You Are Not So Smart Podcast
Some of the key, relevent concepts from the text:
Groupthink-129
Quaker Oats, the first branding experiment
Coke Vs Pepsi Taste Test 88-89
Words and false memories 176 177
Social Norms 186
For instance, look at this sequence of letters and then recite them out loud without looking: RKFBIIRSCBSUSSR. Unless you have caught on, this is a really difficult task. Now chunk those letters into managable portions like this: RK FBI IRS CBS USSR. Look away now and try to recite them. It should be much easier now. You just took fifteen bits of information and reduced them to five. -7
Be careful. People like to be told what they already know. Remember that. They get uncomfortable when you tell them new things. New things. . . well, new things aren't what they expect. They like to know that, say, a dog will bite a man. That is what dogs do. They don't want to know that man bites a dog, because the world is not supposed to happen like that. In short, what people think they want is news, but what they really crave is olds. . . Not news but olds, telling people that what they think they already know is true. -Terry Pratchett, from one of his Discworld novels, quoted on 29
An Ohio State study in 2009 showed people spend 36 percent more time reading an essay if that essay aligns with their opinions. -30
It's simply easier to believe something if you are presented with examples than it is to accept something presented in numbers or abstract facts. -70
Every story needs a strong protagonist with whom you can identify. If they are down on their luck or recently fell from grace, you see them as being approachable. If they are plucky and face great odds, again, you root for them without having to think about it. Early on, the protagonist will save someone without having to, and you'll start to like him or her. On the other side, you need a dastardly antagonist who harms someone for no reason, a person who ignores the rules and wants only to satisfy him-or herself no matter the cost. The hero or heroine leaves his or her normal world and enters into a new life full of adventure. Just when it seems as though the protagonist will fail, he or she overcomes whatever has been in the way, sometimes even saving the world in the process. When the hero or heroine returns to home, he or she has been changed for the better. 82-83
Advertisers use genetic freaks with abnormal symmetry, lit by professionals, altered by makeup artists, and finished off with Photoshop until they are nothing more than realistic cartoons--just like a RealDoll. 134
This is why politicians who bring out charts and graphs tend to fail, and those who use anecdotes tend to win. Stories make sense on an emotional level, so anything that conjures fear, empathy, or pride will trump confusing statistics. 144
Having a dissenting opinion on movies, music, or clothes, or owning clever or obscure possessions, is the way middle-class people fight one another for status. They can't out-consume one another because they can't afford it, but they can out-taste one another. 155
If you are trying to communicate something complex, if you have vast knowledge of a subject and someone does not, realize it is going to be difficult to get it across the gulf between your brain and theirs. The explanation process may become thorny, but don't take it out on the other person. Just because that person can't see inside you mind doesn't mean he or she is not so smart. You don't suddenly become telepathic when you are angry, anxious or alarmed. Keep calm and carry on. -204
Showing posts with label quotes. Show all posts
Showing posts with label quotes. Show all posts
Tuesday, May 12, 2015
Sunday, November 17, 2013
You Are Now Less Dumb
A memory is least accurate when most reflected upon, and most accurate when least pondered. Together, those two facts make eyewitness testimony basically worthless. -6
Psychologists Dan Somons and Christopher Chabris published a study in 2011 revealing that 63 percent of those surveyed in the United States believe memory works like a video camera, and another 48 percent believe memories are permanent. An additional 37 percent said that eyewitness testimony was reliable enough to be the only evidence necessary to convict someone accused of a crime. Those are seriously shocking facts to a psychologist or a neuroscientist, because none of those things is true. -7
This is not a book about abnormal psychology. It is about normal psychology, the common, default, baked-into-every brain sort of thinking you can expect to find in rocket scientists, heads of state, and the lady at the office who has a kitten calendar for personal use and a fireman calendar for business meetings. You think seeing is believing, that your thoughts are always based on reasonable intuitions and rational analysis, and that though you may falter and err from time to time, for the most part you stand as a focused, intelligent operator of the most complicated nervous system on earth. You believe that your abilities are sound, your memories perfect, your thoughts rational and wholly conscious, the story of your life true and accurate, and your personality stable and stellar. The truth is that your brain lies to you. Inside your skull is a vast and far reaching personal conspiracy to keep you from uncovering the facts about who you actually are, how capable you tend to be, and how confident you deserve to feel. That undeserved confidence alters your behavior and creates a giant, easily opened back door through which waltz con artists, magicians, public relations employees, advertising executives, pseudoscientists, peddlers of magical charms, and others. You can learn about yourself when you take on the perspective of those who see through your act and know how to manipulate your gullibility. A great deal can be learned and gained by focusing on your failings. 24-25
When you gather with others, they tell you about their reality in the same story format, and the better the story, the more likely you are to accept their explanation. -23
Books, movies, games, lectures--every form of information transfer seems better when couched in the language of storytelling. -24
The central argument of narrative psychology is that you do not use the logic and careful analysis to unravel the mysteries of who you are and what you want. You do not hypothesize and test. You don't study, record, and contemplate the variables of life and the people you meet along the way. Objectivity and rationality find it difficult to thrive in your intellectual ecosystem. -37
The people who came before you invented science because your natural way of understanding and explaining what you experience is terrible. When you have zero evidence, every assumption is basically equal. You prefer to see causes rather than effects, signals in the noise, patterns in the randomness. You prefer easy to understand stories, and then turn everything in life into a narrative so that complicated problems become easy. -55
As a professional do you feel compelled to wear a suit, or after donning a suit do you conduct yourself in a professional manner? Do you vote Democratic because you champion social programs, or do you champion social programs because you vote Democratic? The research says the latter in both cases. -61
This is why volunteering feels good and unpaid interns work so hard. Without an obvious outside rewards you create an internal one. -66
[About Power Balance wristbands, a worthless band which promised increased balance]
Former U.S. president Bill Clinton was photographed wearing one, as was Robert DeNiro, and Gerard Butler, and probably all the uncles in your famnily who spend more time talking about golf than playing it. The Associated Press reported in 2011 the trainers for the Phoenix Suns basketball team swore by the trinkets, and that a spokesperson for St. Vincent Sports Performance in Indianapolis, where hundreds of professional athletes go to train. -72
You are actually more likely in your lifetime to win an Academy Award than get mauled by a shark. -87
In 1974, psychologistsDavid Landy and Harold Sigall published a study in which they handed out essays to subjects, each with one of two photos of different women attached. Some subjects received an essay with a photo included of a woman deemed by the scientists to be attractive, and others got a photo of a woman deemed unattractive. They asked the participants to rate the quality of the writing in the essays but made no mention of the photo. The more attractive the woman in the picture, the better the score, and when asked about the overall creativity and the depth of the ideas in the essay, the papers attached to the beautiful photograph were rated as being of higher quality in both areas. The essays, of course, were identical. The only difference was the photo attached. When the scientists ran the study with essays purposely written to be awful, the disparity between the ratings was magnified. As Landy and Sigall wrote, you expect better performances from attractive people, but when they fail, you are also more likely to forgive them. -91
The current understanding of this is that all brain functions require fuel, but the executive functions seem to require the most. Or, if you prefer, the executive branch of the mind has the most expensive operating costs. -115
Over the course of Graham's experiments, he found that partners tended to feel closer, more attracted to, and more in love with each other when their skills were routinely challenged. He reasoned the buzz you get when you break through a frustrating trial and succeed was directly tied to bonding. -122
The research into arousal says you are bad at explaining yourself to yourself, but it sheds light on why so many successful dates include roller coasters, horror films, and conversations over coffee. There is a reason that playful westling can lead to passionate kissing, that a great friend can turn a heaving cry into a belly laugh. Theres a reason great struggle bring s you closer to friends, family, and lovers. There is a reason Rice Krispies commercials show moms teaching children how to make treats in crisp black-and-white while Israel Kamakawiwo'ole sings "Over The Rainbow."
Subjective optimization complements sour grapes, the inclination to see that which you can't have as taht which you didn't want in the first place. Subjective optimization makes whatever you get stuck with seem better than that which you can no longer obtain. Metaphorically, it is the process that makes lemons into lemonaide. -131
In 1976, when Ronald Reagan was running for president of the United States, he often told a story about a Chicago woman who was scamming the welfare system to earn her income. Regain said the woman had eighty names, thirty addresses, and twelve Social Security cards she used to get food stamps, along with more that her fair share of money from Medicaid and other welfare entitlements. He said she drove a Cadillac, didn't work, and didn't pay taxes. He talked about this woman, whom he never named, in just about every small town he visited, and it tended to infuriate his audiences. The story solidified the term welfare queen in American political discourse and influence not only the national conversation for the next thirty years, but public policy as well. It also wasn't true. -145
In experiments where two facts were placed side by side, subjects tended to rate statements as more likely to be true when those statements were presented in simple, legible type than when printed in a weird font with a difficult-to-read color pattern. -149
Social Norms and Pluralistic Ignorance
In every new situation, you innately seek out and follow norms like spilled water seeking its level, because doing so is an adaptive response built into the primate brain. -160
The norms that hold a culture together escalate by an arrangement of concentric circles of tradition. Your family has its ways of doing things; then your friends, your employer or school, your community, your ethnic subculture, your socioeconomic peer group, your town, state, nation, and so on. Since norms alter your behavior from one setting to the next, they can build upon one another until they dictate voting, policy making, governance, and giant social movements. Still, in many situations, people stick to norms only when everyone is watching. -161
Prentice and Miller concluded that their research provided plenty of evidence that you have no idea whether the norms in your culture, subculture, era, or group of friends are real or imagined. -165
the people on the fence went with what they assumed the majority wanted. They didn't know, however, that most people didn't actually feel that way, and the presumed majority was just a figment of their imaginations. -167
Thinking through that bias, most people falsely assume their culture is less progressively tilted than it truly is, and thus the institutions and media of culture will present themselves as more conversative than necessary. In addition, its programming will consist of content designed to appeal to a public far more prudish than the actual audience consuming it. -174
Public discourse is the path to being less dumb. The only way out of the loop is to speak up, ask questions, and get a conversation going about what people truly think. -175 [Awareness campaigns to change attitudes are less effective than getting people to share.]
Norms spontaneously generated. For instance, when one boy hurt his foot but didn't tell anyone until bedtime, it became expected among the group that Rattlers didn't complain. From then on, members waited until the day's work was finished to reveal injuries. When a boy cried, the others ignored him until he got over it. Regulations and rituals sprouted just as quickly. 188-189
The idea is this: You put on a mask and a uniform before leaving for work. You put on another set for school. You have a costume for friends of different persuasions and one just for family. Who you are alone is not who you are with a lover or a friend. -192h
The idea is old enough that the word person derives from persona, a Latin word for the mask a Greek actor sometimes wore so people in the back rows of a performance could see who he was onstage. -192
Political parties establish platforms, companies give employee handbooks, countries write out constitutions, tree houses post club rules-- every human gathering and institution, from a fashion show to the NRA, works to remain connected by developing a set of norms and values that signals when they are dealing with members of the in-group and identifies others as part of the out-group. -194
...the motivation to create and wear clothing rests somewhere in that 4 percent difference between your DNA and a chimpanzee's. -202
The research suggests simply working to better explain your own opinion saps your fervor. -200
In studies in which people unscramble sentences about rudeness, those people will later be much more likely to interrupt experimenters after being placed in frustrating situations. People primed by solving puzzles that include words associated with the elderly will temporarily walk more slowly after the task. In one study, subjects asked to imagine how cool it would be to become college professors outperformed others who were not primed in that way in a game of Trivial Pursuit. Priming is one of the fundamental drivers of your behavior, and it isn't limited to simple symbols and images. Studies in which people are asked to hold eitehr a cold or a warm beverage show that those same people will react differently to strangers. Subjects in that same study who held a warm coffee said the people they met seemed sociable and outgoing. Everything else was made identical to both groups, including the strangers. The only difference was the temperature of the cup the subjects were asked to hold. -206
Chap16
THE MISCONCEPTION: There is nothing better in the world than getting paid to do what you love.
