand the obstacles and plan for how to overcome them.  Follow the link for the process; I'm sharing first a bit I want to emphasize then a bit more for context from the introductory and concluding thoughts.

Relentless pie-in-the-sky optimism detached from reality . . . desiccates motivation and implies that having a less sunny view of events is a sign of defective thinking and a deformed attitude. “It’s a load on people who doubt and question things, and who see things in a more differentiated way.”

Why Understanding Obstacles is Essential to Achieving Goals

While inspiring words might provide a moment of motivation, it turns out they can have an adverse effect on achieving those goals. According to the latest research, the positive attitudes meant to provide inspiration may be the ones that get in the way of accomplishing those dreams.

For 20 years, psychology professor Gabriele Oettingen of New York University and the University of Hamburg has been examining positive thinking and her conclusion is clear. All that positive thinking can trick the dreamer into believing she’s already done the work to get to the desired goal, squelching the motivation to actually go after it. “Positive thinking alone is not enough,” Oettingen says. Indeed, fantasizing about success without an anchor in reality can actually diminish the likelihood of a better outcome. . . .

Oettingen is careful to point out that hope is a vital and necessary part of achievement, but that relentless pie-in-the-sky optimism detached from reality just hurts children. It desiccates motivation and implies that having a less sunny view of events is a sign of defective thinking and a deformed attitude. “It’s a load on people who doubt and question things, and who see things in a more differentiated way,” she says. “Positive dreams are not enough to actually achieve them.”

This is far from the first evidence of this sort I've come across.  Having someone take the contrarian role is often essential for a successful enterprise.  People like me serve a very important purpose, and beating us down with feedback that we are negative simply serves to create hostile dynamics instead of appreciative ones, because we are here to help, in our own, "realistic" ways.

For another example, consider my review of Decisive: How to Make Better Choices in Life and Work, by Chip & Dan Heath (particularly notice some of the points of the WRAP process, such as "Reality-Test Your Assumptions"):

"I know one thing: that I know nothing."
- Socrates

For the past few years I've had a fascinating and fun journey working my way through a good collection of titles about how thinking works; more specifically, about how thinking doesn't work the way we think it works. That we are constantly lying to, misleading, and deluding ourselves. That our knowledge, perceptions, beliefs, memories, and actions aren't nearly as rational and reasonable as we like to think. That many of our decisions, both the little, daily ones and the big, life-changing ones aren't as sound and carefully reasoned as we believe. Titles on my shelves I'd include in this category:

- Predictably Irrational: The Hidden Forces that Shape Our Decisions, by Dan Ariely
- Sway: The Irresistible Pull of Irrational Behavior, by Ori Brafman and Rom Brafman
- You Are Not So Smart: Why You Have Too Many Friends on Facebook, Why Your Memory Is Mostly Fiction, and 46 Other Ways You're Deluding Yourself, by David McRaney
- Drive: The Surprising Truth About What Motivates Us, by Daniel Pink
- True Enough: Learning to Live in a Post-Fact Society, by Farhad Manjoo
- Practical Wisdom: The Right Way To Do the Right Thing, by Barry Schwartz and Kenneth Sharpe
- Moonwalking with Einstein: The Art and Science of Remembering Everything, by Joshua Foer
- The Social Animal: The Hidden Sources of Love, Character, and Achievement, by David Brooks
- Connected: The Surprising Power of Our Social Networks and How They Shape Our Lives, by Nicholas Christakis and James Fowler
- Thinking, Fast and Slow , by Daniel Kahneman*

While there have been times the reading has left me feeling cynical and dispirited--that there is no point trying to communicate or connect with others since their assumptions and biases will confound my efforts anyway--for the most part it has been a helpful, healthy process of improving my self-awareness and interpersonal/emotional intelligence. They've made me a better listener, less sure of my own strident opinions in discussions and more likely to assume a generous "AND" stance instead of a combative "EITHER-OR" one.

Something they all have in common, for the most part, is that they spend the bulk of their time sharing the findings of recent research and studies in order to dispel our common-sense assumptions, and only after that leave a bit of space for talking about what to do with the new information. Decisive, on the other hand, starts with the new perspectives, explains them a little, then spends the bulk of its time sharing ways we can make better decisions in light of that information. It's less theoretical and idea-based, much more practical and applied.

And here's where I regret "reading" this book as an audio, because now that I've finished it I want to go back and revisit many parts to study them and consolidate my learning. Unfortunately, there is a long waiting list for our copies of the print book, so I won't be doing that in time to include specific thoughts in this review. In brief, the authors describe a process to follow when making decisions that will help counteract many of the tendencies that steer us wrong. It's not necessarily a step-by-step formula since each decision is unique and every context requires something different, but it provides guidance and a series of checks and balances to make sure we are properly considering the issue from a variety of helpful facets.

