What I’ve Been Reading

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1. Free Flight: Inventing the Future of Travel by James Fallows.

A nice introduction to amateur aviation if you know nothing about it. The second half of the book (published 2001) is about the air taxi movement which by now is out of date. You can get the latest on air taxis from Fallows’ blog.

2. Hearth and the Cosmos: A Cosmopolite’s Viewpoint by Yi-Fu Tuan.

Tuan discusses the tension between the “hearth” (family and local ties) and the “cosmos” (cities and external urban life). The tension exists because “hearth, though nurturing, can be too confining; cosmos, though liberating, can be bewildering and threatening.” He writes, “The elite can have both world and home; they can be cosmopolitan and yet return to the hearth for nurturance and renewal.”

I sympathize when Tuan says, “The more Americans participate in…globalism, the more they learn for locality, tradition, and roots — for the hearths and ethnos that they can directly experience and understand, for the small milieu that yields emotional satisfaction.”

He’s eloquent when describing the shift from hearth to cosmos: “Each step is a move beyond confinement within a particular color patch in the mosaic to the mosaic as a whole that is the United States. Each step is not necessarily the abandonment of a particular cultural heritage, thought it does mean the loss of unreflective acceptance, or a certain innocence, that can be so assuring. As we take these steps, we come closer to recognizing that all cultures are flawed binders as well as the source of unique illuminations, that they deserve affection rather than idolatry, that they are our first home rather than our last.”

These are interesting ideas — I’ve blogged a lot about identity and cosmopolitanism over the years — but on the whole I was disappointed by this book and would recommend passing, though I do recommend Tuan’s mildly-famous Dear Colleague letters.

3. The Happiness Hypothesis by Jonathan Haidt.

A clever approach: cull the famous books of wisdom from all the major faiths and philosophers and report on what you learn. Anyone who’s read bits and pieces of the classics, or sampled from modern positive psychology texts, will in this book find much you already know. Still there are some worthwhile themes and nuggets:

  • Over and over again, psychologists find that the human mind reactions to bad things more quickly, strongly, and persistently than to equivalent good things.

 

  • Twin studies generally show that 50 percent to 80 percent of all the variance among people in their average levels of happiness can be explained by differences in their genes rather than in their life experiences.

 

 

  • We engage in massive self-delusion. From the person who cuts you off on the highway all the way to the Nazis who ran the concentration camps, most people think they are good people and that their actions are motivated by good reasons.

 

 

  • For many traits, such as leadership, there are so many ways to define it that one is free to pick the criterion that will most flatter oneself.

 

 

  • Pleasure comes more from making progress toward goals than from achieving them. Shakespeare captured it perfectly: “Things won are done; joy’s soul lies in the doing.”

 

 

  • Noise, especially noise that is variable or intermittent, interferes with concentration and increases stress. It’s worth striving to remove sources of noise in your life.

 

 

  • Pleasure feels good in the moment, but sensual memories fade quickly, and the person is no wiser or stronger afterwards.

 

 

  • Optimists are for the most part people who won the cortical lottery: They have a high happiness setpoint, they habitually look on the bright side, and they easily find silver linings. Life has a way of making the rich get richer and the happy get happier.

 

 

  • Letting off steam makes people angrier, not calmer.

 

 

  • Wisdom is based on “tacit knowledge.” It’s “knowing how” rather than “knowing that.” Wise people are able to balance three responses to situations: adaptation (changing the self to fit the environment), shaping (changing the environment), and selection (choosing to move to a new environment).

 

 

  • It is worth striving to get the right relationships between yourself and others, between yourself and your work, and between yourself and something larger than yourself. If you get these relationships right, a sense of purpose and meaning will emerge.

 

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Quote of the Day: Wisdom Cannot Be Taught

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"We do not receive wisdom, we must discover it for ourselves, after a journey through the wilderness which no one else can make for us, which no one can spare us, for our wisdom is the point of view from which we come at last to regard the world."

