I Know That You Know That I Know

Posted inRandom4 Comments on I Know That You Know That I Know

Malcolm Gladwell's article this past May examined the "I-know-they-know-I-know-they-know" regress as it relates to spying and national intelligence. If country X knows that country Y is intercepting their communications, isn't country X likely to communicate intentionally wrong information? It's an interesting read.

On a more personal level, social situations where I know the other person knows something about me but they are not aware that I know that they know, or variations thereof, are always intriguing and challenging. Interactions bulging with meta data.

Andre Aciman, in a long, interesting essay in The American Scholar, touches on similar themes when, as an aside, he talks about his favorite French novels which have sentences or paragraphs like:

Her lover knew, by the way she showed every conceivable proof of love for him, that she was determined to say no to him.

Or:

Her future husband could tell, by the way she blushed whenever they were alone together, that she felt neither love, nor passion, nor desire for him; her blushes came from exaggerated modesty, which in her coy, girlish way she was pleased to mistake for love. The very means meant to conceal her blushes is precisely what gave them away. Her husband guessed by how happy his wife was when she heard that their friend was not going to join them on their trip to Spain that he was the one with whom she’d have betrayed him if only she had the courage.

Or:

The frown with which she seemed to dismiss the man she wished she didn’t love told him everything he longed to know. Even the abrupt, rude manner with which she snapped at him as soon as they were alone was a good sign: she was more in love with him than he had ever hoped.

Or:

I thought that if anything could rekindle your feelings for me, it was to let you see that mine too had changed, but to let you see this by feigning to wish to conceal it from you, as if I lacked the courage to acknowledge it to you.

Comment

A Question Men Ask Themselves

Posted inHumor9 Comments on A Question Men Ask Themselves

ATT00001_web

Elsewhere in the world of gender:

  • Marty Nemko on how men don't have it easy in society.
  • The always-funny Kelly Oxford tweets: New numbers: 100% of girls with good posture are called 'bitches'.
  • Here is how to give a great man to man hug. Highly informative. I would just add that if you're doing a goodbye hug it should be at the very end of the interaction. Any sooner, and you risk having to pass time with the person you just hugged / said-goodbye-to — could it get any more awkward?

###

Elsewhere on the web, and on completely different themes: I was moved by Tony Judt's reflection in the NYRB about trying to sleep with Lou Gehrig's disease. Eric Falkenstein's detailed critique of Nassim Taleb in general and Black Swan in particular was interesting — I'm not qualified to comment on the more technical finance / math points, but I do agree that Taleb's (and many others') constant bashing of "experts" has gone way overboard. I learned quite a bit about the history of American foreign policy from George Packer's review of Peter Beinart.

Comment

Book Review: How to Be a High School Superstar

Posted inBooks4 Comments on Book Review: How to Be a High School Superstar

Cal Newport’s latest book is called How to Be a High School Superstar: A Revolutionary Plan to Get Into College by Standing Out (Without Burning Out).

This is a book with loads of original ideas for any student at any level on how to do remarkable things that will favorably attract the attention of others, and in particular college admissions officers. Cal details his various philosophies such as:

  • Why doing less is the foundation for becoming more impressive.
  • Why demonstrating passion is meaningless, but being interesting is crucial.
  • Why accomplishments that are hard to explain are better than accomplishments that are hard to do.

Woven into effortless prove, compelling personal examples, and rigorous academic research, are boxes such as the following:

The Laundry List Hypothesis: Adding to your schedule an activity that could be replicated by any student willing to sign up and invest a reasonable amount of time in it can hurt your impressiveness.

The Goodness Paradox: Most people assume they know how to become good. Yet most are not good at anything. (He goes on to explain how exactly you can get good at something.)

Cal is probably the most rigorous and eloquent writer in the student success space. Because of the sophistication of his ideas — clearly presented as they may be — I expect this is a book only the best high school students (though all parents) will fully appreciate.