THE TRUTH: Getting paid for doing what you already enjoy will sometimes cause your love for that task to wane because you attribute your motivation as coming from the reward, not your internal feeling. -235
Psychologists Dan Somons and Christopher Chabris published a study in 2011 revealing that 63 percent of those surveyed in the United States believe memory works like a video camera, and another 48 percent believe memories are permanent. An additional 37 percent said that eyewitness testimony was reliable enough to be the only evidence necessary to convict someone accused of a crime. Those are seriously shocking facts to a psychologist or a neuroscientist, because none of those things is true. -7
This is not a book about abnormal psychology. It is about normal psychology, the common, default, baked-into-every brain sort of thinking you can expect to find in rocket scientists, heads of state, and the lady at the office who has a kitten calendar for personal use and a fireman calendar for business meetings. You think seeing is believing, that your thoughts are always based on reasonable intuitions and rational analysis, and that though you may falter and err from time to time, for the most part you stand as a focused, intelligent operator of the most complicated nervous system on earth. You believe that your abilities are sound, your memories perfect, your thoughts rational and wholly conscious, the story of your life true and accurate, and your personality stable and stellar. The truth is that your brain lies to you. Inside your skull is a vast and far reaching personal conspiracy to keep you from uncovering the facts about who you actually are, how capable you tend to be, and how confident you deserve to feel. That undeserved confidence alters your behavior and creates a giant, easily opened back door through which waltz con artists, magicians, public relations employees, advertising executives, pseudoscientists, peddlers of magical charms, and others. You can learn about yourself when you take on the perspective of those who see through your act and know how to manipulate your gullibility. A great deal can be learned and gained by focusing on your failings. 24-25
When you gather with others, they tell you about their reality in the same story format, and the better the story, the more likely you are to accept their explanation. -23
Books, movies, games, lectures--every form of information transfer seems better when couched in the language of storytelling. -24
The central argument of narrative psychology is that you do not use the logic and careful analysis to unravel the mysteries of who you are and what you want. You do not hypothesize and test. You don't study, record, and contemplate the variables of life and the people you meet along the way. Objectivity and rationality find it difficult to thrive in your intellectual ecosystem. -37
The people who came before you invented science because your natural way of understanding and explaining what you experience is terrible. When you have zero evidence, every assumption is basically equal. You prefer to see causes rather than effects, signals in the noise, patterns in the randomness. You prefer easy to understand stories, and then turn everything in life into a narrative so that complicated problems become easy. -55
As a professional do you feel compelled to wear a suit, or after donning a suit do you conduct yourself in a professional manner? Do you vote Democratic because you champion social programs, or do you champion social programs because you vote Democratic? The research says the latter in both cases. -61
This is why volunteering feels good and unpaid interns work so hard. Without an obvious outside rewards you create an internal one. -66
[About Power Balance wristbands, a worthless band which promised increased balance]
Former U.S. president Bill Clinton was photographed wearing one, as was Robert DeNiro, and Gerard Butler, and probably all the uncles in your famnily who spend more time talking about golf than playing it. The Associated Press reported in 2011 the trainers for the Phoenix Suns basketball team swore by the trinkets, and that a spokesperson for St. Vincent Sports Performance in Indianapolis, where hundreds of professional athletes go to train. -72
You are actually more likely in your lifetime to win an Academy Award than get mauled by a shark. -87
In 1974, psychologistsDavid Landy and Harold Sigall published a study in which they handed out essays to subjects, each with one of two photos of different women attached. Some subjects received an essay with a photo included of a woman deemed by the scientists to be attractive, and others got a photo of a woman deemed unattractive. They asked the participants to rate the quality of the writing in the essays but made no mention of the photo. The more attractive the woman in the picture, the better the score, and when asked about the overall creativity and the depth of the ideas in the essay, the papers attached to the beautiful photograph were rated as being of higher quality in both areas. The essays, of course, were identical. The only difference was the photo attached. When the scientists ran the study with essays purposely written to be awful, the disparity between the ratings was magnified. As Landy and Sigall wrote, you expect better performances from attractive people, but when they fail, you are also more likely to forgive them. -91
The current understanding of this is that all brain functions require fuel, but the executive functions seem to require the most. Or, if you prefer, the executive branch of the mind has the most expensive operating costs. -115
Over the course of Graham's experiments, he found that partners tended to feel closer, more attracted to, and more in love with each other when their skills were routinely challenged. He reasoned the buzz you get when you break through a frustrating trial and succeed was directly tied to bonding. -122
The research into arousal says you are bad at explaining yourself to yourself, but it sheds light on why so many successful dates include roller coasters, horror films, and conversations over coffee. There is a reason that playful westling can lead to passionate kissing, that a great friend can turn a heaving cry into a belly laugh. Theres a reason great struggle bring s you closer to friends, family, and lovers. There is a reason Rice Krispies commercials show moms teaching children how to make treats in crisp black-and-white while Israel Kamakawiwo'ole sings "Over The Rainbow."
Subjective optimization complements sour grapes, the inclination to see that which you can't have as taht which you didn't want in the first place. Subjective optimization makes whatever you get stuck with seem better than that which you can no longer obtain. Metaphorically, it is the process that makes lemons into lemonaide. -131
In 1976, when Ronald Reagan was running for president of the United States, he often told a story about a Chicago woman who was scamming the welfare system to earn her income. Regain said the woman had eighty names, thirty addresses, and twelve Social Security cards she used to get food stamps, along with more that her fair share of money from Medicaid and other welfare entitlements. He said she drove a Cadillac, didn't work, and didn't pay taxes. He talked about this woman, whom he never named, in just about every small town he visited, and it tended to infuriate his audiences. The story solidified the term welfare queen in American political discourse and influence not only the national conversation for the next thirty years, but public policy as well. It also wasn't true. -145
In experiments where two facts were placed side by side, subjects tended to rate statements as more likely to be true when those statements were presented in simple, legible type than when printed in a weird font with a difficult-to-read color pattern. -149
Social Norms and Pluralistic Ignorance
In every new situation, you innately seek out and follow norms like spilled water seeking its level, because doing so is an adaptive response built into the primate brain. -160
The norms that hold a culture together escalate by an arrangement of concentric circles of tradition. Your family has its ways of doing things; then your friends, your employer or school, your community, your ethnic subculture, your socioeconomic peer group, your town, state, nation, and so on. Since norms alter your behavior from one setting to the next, they can build upon one another until they dictate voting, policy making, governance, and giant social movements. Still, in many situations, people stick to norms only when everyone is watching. -161
Prentice and Miller concluded that their research provided plenty of evidence that you have no idea whether the norms in your culture, subculture, era, or group of friends are real or imagined. -165
the people on the fence went with what they assumed the majority wanted. They didn't know, however, that most people didn't actually feel that way, and the presumed majority was just a figment of their imaginations. -167
Thinking through that bias, most people falsely assume their culture is less progressively tilted than it truly is, and thus the institutions and media of culture will present themselves as more conversative than necessary. In addition, its programming will consist of content designed to appeal to a public far more prudish than the actual audience consuming it. -174
Public discourse is the path to being less dumb. The only way out of the loop is to speak up, ask questions, and get a conversation going about what people truly think. -175 [Awareness campaigns to change attitudes are less effective than getting people to share.]
Norms spontaneously generated. For instance, when one boy hurt his foot but didn't tell anyone until bedtime, it became expected among the group that Rattlers didn't complain. From then on, members waited until the day's work was finished to reveal injuries. When a boy cried, the others ignored him until he got over it. Regulations and rituals sprouted just as quickly. 188-189
The idea is this: You put on a mask and a uniform before leaving for work. You put on another set for school. You have a costume for friends of different persuasions and one just for family. Who you are alone is not who you are with a lover or a friend. -192h
The idea is old enough that the word person derives from persona, a Latin word for the mask a Greek actor sometimes wore so people in the back rows of a performance could see who he was onstage. -192
Political parties establish platforms, companies give employee handbooks, countries write out constitutions, tree houses post club rules-- every human gathering and institution, from a fashion show to the NRA, works to remain connected by developing a set of norms and values that signals when they are dealing with members of the in-group and identifies others as part of the out-group. -194
...the motivation to create and wear clothing rests somewhere in that 4 percent difference between your DNA and a chimpanzee's. -202
The research suggests simply working to better explain your own opinion saps your fervor. -200
In studies in which people unscramble sentences about rudeness, those people will later be much more likely to interrupt experimenters after being placed in frustrating situations. People primed by solving puzzles that include words associated with the elderly will temporarily walk more slowly after the task. In one study, subjects asked to imagine how cool it would be to become college professors outperformed others who were not primed in that way in a game of Trivial Pursuit. Priming is one of the fundamental drivers of your behavior, and it isn't limited to simple symbols and images. Studies in which people are asked to hold eitehr a cold or a warm beverage show that those same people will react differently to strangers. Subjects in that same study who held a warm coffee said the people they met seemed sociable and outgoing. Everything else was made identical to both groups, including the strangers. The only difference was the temperature of the cup the subjects were asked to hold. -206
Chap16
THE MISCONCEPTION: There is nothing better in the world than getting paid to do what you love.
THE TRUTH: Getting paid for doing what you already enjoy will sometimes cause your love for that task to wane because you attribute your motivation as coming from the reward, not your internal feeling. -235
Thursday, January 12, 2012
Thinking Fast and Slow- quotes Nobel Prize Winner
Best quotes:
An example of a thinking problem.
"Consider the letter K.
Is K more likely to appear as the first letter in a word OR as the third letter?"
We therefore expected respondents to exaggerate the frequency of letters appearing in the first position--even those letters (such as K,L,N,R,,V) which in fact occur more frequently in the third position. -9
In rough order of complexity, here are some examples of the automatic activities that are attributed to System 1:
Detect that one object is more distant than another.
Orient to the source of a sudden sound.
Complete the phrase "bread and . . ."
Make a "disgust face" when shown a horrible picture.
Detect hostility in a voice.
Answer to 2 + 2 = ?
Read words on large billboards.
Drive a car on an empty road
Find a strong move in chess (if you are a chess master).
Understand simple sentences.
Recognize that a "meek and tidy soul with a passion for detail" resembles an
occupational stereotype. -21
Money-primed people become more independent than they would be without the associative trigger. They persevered almost twice as long in trying to solve a very difficult problem before they asked the experimenter for help a crisp demonstration of increased self-reliance. Money-primed people are also more selfish: they were much less willing to spend time helping another student who pretended to be confused about an experimental task. When an experimenter clumsily dropped a bunch of pencils on the floor, the participants with money (unconsciously) on their mind picked up fewer pencils. -55
The idea you should focus on, however, is that disbelief is not an option. The results are not made up, nor are they statistical flukes. You have no choice but to accept that the major conclusions of these studies are true. More important, you must accept that they are true about you. If you had been exposed to a screen saver of floating dollar bills, you two would likely have picked up fewer pencils to help a clumsy stranger. You do not believe that these results apply to you because they correspond to nothing in your subjective experience. But your subjective experience consists largely of the story that your system 2 tells itself about what is going on. Priming phenomena arise in System 1, and you have no conscious access to them. -57
Conversely, you experience cognitive strain when you read instructions in a poor font, or in faint colors, or worded in complicated language, or when you are in a bad mood, or even when you frown. -59
Causes and consequences of cognitive ease
Repeated experience Feels familiar
Clear display EASE Feels true
primed idea Feels good
good mood Feels effortless
-60
More advice: if your message is to be printed use high quality paper to maximize the contrast between characters and their background. If you use color, you are more likely to be believed if your text is printed in bright blue or red than in middling shades of green, yellow, or pale blue. -63
Finally, if you choose a source, choose one with a name that's easy to pronounce. -64
They found that putting the participants in a good mood before the test by having them think happy thoughts more than doubled accuracy. An even more striking result is that unhappy subjects completely incapable of performing the intuitive task accurately; their guesses were no better than random. Mood evidently affects the operation of System 1: when we are uncomfortable and unhappy, we lose touch with our intuition. -69
"How many animals of each kind did Moses take into the ark?" The number of people who detect what is wrong with this question is so small that it has been dubbed the "Moses illusion." -73
When something cement does not fit into the current context of activated ideas, the system detects an abnormality, as you just experienced. You had no particular idea of what was coming after something, but you knew when the word cement came that it was abnormal in that sentence. -74
Alan: intelligent--industrious--impulsive--critical--stubborn--envious
Ben: envious--stubborn--critical--impulsive--industrious--intelligent.
If you are like most of us, you viewed Alan much more favorably than Ben.
-82
A simple rule can help: before an issue is discussed, all members of the committee should be asked to write a very brief summary of their position. This procedure makes good use of the value of the knowledge and diversity of opinion in the group. The standard practice of open discussion gives too much weight to the opinions of those who speak early and assertively, causing others to line up behind them. -85
Nevertheless, the presentation of one sided evidence had a very pronounced effect on judgements. Furthermore, participants who saw one-sided evidence were more confident of their judgements than those who saw both sides. This is just what you would expect if the confidence that people experience is determined by the coherence of the story they manage to construct from the available information. It is the consistency of the information that matters for a good story, not it's completeness. Indeed, you will often find that knowing little makes it easier to fit everything you know into a coherent pattern. -87
System 2 receives questions or generates them: in either case it directs attention and searches memory to find the answers. System 1 operates differently. It continuously monitors what is going on outside and inside the mind, and continuously generates assessments of various aspects of the situation without specific intention and with little or no effort. -89
The normal state of your mind is that you have intuitive feelings and opinions about almost everything that comes you way. You like or dislike people long before you know much about them; you trust or distrust strangers without knowing why; you feel that an enterprise is bound to succeed without analyzing it. -97
The dominance of conclusions over arguments is most pronounced where emotions are involved. The psychologist Paul Slovic has proposed an affect heuristic in which people let their likes and dislikes determine their beliefs about the world. Your political preference determines the arguments that you find compelling. -103
The following are some conditions in which people "go with the flow" and are affected more strongly by ease of retrieval than by the content they retrieved:
-when they are engaged in another effortful task at the same time
-when they are in a good mood because they just thought of a happy episode in their life
-if they score low on the depression scale
-if they are knowledgeable novices on the topic of the task, in contrast to true experts
-when they score high on a scale of faith in intuition
-if they are (or are made to feel) powerful
-p.135
This is a trap for forecasters and their clients: adding detail to scenarios makes them more persuasive, but less likely to come true. -161
Subjects' unwillingness to deduce the particular from the general was matched only by their willingness to infer the general from the particular. -174
The explanatory stories that people find compelling are simple; are concrete rather than abstract; assign a larger role to talent, stupidity, and intentions than to luck; and focus on a few striking events that happened rather than on the countless events that failed to happen. -199
Do leaders and management practices influence the outcomes of firms in the market? Of course they do, and the effects have been confirmed by systematic research that objectively assessed the characteristics of CEOs and their decisions, and related them to subsequent outcomes of the firm. In one study, the CEOs were characterized by the strategy of the companies they had led before their current appointment, as well as by management rules and procedures adopted after their appointment. CEOs do influence performance, but the effects are much smaller than a reading of the business press suggests. -205
The illusion of skill is not only an individual aberration; it is deeply ingrained in the culture of the industry. 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. This is particularly true of statistical studies of performance, which provide base-rate information that people generally ignore when it clashes with their personal impressions from experience. -216
Claims for correct intuitions in an unpredictable situation are self-delusional at best, sometimes worse.