    – Marcel Proust

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A State of Tolerable Vapidity Overlaid with Entertainment

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A wonderfully evocative character description:

In a sense, Harper (dressed in “Gap casuals”) stands for the hip, knowing, self-conscious, weary, ironied-out, so-like-over-it-and-two-steps-ahead-of-it West, whose empty, hedonistic way of living once plagued Rose. As a restaurateur, he “did nothing extraordinary, ran the business, watched TV, read the newspaper, surfed the Web, bought a new coat every now and then, dated women — black, brown, white — consumed pornography, smoked, met friends for dinner, dreamed, honed anecdotes, got minor ailments.” He experienced, in other words, “a state of tolerable vapidity overlaid with entertainment.”

It's from the always-worth-reading Lee Siegel, in this book review.

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Larry King’s Son Wants to Be Black

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With guests Tavis Smiley and Bob Woodward discussing the historic nature of an Obama presidency, Larry King revealed the other day that his 8 year-old son "wants to be black" because "black is in."

Since when did white kids not want to be black? Since when have white males not wallowed in lonely, lonely identity crises?!

Bottom Line: Black is the new black.

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The Art of Self-Overhearing: Metacognition and Decision Making

Posted inRandom4 Comments on The Art of Self-Overhearing: Metacognition and Decision Making

In response to my last post A Morning of Self-Consciousness, a reader pointed me to Jonah Lehrer's excellent blog on neuroscience. There, he links to an article about Obama's self-awareness that he wrote for the Boston Globe which includes this relevant paragraph:

The crucial skill [to making good decisions], scientists are now saying, is the ability to think about your own thinking, or metacognition, as it is known. Unless people vigilantly reflect on how they are making an important decision, they won't be able to properly use their instincts, or know when their gut should be ignored. Indeed, according to this emerging new vision of decision-making, the best predictor of good judgment isn't intuition or experience or intelligence. Rather, it's the willingness to engage in introspection, to cultivate what Philip Tetlock, a psychologist at the University of California, Berkeley, calls "the art of self-overhearing."

In another post, Lehrer elaborates on metacognition:

The game only has one rule, and it's a simple one: Don't think about white bears. You can think about anything else, but you can't think about that. Ready? Close your eyes, take a deep breath, and banish the animals from your head.

You just lost the game. Everyone loses the game. As Dostoevsky first observed, in Winter Notes on Summer Impressions: "Try to avoid thinking of a white bear, and you will see that the cursed thing will come to mind every minute." In fact, whenever we try to not think about something, be it white bears or a broken heart, that something gets trapped in the mind, stuck in the recursive loop of self-consciousness. The brain backfires; our attempt at repression turns into an odd fixation.

This human frailty has profound consequences. Dan Wegner, a psychologist at Harvard, refers to the failure as an "ironic" mental process. Whenever we establish a mental goal⎯such as trying to not think about white bears⎯the goal is accompanied by an inevitable follow-up thought, as the brain checks to see if we're making progress. The end result, of course, is that we obsess over the one thing we're trying to avoid. Wegner argues that this ironic twitch is responsible for all sorts of afflictions, from anxiety disorder (we get anxious whenever we think about not getting anxious) to insomnia, which can occur when the drowsy brain checks to see if we've fallen asleep (and so we wake up). The mind is a disobedient machine.

Although these perverse thoughts can be irritating⎯⎯wouldn't it be nice to be able to fall asleep at will, like a cat?⎯they also reveal an essential feature of the human mind, which is that it doesn't just think: it constantly thinks about how it thinks. We're insufferably self-aware, like some post-modern novel, so that the brain can't go for more than a few seconds before it starts calling attention to itself, reflecting on its own contents, thoughts and feelings. This even applies to thoughts we're trying to avoid, which is why those white bears are so inescapable.

The technical term for this is metacognition, and it's a rather surreal skill. Imagine that M.C. Escher drawing of a hand drawing a hand, or a video camera making a movie of itself: The cortex is the same way, as it constantly transforms the subject at the center of consciousness⎯you⎯into yet another object contemplated by consciousness. Of course, like all things meta, the process can quickly spiral out of control. When a mind thinks about metacognition, it's thinking about how it thinks about how it thinks. And so on.

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