Category Archives: Psychology

Pragmatism – William James

“The absolute things, the last things, the overlapping things, are the truly philosophic concerns; all superior minds feel seriously about them, and the mind with the shortest views is simply the mind of the more shallow man.”

Pragmatism is a 1907 collection of lectures given by William James, the psychologist and philosopher, on the subject of Pragmatism as a philosophy of life. He positions it as a middle ground between rationalism, a philosophy based on abstract principles, and empiricism, which trusts only observable facts. Pragmatism, he argues, takes the best of both worlds; it believes only what has practical consequences. To take his own words, Pragmatism is to “try to interpret each notion by tracing its respective practical consequences…If no practical difference whatever can be traced, then then alternatives mean practically the same thing, and all dispute is idle.”

Having defined his theory, he then applies it widely, to free will, the existence of God, the nature of truth and salvation, and other ideas. God, for example, he argues we should believe in; religion has no practical consequences except to give us hope and happiness, and so by pragmatism it is true (pragmatic truth is only distantly related to matching some sort of concrete external fact). He’s a gifted writer, and clearly brilliant, but the lectures themselves can be somewhat opaque, particularly his discussion on the nature of truth. Still, few of us today, I think, wrestle enough with problems of free will, whether the universe is one or many, or the existence of God. Yet, these are profound questions that occupied our greatest minds for much of history.

Apart from the main thesis, there are also some great tangents. Reflecting on modernity, for example, he worries that:

“The BEING of man may be crushed by its own powers, that his fixed nature as an organism may not prove adequate to stand the strain of the ever increasing tremendous functions, almost divine create functions, which his intellect will more and more enable him to wield. He may drown in his wealth like a child in a bath-tub, who has turned on the water and who cannot turn it off.”

Or on the subject of God;

“I believe rather that we stand in much the same relation to the whole of the universe as our canine and feline pets do to the whole of human life. They inhabit our drawing-rooms and libraries. They take part in scenes of whose significance they have no inkling. They are merely tangent to curves of history the beginnings and ends and forms of which pass wholly beyond their ken. So we are tangents to the wider life of things. But, just as many of the dog’s and cat’s ideals coincide with our ideals, and the dogs and cats have daily living proof of this fact, so we may well believe, on the proofs that religious experience affords, that higher powers exist and are at work to save the world on ideal lines similar to our own.”

William James is, I think, an underread one of the Wise – plus, his books are free on kindle!

Battle Hymn of the Tiger Mother – Amy Chua

Happy New Year, all! I hope everyone had time to squeeze some food and family into the holiday between all that reading we had to catch up on.

Living life to the fullest is “not about achievement or gratification. It’s about knowing you’ve pushed yourself, body and mind, to the limits of your own potential.” – Lulu Chua (Amy’s daughter)

When this came out a few years ago it was enormously controversial, but I’m afraid I’m a little behind. In brief, it chronicles Chua’s attempts to raise her children with what she sees as Chinese levels of discipline: when her six year old daughter gets tired of practicing piano after only an hour, for example, she threatens that “If the next time’s not PERFECT, I’m going to TAKE ALL YOUR STUFFED ANIMALS AND BURN THEM! [emphasis original]”

Clearly, vast amounts of criticism were directed her way: for some reason, many parents do not approve of forcing your children to practice music so much they gnaw on the piano out of frustration. To my mind, however, reading Tiger Mother in an effort to learn about Chua herself is a waste of time. Chua admits the book is hardly a complete picture, and I’m not sure it’s productive to worry about her relationship with her children. The book is fascinating, though, as a way to provoke your own thinking about parenting.

Chua argues there are two possible styles of parenting, stereotyped as Chinese and Western. Chinese is high discipline, high expectations, while Western focuses on praise and having fun. Since nothing is fun until you’re good at it, she argues, Chinese parents force their children to practice until they’re good. They also have almost unlimited belief in the abilities of their children: if the child fails, therefore, they must not have worked hard enough, and so should be punished. To this difference she traces the difference in outcomes of children.

If my economics side can come out for a moment, my only real complaint is that Chua is clearly a lawyer. The book is only anecdotes: I would have loved even a few statistics. I suspect, for example, that “Chinese” parenting has a vastly higher variance than Western: drive your children that hard, and they either succeed wildly or fail miserably. It would be interesting to see if that’s actually the case in the data.

