Incentive & Lack of Skin In The Game In Washington !!

It is impossible to make a man understand something if his livelihood depends on not understanding it.

- Upton Sinclair

This is Running for Your Life

Raving review of Michelle Orange’s new essay collection, This is Running for Your Life:

Sometimes while reading, I have visions of certain writers flexing their biceps at their desks; sometimes I hear the sound of chests bumping in midair. When they get lost in Beirut, it is the crux of their experience, and they fucking tell that story, like it's just that easy. But I like that Michelle Orange questions herself. I like that the things she experiences aren't inevitable. The unspooling of Orange's thoughts is what I loved most about reading This Is Running for Your Life, even if it did made her writing less muscular. A (female) friend of mine who'd also read the book said that it was like "listening to a good friend tell a story."

Quote of the Day

The brain and the eye may have a contractual relationship in which the brain has agreed to believe what they eye sees, but in return the eye has agreed to look for what the brain wants.

- Daniel Gilbert

Kai Po Che !

Brilliant adaptation of Chetan Bhagat's novel The 3 Mistakes of My Life
Hindi movies can still be deliver without Aamir Khan !!

The Sartre Fallacy

Sam McNerney brilliantly distills how philosophy, psychology and neuroscience helped him "examine" his thinking in this three part series:

Part 1 - Being Irrational About Reason:
Only later did I realize that learning about decision-making gives rise to what I term the confirmation bias bias, or the tendency for people to generate a narrow (and pessimistic) conception of the mind after reading literature on how the mind thinks narrowly. Biases restrict our thinking but learning about them should do the opposite. Yet you’d be surprised how many decision-making graduate students and overzealous Kahneman, Ariely and Gilbert enthusiasts do not understand this. Knowledge of cognitive biases, perhaps the most important thing to learn for good thinking, actually increases ignorance in some cases. This is the Sartre Fallacy – we think worse after learning how to think better.

Part 2 - Is It Inevitable?:
Learning about change blindness caused participants in one study to overestimate their vulnerability to the visual mistake. They suffered from change blindness blindness. The planning fallacy provides another example. When planners notice poor projections made in similar projects they become more confident instead of making appropriate adjustments (“We’ll never be that over budget and that late”). This was my problem. When I imagined the worst-case scenario my confidence in the best-case scenario increased. The idea, simply, is that we tend to read about biases and conclude that we are immune from them because we know they exist. This is of course itself a bias and as we’ve seen it quickly leads to an ad infinitum problem.

Part 3 - The (Real) Socratic Problem:
The Socratic problem usually refers to the fact that our accounts of Socrates are second hand, a problem exacerbated by his stubborn refusal to document, with pen and papyrus, his philosophy. I want to rebrand the Socratic problem to describe his false belief – a belief that pervades the Western world today – that knowledge is necessarily a panacea.

Why is the Sartre Fallacy difficult to avoid?
We’ve seen that humans did not evolve to be philosophers, which is fine except when we act like it.There are no guarantees that acquiring more knowledge – reading more self-help, diet, business, or decision-making books – will improve life. We’re cognitive misers; we only use System 2 if we have to, and even then we’re reluctant. The intellect is, evolutionarily speaking, the youngest addition to the human condition. We don’t know how to use it very well.
This is why the Sartre Fallacy is difficult to avoid: we don’t “do” knowledge well. Natural selection focused on the body, not the mind.

Quote of the Day

It is, as history attests, a grave error to conclude that because our vices are social rather than natural, they will be easier to cure.

- Alan Ryan

Wisdom Of The Week

Last night I started reading George E Vaillant's book Triumphs of Experience: The Men of the Harvard Grant Study and the lessons so far has been life altering to say the least...

• First lesson is that positive mental health does exist, and to some degree can be understood independent of moral and cultural biases.
• The second lesson is that once we leave the study of psychopathology for positive mental health, an understanding of adaptive coping is crucial.
• The third lesson is that the most important influence by far on a flourishing life is love.
• The fourth lesson is that — people really can change, and people really can grow. Childhood need be neither destiny nor doom.
• A fifth lesson is that what goes right is more important than what goes wrong, and that it is the quality of a child’s total experience, not any particular trauma or any particular relationship, that exerts the clearest influence on adult psychopathology. Let me repeat myself: what goes right is more important than what goes wrong.
• A sixth lesson is that if you follow lives long enough, they change, and so do the factors that affect healthy adjustment. Our journeys through this world are filled with discontinuities. Nobody in the Study was doomed at the outset, but nobody had it made, either. Inheriting the genes for alcoholism can turn the most otherwise blessed golden boy into a trainwreck. Conversely, an encounter with a very dangerous disease liberated the pitiful young Dr. Camille from a life of dependency and loneliness.

Persuading twenty-first-century Wall Street types that love is all you need was going to be a hard sell.

There are two pillars of happiness revealed by the seventy-five-year-old Grant Study. One is love. The other is finding a way of coping with life that does not push love away.

Quote of the Day

No man ever steps in the same river twice, for it's not the same river and he's not the same man.

- Heraclitus

Why Humans Like To Cry

Review of new book Why Humans Like to Cry: Tragedy, Evolution, and the Brain by Michael Trimble:

Weeping may have been one of the earliest forms of hominid communication. Initially a method to keep the eye lubricated and a response to pain, Trimble argues that crying became a way for early humans to share feelings of sorrow, joy and compassion and to empathize with others long before we developed language.

Human emotions arise from a network of interconnected brain regions. Trimble discusses research findings that show our brain's emotionally driven limbic system is deeply connected with other areas of the nervous system, such as the sensory cortex, which helps us process our surroundings. As a result, our feelings are integrated with our environment and bodily responses, a different paradigm than occurs in other species. In fact, he suggests that one possible reason we feel better after crying is that weeping stimulates our cranial nerves, which in turn appears to soothe our overactive amygdala.

Trimble ambitiously cracks the surface of a complex human process. Crying, then, does not indicate weakness; rather it highlights our advancement.

Quote of the Day

In the life of every successful physician there comes the temptation to toy with the Delilah of the Press – daily and otherwise. There are times when she may be courted with satisfaction, but beware! Sooner or later she is sure to play the harlot and has left many a man shorn of his strength, namely the confidence of his professional brethren.

- William Osler