They abbreviate the process WRAP, which breaks down--with subcategories--as:

Widen Your Options
- Avoid a narrow frame
- Multitrack
- Find someone who's solved your problems
Reality-Test Your Assumptions
- Consider the opposite
- Zoom out, zoom in
- Ooch
Attain Distance Before Deciding
- Overcome short-term emotion
- Honor your core priorities
Prepare to Be Wrong
- Bookend the Future
- Set a Tripwire

Each point requires the explanations from the book to understand the authors' perspective (especially "ooch"; definition 2 here is vaguely in line with their meaning)--particularly since so much of it is about overcoming commonly accepted truths and operational habits that we unconsciously accept as acceptable--but I think it will be a very helpful process to get in the habit of following, with guidance from the material once it's in my hands.

If I have one complaint about the book, it's that the Heaths spend a little too much time describing the fine details of the real-world examples they use to illustrate all of their points and not enough dwelling in the world of ideas that I love so much. I would have been happier had they tipped the balance of information to case studies and exemplification in the other direction. But, then, this is a book for practitioners.

-----

*Okay, I haven't finished the last one yet; I had both it and Decisive checked out and was considering which to make my next listen, and fairly randomly went with Decisive. I immediately regretted it when, in the introduction, the Heaths mentioned Thinking, Fast and Slow and Predictably Irrational as the two most important titles to read for background information on the studies and theories they worked from in writing this book. I'm now a few discs into it.

Library Database Required

A while back I wrote about liking the idea of "unschooling" as a model of homeschooling. I realize that it's a pretty extreme idea, though, and can't really say how well it works since I haven't seen it in action. An intriguing look at the far other side of the issue was written about by David Brooks on December 3 in the New York Times in an article titled Teaching the Elephant:

. . . A generation ago, the gods of education fashion ordained that children should be liberated from desks-in-a-row pedagogy to follow their "natural" inclinations. In those days, human beings were commonly divided between their natural selves, assumed to be free and wonderful, and their socially constructed selves, assumed to be inhibited and repressed.

But now, thanks to bitter experience and scientific research, we know that the best environments don't liberate students. We know, or have rediscovered, that the most nurturing environments are highly structured. Children flourish in homes that are organized, in families where attachments are stable, among people who plan for the future and within cultures that celebrate work.

Many of today's most effective antipoverty institutions are incredibly intrusive, even authoritarian. Up to a point, elephants seem to like it that way.

We Are Social Creatures to Our Cores

One of the ideas in seminary that really spoke to me was relational theology, that we know, express, and love God through our relationships--relationships with ourselves, each other, all others, nature, and the world around us.  As this website (via a quick Google search) puts it: God is relational, present in every moment of our lives and in all entities and levels of being.  The world is interconnected in effect a giant ecosystem where what harms or blesses one, harms or blesses all.  So it should come as no surprise that I took all of my electives in the areas of social theory and social ethics, that I’ve had a life-long interest in sociology, that I’m intrigued by quantum physics and information theory and their focus on the interconnectedness of everything, or that I was drawn to The Social Animal by David Brooks.  I’ve already had a few long posts about the book (Imagination: Not Just for Kids, Perception: The Interplay of Habit and Attitude, Another Convergence, Intellectual Humility, and Good Thoughts, Bad Thoughts, and the Importance of Having Hobbies), and here are some more quotes of sections that I noted during my reading:

-----

Adults should want two things, he said, and these were the two things he wanted from his own life: First, he wanted to have a successful marriage.  If you have a successful marriage, it doesn’t matter how many professional setbacks you endure, you will be reasonably happy.  If you have an unsuccessful marriage, it doesn’t matter how many career triumphs you record, you will remain significantly unfulfilled.

Then, Harold continued, he wanted to find some activity, either a job or a hobby, which would absorb all his abilities.  He imagined himself working really hard at something, suffering setbacks and frustrations, and then seeing that sweat and toil lead to success and recognition.

He knew that his two goals were in conflict.  Marriage might drain time away from his vocation, and his vocation might steal time he could be spending with his friends.  He had no idea how he’d navigate those problems.  But these were the things he wanted, and neither of them were compatible with the sort of peripatetic, freewheeling life Mark was interested in.  Harold had grown up in a culture that, for forty years, had celebrated expressive individualism, self-fulfillment, and personal liberation.  But he sensed that what he needed was more community, connection, and interpenetration.  He couldn’t bring out his best self alone.  He could only do it in conjunction with other people.

-----

He found that whether on the left or the right, people in this world shared certain assumptions.  They both had individualistic worldviews, tending to assume that society is a contract between autonomous individuals.  Both promoted policies designed to expand individual choice.  Neither paid much attention to social and communal bonds, to local associations, or invisible norms.

Conservative activists embraced the individualism of the market.  They reacted furiously against any effort by the state to impinge upon individual economic choice. . . .

Liberals embraced the individualism of the moral sphere.  They reacted furiously against any effort by the state to impinge upon choices about marriage, family structure, the role of women, and matters of birth and death. . . .