In the end, I’m sympathetic to the view that Western parents expect too little from their children, and that children might respond well to having more expected of them. Interestingly, for all the criticism lauched her way in the West for her harshness, in China, apparently, it was marked as a how-to book on relaxed Western parenting. The truth, surely, is somewhere in the middle.

You can get your copy here (or in the UK or Canada).

The Language Instinct 2 – Steven Pinker

“A language is a dialect with an army and a navy.” – Max Weinreich

Today, just a few choice quotes on language. You can go here for the actual book review.

On Oranges

Orange comes from the Spanish Naranja – originally, the word was norange. Over time, however, ‘a norange’ became ‘an orange’. The same reason is why Ned is a short form of Edward: ‘Mine Edward; became ‘My Nedward’. Or, if you didn’t know why Shakespeare used ‘nuncle’ as an affectionate name, the same reasoning applies – ‘mine uncle’ to ‘my nuncle’.

On Western Languages

The Proto-Indo-Europeans were an ancient group who took over Europe, Turkey, Iran, Afghanistan, Northern India, China, and Western Russia, with a few small exceptions, and are the reason many Western languages seem to have similar words for many nouns: they’re all based on the same root. They’re also the reason English has irregular verbs like shake/shook: in Proto-Indo-European, pluralisation came from changing the vowel in word, not using an s. Based on the enormous area they covered, scientists speculate they represent either an enormous military culture, or the advent of farming, which would have allowed for cultural dominance.

An exception: the Basque Region in Spain, who must have resisted their hegemony somehow and maintained their own language.

On the Passive Case

English teachers always tell us not to use the passive: Pinker fights back. Passive can actually reduce the complexity of sentences, he explains, by reducing how much information you have to hold in memory to understand it.

“Reverse the clamp that the stainless steel hex-head bolt extending upward from the seatpost yoke holds (trace) in place”

“Reverse the clamp that (trace) is held in place by the stainless steel bex-head bolt extending upward from the seatpost yoke.”

The Language Instinct – Steven Pinker

“In our social relations, the race is not to the swift but to the verbal – the spellbinding orator, the silver-tongued seducer, the persuasive child who wins the battle of wills against a brawnier parent.”

I have always assumed that we learn language. Steven Pinker thinks otherwise, and in his book he argues that though we may learn words and the superstructure of an individual language, language in general is something we instinctively do.

Though this is well out of my usual interests, the evidence seems compelling. Children will make consistent errors as they learn languages, errors they cannot have overheard an adult say: “Don’t giggle me” or “we holded the baby rabbits.” Language complexity is universal, Pinker suggests, because children reinvent it every generation. This is why children of parents who speak a language only very poorly, like deaf children whose parents speak very poor sign language, will without further input still end up using advanced and very complex signing rules, ones their parents do not use correctly. They shut out the errors of their parents and develop their own rules.

Languages have far fewer synonyms than we believe: most things we call synonyms actually have slightly different meanings. Children, Pinker points out, intuitively understand this. If you give a child a picture of pewter tongs, call it biff, and ask them to pick out another biff, they’ll pick out plastic tongs: they associate biff with tongs, because they don’t know the word. If you give them a picture of a pewter cup and repeat the process, children will pick out a pewter spoon as being biff. Since they already know the word cup, they assume biff is the material.

Why does it all matter? Pinker worries we tend to undervalue the importance of nature and overvalue the importance of environment in human development. Of course, both matter, and language neatly captures this interaction. Nature provides structure and underlying rules: environment determines which language we learn.

Language is not my area, and I flipped through several chapters that went into the structure of language in detail. That said, Pinker argues frequently for what seems like common sense in language, helping engage those of us who are not experts. He even takes on the language experts and shows that how people intuitively use the language actually makes more sense than the so-called rules, or how the rules are actually misinterpretations of the language. Everpresent, too, is Pinker’s vast knowledge and love of digressions: frustrating if you wish to write a paper, I suppose, but great fun for the casual reader. I didn’t enjoy this one as much as I liked his Better Angels, but I learned a lot and it was certainly worth the read.

Want more? You can pick up a copy of the Language Instinct here (or in the UK or Canada).