Thinking Fast and Slow- quotes Nobel Prize Winner
In the absence of valid cues, intuitive "hits" are due either to luck or to lies. If you find this conclusion surprising, you still have a lingering belief that intuition is magic. -241
Quoting Bruno Frey
"The agent of economic theory is rational, selfish, and his tastes do not change." -269
The brain responds quickly even to purely symbolic threats. Emotionally loaded words quickly attract attention faster than do happy words (peace, love). There is no real threat, but the mere reminder of a bad event is treated in System 1 as threatening. As we saw earlier with the word vomit, the symbolic representation associatively evokes in attenuated form many of the reactions to the real thing, including physiological indices of emotion and even fractional tendencies to approach or avoid, recoil or lean forward. -301
Other scholars, in a paper titled "Bad is Stronger Than Good," summarized the evidence as follows: "Bad emotions, bad parents, and bad feedback have more impact than good ones, and bad information is processed more thoroughly than good. The self is more motivated to avoid bad self-definitions than to pursue good ones. Bad impressions and bad stereotypes are quicker to form and more resistant to disconfirmation than good ones." -302
We studied public perceptions of what constitutes unfair behavior on the part of merchants, employers, and landlords. Our overarching question was whether the opprobrium attached to unfairness imposes constraints on profit seeking. We found that it does. -306
As we have seen, rationality is generally served by broader and more comprehensive frames and joint evaluation is obviously broader than single evaluation. -361
A divorce is like a symphony with a screeching sound at the end--the fact that it ended badly does not mean it was all bad. -385
An Econ will read and understand the fine print of a contract before signing it, but Humans do not. An unscrupulous firm that designs contacts that customers will routinely sign without reading has considerable legal leeway in hiding important information in plain sight. A pernicious implication of the rational-agent model in its extreme form is that customers are assumed to need no protection beyond ensuring that the relevant information is disclosed. The size of the print and the complexity of the language in the disclosure are not considered relevant--an Econ knows how to deal with small print when it matters. In contrast, the recommendations of Nudge require firms to offer contracts that are sufficiently simple to be read and understood by Human customers. -413
Wednesday, December 29, 2010
Words That Work by Frank Luntz
You can have the best message in the world, but the person on the receiving end will always understand it through the prism of his or her own emotions, preconceptions, prejudices, and preexisting beliefs. It's not enough to be correct or reasonable or even brilliant. The key to successful communication is to take the imaginative leap of stuffing yourself right into your listener's shoes to know what they are thinking and feeling in the deepest recesses of their mind and heart. -xi
In essence, it is listener-centered; their perceptions trump whatever "objective" reality a given word or phrase you use might be presumed to have. Again, what matters isn't what you say, it's what people hear. -xiv
In particular, there are seven additional words that have particular powers of persuasion in the world of business, politics, and everyday life, starting with the most powerful: "consequences." -xxv
[The seven new words are consequences, impact, diplomacy, dialogue, reliability, mission, and commitment.)
Never use a sentence when a phrase will do, and never use four words when three can say just as much. -7
So when it comes to effective communication, small beats large, short beats long, and plain beats complex. And sometimes a visual beats them all. -8
As individuals, while we appreciate the predictability of friends and family, we also cherish those things that surprise and shock us--provided that the outcome is pleasant rather than painful. It's the reason why many of us, in our free time, prefer to try different vacation destinations, different hotels, different restaurants, and different experiences rather than the tried and true. -15
Few words--indeed, few messages of any kind--whether in politics or in the business world, are ingested in isolation. Their meanings are shaped and shaded by the regional biases, life experiences, education, assumptions, and prejudices of those who receive them. -35
The language lesson: A+B+C does not necessarily equal C+B+A. The order of presentation determines the reaction. The right order equals the right context. -41
Americans say we are spending too much on "welfare" (42 percent) rather than too little (23 percent). Yet an overwhelming 68 percent of Americans think we are spending too little on "assistance to the poor," versus a mere 7 percent who think we're spending too much. --46
What I'm arguing is that "welfare" and "assistance to the poor" are in fact different topics. --47
We are a nation of moderate, cautious people with a reform bent, a conservative temperament, and a can-do spirit. We will rise to every occasion and meet every crisis, but we would rather not. -61
Ironically, one of the most effective negative attacks in politics is to accuse your opponent of being . . . negative. -61
I return to the Warren Beatty mantra once again: "People forget what you say, but they remember how you made them feel." -82
Tell someone "two plus two," but let him put them together himself and say "four"--and he is transformed from a passive observer to an active participant. -83
The same people who have no problem forking over $2.65 for a cappuccino at Starbucks will complain bitterly about the cost of a $2.65 pill that keeps them sufficiently health and active so that they can consume whatever unhealthy item Starbucks is selling. -95
Most cereals geared toward children sell energy, excitement, adventure, and the potential for fun--even more than the actual taste of the sugar-coated rice or wheat puffs in the cardboard box. -104
Among Advertising Age's top 100 ad campaigns of all time:
-Only eight involve sex.
-Only seven feature celebrities.
-Only four play on consumer fears and insecurities.
The idea has primacy. Accessible language rules. --117
He broke a cardinal rule of political communication: never repeat a criticism as part of your rebuttal. -120
[The following are a list of Words that Work: Words changed to similar ones with better connotations.]
Gambling vs Gaming
Estate Tax vs Death Tax
Liquor vs Spirits
Capitalism vs the Free Market
Honest Data vs Accurate Data
Banks vs Credit Unions
Corporate Accountability vs Corporate Responsibility
Since I knew that many people would only read the first and last items in the document, I asked that the Contract begin and end with the two highest-priority proposals in the eyes of the voters: a balanced budget amendment and term limits. -156
From a polling perspective, "personalizing" Social Security has a 17 percent advantage over "privatizing" it. -170
Myth: Americans Read
False.
In all my years of conducting polls, dial sessions, and focus groups, I've found again and again that nobody reads. -187
[Tony Robbins quote]
Words change our emotions, whether we know it or not, so I teach people what I call transformational vocabulary--the words you use to change your emotions. I don't mean looking in the mirror and saying "I am good enough, I am strong enough, and by golly people love me." I'm not talking about that crap.
I am talking about a one word change. If I say to you, "We are going to have a break and we are going to have some nutritious food, nutritious snacks. . . ' look at your faces [the participants shake their heads, frowning], but if I say they are delicious . . . [laughter] . . . a very different reaction. -206
And that's why the term "family values" (45 percent) tests better than "traditional values" (18 percent), "American values" (17 percent), or "community values" (11 percent). -217
-----------------------------------------------------------------------------
Franks Ten Language Rules
Simplicity: small words
Brevity: short sentences
Credibility
Consistency
Novelty
Sound and texture matter
Be aspirational
Visualize
Ask a question
Provide context and relevance
and sometimes
A strong visual will trump them all.
In essence, it is listener-centered; their perceptions trump whatever "objective" reality a given word or phrase you use might be presumed to have. Again, what matters isn't what you say, it's what people hear. -xiv
In particular, there are seven additional words that have particular powers of persuasion in the world of business, politics, and everyday life, starting with the most powerful: "consequences." -xxv
[The seven new words are consequences, impact, diplomacy, dialogue, reliability, mission, and commitment.)
Never use a sentence when a phrase will do, and never use four words when three can say just as much. -7
So when it comes to effective communication, small beats large, short beats long, and plain beats complex. And sometimes a visual beats them all. -8
As individuals, while we appreciate the predictability of friends and family, we also cherish those things that surprise and shock us--provided that the outcome is pleasant rather than painful. It's the reason why many of us, in our free time, prefer to try different vacation destinations, different hotels, different restaurants, and different experiences rather than the tried and true. -15
Few words--indeed, few messages of any kind--whether in politics or in the business world, are ingested in isolation. Their meanings are shaped and shaded by the regional biases, life experiences, education, assumptions, and prejudices of those who receive them. -35
The language lesson: A+B+C does not necessarily equal C+B+A. The order of presentation determines the reaction. The right order equals the right context. -41
Americans say we are spending too much on "welfare" (42 percent) rather than too little (23 percent). Yet an overwhelming 68 percent of Americans think we are spending too little on "assistance to the poor," versus a mere 7 percent who think we're spending too much. --46
What I'm arguing is that "welfare" and "assistance to the poor" are in fact different topics. --47
We are a nation of moderate, cautious people with a reform bent, a conservative temperament, and a can-do spirit. We will rise to every occasion and meet every crisis, but we would rather not. -61
Ironically, one of the most effective negative attacks in politics is to accuse your opponent of being . . . negative. -61
I return to the Warren Beatty mantra once again: "People forget what you say, but they remember how you made them feel." -82
Tell someone "two plus two," but let him put them together himself and say "four"--and he is transformed from a passive observer to an active participant. -83
The same people who have no problem forking over $2.65 for a cappuccino at Starbucks will complain bitterly about the cost of a $2.65 pill that keeps them sufficiently health and active so that they can consume whatever unhealthy item Starbucks is selling. -95
Most cereals geared toward children sell energy, excitement, adventure, and the potential for fun--even more than the actual taste of the sugar-coated rice or wheat puffs in the cardboard box. -104
Among Advertising Age's top 100 ad campaigns of all time:
-Only eight involve sex.
-Only seven feature celebrities.
-Only four play on consumer fears and insecurities.
The idea has primacy. Accessible language rules. --117
He broke a cardinal rule of political communication: never repeat a criticism as part of your rebuttal. -120
[The following are a list of Words that Work: Words changed to similar ones with better connotations.]
Gambling vs Gaming
Estate Tax vs Death Tax
Liquor vs Spirits
Capitalism vs the Free Market
Honest Data vs Accurate Data
Banks vs Credit Unions
Corporate Accountability vs Corporate Responsibility
Since I knew that many people would only read the first and last items in the document, I asked that the Contract begin and end with the two highest-priority proposals in the eyes of the voters: a balanced budget amendment and term limits. -156
From a polling perspective, "personalizing" Social Security has a 17 percent advantage over "privatizing" it. -170
Myth: Americans Read
False.
In all my years of conducting polls, dial sessions, and focus groups, I've found again and again that nobody reads. -187
[Tony Robbins quote]
Words change our emotions, whether we know it or not, so I teach people what I call transformational vocabulary--the words you use to change your emotions. I don't mean looking in the mirror and saying "I am good enough, I am strong enough, and by golly people love me." I'm not talking about that crap.
I am talking about a one word change. If I say to you, "We are going to have a break and we are going to have some nutritious food, nutritious snacks. . . ' look at your faces [the participants shake their heads, frowning], but if I say they are delicious . . . [laughter] . . . a very different reaction. -206
And that's why the term "family values" (45 percent) tests better than "traditional values" (18 percent), "American values" (17 percent), or "community values" (11 percent). -217
-----------------------------------------------------------------------------
Franks Ten Language Rules
Simplicity: small words
Brevity: short sentences
Credibility
Consistency
Novelty
Sound and texture matter
Be aspirational
Visualize
Ask a question
Provide context and relevance
and sometimes
A strong visual will trump them all.
Tuesday, November 16, 2010
Stumbling on Happiness
by Daniel Gilbert
Rather than saying that such brains are predicting, let's say they are nexting.