The individualism of the left and right produced two successful political movements--one in the 1960s and one in the 1980s.  For a generation, no matter who was in power, the prevailing winds had been blowing in the direction of autonomy, individualism, and personal freedom, not in the directions of society, social obligations, and communal bonds. . . .

These policies had produced bad effects for a common reason.  They rearranged the material conditions in positive ways, but they undermined social relationships in ways that were unintended and destructive. . . .

In a densely connected society, people can see the gradual chain of institutions that connect family to neighborhood, neighborhood to town, town to regional association, regional associations to national associations, and national associations to the federal government.  In a stripped-down society, that chain has been broken and the sense of connection gets broken with it.  The state seems at once alien and intrusive.  People lose faith in the government’s ability to do the right thing most of the time and come to have cynical and corrosive attitudes about their national leaders. . . .

Freedom should not be the ultimate end of politics.  The ultimate focus of political activity is the character of the society.  Political, religious, and social institutions influence the unconscious choice architecture undergirding behavior.  They can either create settings that nurture virtuous choices or they can create settings that undermine them.  While the rationalist era put the utility-maximizing individual at the center of political thought, the next era, Harold believed, would put the health of social networks at the center of thought.  One era was economo-centric.  The next would be socio-centric. . . .

Everything came down to character, and that meant everything came down to the quality of relationships, because relationships are the seedbeds of character.  The reason life and politics are so hard is that relationships are the most important, but also the most difficult, things to understand.

In short, Harold entered a public-policy world in which people were used to thinking in hard, mechanistic terms.  He thought he could do some good if he threw emotional and social perspectives into the mix.

-----

Then there are the psychic effects of inequality itself.  In their book The Spirit Level, Richard Wilkinson and Kate Pickett argue that the mere fact of being low on the status totem pole brings its own deep stress and imposes its own psychic costs.  Inequality and a feeling of exclusion causes social pain, which leads to more obesity, worse health outcomes, fewer social connections, more depression and anxiety.  Wilkinson and Pickett point, for example, to a study of British civil servants.  Some o the civil servants had high-status, high-pressure jobs.  Others had low-status, low-pressure jobs.  You’d think the people in the high-pressure jobs would have higher rates of heart disease, gastrointestinal disease, and general sickness.  In fact, it was the people in the low-pressure jobs.  Low status imposes its own costs.

Heard It Here First

I had a bit of a "Wow" moment reading a recent David Brooks column. Instead of the usual conservative mantra that unregulated individualism is all that matters, he said a number of things that I've been saying for years: that humans are inherently emotional, irrational, and social. He didn't go quite so far as considering policy implications of accepting these things, but it's a start.

The New Humanism

. . . This growing, dispersed body of research reminds us of a few key insights. First, the unconscious parts of the mind are most of the mind, where many of the most impressive feats of thinking take place. Second, emotion is not opposed to reason; our emotions assign value to things and are the basis of reason. Finally, we are not individuals who form relationships. We are social animals, deeply interpenetrated with one another, who emerge out of relationships.

This body of research suggests the French enlightenment view of human nature, which emphasized individualism and reason, was wrong. The British enlightenment, which emphasized social sentiments, was more accurate about who we are. It suggests we are not divided creatures. We don’t only progress as reason dominates the passions. We also thrive as we educate our emotions.

When you synthesize this research, you get different perspectives on everything from business to family to politics. You pay less attention to how people analyze the world but more to how they perceive and organize it in their minds. You pay a bit less attention to individual traits and more to the quality of relationships between people.

You get a different view of, say, human capital. Over the past few decades, we have tended to define human capital in the narrow way, emphasizing I.Q., degrees, and professional skills. Those are all important, obviously, but this research illuminates a range of deeper talents, which span reason and emotion and make a hash of both categories . . .

Interesting Perspective

David Brooks proposes that the Democratic Party is split along class lines, with the working class supporting Clinton and the college educated behind Obama.

. . . The less educated speak the dialect of struggle; the more educated, the dialect of self-fulfillment

Did you hear the message of Clinton’s speech Tuesday night? It’s a rotten world out there. Regular folks are getting the shaft. They need someone who’ll fight tougher, work harder and put loyalty over independence.

Then did you see the Hopemeister’s speech? His schtick makes sense if you’ve got a basic level of security in your life, if you’re looking up, not down. Meanwhile, Obama’s people are so taken with their messiah that soon they’ll be selling flowers at airports and arranging mass weddings. . . .

Questions for Dr. Retail

Of Death to Taxes

It almost seems pointless creating a new post with "facts" after my last one basically saying there's no such thing--at least as far as politics and this kind of thing goes--but everything I've ever shared here has been with the assumption it comes with my point of view (see the header above). So, without too much commentary, here's a whole bunch of articles and interesting information that's caught my eye recently, loosely related to the standoff about the budget and debt ceiling.

