Tag Archives: Self-improvement

The Analects – Confucius (trans. David Hinton)

“If you can revive the ancient and use it to understand the modern, then you’re worthy to be a teacher.” – Confucius

Confucius (around 500 BC), stood for family loyalty, ancestor worship, respect of elders, and ritual. He argued that society was made up of the structure of human relationships, and that to be fully human you had to fulfill your role in society with respect to others. He also argued for egalitarian education for all and a meritocracy, as well as espousing an early version of the Golden Rule. While alive, he was one of many philosophers: after his death, his philosophy would be adopted as an official creed in China, and Confucianism is one of the most lastingly influential creeds in history. It also came to stand for obedience to authority and sacrifice of the individual, but at least from the Analects it’s not clear that’s a fair interpretation.

In any case, I thought I’d share a few quotes that struck me!

General Advice

“When you’re an official with free time, study. When you’re a student with free time, take office.”

“For people to talk all day, enthralled with their clever chitchat, and never once mention right or wrong – that must be difficult indeed!”

À la Rumsfeld: “When you understand something, know that you understand it. When you don’t understand something, know that you don’t understand it. That’s understanding.”

On governing

“I can hear a court case as well as anyone. But we need to make a world where there’s no reason for a court case.”

“One day the stables burned down. When he returned from court, the Master asked: ‘Was anyone hurt?’ He didn’t ask about the horses.”

On Society

“To be poor and free of resentment is difficult. To be rich and free of arrogance is easy.”

“We’re all the same by nature. It’s living that makes us different.”

“Don’t grieve when people fail to recognize your ability. Grieve when you fail to recognize theirs.”

Flow – Mihaly Csikszentmihalyi

“More than anything else, the self represents the hierarchy of goals that we have built up, bit by bit, over the years.”

A personal injury lawyer attends a speech opening a new modern art sculpture in Chicago. While most of the audience dozes, he appears to follow the speech with rapt attention, his lips moving rapidly. When a companion asks him why after the speech, he admits to calculating the total personal injury claims that will arise from children climbing the statue. Is this lawyer lucky, able to transform everything he sees into something relevant to his own life and skills and so enjoy it? Or unlucky, deprived of the opportunity to grow by focusing only on what he already knows (and also somewhat morbid)?

I started Flow with some trepidation. The concept of flow is impressively widely referenced, but I worried that trying to stretch a simple idea into a full book might be trying to make money from it without adding value. Flow, by the way, is the happiness and energy we get when are absorbed in activities that match our skills to difficulty (see above graph). To be truly happy, by this logic, we need lifelong learning to keep upping the difficulty of our activities: passively watching TV cannot bring happiness. Whether what we do is history, philosophy, mountain climbing, or welding, we can find flow in it if we are careful to set goals, watch for feedback, and immerse ourselves in it.

I was pleasantly surprised, however, as the book focuses on what lessons the concept of flow can give us for how to optimally experience life. Most of that, of course, is still fairly obvious (try to get flow in your own activities!), but the author has some excellent off the cuff remarks. He argues, for example, that one of the reasons young people struggle today is that they no longer have challenges or responsibilities commensurate with their abilities: unable to reach flow through schoolwork, they turn to alternate sources of enjoyment, like delinquency or drugs. He worries that the change in professions from hunting/gathering to farming to industrial has seen a steady decline in the simplicity of finding flow in one’s work, as feedback and goals become abstract and delayed in time (Shop Class as Soulcraft would agree). Similarly, I’m not sure many of us have a ready answer as to whether the personal injury lawyer is lucky or not.

The book is by no means life changing, and a lot of the content is available in other places (I’m looking at you, Marcus Aurelius). Still, it was quick and more engaging than I had expected, and though simple we can probably all use more structure in how we think about finding meaning and pleasure in our work and our leisure.

You can pick up a copy here (or in the UK or Canada). Or, just subscribe to the Subtle Illumination email list and work on feeling flow while reading!

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!

Good Strategy, Bad Strategy – Richard Rumelt

“The core of strategy work is always the same: discovering the critical factors in a situation and designing a way of coordinating and focusing actions to deal with those factors.”

John Kay (the British economist, not the guy who invented the flying shuttle) recently came out with his five book recommendations on economics in the real world. Since I hadn’t read it, I thought I’d pick up Good Strategy, Bad Strategy.

Overall, I’m impressed. Rumelt is an academic who studies strategy, and his clarity and insight does him credit. All he wants is structured thinking, and his book reads like a how-to tutorial: though he usually applies it in the context of business or national defense, it could equally relate to strategy in almost any field. CEOs often read things like Sun Tzu’s Art of War, and this book comes as close as any I’ve read to making that seem reasonable.

Rumelt is worried that much of what is done today is bad strategy, for which he has a specific definition. Bad strategy correlates with fluff, a failure to face core challenges, mistaking goals for strategy, and bad strategic objectives. Too many businesses, he points out, have a strategy of having 20% growth in sales for the next 5 years. That’s not a strategy – it’s at best a goal, and quite possibly wishful thinking.