For purposes of full disclosure, in addition to Cal being a good friend and collaborator, there’s a chapter in the book on me. He focuses on how I used the “law of under-scheduling” and “law of randomness” to build a gap year after high school that turned out to be the most phenomenal 15 months of my life.

This is not a book I could have or would have written. He starts from the premise that admission to a selective college is the goal of high school. By emphasizing how one can seem impressive to college admissions officials, Cal addresses the millions of high school students and parents for whom this task is foremost. He wisely ignores folks like me who sit on the radical fringe and start from the premise: “Why college?” Fortunately, many of his philosophies have broad, general application, regardless of the path you choose. So come one, come all.

I highly recommend this book to parents and driven students. Cal and I will do something special for readers of this book later in the year. So if you’re interested go ahead and buy the book and hold onto your Amazon receipt.

Comment

How to Think About Money

Posted inQuotes2 Comments on How to Think About Money

"Money is like gasoline during a road trip. You don't want to run out of gas on your trip, but you're not doing a tour of gas stations. You have to pay attention to money, but it shouldn't be about the money." — Tim O'Reilly

Comment

The Feel-Bad Effect from Not-So-Close Facebook Friends

Posted inRelationships, Web/Tech8 Comments on The Feel-Bad Effect from Not-So-Close Facebook Friends

My good friend Stan James writes about how social networks amplify the feel-bad-in-comparison effect when you see people raving about how glorious their lives are:

In my trips back to Colorado, I have been struck each time by the discord between people’s Facebook lives and what they say in private. On Facebook they have been on an amazing vacation to exotic beaches. In person they confess that the vacation was a desperate attempt to save a marriage. On Facebook they have been to gliteratee tech conferences. In person they confess they haven’t been able to sleep for months, and are on anti-anxiety medication from the stress of financial pressures on their company…

What’s interesting is that this feel-bad Facebook effect seems to come from a distinct source: not-so-close Facebook friends.

In the case of true close friends, you know about all the crap that is going on in their lives. From deep interaction, you know the specific pains and doubt that lies behind the smiling profile picture…

Since TV was invented, critics have pointed out the dangers of watching the perfect people who seem to inhabit the screen. They are almost universally beautiful, live in interesting places, do intereseting work (if they work at all), are unfailingly witty, and never have to do any cleaning. They never even need to use the toilet. It cannot be pschologically healthy to compare yourself to these phantasms.

So it’s interesting that social networks have inadvertently created the same effect, but using an even more powerful source. Instead of actors in Hollywood, the characters are people that you know to be real and have actually met. The editing is done not by film school graduates, but by the people themselves.

In the end, my friend’s strategy seems to be the right one: don’t spend too much time purusing the lives of people who aren’t in your life. And spend more time learning about the uncut, unedited, off-line lives that your friends are actually living.

Very true when reading other people's public content. People tend not to share their warts in public forums. Keep that in mind if you feel shitty in comparison when reading about the apparent charmed life of a blogger you don't know well in real life.

Four years ago I wrote a somewhat similar post but from the perspective of a person who writes generally upbeat tweets and blog posts. When you know you are going to blog about an experience before you have the experience, you want it to be good so that you can write a positive post that's fun to write and read. It changes the actual experience to be more positive. After writing about the (positive) experience, it's in the historical record. When you read old posts to remember your past, you feel happy about all the positive experiences you accumulated and recorded. It's not just about whitewashing the past or selective memory (though this is part of it); there's an anticipatory effect of sharing the experience in a public forum that changes the actual experience for the better.

#

I just told a friend I was writing this post. She said, "This is a litmus test I use for how close I am with a friend. If s/he doesn't tell me anything bad about their life, I assume we're not very good friends."

###

Note to readers: Blogging will be light for the next month due to extensive travel, and probably more sporadic than usual for the rest of 2010. If you don't already use an RSS reader I encourage you to do so, and subscribe to this feed. You can also get my posts via email.

Comment