On Brains

Braaaiiiiinnnssss…..

In her influential research, Dweck distinguishes between people with a fixed mindset — they tend to agree with statements such as “You have a certain amount of intelligence and cannot do much to change it” — and those with a growth mindset, who believe that we can get better at almost anything, provided we invest the necessary time and energy. While people with a fixed mindset see mistakes as a dismal failure — a sign that we aren’t talented enough for the task in question — those with a growth mindset see mistakes as an essential precursor of knowledge, the engine of education.

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It turned out that those subjects with a growth mindset were significantly better at learning from their mistakes.

Why Do Some People Learn Faster?

There is some serious gold here. Granted, nearly every time I see this discussed, it’s the same paper, so I’d love to see some peer-review and Devil’s Advocacy on the subject, but I can think of several examples where I’ve seen this effect, as well as heard about it from others.

Or, if we’re reducing psychology to phrases that would fit on a bumper sticker, “no matter if you think you can or you can’t, you’re right”

Unlike homo economicus, that imaginary species featured in macroeconomics textbooks, Kahneman and Tversky demonstrated that real people don’t deal with uncertainty by carefully evaluating all of the relevant information. They stink at statistics and rarely maximize utility. Instead, their choices depend on a long list of mental short cuts and intemperate emotions, which often lead them to pick the wrong options.

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Football coaches have performed just as badly. Although it’s now clear that their biases have a meaningful impact—a coach immune to loss aversion would win one more game in three seasons out of every four—their collective decision-making hasn’t improved.
This same theme applies to practically all of our thinking errors: self-knowledge is surprisingly useless. Teaching people about the hazards of multitasking doesn’t lead to less texting in the car; learning about the weakness of the will doesn’t increase the success of diets; knowing that most people are overconfident about the future doesn’t make us more realistic. The problem isn’t that we’re stupid—it’s that we’re so damn stubborn.

Is Self Knowledge Overrated?

I’m mixed on this one. I know we all suffer from logical fallacies and mental shortcuts (Las Vegas magicians exploit these mental shortcuts hundreds of times per night), but there’s something here that I think is very important.

Invert, always invert.
— Carl Jacobi

The example mentioned in the article of “think of the lives lost” versus “think of the lives saved” is a good example of making people think about losses (the psychological reframing), but from an economic and mathematical view, what they’re doing is inverting the question. It’s not about fancy math or statistics tricks, it’s just about remembering that sometimes there’s another way (the opposite) to look at whatever you’re being asked, and sometimes it changes your decision.

It’s surprising how often things come up that can be fixed by thinking with this trick.

Why Jack Donaghy looks up when he drinks.

OK, Internet. You and I need to have a talk. Nina beat you all again. She won/tied in the previous challenge, and took the cake on this one.

This morning I asked Why does Jack Donaghy look up when he drinks?. Alec Baldwin is in New York right now, in the middle of Hurricane Irene. So naturally, he’s replying to people on Twitter.

Amazing.

Why does Jack Donaghy look up when he drinks?

I am a big fan of 30 Rock. Great writing, acting, etc.

Alec Baldwin is awesome as Jack Donaghy. There’s one thing that he does for the character that sticks out, and I don’t entirely understand it.

When someone is smiling, it means they’re happy. If there are tears running down their face and their mouth is turned downward, it means they’re sad. These are obvious facial cues.

Every time Donaghy takes a drink on the show, he looks up at the ceiling.

This is the best image I could find, but he does it every single time in the show. I don’t understand what it means. Why is that consistently a part of the character. Does Alec Baldwin naturally look up at the ceiling when he drinks?

Last time I put a question on the internet like this (“Why is there a lobster carved into the Notre Dame Cathedral?“) with a $20 bounty on the answer, I got an answer fast.

Internet — it’s your turn again. $20 for a credible answer to this question. Either something referencing an acting class, face-eye psychology info, or a more official source.

On Innovation

I invented nothing new. I simply assembled the discoveries of other men behind whom were centuries of work.