Yours is nexting right now. For example, at this moment you may be consciously thinking about the sentence you just read, or about the key ring in your pocket that is jammed uncomfortably against your thigh, or about whether the War of 1812 really deserves its own overture. Whatever you are thinking, your thoughts are surely about something other than the word with which this sentence will end. But even as you hear these very words echoing in your very head, and think whatever thoughts they inspire, your brain is using the word it is reading right now and the words it read just before to make a reasonable guess about the identity of the word it will read next, which is what allows you to read so fluently. (6-7)
The surprisingly right answer is that people find it gratifying to exercise control--not just for the futures it buys them, but for the exercise itself. Being effective--changing things, influencing things, making things happen--is one of the fundamental needs with which human brains seem to be naturally endowed. -22
We insist on steering our boats because we think we have a pretty good idea of where we should go, but the truth is that much of our steering is in vain--not because the boat won't respond, and not because we can't find our destination, but because the future is fundamentally different than it appears through the prospectiscope. Just as we experience illusions of eyesight ("Isn't it strange how one line looks longer than the other even though it isn't?") and illusions of hindsight ("Isn't it strange how I can't remember taking out the garbage even though I did?"), so too do we experience illusions of foresight--and all three types of illusion are explained by the same basic principles of human psychology. (25)
In Part III, "Realism," I will tell you about the second shortcoming: Imagination works so quickly, quietly, and effectively that we are insufficiently skeptical of its products. (26)
In Part IV, "Presentism," I will tell you about the second shortcoming: Imagination's products are . . . well, not particularly imaginative, which is why the imagined future often looks so much like the actual present. (26)
In Part V, "Rationalization," I will tell you about the third shortcoming: Imagination has a hard time telling us how we will think about the future when we get there. If we have trouble foreseeing future events, then we have even more trouble foreseeing future events, then we have even more trouble foreseeing how we will see them when they happen. (26)
Apparently, the describers' verbal descriptions of their experiences "overwrote" their memories of the experiences themselves, and they ended up remembering not what they had experienced but what they had said about what they experienced. (44)
Studies such as these demonstrate that once we have an experience, we cannot simply set it aside and see the world as we would have seen it had the experience never happened. (53)
[He uses the story of Adolph Fischer and George Eastman and an example. Both supported worker's rights and had surprising endings to their life story. Eastman was a success who committed suicide. Fischer was a failure, hanged for a crime that he didn't commit, yet he said his last day was the "happiest day of his life."]
This general finding--that information acquired after an event alters memory of the event--has been replicated so many times in so many different laboratory and field settings that it has left most scientists convinced of two things. First, the act of remembering involves "filling in" details that were not actually stored; and second, we generally cannot tell when we are doing this because filling in happens quickly and unconsciously. (88)
Experiments such as these suggest that we do not outgrow realism so much as we learn to outfox it, and that even as adults our perceptions are characterized by an initial moment of realism. (97)
There are endless variations on spaghetti, and this particular variation you imagined surely influenced how much you expected to enjoy the experience. Because these details are so crucial to an accurate prediction of your response to the event you were imagining, and because these important details were not known, you would have been wise to withhold your prediction . . . (100)
Pigeons have no trouble figuring out that the presence of a light signals an opportunity for eating, but they cannot learn the same thing about the absence of a light. Research suggests that human beings are a bit like pigeons in this regard. (107)
If the past is a wall with some holes, the future is a hole with no walls. (126)
When we have an experience--hearing a particular sonata, making love with a particular person, watching the sun set from a particular window of a particular room--on successive occasions, we quickly begin to adapt to it, and the experience yields less pleasure each time. Psychologists call this habituation, economists call it declining marginal utility, and the rest of us call it marriage. But human beings have discovered two devices that allow them to combat this tendency: variety and time. (144)
One of the reasons why most of us think of ourselves as talented, friendly, wise, and fair-minded is that these words are the lexical equivalents of a Necker cube, and the human mind naturally exploits each word's ambiguity for its own gratification. (174)
We may see the world through rose-colored glasses, but rose-colored glasses are neither opaque nor clear. They can't be opaque because we need to see the world clearly enough to participate in it--to pilot helicopters, harvest corn, diaper babies, and all the other stuff that smart mammals need to do in order to survive and thrive. But they can't be clear because we need their rosy tint to motivate us to design the helicopters ("I'm sure this thing will fly"), plant the corn ("This year will be a banner crop") and tolerate the babies ("What a bundle of joy!"). We cannot do without reality and we cannot do without illusion. Each serves a purpose, each imposes a limit on the influence of the other, and our experience of the world is the artful compromise that these tough competitors negotiate. (177)
For example, studies reveal that people have a penchant for asking questions that are subtly engineered to manipulate the answers they receive. A question such as "Am I the best lover you've ever had?" is dangerous because it has only one answer that can make us truly happy, but a question such as "What do you like best about my lovemaking?" is brilliant because it has only one answer that can make us truly miserable (or two if you count "It reminds me of Wilt Chamberlain"). (182)
Wilhelm von Osten was a retired schoolteacher who in 1891 claimed that his stallion, whom he called Clever Hans, could answer questions about current events, mathematics, and a host of other topics by tapping the ground with his foreleg. For instance, when Osten would ask Clever Hans to add three and five, the horse would wait until his master had finished asking the question, tap eight times, then stop. Sometimes, instead of asking the question, Olsten would write it on a card and hold it up for Clever Hans to read, and the horse seemed to understand written language every bit as well as it understood speech. Clever Hans didn't get every question right, of course, but he did much better than anyone else with hooves, and his public performances were so impressive that he soon became the toast of Berlin. But in 1904 the director of the Berlin Psychological Institute sent his student, Oskar Pfungst, to look into the matter more carefully, and Pfungst noticed that Clever Hans was much more likely to give the wrong answer when Osten was standing in back of the horse than in front of it, or when Osten himself did not know the answer to the question the horse had been asked. In a series of experiments, Clever Pfungst was able to show that Clever Hans could indeed read--but that what he could read was Osten's body language. (190)
In fact, practice and coaching are the two means by which we learn just about everything we know. Firsthand knowledge and secondhand knowledge are the only two kinds of knowledge there are, and no matter what task we master-- pooping, cooking, investing, bobsledding--that mastery is always a product of direct experience and/or of listening to those who have had direct experience. (216)
Rather than saying that such brains are predicting, let's say they are nexting.
Yours is nexting right now. For example, at this moment you may be consciously thinking about the sentence you just read, or about the key ring in your pocket that is jammed uncomfortably against your thigh, or about whether the War of 1812 really deserves its own overture. Whatever you are thinking, your thoughts are surely about something other than the word with which this sentence will end. But even as you hear these very words echoing in your very head, and think whatever thoughts they inspire, your brain is using the word it is reading right now and the words it read just before to make a reasonable guess about the identity of the word it will read next, which is what allows you to read so fluently. (6-7)
The surprisingly right answer is that people find it gratifying to exercise control--not just for the futures it buys them, but for the exercise itself. Being effective--changing things, influencing things, making things happen--is one of the fundamental needs with which human brains seem to be naturally endowed. -22
We insist on steering our boats because we think we have a pretty good idea of where we should go, but the truth is that much of our steering is in vain--not because the boat won't respond, and not because we can't find our destination, but because the future is fundamentally different than it appears through the prospectiscope. Just as we experience illusions of eyesight ("Isn't it strange how one line looks longer than the other even though it isn't?") and illusions of hindsight ("Isn't it strange how I can't remember taking out the garbage even though I did?"), so too do we experience illusions of foresight--and all three types of illusion are explained by the same basic principles of human psychology. (25)
In Part III, "Realism," I will tell you about the second shortcoming: Imagination works so quickly, quietly, and effectively that we are insufficiently skeptical of its products. (26)
In Part IV, "Presentism," I will tell you about the second shortcoming: Imagination's products are . . . well, not particularly imaginative, which is why the imagined future often looks so much like the actual present. (26)
In Part V, "Rationalization," I will tell you about the third shortcoming: Imagination has a hard time telling us how we will think about the future when we get there. If we have trouble foreseeing future events, then we have even more trouble foreseeing future events, then we have even more trouble foreseeing how we will see them when they happen. (26)
Apparently, the describers' verbal descriptions of their experiences "overwrote" their memories of the experiences themselves, and they ended up remembering not what they had experienced but what they had said about what they experienced. (44)
Studies such as these demonstrate that once we have an experience, we cannot simply set it aside and see the world as we would have seen it had the experience never happened. (53)
[He uses the story of Adolph Fischer and George Eastman and an example. Both supported worker's rights and had surprising endings to their life story. Eastman was a success who committed suicide. Fischer was a failure, hanged for a crime that he didn't commit, yet he said his last day was the "happiest day of his life."]
This general finding--that information acquired after an event alters memory of the event--has been replicated so many times in so many different laboratory and field settings that it has left most scientists convinced of two things. First, the act of remembering involves "filling in" details that were not actually stored; and second, we generally cannot tell when we are doing this because filling in happens quickly and unconsciously. (88)
Experiments such as these suggest that we do not outgrow realism so much as we learn to outfox it, and that even as adults our perceptions are characterized by an initial moment of realism. (97)
There are endless variations on spaghetti, and this particular variation you imagined surely influenced how much you expected to enjoy the experience. Because these details are so crucial to an accurate prediction of your response to the event you were imagining, and because these important details were not known, you would have been wise to withhold your prediction . . . (100)
Pigeons have no trouble figuring out that the presence of a light signals an opportunity for eating, but they cannot learn the same thing about the absence of a light. Research suggests that human beings are a bit like pigeons in this regard. (107)
If the past is a wall with some holes, the future is a hole with no walls. (126)
When we have an experience--hearing a particular sonata, making love with a particular person, watching the sun set from a particular window of a particular room--on successive occasions, we quickly begin to adapt to it, and the experience yields less pleasure each time. Psychologists call this habituation, economists call it declining marginal utility, and the rest of us call it marriage. But human beings have discovered two devices that allow them to combat this tendency: variety and time. (144)
One of the reasons why most of us think of ourselves as talented, friendly, wise, and fair-minded is that these words are the lexical equivalents of a Necker cube, and the human mind naturally exploits each word's ambiguity for its own gratification. (174)
We may see the world through rose-colored glasses, but rose-colored glasses are neither opaque nor clear. They can't be opaque because we need to see the world clearly enough to participate in it--to pilot helicopters, harvest corn, diaper babies, and all the other stuff that smart mammals need to do in order to survive and thrive. But they can't be clear because we need their rosy tint to motivate us to design the helicopters ("I'm sure this thing will fly"), plant the corn ("This year will be a banner crop") and tolerate the babies ("What a bundle of joy!"). We cannot do without reality and we cannot do without illusion. Each serves a purpose, each imposes a limit on the influence of the other, and our experience of the world is the artful compromise that these tough competitors negotiate. (177)
For example, studies reveal that people have a penchant for asking questions that are subtly engineered to manipulate the answers they receive. A question such as "Am I the best lover you've ever had?" is dangerous because it has only one answer that can make us truly happy, but a question such as "What do you like best about my lovemaking?" is brilliant because it has only one answer that can make us truly miserable (or two if you count "It reminds me of Wilt Chamberlain"). (182)
Wilhelm von Osten was a retired schoolteacher who in 1891 claimed that his stallion, whom he called Clever Hans, could answer questions about current events, mathematics, and a host of other topics by tapping the ground with his foreleg. For instance, when Osten would ask Clever Hans to add three and five, the horse would wait until his master had finished asking the question, tap eight times, then stop. Sometimes, instead of asking the question, Olsten would write it on a card and hold it up for Clever Hans to read, and the horse seemed to understand written language every bit as well as it understood speech. Clever Hans didn't get every question right, of course, but he did much better than anyone else with hooves, and his public performances were so impressive that he soon became the toast of Berlin. But in 1904 the director of the Berlin Psychological Institute sent his student, Oskar Pfungst, to look into the matter more carefully, and Pfungst noticed that Clever Hans was much more likely to give the wrong answer when Osten was standing in back of the horse than in front of it, or when Osten himself did not know the answer to the question the horse had been asked. In a series of experiments, Clever Pfungst was able to show that Clever Hans could indeed read--but that what he could read was Osten's body language. (190)
In fact, practice and coaching are the two means by which we learn just about everything we know. Firsthand knowledge and secondhand knowledge are the only two kinds of knowledge there are, and no matter what task we master-- pooping, cooking, investing, bobsledding--that mastery is always a product of direct experience and/or of listening to those who have had direct experience. (216)
Sunday, October 3, 2010
The Wisdom of Crowds
by James Surowiecki
In that sense, Gustave Le Bon had things exactly backward. If you put together a big enough and diverse enough group of people and ask them to "make decisions affecting matters of general interest," that group's decisions will, over time, be "intellectually [superior] to the isolated individual," no matter how smart of well-informed he is. -introduction, xvii
As sociologists Jack B. Soll and Richard Larrick put it, we feel the need to "chase the expert." The argument of this book is that chasing the expert is a mistake, and a costly one at that. We should stop hunting and ask the crowd (which, of course, includes the geniuses as well as everyone else) instead. Chances are, it knows. -xv
[The book concentrates on three kinds of problems. 1. Cognition problems- problems where a definite answer will be known. 2. Coordination problems- How do members of a group figure out how to coordinate their behavior with each other? (for example, driving laws) 3. Cooperation problems- the challenge of getting self-interested, distrustful people to work together.]
Diversity and independence are important because the best collective decisions are the product of disagreement and contest, not consensus or compromise. -xix
Tellingly, they quoted the Cornell economist Maureen O'Hara, who has said, "While markets appear to work in practice, we are not sure how they work in theory." -9
[Talking about the speed of the market's reaction to the challenger disaster... The market made one company's stock tumble the most.]