A friend posted this status update on Facebook the other day:

I know I'm shushed away and called a Pinko Commie, but I simply cannot understand why people don't like to pay taxes. Taxes are good. They pay for good things that enrich our lives and protect us from people who want to kill us. We are in debt as a nation, and we have insufficient funds in the bank of reality. Why is it bad to raise taxes? Please, give me the best reason you got.

One of the commenters asked, "Do you really believe the government can spend your money better than you can?" and I love her response:

Yes, I do believe the government can spend my money better than I can. Teachers will be able to broaden my daughter's horizon more than I can. Fire fighters, police, highway and bridge and levee builders can keep me safer than I could doing those things for myself. Our miliary protects me far better than I ever could from people who want to kill me. (If attacked I'd probably fall into a fetal position and start crying.) Our judges and legislators can figure out the law better than I ever could. The FDA and EPA keeps me healthier than I could on my own. Government sponsored arts and social and humanities projects allow me to experience things I wouldn't get to on my own. Us taxpayers pooling our funds together so my dad, who is a veteran of World War II, can afford the nine prescription medications he takes to survive and dance and get engaged at age 85 gives both of us a more satisfying life. Please don't cut medicare and social security. I don't want my dad living with me, and I certainly can't afford his meds.

One of the most direct and eloquent statements I've ever seen in favor of taxes. Of course, it's not an opinion apparently shared by many these days, as the discussion demonstrated. Some of those furthest from this position would like to see federal spending cut 40%. Here's a look at what that might mean:

The federal government is scheduled to spend about $300 billion in August. Something like $125 billion of that is debt. So if the debt ceiling doesn't get raised, the government can only spend about $175 billion. Very roughly, here's spending for the month of August in the areas Nan Hayworth says are off limits:

Social Security = $60 billion
Veterans benefits = $10 billion
Medicare/Medicaid = $70 billion
Interest payments = $20 billion
Military pay = $15 billion

Total = $175 billion

So there you have it. Nan Hayworth is right: we can fund all of these things without raising the debt ceiling. Unfortunately, that's it. There's really no other prioritizing necessary. There's not a single dollar left for any other function of government. Not defense spending, not the FBI, not foreign embassies, not the court system, not prisons, not disaster relief, not unemployment insurance, not the border patrol, not TSA or the FAA, not roadbuilding, not maintenance of any kind, not national parks, and not pensions for retired federal workers. Not anything. And aside from military personnel, every single employee of the federal government will have to be furloughed.

It gets a little more spelled out in 40 Percent Less Government Will Be Fun! Things like:

You just cut the IRS and all the accountants at Treasury, which means that the actual revenue you have to spend is $0. . . . The border control stations are entirely unmanned . . . All of our troops stationed abroad quickly run out of electricity or fuel. . . . No federal emergency assistance, or help fighting things like wildfires or floods. . . . The money your local school district was expecting at the October 1 commencement of the 2012 fiscal year does not materialize . . . and much more.

Another way to look at the benefits of taxes and some of the things that get forgotten in all the talk of cutting them is 102 Things NOT To Do If You Hate Taxes. The first few:

1. Do not use Medicare.
2. Do not use Social Security
3. Do not become a member of the US military, who are paid with tax dollars.
4. Do not ask the National Guard to help you after a disaster.
5. Do not call 911 when you get hurt.
6. Do not call the police to stop intruders in your home.
7. Do not summon the fire department to save your burning home.
8. Do not drive on any paved road, highway, and interstate or drive on any bridge.
9. Do not use public restrooms.
10. Do not send your kids to public schools.

Of those supposedly untouchable areas that shouldn't be cut, Medicare is really the only one growing unreasonably out of control because healthcare costs keep skyrocketing and we're not doing anything about it. That leads to articles like Soylent Greenbacks: David Brooks Wants People to Die for Debt Reduction.

. . . Furthermore, he argues, the reason for these soaring costs is that very old and very sick people insist on clinging on to their miserable lives, when they ought to be civic-minded enough to kick off. It's not the insurance companies, which reap huge profits by serving as useless, greed-driven middlemen. It's not the drug companies, which are making out like bandits with virtually no government regulation. It's not the whole corrupt, overpriced system of medicine for profit, which delivers the 37th best health care in the world, according to the WHO, at more than twice the cost of the best (France). No. It's all about us greedy geezers. We're the ones who are placing an untenable burden on the younger, heartier citizenry, with our selfish desire to live a little longer. . . .

Or, in another vein, Why is the Most Wasteful Government Agency Not Part of the Deficit Discussion?

. . . Of course, I’m talking about the Pentagon. Any serious battle plan to reduce the deficit must take on the Pentagon. In 2011 military spending accounted for more than 58 percent of all federal discretionary spending and even more if the interest on the federal debt that is related to military spending were added. In the last ten years we have spent more than $7.6 trillion on military and homeland security according to the National Priorities Project. . . .

