Tag Archives: Learning

How Children Succeed: Grit, Curiosity, and the Hidden Power of Character – Paul Tough

The classic study on self-control is the marshmallow experiment, conducted by Walter Mischel. Children were asked to resist eating a single marshmallow, and if they managed it they would be rewarded with two marshmallows later on. The most successful students would sit on their hands, sing, or otherwise distract themselves. One young overachiever even took a nap! Later in life, the children who could resist the marshmallow best did better on almost every measure of life outcomes. (Interestingly, one measure they didn’t do better on was avoiding problem drinking: alcoholism did not appear to correlate with lack of willpower).

How Children Succeed follows on from this work and examines the importance of character (things like self-control, optimism, and grit), not just intelligence, in adult outcomes. Tough points out that measures of character are as good at predicting success in later life as measures of intelligence, and that measures of intelligence can be disturbingly flawed: one study found that offering M&Ms for each correct answer increased IQ scores by 12 points for kids at the bottom of the distribution.

One of the most fascinating chapters, though, is on stress. On the savannah, when we see a lion every possible system activates in order to get us out of trouble: we breathe faster, we have more white blood cells, our muscles tense, etc. This response is essential for survival, but wears our body out over time. He argues the same happens today when people have stressful childhoods: their systems become overloaded and wear out, and they find it difficult to regulate thoughts and emotions later in life. If we measure stress levels as children and control for them, the effect of poverty on adult outcomes almost disappears.

Perhaps even more interestingly, evidence from rats suggests the opposite of some suggested parenting styles: the rats with nurturing and attentive mothers while they are young become more independent and self-reliant when they are older.

The evidence is clear that character is extremely important to outcomes, and it’s not clear our modern society accounts for that. Policy interventions are therefore critical. Stress reduction among children can contribute to measures meant to tackle poverty, and ensuring that students rate themselves on non-cognitive measures can go a long way to encouraging the right behaviour, as some charter schools that offer a character report card have discovered. Intelligence is not enough, as many an intelligent adult can tell you.

You can keep reading How Children Succeed here (or in the UK or Canada) – for those interested in education, I’d highly recommend it. Or, join the Subtle Illumination email list to your right, and we can try to build our characters together.

The Clock of the Long Now – Stewart Brand

“How do we make long-term thinking automatic and common instead of difficult and rare?”

Stewart Brand is a worried man. Earthquakes, war, murder, the burning of libraries; bad things happen fast, he argues. Good things, in contrast, like reforestation, the growth of a child, the maturing of an adult, or the building of library, happen slow. Today’s world though happens on a faster and faster time scale – our “now” is a smaller and smaller increment of time. How, he wonders, can we make our society see the last ten thousand years as if it were last week, and the next ten thousand as if it were next week? How, in other words, can we give ourselves a long now?

The Clock of the Long Now is a collection of essays by Brand about this topic. Brand is an ecologist and environmental activist, including running the Whole Earth Catalog and being instrumental in having NASA release the first picture of Earth as seen from space, believing it could symbolize our shared destinies. Today, he is a co-founder of the Long Now Foundation, devoted to the issues The Clock of the Long Now raises.

For our world to survive, he argues, we must think and compete on 6 different time scales. Over the scale of years, individuals compete; over decades, families; over centuries, tribes or nations; over millennia, culture; over tens of millennia, species; and over eons, the whole web of life on our planet. Thinking on these scales means we can identify and work to preserve what really matters.

Unfortunately, as he points out, “the great problem with the future is that we die there.” It can be difficult to mentally immanentize the future. To help, he has a number of suggestions, including writing dates in five digits (02013, not 2013), increasing history education among all professions, and following James Lovelock’s proposal of writing a start-up manual for civilization, from making fire through ancient genetic design to modern biotech.

As with any collection of essays, any given reader will like some essays and dislike others. Overall, however, this book, and Brand’s foundation, form a powerful message. We can still read Galileo’s technical correspondence from the 1590s, but not the correspondence that launched AI research in the 1960s, because the electronic storage has decayed. What does that say about what we’re leaving to future generations? I’m not sure Brand knows the answer, and I certainly don’t, but the question is one that is too often lost in the babble of the present.