The market was smart that day because it satisfied the four conditions that characterize wise crowds: diversity of opinion (each person should have some private information, even if it's just an eccentric interpretation of known facts), independence (people's opinions are not determined by the opinions of those around them), decentralization (people are able to specialize and draw on local knowledge), and aggregation (some mechanism exists for turning private judgments into a collective decision). If a group satisfies those conditions, its judgment is likely to be accurate. -10
After all, think about what happens if you ask a hundred people to run a 100-meter race, and then average their times. The average time will not be better than the time of the fastest runners. It will be worse. It will be a mediocre time. But ask a hundred people to answer a question or solve a problem, and the average answer will often be at least as good as the answer of the smartest member. With most things, the average is mediocrity. With decision making, it's often excellence. -11
What makes a system successful is its ability to recognize losers and kill them quickly. Or, rather, what makes a system successful is its ability to generate lots of losers and then to recognize them as such and kill them off. Sometimes the messiest approach is the wisest. -29
The point of Page's[Scott Page] experiment is that diversity is, on its own, valuable, so that the simple fact of making a group diverse makes it better at problem solving. -30
Finally, we seek out experts because we get, as the writer Nassim Taleb asserts, "fooled by randomness." If there are enough people out there making predictions, a few of them are going to compile an impressive record over time. That does not mean that the record was the product of skill, nor does it mean that the record will continue into the future. -36
Corporations, after all, are supposed to be maximizing their profits. That means their business practices are their strategic choices should be rationally determined, not shaped by history or by unwritten cultural rules. And yet the odd thing is that convention has a profound effect on economic life and on the way companies do business. -97
A scientist does not enter his lab as a blank slate, waiting to hear what the data will tell him. Instead he enters it as someone whose understanding of what problems are interesting, what problems can be solved, and what problems are interesting, what problems can be solved, and what problems should be solved has been shaped by the interests (in both senses of the word) of his community. -165
A successful hypothesis is a hypothesis that most scientists find credible, not a hypothesis that most scientists have tested for themselves and found to be true. -169
Social scientists who study juries often differentiate between two approaches juries take. Evidence-based juries usually don't even take a vote until after they've spent some time talking over the case, sifting through the evidence, and explicitly contemplating alternative explanations. Verdict-based juries, by contrast, see their mission as reaching a decision as quickly and decisively as possible. -178
This matters because all the evidence suggests that the order in which people speak has a profound effect on the course of a discussion. Earlier comments are more influential, and they tend to provide a framework within which the discussion occurs. -186
If you talk a lot in a group, people will tend to think of you as influential almost by default. Talkative people are not necessarily well liked by other members of the group, but they are listened to. -187
Another study of fifty-two middle managers found that there was a correlation between upward mobility and not telling the boss about things that had gone wrong. The most successful executives tended not to disclose information about fights, budget problems, and so on. -205
But the old corporate model and what happened to it are still worth paying attention to because in some deep way the assumptions that underwrote that model--that integration, hierarchy, and the concentration of power in a few hands lead to success--continue to exert a powerful hold on much of American business. -207
The idea of the wisdom of crowds is not that a group will always give you the right answer but that on average it will consistently come up with a better answer than any individual could provide. -235
. . . you don't see bubbles in the real economy, which is to say the economy where you buy and sell television sets and apples and haircuts. In other words, the price of televisions doesn't suddenly double overnight, only to crash a few months later. -245
As Richard Posner puts it: "Experts constitute a distinct class in society, with values and perspectives that differ systematically from those of ordinary people. Without supposing that the man in the street has any penetrating insights denied the expert, or is immune from demagoguery, we may nevertheless think it reassuring that political power is shared between experts and nonexperts rather than being a monopoly of the former." -268
In that sense, Gustave Le Bon had things exactly backward. If you put together a big enough and diverse enough group of people and ask them to "make decisions affecting matters of general interest," that group's decisions will, over time, be "intellectually [superior] to the isolated individual," no matter how smart of well-informed he is. -introduction, xvii
As sociologists Jack B. Soll and Richard Larrick put it, we feel the need to "chase the expert." The argument of this book is that chasing the expert is a mistake, and a costly one at that. We should stop hunting and ask the crowd (which, of course, includes the geniuses as well as everyone else) instead. Chances are, it knows. -xv
[The book concentrates on three kinds of problems. 1. Cognition problems- problems where a definite answer will be known. 2. Coordination problems- How do members of a group figure out how to coordinate their behavior with each other? (for example, driving laws) 3. Cooperation problems- the challenge of getting self-interested, distrustful people to work together.]
Diversity and independence are important because the best collective decisions are the product of disagreement and contest, not consensus or compromise. -xix
Tellingly, they quoted the Cornell economist Maureen O'Hara, who has said, "While markets appear to work in practice, we are not sure how they work in theory." -9
[Talking about the speed of the market's reaction to the challenger disaster... The market made one company's stock tumble the most.]
The market was smart that day because it satisfied the four conditions that characterize wise crowds: diversity of opinion (each person should have some private information, even if it's just an eccentric interpretation of known facts), independence (people's opinions are not determined by the opinions of those around them), decentralization (people are able to specialize and draw on local knowledge), and aggregation (some mechanism exists for turning private judgments into a collective decision). If a group satisfies those conditions, its judgment is likely to be accurate. -10
After all, think about what happens if you ask a hundred people to run a 100-meter race, and then average their times. The average time will not be better than the time of the fastest runners. It will be worse. It will be a mediocre time. But ask a hundred people to answer a question or solve a problem, and the average answer will often be at least as good as the answer of the smartest member. With most things, the average is mediocrity. With decision making, it's often excellence. -11
What makes a system successful is its ability to recognize losers and kill them quickly. Or, rather, what makes a system successful is its ability to generate lots of losers and then to recognize them as such and kill them off. Sometimes the messiest approach is the wisest. -29
The point of Page's[Scott Page] experiment is that diversity is, on its own, valuable, so that the simple fact of making a group diverse makes it better at problem solving. -30
Finally, we seek out experts because we get, as the writer Nassim Taleb asserts, "fooled by randomness." If there are enough people out there making predictions, a few of them are going to compile an impressive record over time. That does not mean that the record was the product of skill, nor does it mean that the record will continue into the future. -36
Corporations, after all, are supposed to be maximizing their profits. That means their business practices are their strategic choices should be rationally determined, not shaped by history or by unwritten cultural rules. And yet the odd thing is that convention has a profound effect on economic life and on the way companies do business. -97
A scientist does not enter his lab as a blank slate, waiting to hear what the data will tell him. Instead he enters it as someone whose understanding of what problems are interesting, what problems can be solved, and what problems are interesting, what problems can be solved, and what problems should be solved has been shaped by the interests (in both senses of the word) of his community. -165
A successful hypothesis is a hypothesis that most scientists find credible, not a hypothesis that most scientists have tested for themselves and found to be true. -169
Social scientists who study juries often differentiate between two approaches juries take. Evidence-based juries usually don't even take a vote until after they've spent some time talking over the case, sifting through the evidence, and explicitly contemplating alternative explanations. Verdict-based juries, by contrast, see their mission as reaching a decision as quickly and decisively as possible. -178
This matters because all the evidence suggests that the order in which people speak has a profound effect on the course of a discussion. Earlier comments are more influential, and they tend to provide a framework within which the discussion occurs. -186
If you talk a lot in a group, people will tend to think of you as influential almost by default. Talkative people are not necessarily well liked by other members of the group, but they are listened to. -187
Another study of fifty-two middle managers found that there was a correlation between upward mobility and not telling the boss about things that had gone wrong. The most successful executives tended not to disclose information about fights, budget problems, and so on. -205
But the old corporate model and what happened to it are still worth paying attention to because in some deep way the assumptions that underwrote that model--that integration, hierarchy, and the concentration of power in a few hands lead to success--continue to exert a powerful hold on much of American business. -207
The idea of the wisdom of crowds is not that a group will always give you the right answer but that on average it will consistently come up with a better answer than any individual could provide. -235
. . . you don't see bubbles in the real economy, which is to say the economy where you buy and sell television sets and apples and haircuts. In other words, the price of televisions doesn't suddenly double overnight, only to crash a few months later. -245
As Richard Posner puts it: "Experts constitute a distinct class in society, with values and perspectives that differ systematically from those of ordinary people. Without supposing that the man in the street has any penetrating insights denied the expert, or is immune from demagoguery, we may nevertheless think it reassuring that political power is shared between experts and nonexperts rather than being a monopoly of the former." -268
Thursday, August 26, 2010
Language Power and Consciousness
by Guy Allen, from the Bedford anthology Teaching Writing, 3rd edition
[His basic idea is the power of personal writing]
Basic training exercises include collecting and revising examples of wordiness and cliches, replacing passives and forms of "to be" with active, specific verbs, replacing vagueness with detail, building parallel phrases, sentences, and paragraphs, and transforming weak writing into strong writing. -77
In other words, the expression of the self and its experience through language somehow develops the whole person, so that the evidence of development appears in the various things people do with their lives. -89
Grammar is not a dress code. Grammar, as Chomsky and other linguists have pointed out, is the internal system that allows us to generate and understand infinite new meanings from finite vocabulary. "The normal use of language is . . . free and undetermined but yet appropriate to situations, and it is recognized as appropriate by other participants in the discourse situation" (Chomsky 56-59). The academic addiction to rigid, formal discourse situations is like putting on a tuxedo every time we step out of the house. -93
The work with language leads inevitably to work with the self and its life among other selves. The self uses sharpened language skills in a free and undetermined way to speak to itself and to speak to others. -95
The "writing problem" in our universities is really a humanism problem. We teach humanism and dodge its practice. We ask our students to study and understand meaning at the same time that we offer little opportunity for them to make original meaning. -95
Language is the tool of the human mind, whatever the mind's enterprise. Language can help us to live unconsciously, or it can help us to live consciously. -96
[His basic idea is the power of personal writing]
Basic training exercises include collecting and revising examples of wordiness and cliches, replacing passives and forms of "to be" with active, specific verbs, replacing vagueness with detail, building parallel phrases, sentences, and paragraphs, and transforming weak writing into strong writing. -77
In other words, the expression of the self and its experience through language somehow develops the whole person, so that the evidence of development appears in the various things people do with their lives. -89
Grammar is not a dress code. Grammar, as Chomsky and other linguists have pointed out, is the internal system that allows us to generate and understand infinite new meanings from finite vocabulary. "The normal use of language is . . . free and undetermined but yet appropriate to situations, and it is recognized as appropriate by other participants in the discourse situation" (Chomsky 56-59). The academic addiction to rigid, formal discourse situations is like putting on a tuxedo every time we step out of the house. -93
The work with language leads inevitably to work with the self and its life among other selves. The self uses sharpened language skills in a free and undetermined way to speak to itself and to speak to others. -95
The "writing problem" in our universities is really a humanism problem. We teach humanism and dodge its practice. We ask our students to study and understand meaning at the same time that we offer little opportunity for them to make original meaning. -95
Language is the tool of the human mind, whatever the mind's enterprise. Language can help us to live unconsciously, or it can help us to live consciously. -96
Tuesday, August 24, 2010
The Upside of Irrationality
by Dan Ariely
"Contrafreeloading," a term coined by the animal psychologist Glen Jensen, refers to the finding that many animals prefer to earn food rather than simply eating identical but freely accessible food. -60
That is, as long as fish, bird, gerbils, rats, mice, monkeys, and chimpanzees don't have to work too hard, they frequently prefer to earn their food. In fact, among all the animals tested so far the only species that prefers the lazy route is--you guessed it--the commendably rational cat. -62
In my mind, one person who understands, better than anyone else, the delicate balance between the desire to feel pride of ownership and the wish to not spend too much time in the kitchen is Sandra Lee of "Semi-Homemade" fame. Lee has literally patented a precise equation delineating the point at which the crossover occurs: the "70/30 Semi-Homemade Philosophy." -87
The origami and Legos experiments taught us that we become attached to things that we invest effort in creating, and, once that happens, we start overvaluing these objects. Our next question was whether we are aware or unaware of our tendency to ascribe increased value to our beloved creatures. -97
The lack of difference between the two bidding approaches suggested not only that we overvalue our own creations but also that we are largely unaware of this tendency; we mistakenly think that others love our work as much as we do. -99
This would be nice, but the reality is that science is carried out by human beings. As such, scientists are constrained by the same 20-watt-per-hour computing device (the brain) and the same biases (such as a preference for our own creations) as other mortals. In the scientific world, the Not-Invented-Here bias is fondly called the "toothbrush theory." The idea is that everyone wants a toothbrush, everyone needs one, everyone has one, but no one wants to use anyone else's. -117
Look around. Do you notice a general revenge reaction on the part of the public in response to the increase of bad treatment on the part of companies and institutions? Do you encounter more rudeness, ignorance, nonchalance, and sometimes hostility in stores, on flights, at car rental counters, and so on than ever before? I am not sure who started this chicken and egg problem, but as we consumers encounter offensive service, we become angrier and tend to take it out on the next service provider--whether or not he or she is responsible for our bad experience. -143
This cycle, which is what drive us to keep up with the Joneses, is also known as the hedonic treadmill. We look forward to the things that will make us happy, but we don't realize how short lived this happiness will be, and when adaptation hits we look for the next new thing. -175
The moral of the story? You may think that taking a break during an irritating or boring experience will be good for you, but a break actually decreases your ability to adapt, making the experience seem worse when you have to return to it. When cleaning your house or doing your taxes, the trick is to stick with it until you are done. -179
Overall, this means that the improvement in the market efficiency for young professionals has come, to a certain extent, at the cost of market inefficiency for young romantic partners. -217
The most practical news is this: if we do nothing while we are feeling an emotion, there is no short- or long term harm that can come to us. However, if we react to the emotion by making a decision, we may not only regret the immediate outcome, but we may also create a long-lasting pattern of decisions that will continue to misguide us for a long time. -276
From "Clueless in Academe"
This is from the anthology, Teaching Composition, by Bedford St Martin...