Strategies are made up of three things. First, diagnose the problem. Second, come up with a guiding policy. And third, derive a set of coherent actions that allow you to implement that guiding policy. Too many organizations neglect the first and third steps, and are thus far too vague in doing the second. A doctor, in contrast, diagnoses a problem, chooses a therapeutic approach as a guiding policy, and then recommends specific medicines, diets, and therapy as a result of the guiding policy. Action is the key to strategy: goals and theories are only part of the story.

A lot of the book feels straightforward, or at least not complicated. As Rumelt points out, however, in a world where we are often increasingly focused on the short term, there is value in forcing ourselves to think strategically. Consultants, he suggests, are not valuable because they suggest you write a checklist: they’re valuable because you actually write one when they suggest it, when otherwise you might never get around to it. I’m not sure I learned anything revolutionary while reading, but I did think deeply and in new ways about strategy and how we make decisions.

Both as a breakdown of how to think about strategy and a source of fun stories about business, Good Strategy, Bad Strategy does well. Perhaps a little too long and repetitive in parts, but it was well worth the read, and I suspect would be even more useful for someone directly involved in business.

If you want to pick up Good Strategy, Bad Strategy yourself, you can get it here (or in the UK or Canada). Or, join the subtle illumination email list and absorb strategy from reading!

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.

The Book of Chuang Tzu

“The Tao that can be spoken is not the eternal Tao” – Tao Te Ching

The Book of Chuang Tzu (also known as Zhuangzi or True Classic of Southern (Cultural) Florescence) makes up one of the three core texts of Taoism. The Tao Te Ching, its arguably more famous fellow, is short to the point of cryptic, and uses as few as words as possible to illustrate the Tao. Chuang Tzu, on the other hand, is full of stories, personalities, events, and entertainment, to the point of being cryptic.

Taoism differs from both modern philosophies and its contemporaries in emphasizing that it is a path to be walked, rather than a term to be defined. Rather than review it, therefore, for those interested I thought I’d share an anecdote from the book.

“Hui Tzu spoke to Chuang Tzu, saying, ‘I have a big tree, which people call useless. Its trunk is so knotted, no carpenter could work on it, while its branches are too twisted to use a square or compass upon. So, although it is close to the road, no carpenter would look at it. Now, Sir, your words are like this, too big and no use, therefore everyone ignores them.

Chuang Tzu said, ‘Sir, have you never seen a wild cat or a weasel? It lies there, crouching and waiting; east and west it leaps out, not afraid of going high or low; until it is caught in a trap and dies in a net. Yet again, there is the yak, vast like a cloud in heaven. It is big, but cannot use this fact to catch rats. Now you, Sir, have a large tree, and you don’t know how to use it, so why not plant it in the middle of nowhere, where you can go to wander or fall asleep under its shade? No axe under Heaven will attack it, nor shorten its days, for something which is useless will never be disturbed.”

Honestly, if you want to find out about Taoism, you’ll have to read it yourself: you can pick it up here (or in the UK or Canada). Or, just sign up for the Subtle Illumination email list!

Decisive – Chip & Dan Heath

“[T]hat, in essence, is the core difficulty of decision making: What’s in the spotlight will rarely be everything we need to make a good decision, but we won’t always remember to shift the light. Sometimes, in fact, we’ll forget there’s a spotlight at all, dwelling so long in the tiny circle of light that we forget there’s a broader landscape behind it.”

The shoe company Zaapos offers all trainees $1000 to leave immediately and not work for them. Why? Consider the following decision-making process.

You’re faced with an important decision. You first look for your options, but narrow framing means you ignore several critical ones. What options you’ve found, you analyze, but confirmation bias means you fail to adequately look for information that disproves your thesis. Then, you make a choice, but fall victim to short term emotion and temptations. Finally, you live with your choice, but overconfidence means you’ve failed to prepare for error.

That, essentially, is the process Chip and Dan Heath describe in Decisive. Our brains are wired to act foolishly in some situations; how, they ask, can we do better? To help, they outline a series of mental tricks and approaches that allow us to better analyze, understand, and most of all improve our decisions.

What really comes through, however, is how often we don’t do what we obviously should to make a good decision. In a study of businesses, only 29% of teams considered more than one alternative option, while experts forecasting the future do less well than a simple extrapolation of base rates (though better than novices). Simple techniques can therefore be powerful; searching for options until you fall in love at least twice (better for houses than for marriages, perhaps), testing the future instead of predicting it, focusing on process, and asking yourself what you would do if none of your current options were available, can all have large payoffs.

All of which brings us back to Zappos and their $1000 offer. People who accept it, Zappos argues, are people they didn’t want anyway. It forces employees to stop, think, and decide, not just accidentally drift into a job they didn’t want. Those who remain know that they valued this opportunity so much they turned the offer down.