Just yesterday, in fact, I was talking to someone on leave from the military. He actually requested a new, less desirable assignment with a pay cut because he was tired of his assignment being sitting around for eight hours a day. Literally, because the reason for the assignment had not materialized, so his job was just to wait around until a new purpose emerged.

Since this is a very divided, partisan issue, I guess I'll include a bit of finger pointing and claims that my facts are truer. From What if You Held a Class War and No One Showed Up?

. . . But then, for about the thousandth time, my mind wanders over the past ten years. Republicans got the tax cuts they wanted. They got the financial deregulation they wanted. They got the wars they wanted. They got the unfunded spending increases they wanted. And the results were completely, unrelentingly disastrous. A decade of sluggish growth and near-zero wage increases. A massive housing bubble. Trillions of dollars in war spending and thousands of American lives lost. A financial collapse. A soaring long-term deficit. Sky-high unemployment. All on their watch and all due to policies they eagerly supported. And worse: ever since the predictable results of their recklessness came crashing down, they've rabidly and nearly unanimously opposed every single attempt to dig ourselves out of the hole they created for us. . . .

Along with waste, one of the big complaints about taxes is supposed unfair redistribution, taking from people who work hard for it and giving to people who don't deserve it. One of the "facts" being thrown around rampantly these days is that half the nation doesn't pay any taxes. That's not quite right, as The 51 Percent Zombie Lie goes into. Half don't end up paying federal income taxes. But, in addition to federal income taxes, Americans pay excise taxes, payroll taxes, property taxes, sales taxes, state income taxes, and various other taxes. . . . In one form or another, even poor Americans pay a fair chunk of their income in taxes. I would argue that even that most extreme example, illegal immigrants, can't avoid the majority of these taxes because of the way they're built into everyday life. A bit more of detail about that 51% number at Breaking Down the Lucky Duckies.

And there's all this outrage being generated about these so-called freeloaders, but why doesn't anyone seem to care about the fact that Amazon is able to beat the competition's prices by not having to pay state sales taxes? Don't think that's such a big deal? You should see all of the money they're pouring into efforts to make sure that doesn't change at Amazon's Scorched-Earth War Against the Rest of Us.

Exploratory Divination

To gain mastery over reality is to create a mythology worth living for. Your head is the space from which all meaning derives.

I like to let my mind dwell on random thoughts to see what connections they might synthesize. I love this bit of dialogue in one scene from a Battlestar Galactica episode:

You can't hurry her.
You have to absorb her words.
Allow them to caress your associative mind.

Or, something a bit longer that I wrote in a previous post:

In Another Convergence, I wrote, "One of the areas David Brooks explores repeatedly in The Social Animal is non-linear associations and intuitive connections."  Here's a good representative quote:

This is a different sort of knowledge.  It comes from integrating and synthesizing diverse dynamics.  It is produced over time, by an intelligence that is associational--observing closely, imagining loosely, comparing like to unlike and like to like to find harmonies and rhythms in the unfolding of events.

And, as I was typing it just now, as part of my reflection on what this post is and where it's going, I made another association.  This time I noticed the word "synthesizing" and recalled something I've thought previously.  In Speaking of Supervillians, I wrote that if I could be a superhero my power would be based in my ability to synthesize:

c. Your superhero alter-ego is . . .

The Synthesist
(Bringing together disparate: 1) ideas, to solve problems and mysteries; 2) materials, to address physical issues (MacGyverish); and 3) people, to overcome conflict.) 

I was taking a broader view than Brooks does--mostly because I needed to extend the idea into superhero territory and tangible action--but what he describes is certainly a part of what I was trying to get at, one I try to regularly express in my ramblings here.  The paragraph that immediately follows the one I quoted above goes on to say, in reference to associational and rational thinking:

The modest person uses both methods, and more besides.  The modest person learns not to trust one paradigm.  Most of what he knows accumulates through a long and arduous process of wandering.

I love that image of being a knowledge and wisdom wanderer, and he expands the metaphor after introducing it.  A wanderer, to me, is an open-minded seeker, which is someone I've always tried to be.  Intellectual curiosity combined with an awareness of just how much there is to know and how limited and finite our ability to know--much less actually grasp--all of it really is.  The goal really shouldn't be to master knowledge, which is impossible, but to wander through it and glean as much from it as we can.

So I find this article on Shamanism most intriguing.

Masters of Reality

The trances and healing powers of shamans are so widespread that they can be counted a human universal. Why did they evolve?

Whereas many animals use their brains to search in physical space, human minds (and those of some other animals) can search via simulation. That is, the brain can simulate potential future realities. This is possible because brains like ours encode a mental model of the world. By searching inside that mental model, we build narratives that tell us how to get from one place to another. Sometimes we do this backwards, by constructing counterfactual alternatives to explain how, if we had behaved differently, things might have gone. But just as often, we conjure up simulations to better understand how to influence outcomes in the future.