[Discussing what unites different fields]
Whatever the differences between their specialized jargons, they have all learned to play the following game: listen closely to others, summarize them in a recognizable way, and make your own relevant argument. This argument literacy, the ability to listen, summarize, and respond, is rightly viewed as central to being educated. - 33-34
In giving priority to ideas and arguments, however, I don't minimize the importance of qualities that can't be reduced to pure rationality--emotional intelligence, moral character, visual and aesthetic sensitivity, and creativity in storytelling and personal narrative. What I do claim is that training in these qualities will be incomplete if students are unable to translate them into persuasive public discourse. -34
Nor does privileging argumentation in the curriculum necessarily represent the ethnocentric or racist bias that some make it out to be. On the contrary, since effective argument starts with attentive listening, training in argument is central to multicultural understanding and respect for otherness. -34
Given the genius-worship that runs through our culture, academics are often admired for speaking above other people's heads, but knowing this fact somehow doesn't save me from embarrassment when I fumble painfully to explain what I do to nonacademic relatives and friends. -35
Students must not only read texts, but find things to say about them, and no text tells you what to say about it. -39
In my educational writing, I am best known for the argument that the wisest response we can make to the philosophical and social conflicts that have disrupted education is to "teach the conflicts' themselves, to bring controversy to the center of the academic curriculum. -41
. . . the ultimate motivation of my argument for teaching the conflicts is the need to clarify academic culture, not just to resolve spats among academics or cultural factions. -41
We take for granted, for example, that reflecting in a self-conscious way about experience--"intellectualizing"-- is something our students naturally see the point of and way to learn to do better. -43
The idea that, below their apparent surface, texts harbor deep meanings that cry out for interpretation, analysis, and debate is one of those assumptions that seems so normal once we are socialized into academia that we forget how counterintuitive it can be. -45
If what authors intend does not seem a genuine problem, then making a problem of unintended psychological or social meanings in texts seems all the more patently a waste of time. -47
Why would any sane person go out of his or her way to say things that are "arguable"? Just as common sense suggests that it is foolish to invent problems that did not previously exist, it also suggests that the point of writing and speaking is to make statements that nobody is likely to dispute. -50
[Discussing what unites different fields]
Whatever the differences between their specialized jargons, they have all learned to play the following game: listen closely to others, summarize them in a recognizable way, and make your own relevant argument. This argument literacy, the ability to listen, summarize, and respond, is rightly viewed as central to being educated. - 33-34
In giving priority to ideas and arguments, however, I don't minimize the importance of qualities that can't be reduced to pure rationality--emotional intelligence, moral character, visual and aesthetic sensitivity, and creativity in storytelling and personal narrative. What I do claim is that training in these qualities will be incomplete if students are unable to translate them into persuasive public discourse. -34
Nor does privileging argumentation in the curriculum necessarily represent the ethnocentric or racist bias that some make it out to be. On the contrary, since effective argument starts with attentive listening, training in argument is central to multicultural understanding and respect for otherness. -34
Given the genius-worship that runs through our culture, academics are often admired for speaking above other people's heads, but knowing this fact somehow doesn't save me from embarrassment when I fumble painfully to explain what I do to nonacademic relatives and friends. -35
Students must not only read texts, but find things to say about them, and no text tells you what to say about it. -39
In my educational writing, I am best known for the argument that the wisest response we can make to the philosophical and social conflicts that have disrupted education is to "teach the conflicts' themselves, to bring controversy to the center of the academic curriculum. -41
. . . the ultimate motivation of my argument for teaching the conflicts is the need to clarify academic culture, not just to resolve spats among academics or cultural factions. -41
We take for granted, for example, that reflecting in a self-conscious way about experience--"intellectualizing"-- is something our students naturally see the point of and way to learn to do better. -43
The idea that, below their apparent surface, texts harbor deep meanings that cry out for interpretation, analysis, and debate is one of those assumptions that seems so normal once we are socialized into academia that we forget how counterintuitive it can be. -45
If what authors intend does not seem a genuine problem, then making a problem of unintended psychological or social meanings in texts seems all the more patently a waste of time. -47
Why would any sane person go out of his or her way to say things that are "arguable"? Just as common sense suggests that it is foolish to invent problems that did not previously exist, it also suggests that the point of writing and speaking is to make statements that nobody is likely to dispute. -50
Tuesday, August 17, 2010
The Writing Center Journal Vol 30 Nu 1
[From "The Polarities of Context in the Writing Center Conference" by Joseph Janangelo, WCJ 8.2 (1988) 31-6]
Conferences with one's own students are always influenced by personal context. They differ from first-time tutorial encounters in that teachers have "personal knowledge" of their student writers' strengths and weaknesses-- where they are with a piece of writing and where our experience tells us they need to be in order to succeed in the academic community. -16
[From "Introduction to 'Multicultural Voices: Peer Tutoring and Critical Reflection in the Writing Center" by Nancy Maloney grimm]
Although we have plenty of multicultural readers to use in classrooms, as a field we have yet to develop practices, principles, and genres that encourage student writers to represent bicultural experiences, to articulate their cultural backgrounds in ways that attain academic validation and to connect literacy with meaningful personal aspirations. -37
There is clearly a persistent reappearing thread of change-agent aspiration in writing center scholarship, an aspiration that becomes less idealistic and more realistic when we start changing the things we can, such as the linguistic, cultural, racial, social, and disciplinary diversity of our undergraduate staff. As other introductions in this anniversary issue indicate, much of what we can accomplish in writing centers has to do with how we construe the contexts in which we work. -38
[From Multi-cultural Voices: Peer Tutoring and Critical Reflection in the Writing Center, WCJ 12.1 (1991): 11-33
Our version of critical reflection in tutor-training programs focuses on conscious explorations of language within a society stratified by race and cultural background and the implications of this social context for education. -41
As Knoblauch and Brannon point out it is important for teacher--and similarly tutors--to develop a conscious philosophical basis for their work because "nothing short of that consciousness will make instruction sensible and deliberate, the result of knowledge, not folklore, and of design, not just custom or accident. -45
[New writer]
In my own writing classes, I had studied the ways that educational, cultural, and social hierarchies inhibited students' use of writing for liberation (most students seemed to see writing as a means of coercion), enforced a formalist agenda of correctness over the force of meaning, and functioned to exclude non-mainstream students instead of empower them. -52
[Multiliteracies, Social Futures, and Writing Centers
This notion of multiliteracies has to do in part with new text forms and new means of communication associated with the information age and knowledge economies of the globalized markets and societies of late capitalism. -88
My guess is that writing centers will more and more define themselves as multiliteracy centers. Many are already doing so--tutoring oral presentations, adding online tutorials, offering workshops in evaluating web sources, being more conscious of document design. -89
[Queering the Writing Center by Harry Denney, WCJ 25.2 (2005): 39-62]
Gillespie and Lerner describe commonplace mindsets about writing centers as garrets for skills--builging and testing, as generative spaces for confidence and collaboration, and as critical arenas in which to problem-pose institutional and social discursive practices (147-150). -95
Producing better writers, to extend Stephen North's aphorism, involves understanding the manufacture and dynamics of identity, a process that involves on-going self-discovery and reconciliation with collective identities and discourse communities. -96
Learning to code-switch between "standard" discourse practices and community-based ones does not necessarily translate into practical empowerment: speaking a white, middle-class, academic vernacular enables outsiders to gain access to that discourse community, but such code-switchers do not eliminate the ubiquitous presence of racism, sexism, and nationalism and their marginalizing effects. -102
As students learn to construct essays with an attention to audience that forces them away from safe confines of the personal and the local, their ways of knowing confront a complex interplay of the dominant, the oppositional, the subversive, and the self. -103
Conferences with one's own students are always influenced by personal context. They differ from first-time tutorial encounters in that teachers have "personal knowledge" of their student writers' strengths and weaknesses-- where they are with a piece of writing and where our experience tells us they need to be in order to succeed in the academic community. -16
[From "Introduction to 'Multicultural Voices: Peer Tutoring and Critical Reflection in the Writing Center" by Nancy Maloney grimm]
Although we have plenty of multicultural readers to use in classrooms, as a field we have yet to develop practices, principles, and genres that encourage student writers to represent bicultural experiences, to articulate their cultural backgrounds in ways that attain academic validation and to connect literacy with meaningful personal aspirations. -37
There is clearly a persistent reappearing thread of change-agent aspiration in writing center scholarship, an aspiration that becomes less idealistic and more realistic when we start changing the things we can, such as the linguistic, cultural, racial, social, and disciplinary diversity of our undergraduate staff. As other introductions in this anniversary issue indicate, much of what we can accomplish in writing centers has to do with how we construe the contexts in which we work. -38
[From Multi-cultural Voices: Peer Tutoring and Critical Reflection in the Writing Center, WCJ 12.1 (1991): 11-33
Our version of critical reflection in tutor-training programs focuses on conscious explorations of language within a society stratified by race and cultural background and the implications of this social context for education. -41
As Knoblauch and Brannon point out it is important for teacher--and similarly tutors--to develop a conscious philosophical basis for their work because "nothing short of that consciousness will make instruction sensible and deliberate, the result of knowledge, not folklore, and of design, not just custom or accident. -45
[New writer]
In my own writing classes, I had studied the ways that educational, cultural, and social hierarchies inhibited students' use of writing for liberation (most students seemed to see writing as a means of coercion), enforced a formalist agenda of correctness over the force of meaning, and functioned to exclude non-mainstream students instead of empower them. -52
[Multiliteracies, Social Futures, and Writing Centers
This notion of multiliteracies has to do in part with new text forms and new means of communication associated with the information age and knowledge economies of the globalized markets and societies of late capitalism. -88
My guess is that writing centers will more and more define themselves as multiliteracy centers. Many are already doing so--tutoring oral presentations, adding online tutorials, offering workshops in evaluating web sources, being more conscious of document design. -89
[Queering the Writing Center by Harry Denney, WCJ 25.2 (2005): 39-62]
Gillespie and Lerner describe commonplace mindsets about writing centers as garrets for skills--builging and testing, as generative spaces for confidence and collaboration, and as critical arenas in which to problem-pose institutional and social discursive practices (147-150). -95
Producing better writers, to extend Stephen North's aphorism, involves understanding the manufacture and dynamics of identity, a process that involves on-going self-discovery and reconciliation with collective identities and discourse communities. -96
Learning to code-switch between "standard" discourse practices and community-based ones does not necessarily translate into practical empowerment: speaking a white, middle-class, academic vernacular enables outsiders to gain access to that discourse community, but such code-switchers do not eliminate the ubiquitous presence of racism, sexism, and nationalism and their marginalizing effects. -102
As students learn to construct essays with an attention to audience that forces them away from safe confines of the personal and the local, their ways of knowing confront a complex interplay of the dominant, the oppositional, the subversive, and the self. -103
Wednesday, August 4, 2010
A Letter to Maggie, by James Slevin
From Teaching Composition: Background Readings
This is a letter to a new teacher who is worried.
What's the difference between having a point and making a point?- abstract
Slevin ultimately comes to suggest that the essential material of a good writing course belongs to the category of "evidence"---what counts as evidence, what does the evidence mean, what points can it support?-abstract
What matters in college writing, more than any writing they have done before and perhaps more than any writing or speaking they will do later, what matters is evidence. -60
Politicians, pundits, advertisers have in common a studied commitment to assertion, often at the level of the sound bite. Neither evidence nor competing assertions make any difference, except as part of a staged drama. -60
I wish my students could distinguish between having a point (or having a thesis) and making a point (or a thesis). (It is curious that the phrase, "making a thesis," is not idiomatic, and yet it is the heart of academic work.) We all have points but don't often make them. -61
Precisely because academic culture is never like that--we are never omniscient, our work is almost never a matter of life and death, our conclusions never entirely conclusive, never closing on exactly the right answer that will effectively eliminate the need for any further work in our fields--because of all that, we found Columbo a weekly delight. -62
We talk a great deal about examining the assumptions behind a thesis, looking at the bias of the author we are reading or the work we are composing. That is an important thing to do, but it doesn't necessarily clarify what is at stake in undertaking this critique. The point is not simply to identify bias but to explain what that particular bias does with the evidence at hand--how it misinterprets or inadequately explains the evidence, occasionally even distorting it. -63
I should rephrase that and say that the heart of academic writing is the process of supporting, testing, and complicating theses, not just having them. -64
This is a letter to a new teacher who is worried.