Want more illumination? Keep reading (or in the UK or Canada). Or, join the Subtle Illumination email list to your right!

What Intelligence Tests Miss – Keith Stanovich

We should take care not to make the intellect our god; it has, of course, powerful muscles, but no personality. – Albert Einstein

When people criticize IQ, they often argue that personality and character are equally important, as indeed they are. For Stanovich, however, even those critics give too much credence to intelligence. Not only are there many non-cognitive factors that matter, he argues, but IQ does not even capture cognitive ability: it measures intelligence, narrowly defined, but not what he calls rationality.

Intelligence, he suggests, is the ability to achieve a specific task or objective, as measured by IQ tests. Rationality, in contrast, is the ability to select goals and objectives. It is divided into instrumental rationality, which helps you achieve what you want for the minimum resources, and epistemic rationality, which ensures your beliefs actually correspond to reality.

The distinction is one any video-gaming teenager could tell you; characters in video games have both wisdom and intelligence, and absent-minded professors have only one of the two. To make the general case, Stanovich points to individuals given problem solving tasks. When given clear directions on how to solve the problem, high-IQ people do better: without directions, IQ appears to give little advantage in figuring out how to solve the problem in the first place.

Perhaps Stanovich’s most useful insight though is that of mindware. No matter how intelligent or wise you are, he points out, if you haven’t been taught probability you will struggle with some problems. “Installing” mindware like probability theory, expected utility, and others is essential. All of us benefit from focusing not just on learning knowledge, but on developing approaches and mental models that can serve us in a variety of situations. We can also benefit from reducing contaminated mindware: mindware that reduces our ability to think critically or analyze problems effectively, be those instinctive biases or taught ideologies.

There’s no denying that intelligence tests miss a phenomenal amount of what is important, and anything that contributes to our understanding is helpful. This doesn’t mean IQ tests are meaningless, of course; simply that they should be treated as one, very limited, piece of the puzzle. What Intelligence Tests Miss is by no means the final word on this subject, but it’s a good attempt on a very complicated issue.

Want to read more on intelligence? Get the book here (or in the UK or Canada). Or, join the Subtle Illumination email list to your right!

Stranger Magic – Marina Warner

“Magical thinking structures the processes of imagination, and imagining something can and sometimes must precede the fact or the act.”

In Stranger Magic: Charmed States and the Arabian Nights, Marina Warner examines the presence of enchantment and magic in everyday culture, and the reasons for its continued persistence despite its difficult co-existence with science. To do so, she studies how the perception of magic and imagination has evolved over history in the context of the Arabian Nights, and worries magic has been made more comfortable for Western audiences through the exoticisation of Oriental material.

She begins each chapter with a chosen story from the Arabian Nights, and analyzes it in detail before moving on to its larger implications. For me, this was actually the highlight of the book: I haven’t read the Arabian Nights in years, and having someone explain the context of the stories was fascinating. She covers Shahrazad’s gradual move from stories of men wronged by women to stories portraying women as victims, eventually earning the Sultan’s forgiveness for all women and his agreement to stop executing one per day.

Arabian Nights was enormously popular in Europe when it was translated, so much so that many of the classic tales we associate with it, like Aladdin or Ali Baba and the Forty Thieves, were actually additions by European translators. Warner argues that the Arabian Nights were one of the first major popularisers of flights of fancy in Western European thought. They have provoked imagination and ideas ever since, and it is imagination that is key to knowledge, key to ethics, and key to humanity. The Enlightenment may have been the Age of Reason, but it also required imagination, and it is fiction and magic that allow for imagination to grow. Unfortunately, she suggests, since then magic has become perceived as exotic and foreign, diminishing cultural exchange and cultural understanding, not just of reason and imagination, but of East and West.

The book, however, is almost impossible to take good notes on: she moves directly from Mongolian Shamanism to Obama’s Dreams from my Father, all in the context of understanding dreams. Such tangled webs make for interesting reading, though some chapters seem to lack relevance. That said, her thesis on the importance of imagination is one I am sympathetic to, and the framing of the issue in Arabian Nights is excellent. All of us might be better off if we were a little more willing, even in this rational world, to indulge in magic, both strange and everyday.

Want more enlightenment? Keep reading (or in the UK or Canada). Or, join the Subtle Illumination email list to your right!