You might get only one chance to decide which house to buy, which partner to marry or what project to invest the next 10 years of your life in. Our brains allow us to solve these problems by projecting ourselves into alternative versions of these potential futures. This is called self-projection, which already starts to hint at the shamanic forces that might lie therein.

Sometimes, however, we don’t even know what we’re looking for. The threat of collective starvation from a bad harvest. The death of a child. The decimation of one’s entire village from a landslide. Such problems unravel the semantic connective tissue that holds reality together. They don’t seem to play by the rules of our past experience. When that happens, humans need a ‘search engine’ that knows how to do what Google cannot: to generate search terms for a problem that they don’t yet fully understand.

When minds can’t find things, they engage with the random. . . .

The mind’s use of randomness is how we think new thoughts and come up with creative solutions to vexing problems. This is an inbuilt feature of minds such as ours, and one we don’t often notice. If you sit quietly and let your mind wander, you can get a glimpse of this randomness at work, as your daydreams put together odd combinations in a kind of Rube Goldberg approach to problem solving.

But we also use randomness more purposefully. For example, when we use practices such as the I Ching or Tarot card readings, we are engaging in a form of exploratory divination.

Such practices have been used for thousands of years to help people understand their problems by confronting them with meaningful but random interpretations. Appropriately used, these methods can help to escape one’s natural biases by being forced to consider alternative hypotheses. These can, upon consideration, lead to new insights, especially in situations where there are no competing solutions.

Shamanism is a form of exploratory divination. . . .

Shamans do this by accessing a particular part of the mind. Through purposeful and yet exploratory investigation, shamans make lucid the mental associations that lurk quietly underneath our understanding of reality. . . .

As a form of exploratory divination, shamanism uses these in-built associations to construct meanings for which the mind has a natural affinity. There is little that is as important as this constructed meaning. Research consistently finds that experiencing a coherent and meaningful life is one of the strongest predictors of our wellbeing. By meaningful, I mean having a story to tell, a higher reason as to why one thing happened and not another. This makes us feel good and helps us to act in ways that are consistent with our higher goals, instead of pursuing more short-term pleasures. . . .

To gain mastery over reality is to create a mythology worth living for. Your head is the space from which all meaning derives. It is the shaman’s role to shine light on that meaning in order, like a wind-up doll, to make you go.

I'm sure this doesn't actually add up to exploratory divination so much as confirmation bias, but I'll use the rest of this space to engage with some random thoughts that have recently caught my interest, intertwined with images I have captured as an expression of this idea:

We crave rich variegations of light. Too much time in one ambience, and we long for something new. Perhaps this explains the sensory ennui of those who live under unchanging skies. The monotony of blank sunny skies or of an endless cloud ceiling deprives us of the visual diversity we desire.

Initially quoted as part of: Our Biggest Failing Is Lack of Compassion for the World, Including Ourselves.

Speaking of exploration . . .

Why You Should Parent Like a Librarian

Librarians don’t tell you what you should be reading, or hover over you to make sure you’re on track. They do, however, stay in the cultural conversation, give you access to a diverse array of material, and help you follow your interests, whatever they might be (say, ventriloquism or taxidermy or record stores in Tokyo).

To parent your children like a librarian, you might display books (or other interesting items) face-out, encourage their curiosities (“If you’re into pinball, you might also like Rube Goldberg machines or the inventions of Galileo”), and make a decision to not answer their every question but instead help them figure out the steps to find the information on their own. Then simply stand back and let them try to figure out how the world works at their own pace.

"Everything just sucks. There are no good decisions, everyone's messed up, and no matter what I do, I risk hurting someone. I thought it was supposed to get better. When does it get better?" . . .

"There's no light at the end of the tunnel."

"That doesn't give me the warm fuzzies."

"It's not supposed to. But that's life. One long tunnel. There are lights along the way. Sometimes they feel spread farther apart than others, but they're there. And when you find one, it's okay to stand under it for a while to catch your breath before marching back into the dark."

"So it never gets better, then?"

"Not the way you think. But walking through a stretch of dark doesn't mean you can't be happy. And if you're lucky, you'll bump into someone willing to walk through the darkness with you." . . .

"Sometimes we walk with people. Other times we carry them."

― Shaun David Hutchinson, The Apocalypse of Elena Mendoza

Speaking of librarians, we are all about information literacy.

Older People Are Worse Than Young People at Telling Fact From Opinion

On the individual questions, the identification gap was particularly large regarding the nature of the American government and questions about immigration, but there was no statement that younger Americans did not identify with equal or higher accuracy than their elders.

An earlier study by the American Press Institute also found that older Americans were more confident than younger ones in their ability to discern fact from opinion.

The research tacks against the idea that younger people who are extremely online (or “digital savvy,” in Pew’s terms) might be more exposed and/or more susceptible to misinformation. But the real correlation with poor performance is exposure to television news, which has fallen off among young people but remains very high among older people.