What's the difference between having a point and making a point?- abstract
Slevin ultimately comes to suggest that the essential material of a good writing course belongs to the category of "evidence"---what counts as evidence, what does the evidence mean, what points can it support?-abstract
What matters in college writing, more than any writing they have done before and perhaps more than any writing or speaking they will do later, what matters is evidence. -60
Politicians, pundits, advertisers have in common a studied commitment to assertion, often at the level of the sound bite. Neither evidence nor competing assertions make any difference, except as part of a staged drama. -60
I wish my students could distinguish between having a point (or having a thesis) and making a point (or a thesis). (It is curious that the phrase, "making a thesis," is not idiomatic, and yet it is the heart of academic work.) We all have points but don't often make them. -61
Precisely because academic culture is never like that--we are never omniscient, our work is almost never a matter of life and death, our conclusions never entirely conclusive, never closing on exactly the right answer that will effectively eliminate the need for any further work in our fields--because of all that, we found Columbo a weekly delight. -62
We talk a great deal about examining the assumptions behind a thesis, looking at the bias of the author we are reading or the work we are composing. That is an important thing to do, but it doesn't necessarily clarify what is at stake in undertaking this critique. The point is not simply to identify bias but to explain what that particular bias does with the evidence at hand--how it misinterprets or inadequately explains the evidence, occasionally even distorting it. -63
I should rephrase that and say that the heart of academic writing is the process of supporting, testing, and complicating theses, not just having them. -64
The Making of Meaning, Ann Berthoff
This is a selection from a longer work.
From Teaching Composition: Background Readings, 3rd Ed, Bedford/St Martins
Thus writing is not like cooking a particular dish; writing may resemble, at one stage or another, some phase of say, making a cream sauce, but it is not sequential or "linear"; it is not measurement, followed by amalgamation and transformation. An analogy for writing that is based on culinary experience would have to include ways of calculating the guests' preferences, as well as ways of determining what's on the shelf--the cook's and the grocer's--and what's in the purse. -293
Our job is to design sequences of assignments that let our students discover what language can do, what they can do with language. Kenneth Koch got poetry out of his youngsters because he gave them syntactic structures to play with; Sylvia Aston-Warner's "key vocabulary" became what she called "the captions of the dynamic life itself"; Paulo Freire's "generative words" provided the means by which the peasants in his literacy classes--"culture circles"--could name the world. -295
Meanings change as we think about them; statements and events, significances and interpretations can mean different things to different people at different times. -295
We know reality not directly but by means of the meanings we make. (The role of critical thinking is, of course, to review and revise those meanings.) What we know, we know in some form--perceptual or conceptual. --295
The ability to speak is innate, but language can only be realized in a social context. Dialogue, that is to say, is essential to the making of meaning and thus learning to write. -297
From Teaching Composition: Background Readings, 3rd Ed, Bedford/St Martins
Thus writing is not like cooking a particular dish; writing may resemble, at one stage or another, some phase of say, making a cream sauce, but it is not sequential or "linear"; it is not measurement, followed by amalgamation and transformation. An analogy for writing that is based on culinary experience would have to include ways of calculating the guests' preferences, as well as ways of determining what's on the shelf--the cook's and the grocer's--and what's in the purse. -293
Our job is to design sequences of assignments that let our students discover what language can do, what they can do with language. Kenneth Koch got poetry out of his youngsters because he gave them syntactic structures to play with; Sylvia Aston-Warner's "key vocabulary" became what she called "the captions of the dynamic life itself"; Paulo Freire's "generative words" provided the means by which the peasants in his literacy classes--"culture circles"--could name the world. -295
Meanings change as we think about them; statements and events, significances and interpretations can mean different things to different people at different times. -295
We know reality not directly but by means of the meanings we make. (The role of critical thinking is, of course, to review and revise those meanings.) What we know, we know in some form--perceptual or conceptual. --295
The ability to speak is innate, but language can only be realized in a social context. Dialogue, that is to say, is essential to the making of meaning and thus learning to write. -297
Monday, July 12, 2010
Monday, April 26, 2010
Signs of Truthfullness
Signs of Truthfulness is Witness Accounts
From Derren Brown's book, Tricks of the Mind, p246-249
1. Unstructured production- Truthful, unrehearsed stories, tend to jump forward and backward in time.
2. Quantity of details- the richer the details, the more likely it is true
3. Contextual embedding- If the story takes place within the context of daily life rather than within a vaccuum.
4. Descriptions of Interactions- True stories are more likely to involve interactions between the characters. (A reacting to B)
5. Reproduction of speech- few liars will reproduce parts of a dialogue in their stories
6. Unexpected complications during the incident. -If the story doesn't have them, it is less likely to be true.
7. Unusual details- Often superfluous to the main thrust of the story.
8. Accurately reported details misunderstood- Reporting facts where the meaning is lost on the teller.
9. Accounts of subjective mental state- Reference to feelings or thoughts during the story.
10. Attribution of the perpetrator's mental state.- For example, "he was clearly annoyed because of XXX..."
11. Spontaneous corrections- little corrections or dropped in additions
12. Admitting a lack of memory. - "I cant remember where we ate..."
13. Raising doubts about one's own testimony. - "I might have this wrong. My memory is hazy."
14. Self-deprecation- Referring to details that might incriminate himself or make him feel foolish.
From Derren Brown's book, Tricks of the Mind, p246-249
1. Unstructured production- Truthful, unrehearsed stories, tend to jump forward and backward in time.
2. Quantity of details- the richer the details, the more likely it is true
3. Contextual embedding- If the story takes place within the context of daily life rather than within a vaccuum.
4. Descriptions of Interactions- True stories are more likely to involve interactions between the characters. (A reacting to B)
5. Reproduction of speech- few liars will reproduce parts of a dialogue in their stories
6. Unexpected complications during the incident. -If the story doesn't have them, it is less likely to be true.
7. Unusual details- Often superfluous to the main thrust of the story.
8. Accurately reported details misunderstood- Reporting facts where the meaning is lost on the teller.
9. Accounts of subjective mental state- Reference to feelings or thoughts during the story.
10. Attribution of the perpetrator's mental state.- For example, "he was clearly annoyed because of XXX..."
11. Spontaneous corrections- little corrections or dropped in additions
12. Admitting a lack of memory. - "I cant remember where we ate..."
13. Raising doubts about one's own testimony. - "I might have this wrong. My memory is hazy."
14. Self-deprecation- Referring to details that might incriminate himself or make him feel foolish.
Thursday, April 8, 2010
The Language Instinct, Chapter 12
Imagine that you are watching a nature documentary. The video shows the usual gorgeous footage of animals in their natural habitats. But the voiceover reports some troubling facts. Dolphins do not execute their swimming strokes properly. White-crowned sparrows carelessly debase their calls. Chickadees' nest are incorrectly constructed, pandas hold bamboo in the wrong paw, the song of the humpback whale contains several well-known errors, and monkeys' cries have been in a state of chaos and degeneration for hundreds of years. Your reaction would probably be, What on earth could it mean for the song of the humpback whale to contain an "error"? Isn't the song of the humpback whale whatever the humpback whale decides to sing? Who is this announcer, anyway? -370
To a linguist or a psycholinguist, of course, language is like the song of the humpback whale. The way to determine whether a construction is "grammatical" is to find people who speak the language and ask them. -370
The legislators of "correct English," in fact, are an informal network of copy-editors, dictionary usage panelists, style manual and handbook writers, English teachers, essayists, columnists, and pundits. -372
. . . since prescriptive rules are so psychologically unnatural that only those with access to the right schooling can abide by them, they serve as shibboleths, differentiating the elite from the rabble. -374
One of the major discorveries of modern generative grammar is that the part of speech of a word--noun, verb, adjective--is not a label assigned by convenience but an actual mental catagory that can be verified by experimental assays, just as chemist can verify whether a gem is a diamond or zirconium. -394
Not every woman who has fallen is a fallen woman, and if someone stones you you are not necessarily stoned. -396
[A quote from Dwight Bollinger]
In language there are no licensed practitioners, but the woods are full of midwives, herbalists, colonic irrigationists, bonesetters, and general-purpose witch doctors, some abysmally ignorant, otehrs with a rich fund of practical knowledge--whom we shall lump together and call shamans. They require our attention not only because they fill a lack but because they are almost the only people who make the news when language begins to cause trouble and someone must answer the cry for help. Sometimes their advice is sound. Sometimes it is worthless, but still it is sought because no one knows where else to turn. We are living in an African village and Albert Schweitzer has not arrived yet. -399
Overcoming one's natural egocentrism and trying to anticipate the knowledge state of a generic reader at every stage of the exposition is one of the most important tasks of writing well. -401
To a linguist or a psycholinguist, of course, language is like the song of the humpback whale. The way to determine whether a construction is "grammatical" is to find people who speak the language and ask them. -370
The legislators of "correct English," in fact, are an informal network of copy-editors, dictionary usage panelists, style manual and handbook writers, English teachers, essayists, columnists, and pundits. -372
. . . since prescriptive rules are so psychologically unnatural that only those with access to the right schooling can abide by them, they serve as shibboleths, differentiating the elite from the rabble. -374
One of the major discorveries of modern generative grammar is that the part of speech of a word--noun, verb, adjective--is not a label assigned by convenience but an actual mental catagory that can be verified by experimental assays, just as chemist can verify whether a gem is a diamond or zirconium. -394
Not every woman who has fallen is a fallen woman, and if someone stones you you are not necessarily stoned. -396
[A quote from Dwight Bollinger]
In language there are no licensed practitioners, but the woods are full of midwives, herbalists, colonic irrigationists, bonesetters, and general-purpose witch doctors, some abysmally ignorant, otehrs with a rich fund of practical knowledge--whom we shall lump together and call shamans. They require our attention not only because they fill a lack but because they are almost the only people who make the news when language begins to cause trouble and someone must answer the cry for help. Sometimes their advice is sound. Sometimes it is worthless, but still it is sought because no one knows where else to turn. We are living in an African village and Albert Schweitzer has not arrived yet. -399
Overcoming one's natural egocentrism and trying to anticipate the knowledge state of a generic reader at every stage of the exposition is one of the most important tasks of writing well. -401
Monday, February 8, 2010
Teacher-Student Nonverbal Relationships
Teacher-Student Nonverbal Relationships
Richmond, Virginia Peck, James C. McCroskey, and Mark L. Hickson. "Teacher-Student Nonverbal Relationships." Nonverbal Behavior in Interpersonal Relations (6th Edition). Boston: Allyn & Bacon, 2007. 251-77. Print.
Research has indicated that students taught by lecture do as well as or better on tests of factual recall than those taught by discussion methods. -252
On the downside, lectures are not as effective as other methods in fostering higher levels of learning (application, analysis, synthesis, and evaluation) or in developing psychomotor skills. Students tend to be passive; according to various studies, their attention frequently wanes in fifteen to twenty-five minutes and their retention decreases by as much as 80 percent within about eight weeks. -252
Using student names, incorporating personal anecdotes and other means of self-disclosure, asking questions and encouraging students to talk, referring to the class as "our" class and to what "we" are doing, and using humor all contribute to immediacy, as do maintaining eye contact with the students, smiling, having a relaxed body position and using animated gestures, moving about the classroom during the lecture, and this point is very important to remember using a dynamic, vocally expressive style of delivery. These strategies have been shown to have both cognitive and affective learning payoffs. -253
For teachers to effectively coach students until they master a skill, it is essential that they be able to break the performance of the skill into separate components so that they can offer corrective instruction. -256
Some students got better and better at baseball just by getting more playing experience, but others simply repeated ineffective moves until they were pulled out of the game and allowed to concentrate only on one aspect of play until they got the hang of it. -256
Research provides evidence that students retain information longer when they have an opportunity to verbalize it, especially to their peers. -257
If students are given all the resources needed at the outset and a very specific model of what they are to come up with, much of the incidental learning from the group's process will be lost. The groups are then the educator's staff, working on the teacher's project rather than on their own. -258
In this section, we have suggested that a teacher might wear many hats: speaker, moderator, trainer, manager, and coordinator. Most teacher look good in all of them, and most students get tired of looking at the same hat every day. The hat most students prefer on their teacher, whether the teacher is in speaker, moderator, trainer, manager, or coordinator mode is the nonverbally receptive, expressive, supportive teacher. -258
We have stated for years that the primary function of teachers' verbal behavior in the classroom is to give content to improve students' cognitive learning. The primary function of teachers' nonverbal behavior in the classroom is to improve students' affect or liking for the subject matter, teacher, or class, and to instill in them the desire to learn more about the subject matter. -260
Therefore our advice is to dress formally for a week or two or until credibility is established. Then dress more casually to project the image that one is open to student interaction. -261
Unattractive children are commonly ignored by teachers, given less time to answer questions than their attractive counterparts, encouraged less to talk, given less eye contact, given more distance, and touched less by their teacher. This type of nonverbal behavior communicates to the unattractive child that he or she is not as good as the other students. -263
In the classroom, adaptors are probably the most common gestures used by students. The classroom is an anxiety-producing situation for many children. Observe a typical classroom and you will find students chewing pencils, biting their nails, picking at their desks or notebooks, pulling at their hair, smoothing their clothing, and clicking their pens. -264
Students use more adaptors in classes where they feel anxious or bored. -264
Increased teacher immediacy results in
Increased liking, affiliation, and positive affect on the part of the student. Immediate teachers are liked far more than nonimmediate teachers.
Increased student affect for the subject matter. Students who become motivated to learn the subject matter because of the teacher's immediate behaviors will do well in the content and continue to learn long after the teacher who motivated them is out of the picture.