Had I worked fifty or ten or even five years before, I would have failed. So it is with every new thing. Progress happens when all the factors that make for it are ready and then it is inevitable.

To teach that a comparatively few men are responsible for the greatest forward steps of mankind is the worst sort of nonsense.

– Henry Ford

Everything Is A Remix (including this blog post)

Thanks to Bob at Meta for suggesting this. This is beyond cool. Watch it all.

Everything is a Remix Part 1 from Kirby Ferguson on Vimeo.

Everything is a Remix Part 2 from Kirby Ferguson on Vimeo.

Everything is a Remix Part 3 from Kirby Ferguson on Vimeo.

Part 3 was just released, so Part 4 should be out in another 2-3 months.

Treat your waiter politely

The Waiter Rule also applies to the way people treat hotel maids, mailroom clerks, bellmen and security guards. Au Bon Pain co-founder Ron Shaich, now CEO of Panera Bread, says he was interviewing a candidate for general counsel in St. Louis. She was “sweet” to Shaich but turned “amazingly rude” to someone cleaning the tables, Shaich says. She didn’t get the job.

Shaich says any time candidates are being considered for executive positions at Panera Bread, he asks his assistant, Laura Parisi, how they treated her, because some applicants are “pushy, self-absorbed and rude” to her before she transfers the call to him.

Just about every CEO has a waiter story to tell. Dave Gould, CEO of Witness Systems, experienced the rule firsthand when a waitress dumped a full glass of red wine on the expensive suit of another CEO during a contract negotiation. The victim CEO put her at ease with a joke about not having had time to shower that morning. A few days later, when there was an apparent impasse during negotiations, Gould trusted that CEO to have the character to work out any differences.

via USATODAY.com – CEOs say how you treat a waiter can predict a lot about character.

Sinatra and Loyalty

Sinatra swiftly became an international singing idol whose voice and face made women and girls scream and faint; riots broke out at his concerts. Patsy, meanwhile, left the Sorrento and opened Patsy’s. Both men — the crooner and the cook — were doing well for themselves.

But in the early 1950s, Sinatra’s career crashed. He was no longer a kid. His records stopped selling. His romance with Ava Gardner was on the rocks. His record company dropped him. The winner suddenly was being widely seen as a loser, washed up.

People who follow the Sinatra story know about the eventual comeback: how he landed a role in the movie “From Here to Eternity” and won an Academy Award, how his career zoomed again, how he became the living symbol of success and swagger.

Yet in those down years, no one could have anticipated the rebirth. Sinatra was a has-been, yesterday’s news.

“He would come in to the restaurant alone for lunch,” Sal Scognamillo said to me. I could tell that this was a thrice-told family tale — or a thrice-times-thrice-told tale. That didn’t make it any less compelling.

“My grandfather would sit with him,” Sal said. “There would be people eating lunch who would avoid making eye contact with Sinatra — people who used to know him when he was on top. Sinatra would nod toward them and say to my grandfather: ‘My fair-weather friends.'”

One November, on the day before Thanksgiving, Sinatra asked Patsy if he would make him a solo reservation for the next day. “He said he would be coming in for Thanksgiving dinner by himself,” Sal said. “He said, ‘Give me anything but turkey.’ He didn’t want to think about the holiday, but he didn’t want to be alone.”

The restaurant was scheduled to be closed on Thanksgiving. But Patsy didn’t tell Sinatra that; he told him that he’d make the reservation for 3 p.m. He didn’t want Sinatra to know that he was opening especially for him, so he invited the families of the restaurant’s staff to come in for dinner, too. He cooked for Sinatra, on that solitary holiday, and it wasn’t until years later that Sinatra found out.

That’s where the loyalty came from. That’s why Sinatra never stopped coming to the restaurant. In later years, when Patsy’s would be jammed with diners hoping to get a glimpse of him, few understood why the most famous singer in the world would single out one place as his constant favorite.

Frank Sinatra’s lesson in loyalty

“I have no opinion”

One of the most powerful and underused tools in any manager’s toolkit is “I have no opinion”. In fact, it’s useful for anyone who is asked to provide input on a thing.