Checklist Manifesto – Atul Gawande

Are you using enough checklists? It feels like the world is getting increasingly complicated, and I’m sure we’ve all experimented with various memory aides to try to remember everything we have to do. These range from the humble checklist to the mighty online planning tool with hyperlinked entries. For most of us, though, I suspect it’s hard to know what we’re doing right.

Gawande, a surgeon himself, is firmly convinced by the virtue of the checklist, and in his hands it becomes a powerful and thought-provoking tool to confront complexity. He begins by pointing out there are two reasons we fail: ignorance, if we don’t know something, and ineptitude, if we know how to do something and do it wrong. It is the second problem that is the most serious in the modern world, he argues, and checklists can make a dramatic difference.

There are approximately 150,000 deaths following surgery in the US, about 3x as many as deaths from car accidents, and so he’s got a point. If checklists can reduce even a small percentage of errors in surgery, it could make an enormous difference. Fortunately, Gawande has a number of stories of astonishing success from checklist adoption. When Johns Hopkins introduced a checklist for central line insertions, for example, infection rates dropped from 11% to zero; when Michigan did, it probably saved over 1,500 lives in 18 months. The results are much the same in fields as diverse as aviation or skyscraper construction.

He does caution readers not to overreach, however. Checklists longer than 5 to 9 items long become cumbersome, and people start ignoring them. Good lists therefore focus on the steps that make the biggest difference, and the ones likely to be forgotten. Too long, and they stop being effective. They also need to be carefully tested: much of the book is devoted to failed attempts at introducing checklists, as people have a tendency to ignore or fail to follow the list unless it is designed well.

The book’s a quick and easy read, but the idea is extremely powerful. Gawande talks about his own initial reluctance to adopt checklists, seeing himself as above them, and his more recent reversal of opinion. When he asked surgeons about the value of a checklist, 20% said it did not improve safety. When asked if they would want it used in surgery on them, however, 93% agreed. I suspect we could all benefit from a bit more humility and a few more lists.

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Training Genius: The Genius in All of Us (David Shenk)

“The genius in all of us is our built-in ability to improve ourselves and our world.”

David Shenk thinks you misunderstand genetics. It’s not personal – he thinks pretty much everyone does. He argues in The Genius in All of Us that in trying to distinguish nature vs. nurture, we have missed the fact that who we are is determined by their interaction. Genes are turned on and off by the environment in which we live, and in the vast majority of activities for which we never reach our genetic limitations, it is practice and context that will determine just how talented we are. All of us have the potential to be a genius.

He points to Cooper and Zubek’s experiments with maze-bright and maze-dull rats, chosen as such because they descend from generations of rats who have been relatively good or poor at solving mazes. In normal conditions, the bright rats impressively outperform the dull ones. In enriched or restricted environments, however, both types of rats performed almost the same, whether as geniuses or dullards. Genetics do make a difference, but that difference can be overwhelmed by the influence of context and environment, despite what humans usually assume.

Shenk makes an important point, that we often neglect or underrate the importance of environment and its interaction with genes. Unfortunately, perhaps due to the shortness of the book (136 pages of argument, plus 200 of endnotes and citations), it can often feel like he hasn’t explored the ideas, but rather just rushed through them without examining their implications. He focuses, for example, on the idea that we can all be geniuses with a supportive environment: equally meaningful, however, is the implication that no one can be a genius without hard work and environment, and I am suspicious his choice of one perspective over the other is intended to sell books, not provide insight. He also sometimes seems to get carried away by his own arguments, so much so that he leaves his focus on interactions and seems to imply that environment is actually dominant over genetics, a suggestion he rightfully criticizes in the inverse.

The nature of heritability is always a controversial one, and the debate is often unfortunately ideologically, not factually, based. In that respect, Shenk has done a good job attempting to stick to the science, referring to many studies and explicitly citing his research. Nevertheless, a more thorough examination of the issues would likely be more compelling, and less likely to leave the reader feeling unsatisfied.

Cultivate your own genius and join the Subtle Illumination reading list to your right! Or, keep reading (or in the UK or Canada).