Speaking of parenting . . .

Early childhood education yields big benefits — just not the ones you think

So the most important effect from early childhood education may be that these programs are places where parents can leave their children all day, allowing the parents to work a full-time job or pursue higher education.

In other words, early childhood education may change children’s lives not by teaching them things they’ll retain in elementary school, but simply by being in a safe, predictable, and consistent environment for them to play in — and by providing their parents with the stability to get and keep better jobs. . . .

In short, early childhood education programs do have real effects — but these effects likely don’t stem from their merits at educating children. The effects likely come from these programs’ function as child care.

If this is true, it should change how we think about early childhood education. Head Start’s mission statement is to improve school readiness. But school readiness seems to be an area where Head Start doesn’t really matter, while it has lifelong effects in other areas. . . .

There’s actually not much evidence that starting education early makes any difference for children. What there is evidence for is that a safe daycare and a stable home environment make a big difference, and that greater family stability and wealth — which child care enables — produce lasting, positive results.

The sky was as blue as I'd ever seen it. On a day like that, if felt impossible to believe humanity was in danger and the world might ever end. And maybe the world wouldn't ever end. Maybe, instead, humanity would be wiped away and the world would keep going on with its blue skies and boundless oceans. It's not as if the world needed us to keep spinning.

― Shaun David Hutchinson, The Apocalypse of Elena Mendoza

If you want to wander . . .

What Makes the Flint Hills of Kansas a Sight to See

This might be the most beautiful place in America.

Walk with me.

Walk awhile up and down these Kansas hills, where the tallgrass prairie rolls out deep green on every side, the land rising and falling to a faraway horizon, out to the silent edge of a high, hot sky, the big bluestem and the wild alfalfa and the switchgrass and the Indian grass and the buffalo grass waving and swaying in the wind, gathering in the streambeds where the Eastern red cedar and the cottonwood shadow the springs and seeps, until even your own footsteps sound far away and that abiding green reaches for you and finally, gratefully, you feel yourself dissolving into the immensity of the world. You are taken up, even as you slip away. This landscape is its own poetry, a match for the breadth and reach of your imagination, a wilderness of perfect solitude. There are no politics here, only peace; no sadness, only hope; no doubt, only certainty. Not a house, not a fence, not a single human sign, only you, alone at last and at one with everything. . . .

In early spring, ranchers here burn a regional patchwork of pastureland. Flames 30 feet high! Smoke so thick it closes the interstate! A week or two or three later, those blackened acres come back green and bright as an emerald. The new growth is irresistible to cattle. And for thousands of years before that, to the buffalo. Native people burned the tallgrass too, as an attracter for the elk and bison they hunted. And fire keeps the prairie from being overrun by trees. Back into prehistory, lightning did that work.

So earth, air, fire and water. Two hundred seventy-five million years’ worth of it. Makes it seem simple.

But history is ruffer even than flint. The death and displacement of Native Americans in service of “Manifest Destiny” or free enterprise or private property cannot be ignored. Nor can the environmental costs of development and profit-taking on these last few acres of one of the country’s greatest treasures. This is some of the most contested ground in America. . . . 

Speaking of earth and air . . .

Allergies: the scourge of modern life?

As to why there are more food allergies today, nobody knows the precise reason, but experts now believe there are three contributing factors.

The first is the delayed introduction of allergens. For years, throughout the world, allergy specialists had been advising that infants avoid the consumption of potentially allergenic foodstuffs. Not only was this incorrect but it may have played a role in driving the food allergy epidemic that we are seeing today. . . .

The second contributory factor in food allergy (and allergy more generally) involves the human microbiome and the microorganisms that are our “old friends”. The body learns about its environment after it is born by coming into contact with an array of substances, everything from the bacteria we are smothered in as we travel down the birth canal to the breast milk we are fed on. After that, proximity to animals and natural environments makes it more likely that we will be exposed to a wide variety of bacterial life, in the air, on the ground and in our diet. All of these help populate our bodies, but particularly our gut, with microbiota. This is such an important part of being human that microbiota outnumber us within our own bodies: humans are made up of something between 27tn and 37tn cells; but we carry about 100tn of these organisms within us. We are astonishingly complex ecosystems. The “old friends” or hygiene hypothesis postulates that modern life has compromised our microbiome: our immune systems may now incorrectly categorise harmless substances as a threat. . . .

The final, third driver of food allergy, also connected to urban life, is associated with the curious fact that there is an approximate geographical spread of food allergy. Scientists have begun to notice that the prevalence of food allergy has a tendency to align with the geographical availability of sunlight. In a number of papers and studies, Prof Carlos Camargo in the US and Prof Katie Allen and her colleagues in Australia have explored how a lack of exposure to sunlight – and a consequent vitamin D deficiency – can make infants three times more likely to have an egg allergy and a staggering 11 times more likely to have a peanut allergy. . . .