I’m not sure I learnt very much reading Decisive, but it was a quick and easy read, and some of the tricks for improving decision-making will certainly be useful. If you’re looking for a substantive addition to the literature, I can’t recommend it, but if you’re looking for a fun summer read it’s worth picking up.

If you do decide to pick it up, you can get it here (or in the UK or Canada). Or, join the Subtle Illumination email list to your right instead! (Doing both also permitted…)

The Art of Choosing – Sheena Iyengar

“In order to choose, we must first perceive control is possible.” – Sheena Iyengar

For those who haven’t heard of the jam experiment, researchers set up two jam-tasting stalls at a luxury grocery store. One offered 6 flavours of jam to sample from, while the other offered 24. More passersby chose to stop at the wide-choice stall, and on average, people tasted two jams at either stall. In the end, however, 30% of people who stopped at the limited choice stall bought a jam: only 3% of people facing 24 options did.

Sheena Iyengar conducted this experiment in an effort to show that though small increases in choice can be a strict improvement, large amounts of choice can actually make us worse off. In her book, The Art of Choosing, she examines the idea of choice and how it affects our lives. Choice, and even more so believing we have choice, is integral to the human experience. Even animals in zoos apparently develop neuroses in its absence, as happened to Gus, a 700 pound polar bear in New York City Zoo who started swimming endless laps in his pool. It being New York, however, they brought in a therapist and he recovered.

Our affection for choice can lead us into trouble, however. Even when having extra choices actually makes us worse off, we still pursue them, and, as Gus demonstrates, when we don’t have enough choice we can struggle psychologically. Fortunately, how much choice we have is usually a result of narratives we construct for ourselves, both when we have too few and too many. Retirees given a plant and told to care for it themselves, as opposed to being given a plant and told the nurse would care for it, showed marked health improvements despite the fact that a plant was given to them in both cases. Similarly, Japanese students believed they had made far fewer choices in a given day than American students, since the Americans counted things like brushing their teeth or hitting the snooze button as choice while the Japanese students did not.

Though filled with interesting experiments and ideas, The Art of Choosing can sometimes feel somewhat oversimplified. It is made up largely of stories and anecdotes rather than analysis, and so will appeal largely to readers who prefer that style of book. For myself, I preferred Barry Schwartz’s The Paradox of Choice as an introduction to choice, Marcus Aurelius’ Meditations for self-constructed narratives, and Malcolm Gladwell if you’re looking to accumulate stories for cocktail parties. Still, if choice is something that interests you, the book is worth the read, and even more so is Iyengar’s original work on jam.

Want more? Keep reading here (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!

The Invisible Gorilla – Chabris & Simons

“It’s true that we vividly experience some aspects of our world, particularly those that are the focus of our attention. But this rich experience inevitably leads to the erroneous belief that we process all of the detailed information around us.”

In what is perhaps one of the best known psychology experiments conducted, subjects are asked to carefully count the passes of a basketball made between a team wearing white shirts and one wearing black shirts. About half the subjects fail completely to notice when a woman wearing a gorilla suit walks into the middle of the screen, pounds her chest, and walks off!

The authors of the experiment, Chabris and Simons, argue in The Invisible Gorilla that this captures a cognitive illusion, a situation in which our intuition leads us astray. In this case, almost all of us believe that were such a situation to happen to us, we would notice the gorilla. In reality, they suggest, looking does not imply seeing if our attention is directed elsewhere. The same problem occurs when we talk on cell phones while driving: we all believe we will still see what is going on in front of us, when in reality we emphatically do not.

They list several such illusions, including attention, memory, confidence, knowledge, cause, and potential. We do not see everything we look at or remember everything we have seen; we massively overestimate our abilities, particularly those of us who are worst at something; we say we could explain how a zipper works or why the sky is blue, but when asked cannot; we believe spurious causation claims with no grounding in evidence, as in the case of autism and vaccinations; and we believe there must be an easy way to unlock vast abilities in our brains.

We tend to intuitively believe in our abilities, whether multitasking or memory, yet experiments like the invisible gorilla or one in which 50% of subjects failed to notice when experimenters replaced their conversational partner with a different person while they were distracted cast significant doubt on these claims. Intuition, Chabris & Simons argue, may well be useful in the Gladwellian sense, but the only way to know whether it is accurate or illusory is to conduct randomized experiments. In this sense, they are firmly on the side of Banerjee and Duflo, though in a different context.

At heart, though, their book is one of stories; for every claim they make they tell multiple stories of experiments run and demonstrations seen, and so the book is both entertaining and educational. Our intuitions can guide us well, often for reasons unknown to our conscious selves, but a little humility would do us all good, instead of assuming our intuitions will always steer us correctly.

Looking to understand more of the psychology of illusions? Keep reading (or in the UK or Canada). Or, join the Subtle Illumination email list to your right!