Increased student cognitive learning. Students with immediate teahcers attend more to the subject matter, concentrate more on the subject, retain more of the content, and when challenged can correctly recall more of the subject matter than students with nonimmediate teachers.
Increased student motivation. It seems that the primary way that immediacy produces learning effects may be by increasing student motivation.
Reduced student resisitance to instructors' attempts to influence or modify behavior. Immediate teachers seem to have more referent, respect, or liking power; hence students tend to comply with or conform to the wishes of the more immediate teachers. Nonimmediate teachers have more difficulty getting students to comply with or conform to their wishes.
The teacher being perceived as a more competant communicator, one who listens and cares. Increased student-teacher communication and interaction.
A reduced status differential between student and teacher.
Higher evaluations from one's immediate supervisor. -276
[Starting with "The teacher being" I've only included the topic sentences for each of immediacy's effects.]
Wednesday, February 3, 2010
Pedagogy of the Oppressed
Pedagogy of the Oppressed
In order to have the continued opportunity to express their "generosity," the oppressors must perpetuate injustice as well. An unjust social order is the permanent fount of this "generosity," which is nourished by death, despair, and poverty. -45
True generosity consists precisely in fighting to destroy the causes which nourish false charity. -45
Conditioned by the experience of oppressing others, any situation other than their former seems to them like oppression. Formerly, they could eat dress, wear shoes, be educated, travel, and hear Beethoven: while millions did not eat, had no clothes or shoes, neither studied nor traveled, much less listened to Beethoven. Any restriction on this way of life, in the name of the rights of the community, appears to the former oppressors as a profound violation of their individual rights--although they had no respect for the millions who suffered and died of hunger, pain, sorrow, and despair. -57
[attitudes of the banking concept of education]
(a) the teacher techers and the students are taught;
(b) the teacher knows everything and the students know nothing;
(c) the teacher thinks and the students are thought about;
(d) the teacher talks and the students listen--meekly;
(e) the disciplines and the students are disciplined;
(f) the teacher chooses and enforces his choice, and the students comply;
(g) the teacher acts and the students have the illusion of acting through the action of the teacher;
(h) the teacher chooses the program content, and the students (who were not consulted) adapt to it;
(i) the teacher confuses the authority of knowledge with his or her own professional authority, which she and he sets in opposition to the freedom of the students;
(j) the teacher is the Subject of the learning process, while the pupils are mere objects.
-73
Animals are not challenged by the configuration which confronts them; they are merely stimulated. Their life is not one of risk-taking, for they are not aware of taking risks. Risks are not challenges perceived upon reflection, but merely "noted" by the signs which indicate them; they accordingly do not require decision-making responses. -98
As each person, in his decoding essay, relates how he perceived or felt a certain occurrence or situation, his exposition challenges all the other decoders by re-presenting to them the same reality upon which they have themselves been intent. -112
The first requirement is that these codifications must necessarily represent situations familiar to the individuals whose thematics are being examined, so that they can easily recognize the situations (and this their own relation to them). -114
The theme of development, for example, is especially appropriate to the field of economics, but not exclusively so. This theme would also be focalized by sociology, anthropology, and social psychology (fields concerned with cultural change and with the modification of attitudes and values--questions which are equally relevant to a philosophy of development). It would be focalized by political science (a field concerned with the decisions which involve development), by education, and so forth. In this way, the themes which characterize a totality will never be approached rigidly. -120
It is accomplished by the oppressors' depositing myths indispensible to the preservation of the status quo: for example, the myth that the oppressive order is a "free society": the myth that all persons are free to work where they wish, that if they don't like their boss they can leave him and look for another job; the myth that this order respects human rights and is therefore worthy of esteem; the myth that anyone who is industrious can become an entrepreneur--worse yet, the myth that the street vendor is as much an entrepreneur as the owner of a large factory; the myth of the universal right of education, when of all the Brazilian children who enter primary schools only a tiny fraction ever reach the university; the myth of the equality of all individuals, when the question: "Do you know who you're talking to?" is still current among us; the myth of the heroism of the oppressor classes as defenders of "Western Christian civilization" against "materialist barbarism"; the myth of the charity and generosity of the elites, when what they really do as a class is to foster selective "good deeds" (subsequently elaborated into the myth of "disinterested aid," which on the international level was severely criticized by Pope John XXII);
-140
In the theory of antidialogical action, conquest (as its primary characteristic) invovles a Subject who conquers another person and transforms her or him into a "thing." In the dialogical theory of action. Subjects meet in cooperation in order to transform the world. -167
In cultural invasion, the actors draw the thematic content of their action from their own values and ideology: their starting point is their own world, from which they enter the world of those they invade. In cultural synthesis, the actors who come from "another world" to the world of the people do so not as invaders. They do not come to teach or to transmit or to give anythign, but rather to learn with the people, about the people's world. -180
Monday, December 28, 2009
The Stuff of Thought: Language as a Window into Human Nature
The Stuff of Thought: Language as a Window into Human Nature
*The human mind can construe a particular scenario in multiple ways.
*Each construal is built around a few basic ideas, like "event," "cause," "change," and "intend."
*These ideas can be extended metaphorically to other domains, as when we count events as if they were objects or when we use space as a metaphor for time.
*Each idea has distinctively human quirks that make it useful for reasoning about certain things but that can lead to fallacies and confusions when we try to apply it more broadly.
--26
. . . .inspired Bertolt Brecht's "Questions from a Worker Who Reads":
Who built Thebes of the seven gates?
In the books you will find the names of kings.
Did the kings haul up the lumps of rock?
The young Alexander conquered India.
Was he alone?
Caesar beat the Gauls.
Did he not have even a cook with him?
--68
Though linguists often theorize about a language as if it were the fixed protocol of a homogeneous community of idealized speakers, like the physicists frictionless plane and ideal gas, they also know that a real language is constantly being pushed and pulled at the margins by different speakers in different ways. -74
"Put the new material last" and "Put the heave material last" are two of the most important guidelines for good style in writing and speaking. -74
It is the same strategy that wine dealers use when they stock an exorbitantly priced bottle on every rack. They know that insecure buyers gravitate to the middle of the range, so if there's a hundred-dollar bottle on display, they'll go for the thirty-dollar bottle, whereas if the most expensive bottle had cost thirty dollars, they'd maybe have been content to spend ten. -90
What is this meaning component? The computational linguist James Pustejovsky argues that Aristotle got it right when he proposed that the mind understands every entity in terms of four causes: who or what brought it about; what it's made of; what shape it has; and what it's for. -116
Let me say at the outset that language surely affects thought--at the very least, if one person's words didn't affect another person's thoguhts, language as a whole would be useless. The question is whether language determines thought--whether the language we speak makes it difficult or impossible to think certain thoughts, or alters the way we think in surprising or consequential ways. -125
I suspect that the dollop of additional retrievability and manipulability that a concept gains when it has its own word is a version of the Whorfian hypothesis that has a grain of truth to it and is not completely boring. But it is a far cry from Linguistic Determinism. -129
So one way in which language has to affect thought is that speakers attend to different things as they select words and assemble them into a sentence--an effect called "thinking for speaking." They question is whether a lifelong habit of attending to certain distinction and ignoring others spills over into tinking ofr thinking--that is, reasoning about objects and events for purposes other than just describing them. -132
A genuine demonstration of linguistic determinism would have to show three things. The first would be that hte speakers of one language find it impossible, or at least extremely difficult, to think in a particular way that comes naturally to the speakers of another language (as opposed to merely being less in the habit of thinking that way). Another would be that the difference in thinking involves genuine reasoning, leaving speakers incapable of solving a problem or befuddled in paradox, rather than merely tilting their subjective impressions in inkblot-style judgments. And most important, the difference in thinking must be caused by the language, rather than from other reasons and simply being reflected in the language, and rather than both the language and the thought pattern being an effect of the surrounding culture or environment. -135-36
One of the major discoveries in memory research is that people have poor memories for teh exact sentences that gave them their knowledge. This amnesia for form, however, does not prevent them from retaining the gist of what they have heard or read. 149
Kant's version of nativism, with abstract organizing frameworks but not actual knowledge built in to the mind, is the version that is most viable today, and can be found, for example, in Chomskyan linguistics, evolutionary psychology, and the approach to cognitive development called domain specificity. -160
Head-scratching about holes-real things in the mind, nothings in reality--is not just an occupational hazard of linguists and philosophers. A hole can be the answer to brainteasers like "What's the only thing you can put in a bucket that will make it lighter?" and "The more you take from me, the bigger I grow; what am I?" They are the source of trick questions, like "How much dirt is in a hole six feet wide, eight feet deep, and five feet long?" (Answer: None.) -181
The future tense is often used by flight attendants and waitstaff at fancy restaurants as a display of politeness. It pretends not to foreclose any possibilities, as if the listener's approval will be solicited at every stage, before anything is set in stone. As we shall see in chapter 8, it is an example of a common tactic of politeness in the world's languages: Pretend to give the listener options. -197
The common denominator in all these problems is that the world is not a line of dominoes in which each event causes exactly one event and is caused by exactly one event. The world is a tissue of causes and effects that criss and cross in tangled patterns. . . .
One solution to the webbiness of causation is a technique in artificial intelligence called Causal Bayes Networks. -215
[Causal Bayes Networks involve multiple variables that each influence the others in more than one way. Setting them up is a nightmare. Once it is set, it would be brilliant.]
Another fallout of the metaphor metaphor is the phenomenon of framing. Many disagreements in human affairs turn not on differences in data or logic but on how a problem is framed. We see this when adversaries "talk past each other" or when understanding something requires a "paradigm shift." -243
Even by these standards, Lakoff's theory of conceptual metaphor is a lollapalooza. If he is right, conceptual metaphor can do everything from overturning twenty-five hundred years of misguided reliance on truth and objectivity in Western thought to putting a Democrat in the White House. . . .
I think Lakoff takes the idea a wee bit too far. -246-47
Moving from philosophy to psychology, we discover a big problem with the claim that most of our thinking is metaphorical: people effortlessly transcend the metaphors implicit in their language. I have already mentioned the killjoy's point that many, if not most, conceptual metaphors are opaque to current speakers. -248
So the ubiquity of metaphor in language does not mean that all thought is grounded in bodily experience, nor that all ideas are merely rival frames rather than verifiable propositions. Conceptual metaphors can be learned and used only if they are analyzed into more abstract elements like "cause," "goal," and "change," which make up the real currency of thought. And the methodical use of metaphor in science shows that metaphor is a way of adapting language to reality, not the other way around, and that it can capture genuine laws in the world, not just project comfortable images onto it. -259
Language, by its very design, would seem to be a tool with a well-defined and limited functionality. With a finite stock of arbitrary signs, and grammatical rules that arrange them in sentences, a language gives us the means to share an unlimited number of combinations of ideas about who did what to whom, and about what is where. Yet by digitizing the world, language is a "lossy" medium, discarding information about the smooth multidimensional texture of experience. Language is notoriously poor, for instance, at conveying the subtlety and richness of sensations like smells and sounds. And it would seem to be just as inept at conveying other channels of sentience that are not composed out of discrete, accessible parts. Flashes of holistic insight (like those in mathematical or musical creativity), waves of consuming emotion, and moments of wistful contemplation are simply not the kinds of experience that can be captured by the beads-on-a-string we call sentences. -276-77
Language is a medium that is public and digital, and so must hide the aspects of our experience that are private and smoothly blended: our sensations, our emotions, our inklings and intuitions, and the choreography of our bodies. Still, we are gregarious animals who like to teach and gossip and boss one another around, and few aspects of our lives are unaffected by our dealings with other people. As the channel in which much of this information is trafficked, language is adapted to every feature of our experience that is sharable with others, and a large part of the human condition falls into its purview. -427
Humans construct an understanding of the world that is very different from the analogue flow of sensation the world presents to them. They package their experience into objects and events. They assemble these objects and events into propositions, which they take to be characterizations of real and possible worlds. The characterizations are highly schematic: they pick out some aspects of a situation and ignore others, allowing the same situation to be construed in multiple ways. People, thereby can disagree about what a given situation really is even when they agree on how matter has moved through space. -428
Humans have a primitive concept of number, which distinguishes only one, two, and many, though they can also estimate larger quantities approximately. -429
Humans are touchy about their relationships. They maintain a "face" which emboldens them to stake out claims in negotiation and conflict. They are sensitive to their social rank, and also to their solidarity and empathy with others. With some of their fellows--typically kin, lovers, and friends--humans share resources, freely extend favors, and feel ties of empathy and closeness, which they blur with an intuition of being one flesh. With other people, they jockey for dominance, or show off their status, entitling them to teh exercise of power or influence. With still others, they trade goods and services on a tit-for-tat basis, or divide things and responsibilities into even portions. -432
People are not handcuffed to a single metaphor when thinking about something but can switch among them, sifting them for hte best match between the relations among the concepts in the metaphor and the relations among the things they are trying to understand. -437
The goal of education is to make up for the shortcomings in our instinctive ways of thinking about the physical and social world. And education is likely to succeed not by trying to implant abstract statements in empty minds but by taking the mental models that are our standard equipment, applying them to new subjects in selective analogies, and assembling them into new and more sophisticated combinations. --439
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