Speaking of earth and life and connections . . .

Meet the Endoterrestrials

A growing number of scientists . . . believe that the Earth’s deep subsurface is brimming with life. By some estimates, this unexplored biosphere may contain anywhere from a tenth to one-half of all living matter on Earth.

Scientists have found microbes living in granite rocks 6,000 feet underground in the Rocky Mountains, and in seafloor sediment buried since the age of the dinosaurs. They have even found tiny animals—worms, shrimp-like arthropods, whiskered rotifers—among the gold deposits of South Africa, 11,000 feet below the surface.

We humans tend to see the world as a solid rock coated with a thin layer of life. But to scientists like Templeton, the planet looks more like a wheel of cheese, one whose thick, leathery rind is perpetually gnawed and fermented by the microbes that inhabit its innards. Those creatures draw nourishment from sources that sound not only inedible, but also intangible: the atomic decay of radioactive elements, the pressure-cooking of rocks as they sink and melt into the Earth’s deep interior—and perhaps even earthquakes. . . .

Oxygen sustains every animal on Earth, from aardvarks to earthworms to jellyfish; our atmosphere and most of our ocean is chock-full of it. But Earth has only been highly oxygenated for a tiny fraction of its history. Even today, vast swaths of our planet’s biosphere have never encountered oxygen. Go more than a few feet into bedrock, and it’s virtually nonexistent. Go anywhere else in the solar system, including places like Mars that might harbor life, and you won’t find it, either. . . .

Even as Onstott awaits those results, he is starting to consider an even more radical possibility: that deep-dwelling microbes don’t just feed off of earthquakes, but might also trigger them. He believes that as microbes attack the iron, manganese, and other elements in the minerals that line the fault, they could weaken the rock—and prime the fault for its next big slip.

Here's the thing about falling in love: It's an illusion. We watch television and movies, we read books, and we see all these examples of how two people meet and fall in love over the course of a couple of hours or a couple of hundred pages, and we think that's how it's supposed to be. But it never is. Not really. Falling in love is about hormones and pheremones and powerful emotions that overwhelm our better judgment. Staying in love requires time and effort and knowledge and trust that has to be earned over the course of lifetimes. Falling in love is the illusion. Staying in love is the real miracle.

― Shaun David Hutchinson, The Apocalypse of Elena Mendoza

Speaking of love . . .

Simply Having a Gay Straight Alliance Reduces Suicide Risk for All Students

Students in Canadian schools with gay-straight alliances were less likely to be discriminated against, had lower odds of suicidal thoughts and had fewer suicide attempts—regardless of whether they were gay or straight.

A mythology of greater acceptance?

The moment we forget that even the evil among us are still human is the moment we forget that even the most human among us are capable of evil.

― Shaun David Hutchinson, The Apocalypse of Elena Mendoza

Of course, I do have a predilection for all this thinking . . .

Acting like an extravert has benefits, but not for introverts

For example, regardless of their usual disposition, people tend to report feeling happier and more authentic whenever they are behaving more like an extravert (that is, more sociable, active and assertive). That’s a mere correlation that could be interpreted in different ways. But lab studies have similarly found that prompting people, including introverts, to act more like an extravert makes them feel happier and truer to themselves. . . .

First and unsurprisingly, introverts did not succeed in increasing their extraverted behaviour as much as other participants. And while the introverts in the ‘act like an extravert’ condition did enjoy momentary gains in positive emotion, they did not report this benefit in retrospect at the end of the study. Unlike extraverts, they also did not show momentary gains in authenticity, and in retrospect they reported lower authenticity. The ‘act extraverted’ intervention also appeared to increase introverts’ retrospective fatigue levels and experience of negative emotions.

Jacques-Hamilton and his team said that these were perhaps their most important findings – ‘dispositional introverts may reap fewer wellbeing benefits, and perhaps even incur some wellbeing costs, from acting more extraverted’. They also made an important point that strong introverts might not desire to experience positive emotions as frequently as extraverts.

Somehow, I don't blame him . . .

Scientist in remote Antarctic outpost stabs colleague who told him endings of books he was reading

A scientist in a remote outpost in Antarctica plunged a kitchen knife into his colleague because he was fed up with the man telling him the endings of books, say investigators.

Sergey Savitsky, 55, and Oleg Beloguzov, 52, were avid readers to pass the lonely hours during four harsh years together.

But Savitsky became angry after Beloguzov kept telling him the endings, it is alleged.

It's easy to allow the world to collapse down to our own stories. To see ourselves as the central figure in the only story worth knowing and forget that every person we encounter is living their own, is the center of their own universe. But that's the nature of the human experience.

― Shaun David Hutchinson, The Apocalypse of Elena Mendoza

Be a knowledge and wisdom wanderer. Allow the ideas to caress your associative mind. Practice exploratory divination.

To gain mastery over reality is to create a mythology worth living for. Your head is the space from which all meaning derives.