Random Notes from a Crank

 Of the stemware that's out there, the martini glass has to be the most stupid one. The glass is designed almost on purpose to be easy to spill, especially for the cocktail it contains, the high-alcohol martini. When I drink martinis at home, I use a stemless wine glass.  

The other night I watched Jim Gaffigan's Amazon stand-up The Pale Tourist. There's only two episodes - one for Canada and the other for Spain. Both are solid, but I really enjoyed the one about Canada. It's hilarious. 

I'm reading The Bird Way: A New Look at How Birds Talk, Work, Play, Parent, and Think by Jennifer Ackerman. It's a good book. I liked The Genius of Birds better. Regardless, in a couple of chapters when she's describing the behavior of raven and keas, she cites the concept of "emotional contagion" among those species.  

So now I'm thinking of how that concept plays out with humans. 

And here's something from Psychology Today to chew on: "Protect Yourself from Emotional Contagion." 

A month ago, the Nasty family got a membership to Costco, which in the long run is going to save us a good bit of money. One of the grocery items we have consistently bought when we go there is Kirkland basil pesto. 

But I wonder at the terms. By nature, traditional pesto is made with basil, so why the need to use basil as an adjective? 

Stay Positive: The Nature Fix: Why Nature Makes Us Happier, Healthier, and More Creative

I've praised the work of Florence Williams in a previous post, but I thought I'd do a Stay Positive post about her book, The Nature Fix: Why Nature Makes Us Happier, Healthier, and More Creative. 

Starting with E.O. Wilson's biophilia hypothesis, Williams investigates the scientific support why humans are drawn to natural settings and how they positively affect our emotions, intelligence, and cognition. 

She travels to places across the world to talk with researchers and be part of research experiments in some cases. 

Here are some quotations of note, some of which I'll be transcribing into my commonplace book: 

• "When we are relaxed and at ease in our environment, our parasympathetic system--sometimes called the 'rest and digest' branch--kicks in" (25). 
• "It sound totally hokey, even unbelievable, that evergreen scents--not unlike the thing that dangles from taxicab rear-view mirrors--could help us live longer" (29). 
• "Moreover, task-switching, which is something we do an awful lot of these days, burns up precious oxygenated glucose from the prefrontal cortex and other areas of the brain, and this is energy we need for both cognitive and physical performance" (44). 
• "At least one MRI study (using photographs of nature) show it's ["the neural growth factor BDNF"] going to parts of the brain like the insula and the interior cingulate that are associated with pleasure, empathy, and unconstrained thinking" (53). 
• "Noise may well be the most pervasive pollutant in America" (87). 
• "There's some evidence that more introverted or neurotic people are more annoyed by loud noises" (93). 
• "To the extent that nature sounds are soothing to most humans, three in particular stand out: wind, water, and birds. They are the trifecta of salubrious listening (favorite music and the voices of loved ones are perhaps the happiest of all, engaging almost every part of the brain, according to neuroscientist and musician Daniel Levitin, in This is Your Brain on Music" (98). 
• "our brains are surprisingly similar to parts of birds' brains that hear, process, and make language. Humans share more genes governing speech with songbirds than we do with other primates" (99).
• "Finland scores high on global scales of happiness. Many people assume this is because there isn't much income disparity here. But perhaps it's also because everyone has access to what makes them happy--a bunch of lakes, forests and coastlines, combined with ridiculously long, state-sanctioned vacations and a midnight sun" (135). 
• "Physical activity changes the brain to improve memory and to slow aging; it improves mood and lowers anxiety; in children, it increases the capacity to learn; some studies show it is as effective as antidepressants for alleviating mild depression without the unwanted side effects" (151).

I was going to provide what she offers at the end of the book, which she calls "essential take-homes," but you should buy the book. Support writers and good writing, people. 

However, the quotations above offer me some take-homes, or should I say "take-outsides"? 

• Get candles that waft evergreenish, lavender, and rosemary scents. 
• Stop multi-tasking. 
• Embrace silence more often when I can find it (I'm introverted and one might describe me as neurotic sometimes). 
• Exercise.
• Go outside more often, especially the trails around Lake Charleston.

Random Notes from a Crank

If you're an educator, a parent, or a coach, you should check out Angela Duckworth's Grit: The Power of Passion and Perseverance. I finished it last week. 

I wonder about the word origins of people using "salty" as an adjective for language as in "That guy was using some salty language." I wonder if it comes from the stereotype of sailors being people that swear often. 

I got sucked into another graphic novel series: Brian Wood's DMZ. 

I need to get back to reading The Walking Dead Compendium One. 

The Crimson Tide has a challenging opening game against the USC Trojans. If I remember right, it's going to be played at JerryWorld. 

One of our friends uses mayonnaise to take off ring marks off of woodwork. I'm fascinated by this. I want to understand the science behind it. It didn't work on my dining room table, however. 

Random Notes from a Crank

Lately I've been thinking a lot about the sunk cost fallacy on a number of levels. I first got reminded of the concept in Kahneman's Thinking, Fast and Slow, but McRaney has a post from '11 on his You're Not So Smart site that eventually turned into a chapter in his book. 