The Righteous Mind 2 – Jonathan Haidt

“Morality binds and blinds. It binds us into ideological teams that fight each other as though the fate of the world depended on our side winning each battle. It blinds us to the fact that each team is composed of good people who have something important to say.” Jonathan Haidt

You can read part 2 of this review here.

Can liberals and conservatives understand each other? Haidt examines the priorities of each over his six bases for morality (care, fairness, loyalty, authority, sanctity, liberty). Liberals, he finds, place weight on care and liberty, with little or no interest in loyalty, authority, or sanctity. Conservatives placed weight on all the bases, with relatively more than liberals on loyalty, authority, and sanctity, and equal amounts on fairness. Incidentally, liberals are also usually more sensation-seeking and open to new experiences, while conservatives react more strongly to signs of danger.

As a result, he says, liberals find it hard to reach out to or even understand conservatives, because they place no value on the moral bases of conservatives. To test this, he studies how well each side could predict how the other would respond to questions. Conservatives and moderates did well; liberals, on the other hand, did very poorly in predicting conservative responses, particularly on care and fairness questions, because they assumed conservatives attached no weight to these bases.

The problem, Haidt says, is that when we already support something, when challenged we ask ourselves if we can agree with our previous position: we look for any reason to stick with what we support. When we intuitively disagree with something, however, we look for whether we must agree, and seize on any reason not to. Unfortunately, this makes it easy for us to ignore the views of others, and rather than acknowledging that each side is acting morally but simply from different moral bases, we assume that our opponents are evil and self-interested. Interestingly, by the way, research suggests that self-interest has no predictive power when it comes to voting: instead, the interest of groups with which we self-identify is the key variable, even when that conflicts with self interest.

How do we fix this? We must interact with other people. Our brains are “terrible at seeking evidence that challenges our beliefs, but other people do us this favor.” Forming a connection with someone and then having them disagree with you is the ideal way to make sure our beliefs are challenged. If we don’t form that connection first though, we too often debate not to convince others or learn ourselves, but to score points with our own side, who need no convincing.

“It would be nice to believe that we humans were designed to love everyone unconditionally. Nice, but rather unlikely from an evolutionary perspective. Parochial love – love within groups – amplified by similarity, a sense of shared fate, and the suppression of free riders, may be the most we can accomplish.”

You can pick up a copy of your own here (or in the UK or Canada). I’d recommend you do.

The Righteous Mind – Jonathan Haidt

“Trying to understand the persistence and passion of religion by studying beliefs about God is like trying to understand the persistence and passion of college football by studying the movements of the ball….You’ve got to look at the ways that religious beliefs work with religious practices to create a religious community.” – Jonathan Haidt

You can read part 2 of this review here.

There’s enough (and more!) to The Righteous Mind that I’m going to spend today talking about Haidt’s analysis of morality, and Wednesday talking about its implications for politics. Mix and match as you please, but the broad takeaway should be that I was enormously impressed with the book.

Haidt argues that morality does not and cannot flow out of reason and rationality. Instead, he suggests we decide whether something is moral immediately, and then use our reason to justify why we think what we do. In other words, our reason is like the rider on an elephant. When the elephant leans, the rider doesn’t know what it’s thinking and can’t control it: all he can do is post-hoc attempt to explain why it did what it did. In his words,

“We do moral reasoning not to reconstruct the actual reasons why we ourselves came to a judgment; we reason to find the best possible reasons why somebody else ought to join us in our judgment.”

What is morality though? Haidt compares it to the sense of taste. Some people may for cultural or personal reasons notice sour more than bitter, but everyone has the taste buds for all flavours. The bases of morality are;

Care – We feel and dislike the pain of others
Fairness – Justice, rights, and autonomy
Liberty – A resentment of dominance and restrictions
Loyalty – Patriotism and self-sacrifice for the group
Authority – Deference to legitimate authority and respect for traditions
Sanctity – The body is a temple which can be desecrated by immoral contaminants

He is no moral relativist, but for Haidt, understanding the morality of others means understanding that there is more than one base from which morality can be drawn. Reasonable people can disagree on the importance of each base, but that does not make them immoral.

Why, however, are we moral at all? The answer lies in a fundamental tension in how we evolved. We are partly selfish, Haidt agrees, but we are also partly groupish; willing to sacrifice for the good of the group. Morality is about suppressing and regulating self-interest in order to make cooperative societies possible. The key moment in human history was when a few individuals began to share a common understanding of how things were supposed to be done – from that flowed language, cooperation, and society. This groupishness is what we see in religion, in sports games, in Kibbutzim, in communes, and in other human institutions.