(Honest) Truth About Dishonesty by Dan Ariely

“The gates of hell are open night and day / Smooth the descent, and easy is the way” – Virgil, The Aeneid

Are you a liar? We tend to assume some people just are: that they consistently cheat in life. An Enron theory of dishonesty, if you will. Ariely, though, argues in The (Honesty) Truth About Dishonesty that the reality is that almost everyone cheats a little given the right circumstances. The key, he says, is to still be able to tell ourselves that we’re a good person: after all, we haven’t cheated that much.

Unfortunately, this means we can’t just assume people cheat when the money is good. Instead, he points to experiments where people cheat more when they’re knowingly wearing counterfeit brand clothes, when they’re representing a cause that doesn’t benefit them, and when tokens exchangeable for cash, not cash, is the prize. What’s worse, he also shows we usually aren’t aware of the effect, with individuals unconsciously preferring art from one gallery over another if they’ve been told the funding for the experiment came from that gallery (and even showing increased activity in their brain’s pleasure centers when they see “their” logo), while remaining completely certain of their objectivity.

There is hope, however. Dishonesty diminishes when it becomes harder to self-justify an act: we might take a coke but we wouldn’t take a dollar bill from a fridge, for example. Even small reminders of morality reduce cheating, whether trying to remember the Ten Commandments (even if you only remember one or two), or signing a commitment to an honour code at the top of the page (even if the honour code is fictional). If we can stop the small acts of dishonesty, he argues, we can prevent it from gathering momentum and becoming contagious.

For me, the implication is that if we’re trying to stop a firm from committing fraud or a politician from lying, the answer isn’t to fire the bad apples or even have them declare conflicts of interest. It’s environmental and psychological factors that encourage us to cheat, and environmental and psychological factors that can help discourage us from doing so. All of us run the risk of drifting into dishonesty, a little bit at a time, while remaining convinced that we are acting morally. In a high paced, modern lifestyle, we may never get the chance to stop, reflect, and reset those patterns, but it may be ever more important that we try.

Interested? Keep reading (or in the UK or Canada). Readers might also like Ariely’s earlier books, Predictably Irrational and The Upside of Irrationality, about the irrationalities that drive us and their potential benefits. Or, join the Subtle Illumination email list to your right!

The Art of Learning by Josh Waitzkin

“My whole life I had studied techniques, principles, and theory until they were integrated into the unconscious.” – Josh Waitzkin

Joshua Waitzkin was national chess champion in the U.S. 8 times, inspiring the movie “Searching for Bobby Fischer,” and more recently has earned two world champion titles in Pushing Hands, the martial arts version of Tai Chi. It’s fair to say that he knows something about learning.

Quite a bit of The Art of Learning is devoted to Waitzkin’s career in both chess and pushing hands, and unfortunately though enjoyable it is perhaps a bit short on wisdom. Interspersed with that, however, are discussions of how he sees the learning process and the principles he believes underlie expertise in any discipline.

Waitzkin introduces a few vague lists of principles, but in essence argues the key to excellence is the gradual mastery of fundamental principles, over time interlinked into complexity and integrated into our subconscious. The key to such learning is to take the small things you learn and ‘chunk’ them into larger ideas in your memory, ensuring efficient storage and retrieval. As a result, an expert martial artist and a beginner actually perceive different things. A complicated strike may be made up of six parts, but an expert perceives it as one moderately fast attack. The beginner, on the other hand, sees six different moves, all blindingly fast. Mastery of the fundamentals can actually change not just how you perform an event but also how you perceive an event.

Once you’ve achieved this chunking of basic concepts into complicated ones, he argues, you start achieving the deeper mastery critical for progress, and the correct decision can even seem intuitive. Studies of chess grandmasters, for example, have shown they do not see many moves farther ahead than weaker players. Instead, they have an intuition on which moves may be best, and so though they study the same number of possible moves, they study better quality ones.

Given Waitzkin’s success, the book is certainly inspirational, and mixed in with the story of his life are a few seeds of wisdom. I think my favourite story was that apparently as an offshoot of Soviet hypnosis programs, young Soviet chess players were taught to tap a piece quickly but softly against the table, in an effort to subliminally speed up the thinking of their opponent and encourage errors. Who knew?

Want to learn more about learning? Keep reading (or in the UK or Canada). Or, sign up for the subtleilluminations email list to your right.