Unless you’re contributing real value to a question — don’t answer it. Unless you can really answer “why do you hold this opinion” — unless you can really justify your position on something — don’t respond.

“I have no opinion” is polite. It means “I’m not going to clutter your head up with a non-valuable bunch of words.” It says “I have confidence in your ability to make the right decision.” It’s rewarding to the other person. It’s empowering.

See “Why Should I Care What Color the Bikeshed Is?” for a great in-depth discussion on this.

@hamilton RT @publius hay guyz i think ppl voting in democracy 4 d uniting states FTW whatchoo think LMK

I got into a small debate/discussion about direct versus representative democracy. Via Twitter. While drinking. Not really the place for significant exposition. I thought of the founders of the US discussing the Federalist Papers. And I thought, “what if?” Not “what if the founders were drunk?” but “what if they were limited to tweets?”

I went to Project Gutenberg and grabbed a plain text file of the Federalist Papers. I stripped off the Gutenberg header and footer so that I was left with the main text, and the headings that were part of the original text.

I wrote a quick script to split the text on periods, question marks, and exclamation points. I filtered out sentences under 15 characters (since there are titles and non-sentence cases). Seems like a comfortable threshold for “smallest possible sentence” — at least 15 characters between “end of sentence marks”, excluding newline characters.

There are 6190 sentences in the text. Of those, 2528 are less than or equal to 140 characters in length (but larger than 15). There are 3662 sentences greater than 140 characters in length. 59% of the sentences wouldn’t fit in a single tweet.

The longest sentence in the Federalist Papers is

The recommendatory act of Congress is in the words following:“WHEREAS, There is provision in the articles of Confederation and perpetual Union, for making alterations therein, by the assent of a Congress of the United States, and of the legislatures of the several States; and whereas experience hath evinced, that there are defects in the present Confederation; as a mean to remedy which, several of the States, and PARTICULARLY THE STATE OF NEW YORK, by express instructions to their delegates in Congress, have suggested a convention for the purposes expressed in the following resolution; and such convention appearing to be the most probable mean of establishing in these States A FIRM NATIONAL GOVERNMENT:“Resolved, That in the opinion of Congress it is expedient, that on the second Monday of May next a convention of delegates, who shall have been appointed by the several States, be held at Philadelphia, for the sole and express purpose OF REVISING THE ARTICLES OF CONFEDERATION, and reporting to Congress and the several legislatures such ALTERATIONS AND PROVISIONS THEREIN, as shall, when agreed to in Congress, and confirmed by the States, render the federal Constitution ADEQUATE TO THE EXIGENCIES OF GOVERNMENT AND THE PRESERVATION OF THE UNION

I’m not sure where to go with this. I could filter down easy abbreviations like “for” => “4”, “people” => “ppl”, etc, but there’s a limit on the information content of a single tweet. Possibly we’ve invented new words in the past 200 years that would allow for a higher idea/characters ratio, but there’s even a limit on the complexity of sentence structures that can be conveyed in short messages. Franklin and Douglas would debate for hours on end using enormous grammatical structures that most people can now barely read. Does this make us dumber?

I’ve got no evidence to back this up, but it does seem easier to communicate things orally instead of in writing. I think the parts of the brain that process language have been around longer than the parts that process writing, so our brains might be better equipped for insanely long spoken sentences instead of written sentences.

Fun for brainstormin.

Anagnorisis and Peripeteia

Mike Rowe of Dirty Jobs gave a talk at TED. In it, he mentions two words that I’ve never heard before, but I do like.

anagnorisis – basically means “discovery”. Aristotle defined anagnorisis as “a change from ignorance to knowledge, producing love or hate between the persons destined by the poet for good or bad fortune”.

peripeteia – a drastic and unexpected change of fortune. Perepity is a different form of the same word.

Dirty Jobs is awesome, and Rowe is a big reason. He’s well-educated, and spends his time going out and doing really hard and nasty work.

Here’s the video of the TED talk.