Unfortunately, though this can be good within a group, it does little for inter-group communication, as political dialogue today (I’m looking at you, American government shutdown) can testify. Fortunately, he addresses that too – see the next review! In the meantime, you can test your own morality bases and participate in his studies here.

You can pick up a copy of your own here (or in the UK or Canada). In light of the current state of politics, it’s perhaps particularly relevant, but honestly I found it one of the more profound books I’ve read in a long time.

In Praise of Slow – Carl Honoré

“And yet some things cannot, should not, be sped up. They take time; they need slowness. When you accelerate things that should not be accelerated, when you forget how to slow down, there is a price to pay.”

“Does it really make sense to speed-read Proust, make love in half the time or cook every meal in the microwave?”

I’m going about this backwards, because I reviewed Honoré’s more recent book, The Slow Fix, several months ago, and am now reviewing his older one. Worse yet, I think I like his newer book more, so the need for this review is debatable, since the two are on very similar topics. Apologies to all who find that irritating.

My reasons for preferring his second book are twofold. First, this first can feel dated: it predates the financial crisis, and there are a few sections where that shows. More broadly, though, his second book simply has the better stories and anecdotes of the success of slow, and that’s what makes it such a pleasure to read.

All that said, there are definitely still pearls of wisdom to be found here. Honoré is careful to say that many things can and should be done quickly. Some things, though, must be done slowly, and in the modern world it’s not clear we remember that. How many of us, for example, wince when we read the letter from the Harvard Dean of undergraduates to new students, which suggests that “empty time is not a vacuum to be filled…It is the thing that enables the other things on your mind to be creatively rearranged, like the empty square in the 4×4 puzzle that makes it possible to move the other 15 pieces around.”

I read recently that most people don’t listen to each other; when they’re not talking, they mentally rehearse what they’re going to say next. That’s why most conversations proceed without pauses, and yet when you think about it, that’s crazy: does no one ever need to stop and think? Fitting in writing blog posts with the rest of my life, I’m the last person to claim speed isn’t useful, but I think there’s a deeper point to be made here. If we don’t remember to stop and slow down over what matters, we may reach a point where nothing feels like it matters.

No amazon links today: you can slowly navigate there yourself, and see if you see any other books that look good on the way there! Or, you could just join the Subtle Illumination email list.

The Honor Code: How Moral Revolutions Happen – Kwame Anthony Appiah

“[H]onor, especially when purged of its prejudices of caste and gender and the like, is peculiarly well suited to turn private moral sentiments into public norms…That is one reason why we still need honour: it can help us make a better world.”

Author’s note: it’s an American book, and so he spells honour with an ‘o’ – being a Canadian, I refuse to do the same. Apologies for confusion.

In the Gospels, when Paul was about to be whipped, he revealed he was a Roman citizen, and therefore exempt. Romans took it as a matter of honour that their citizens should never be beaten but rather be treated with dignity at all times, regardless of the crime. For much of history, honour was a founding principle of (usually male) behaviour, but in modern society, it has something of a bad name, linked as it is to human rights abuses, including honour killings, and violations of the rule of law. Appiah, however, believes that far from deserving a bad name, honour provides a motivating force for morality; it compels people to be honourable out of a desire to avoid shame.

There are two kinds of honour, Appiah suggests. The first, competitive honour, is about being better than others; winning a race or gaining victory in war. The second is peer honour, which governs relations among equals: being born a lord in medieval England would give you peer honour, to be beheaded instead of hanged if you were found guilty of a crime, for example, even if you were a completely incompetent lord. The modern conception of human rights is perhaps similar to a universal extension of peer honour.

Appiah examines three case studies, dueling, footbinding, and slavery, and discusses the role honour had in ending each of them. Each activity had critics long before it actually ended, he points out, but what actually ended them was a shift in the perception of what was honourable, from the activity itself being honourable to the activity being shameful.

To my mind, there is some question of correlation versus causation in his case studies, but they are interesting nonetheless. Unfortunately, my broader impression was somewhat neutral. The book plays an important role in attempting to introduce honour into the discussion of morality, and that far I agree. Often though I was left feeling his examples were incomplete, and they lacked the depth of understanding of Steven Pinker on a similar subject, for example. I just didn’t feel he fully engaged with the complexity of honour or morality, and as a result for me the book raised more questions than it answered.