And here's a short article from Lifehack about it. 

This "10 Reasons Why Introverts Are Incredibly Attractive People" article from the same site cheers me up a little bit though. 

If you enjoy visual satire, check out "Artist Perfectly Captures Flaws of Our Society in a Series of Witty Illustrations." 

Random Notes from a Crank

If you're looking for a good laugh, and I certainly am these days, check out this segment on Jimmy Kimmel's show called "Celebrities Read Out Mean Tweets About Themselves." I'm sorry I've missed the first five installments. 

On the 19th, my daughter will receive a Kindness Award at her elementary school. The deal is that every teacher nominates a kid from their class to receive the award. I have to say it fits her character. If there's an example of Mom's teachings and actions flowing to the younger generation, Hannah receiving the Kindness Award is one. 

When we talked about the award last week, my daughter said she liked that she received the award, but she really wanted the Perserverence Award because, as she said (and I"m paraphrasing here), perserverence means you work hard toward your goals and never give up. For those of you who know my interest in the "growth mindset" and research about "grit," you understand the pride that enveloped me when she said that. 

When I was driving my daughter to school this morning, she asked when her grandma's birthday is. It's the 23rd of this month, and she wants to celebrate her grandma's birthday even though she's gone. We decided we could make pies for her birthday because my mom was an excellent maker of pies. I'm sure we'll make pecan, but I need to figure out what to make for the second one. This weekend will entail making pie crusts and then putting them in the freezer. 

Music Friday: "Since Jimmy Came" & "I Bought a Pie"

I discovered yesterday Shonna Tucker and her backing band named Eye Candy had an album come out last month. 

For those of you who might not recognize the name, Shonna Tucker is the former bass player for the Drive-By Truckers and the ex-wife of Jason Isbell. After Isbell was kicked out of DBT, Tucker started singing some of her own songs for DBT, tunes some fans found to be the weakest part of those albums. 

I think a lot of that reception has to do with reference point (see info on prospect theory), meaning after having a stable lineup of who sings ~ Hood, Cooley, or Isbell ~ introducing Tucker as the third voice of DBT got mixed reviews partly out of the quality of the songs (her Alabama accent is pronounced on some of them) and probably because of sexist reasons (for some people). 

That said though, her songs weren't my favorites of those discs, Brighter Than Creation's Dark, The Big To-Do, and Go-Go Boots. I'm a fan of "Where's Eddie?" though.   

After I found out about the new album, I plopped down my $6.99 for a download and acquired A Tell All by Shonna Tucker and Eye Candy. 

It's good. Her voice is smoother and more sustained, and the album has a solid mix of songs. Without the expectation of her songs being Truckers' tunes, I really like the album. In other words, my reference point has changed. 

Below is "Jimmy Came Here" and "I Bought a Pie."

Stay Positive: Kahneman's Thinking, Fast and Slow

One of the best books I've read in a while is Daniel Kahneman's Thinking, Fast and Slow. 

It's a book that synthesizes all kinds of important research from psychology, economics, and other social sciences, much of it connecting to decision making and what college professors might call "critical thinking." I'm interested in what he says about our "System 1" and "System 2" thinking, and the research makes you question how "rational" and open-minded you really are. If you work in any kind of organization, Kahneman's book is a must-read. 

I'm not doing a book review, but what I want to do here is present a litany of quotations (without the marks) from the book that are going to make it into my commonplace book:

• The best we can do is a compromise: learn to recognize situations in which mistakes are likely and try harder to avoid significant mistakes when the stakes are high.
• We normally avoid mental overload by dividing our tasks into multiple easy steps, committing intermediate results to long-term memory or to paper rather than to easily overloaded working memory. We cover long distances by taking our time and conduct our mental lives by the law of least effort. 
• Too much concern about how well one is doing in a task sometimes disrupts performance by loading short-term memory with pointless anxious thoughts. 
• ...many people are overconfident, prone to place too much faith in their intuitions. 
• Those who avoid the sin of intellectual sloth could be called "engaged." They are more alert, more intellectually active, less willing to be satisfied with superficially attractive answers, more skeptical about their intuitions. 
• Studies of priming effect have yielded discoveries that threaten our self-image as conscious and autonomous authors of our judgments and our choices.
• Anything that makes it easier for the associative machine to run smoothly will also bias beliefs. A reliable way to make people believe falsehoods is frequent repetition, because familiarity is not easily distinguished from truth. 
• How do you know that a statement is true? If it is strongly linked by logic or association to other beliefs or preferences you hold, or comes from a source you trust and like, you will feel a sense of cognitive ease. 
• Robert Zajonc dedicated much of his career to the study of the link between the repetition of an arbitrary stimulus and the mild affection people eventually have for it. Zajonc called it mere exposure effect. 
• "Familiarity breeds liking. This is mere exposure effect." 
• The operations of associative memory contribute to a general confirmation bias. 
• The tendency to like (or dislike) everything about a person--including things you have not observed--is known as the halo effect. 
• Whether you state them or not, you often have answers to questions that you do not completely understand, relying on evidence that you can neither explain nor defend. 
• We are pattern seekers, believers in coherent world, in which regularities ... appear not by accident but as a result of mechanical causality or of someone's intention. 
• "The emotional tail wags the dog." ~Jonathan Haidt
• There is a deep gap between our thinking about statistics and our thinking about individual cases. Statistical results with a causal interpretation have a stronger effect on our thinking than noncausal information. But even compelling causal statistics will not change long-held beliefs or beliefs rooted in personal experience. On the other hand, surprising individual cases have a powerful impact and are a more effective tool for teaching psychology because the incongruity must be resolved and embedded in a causal story. 
• ... it is natural for System 1 to generate overconfident judgments, because confidence, as we have seen, is determined by the coherence of the best story you can tell from the evidence at hand. Be warned: your intuitions will deliver predictions that are too extreme and you will be inclined to put far too much faith in them. 
• The tendency to revise the history of one's beliefs in light of what actually happened produces a robust cognitive illusion. 
• The sense-making machinery of System 1 makes us see the world as more tidy, simple, predictable, and coherent than it really is. 
• Facts that challenge such basic assumptions--and thereby threaten people's livelihood and self-esteem--are simply not absorbed. The mind does not digest them. 
• We know that people can maintain an unshakable faith in any proposition, however absurd, when they are sustained by a community of like-minded believers. 
• Emotional learning may be quick, but what we consider as "expertise" usually takes a long time to develop.
• The associative machine is set to suppress doubt and to evoke ideas and information that are compatible with the currently dominant story.
• In other words, do not trust anyone--including yourself--to tell you how much you should trust their judgment. 
• ...the two basic conditions for acquiring a skill: an environment that is sufficiently regular to be predictable and an opportunity to learn these regularities through prolonged practice.
• Expertise is not a single skill; it is a collection of skills, and the same professional may be highly expert in some of the tasks in her domain while remaining a novice in others. 
• The planning fallacy is only one of the manifestations of pervasive optimistic bias. Most of us view the world as more benign than it really is, our own attributes as more favorable than they truly are, and the goals we adopt as more achievable than they are likely to be. We also tend to exaggerate our ability to forecast the future, which foster optimistic overconfidence. 
• The evidence suggests that optimism is widespread, stubborn, and costly. 
• The main obstacle is that subjective confidence is determined by the coherence of the story one has constructed, not by the quality and amount of the information that supports it. 
• He [Gary Klein] labels his proposal the premortem. The procedure is simple: when the organization has almost come to an important decision but has not formally committed itself, Klein proposes gathering for a brief session a group of individuals who are knowledgeable about the decision. The premise of the session is a short speech: "Imagine that we are a year into the future. We implemented the plan as it now exists. The outcome was a disaster. Please take 5 to 10 minutes to write a brief history of that disaster."
• The premortem has two main advantages: it overcomes groupthink that affects many teams once a decision appears to have been made, and it unleashes the imagination of knowledgeable individuals in a much-needed direction. As a team converges on a decision--and especially when the leaders tips her hand--public doubts about the wisdom of the planned move are gradually suppressed and eventually come to be treated as evidence of flawed loyalty to the team and its leaders. The suppression of doubt contributes to overconfidence in a group where only supporters of the decision have a voice. The main virtue of the premortem is that it legitimizes doubts. Furthermore, it encourages even supporters of the decision to search for possible threats that they had not considered earlier. 
• The errors of a theory are rarely found in what it asserts explicitly; they hide in what it ignores or tacitly assumes. 
• I call it theory-induced blindness: once you have accepted a theory and used it as a tool in your thinking, it is extraordinarily difficult to notice its flaws. 
• The brains of humans and other animals contain a mechanism that is designed to give priority to bad news.
• Animals, including people, fight harder to prevent losses than to achieve gains. In the world of territorial animals, this principle explains the success of defenders. 
• Amos [Tversky] had little patience for these efforts; he called the theorists who tried to rationalize violations of utility theory "lawyers for the misguided." We went in another direction. We retained utility theory as a logic of rational choice but abandoned the idea that people are perfectly rational choosers. We took on the task of developing a psychological theory that would describe the choices people make, regardless of whether they are rational. In prospect theory, decision weights would not be identical to probabilities.
• ...people expect to have stronger emotional reactions (including regret) to an outcome that is produced by action than to the same outcome when it is produced by inaction. 
• The most "rational" subjects--those who were the least susceptible to framing effects--showed enhanced activity in the frontal area of the brain that is implicated in combining emotion and reasoning to guide decisions. 
• Tastes and decisions are shaped by memories, and the memories can be wrong. The evidence presents a profound challenge to the idea that humans have consistent preferences and know how to maximize them, a cornerstone of the rational-agent model. 
• Some aspects of life have more effect on the evaluation of one's life than on the experience of living. Educational attainment is an example. More education is associated with higher evaluation of one's life, but not with greater experienced well-being. Indeed, at least in the United States, the more educated tend to report higher stress.
• The acquisition of skills requires a regular environment, an adequate opportunity to practice, and rapid and unequivocal feedback about the correctness of thoughts and actions.