Still, it’s an interesting subject, and if you want to keep reading, you can do so here (or in the UK or Canada),

Zen Gaming and the Art of Electronic Sports – Lee Southard

“The true purpose of Zen is to see things as they are, to observe things as they are, and to let everything go as it goes. Zen practice is to open up our small mind.” -Shunryu Suzuki

I thought I’d stick to the theme of games this week, and add in some applied Zen; of particular interest to some more than others, perhaps.

I can’t claim to be an expert on the gaming world, but as Kelly McGonigal argues, it’s certainly an interesting trend in the world today. Southard, however, aims to apply Zen lessons to improving the skills of gamers, and to encourage electronic sports (as he refers to them) to go mainstream.

It’s a fun idea, and the book is structured to appeal to gamers, with each chapter (a level) focused on giving specific stat increases and abilities to the reader. The result is engaging for gamers, but risks being a bit less appealing to non-gamers. Still, the attempt to apply the lessons of Zen to a modern activity is interesting, and the book is a relatively light read, albeit while providing the opportunity for reflection, as any good book on Zen requires.

I found particularly interesting his chapter on Awareness, a fairly standard first step in meditation practice. Southard suggests applying the same to gaming; instead of getting sucked into the game and falling victim to instinctive fight or flight reactions, he advises gamers to keep a part of themselves back, to note when they’re falling into bad patterns of behaviour and to enact changes as necessary. Gamers may be in particular need of this advice (I’m looking at you, people who die from exhaustion while gaming), but I suspect it’s good advice for everyone, ensuring that we not just undertake an activity, but that we note our strengths and weaknesses in order to improve. Deliberate Practice, in Karl Ericsson’s phrase.

Looking to improve your own gaming, or just find Zen? Keep reading (or in the UK or Canada). Or, sign up for the Subtle Illumination email list to your right! Disclosure: I read Zen Gaming as a free reader copy.

Of Dice and Men – David M. Ewalt

“Unlike board games, which limit the player to a small set of actions, or video games, which offer a large but finite set of preprogrammed possibilities, role-playing games give the player free will…if clue was played like D&D, you could grab the lead pipe, beat a confession out of Colonel Mustard, and have sex with Miss Scarlet on the desk in the conservatory.”

Dungeons and Dragons arouses diverse emotions even apart from the social stigma it often carries, from scorn to obsession. Writing a history of the game, therefore, is a difficult endeavor at best. That said, approximately 30 million people have played the game since it started in 1974, and even today the release of an update to the rules commands the front page of the NYT Arts section. In the 1980s, tempers burned so hot it was linked to murders and satanic rituals, and it was banned by schools and churches. It’s an understudied, but important, subject.

At times, Of Dice and Men can feel a bit like hero worship – the author clearly loves the game. Its strength, however, lies with its exploration of the human need to play and tell stories. D&D is the foundation for dozens of ideas we take for granted in today’s board and video games, games of overwhelming popularity and influence. It was D&D, for example, that introduced the idea that characters get stronger over time, contributing to emotional investment and attachment on the part of players in games like World of Warcraft today.

What marks D&D as different from most games popular with teenage boys are its open-endedness and focus on cooperation. Instead of trying to beat the others, players compare D&D to communal storytelling, in which players work together to develop worlds and stories together. It appeals to the need for narrative in all of us.

Why does this open-endedness matter? In school, we teach children that there are correct approaches to solving problems, and that what they learn correlates exactly with problems they are given. In life, however, there are no limits on solution methods; originality is far more valuable in life than in school. To that extent, D&D introduces an important idea to children; the idea that they can achieve whatever they can think of.

D&D gives the players the opportunity to be heroes, in worlds they create and describe themselves. Perhaps in a similar manner, Of Dice and Men is fun, entertaining, and though likely appealing most to people already interested in games and D&D in particular, has insights to share even with those interested in neither. In the end, I suspect all of us would be better off with more opportunities to imagine and create.

Want the full history? Keep reading (or in the UK or Canada). Or, sign up for the Subtle Illumination email list to your right! Disclosure: I read Of Dice and Men as a free advance reader copy – it is released on Tuesday.