Feel bad to feel good

Alain de Botton on self-help books : " [they] make the grave assumption that the best way to cheer someone up is to tell them that all will be well. They are utterly cut off from the spirit of their more noble predecessors, who knew that the fastest way to make someone feel well is to tell her that things are as bad as, and possibly much worse than, she could ever  have thought. Or, as Seneca put it so well, "What need is there to weep over parts of life? The whole of it calls for tears." "

The Irrationality of Irrationality: The Paradox of Popular Psychology | Guest Blog, Scientific American Blog Network

The Irrationality of Irrationality: The Paradox of Popular Psychology | Guest Blog, Scientific American Blog Network
Extracts : 

• People do not compensate sufficiently for missing information even when it is painfully obvious that the information available to them is incomplete.
• we humans love narratives...But narratives are also irrational because they sacrifice the whole story for one side of a story that conforms to one?s worldview. Relying on them often leads to inaccuracies and stereotypes..rarely do we ask: ?What more would I need to know before I can have a more informed and complete opinion??
• The last several years have seen many popular psychology books that touch on this line of research....[BUT] when people learn about how we irrationally jump to conclusions they form new opinions about how the brain works from the little information they recently acquired. They jump to conclusions about how the brain jumps to conclusions and fit their newfound knowledge into a larger story that romantically and naively describes personal enlightenment
• The crux of the problem, as Cowen points out [http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=RoEEDKwzNBw], is that it?s nearly impossible to understand irrationalities without taking advantage of them. And, paradoxically, we rely on stories to understand why they can be harmful
• Brenner, Koehler and Tversky...reduced conclusion jumping by getting people to consider the other information at their disposal
• Ultimately, we need to remember what philosophers get right. Listen and read carefully; logically analyze arguments; try to avoid jumping to conclusions; don?t rely on stories too much. The Greek playwright Euripides was right: Question everything, learn something, answer nothing.

Ten things you need to know about tax | Money | The Guardian

Ten things you need to know about tax | Money | The Guardian

extracts:

• 'Taxes are the price we pay for civilisation," US supreme court justice Oliver Wendell Holmes
•  Philosopher Peter Singer addresses this issue in his book on American politics, The President of Good and Evil. "It makes no sense to talk of the money you would have if the government did not levy taxes," he writes. Imagine, he suggests, you're working for a car manufacturer and get $1,000 a week, $200 of which is taken in taxes. Why can't I donate that $200 to the donkey sanctuary or use it to destroy my septum with illegal drugs, professor? Well, says Singer, your car company could not make cars without a legal system that protects mining rights, private ownership of land, accepted currency, transport systems, energy production, an educated labour force, patent protection, judicial resolution of disputes, national defence, protection of trading routes
• Nobel prize-winning economist Herbert Simon once estimated that it is such social capital ? or the social environment in a wealthy country such as the US or UK ? that enables its residents to generate 90% of its income.

the wrong point in the rights argument

Watching the BBC2 programme on the furore over certain human rights cases (Rights gone wrong?) it seemed to be that most of the controversial cases had the same basic problem : the primary mechanism to handle these cases was inadequate to provide the sense justice the public desired, but their anger was directed at the way follow up approaches were then often blocked by the European Court on Human Rights.

So for example the case of the failed asylum seeker who ran over a 12 year old and left her dying in the street. After serving his (unbelievably short) four month sentence he was allowed stay in the country (on the grounds of right to a family life) because he had in the meantime married an English woman. While the length of the sentence sounds ridiculous, the point is that it was only this which related to his crime, and it was this that was actually lacking. Once he had served his time then he couldn't be punished in future ways on the basis of it, yet this is what was basically being demanded in deporting him and breaking up his family.  Of course it is abhorrent to think of him leading a normal life after having paid such a small penalty for killing a young girl and bringing untold grief to her family, but the problem is his original sentence. It would be like if such a criminal won the lottery afterwards, and suddenly was seen to live a life of luxury. It would be frustratingly unfair in the grand scheme of things, but there couldn't really be a process by which such winnings would be taken off him 'just because'.

The same misplaced reaction is to be seen in the other cases mentioned. There was the issue of forced marriages, and how raising the age limit of people entering the UK to be married had (until stricken down by Strasbourg) reduced the phenomenon. Again the point was something should be done to tackle the problem directly, not rely on indirect methods (if no marriages were allowed at all then the number of forced ones would also drop). Similarly with the Abu Qatada case, since the fundamental problem here is that nothing can be done to him legally in the UK for what he is doing, but they want to deport him because of this (and can't because of rights against shipping off people to kangaroo courts). if the UK has a problem with his behaviour it needs to be able to bring in laws to deal with it, not rely on indirect workarounds (and of course the point is there are no laws because it is such a complicated and sensitive topic.

What I do admit is more complicated is the case of prisoners having the right to vote. When it comes to ex-convicts then would think the logic should be that if they have served their sentence, then afterwards they should get back their normal rights. Either they have paid their price, or they haven't, but if they haven't then there is something wrong with the original sentencing.  What I don't perhaps agree with is insistence on rights when in prison. If society has the right to take away some rights (their liberty) then I don't see why it can't take away others, for a specified amount of time. Maybe it is the blanket nature of the denial which is the problem, but surely this could be resolved. And of course there could be a case for certain extra limitations - for example psychological analysis - to refrain from returning right to vote after prison, but this would perhaps be too slipper a slope to start down, since having to meet certain conditions set by the state to be allowed vote for it could lead to unwanted places.

What was most informative in the programme was the history of the convention on human rights, and how it had been, of all people, conservatives like Winston Churchill who had pushed most for it in the post-war era. And of course there it is very debateable as to whether (as is the case in the UK) the democratically chosen laws of a country should be subject to a foreign court. The main point I would think in this argument would be that it is I think in general a good thing to have a semi-inviolate set of rules (consitution, bill of rights, etc.) which cannot be easily discarded by lawmakers, even if popular at certain times), but these rules need to be something society as a whole signs up for, and perhaps repeatedly, and one problem with the European convention is that too much unanticipated interpretation and stress might be being placed on a too old set of rules.


However, as stated above, it seems most of the bad reputation the convention gets is from a minority of cases with unappealing outcomes, in which the convention is involved, but not primarily at fault. And when one considers the great bulwark the convention acts as against unfair intrusion by the powers that be into the lives of individuals, and as the rules of a club into which countries with serious problems can be coerced, then much careful debate and analysis would be required before tinkering with it.

further information :

• European convention on human rights (pdf)
• convention on human rights wikipedia entry

On writing, memory, and forgetting

I only recently encountered the Zeignarik Effect (that people remember uncompleted or interrupted tasks better than completed tasks) for the first time  in a book on concentration, and had only thought about it in negative terms, since it could lead to constant distraction as unfinished tasks repeatedly popped back into mind. So intriguing (and after consideration very plausible) to think that it might have a more general and positive role in maintaining memories, or at least the ones that matter (which maybe are just those that are still 'open'). In this article, Maria Konnikova wonders if this effect was something that has been recognized as far back as Socrates, and whether his warnings then against the written word might be relevant today with respect to our embracing of online tools and databases. In both cases we are delegating the mental effort of memory to something external to us, and while this is  useful and necessary for the preservation of the data itself, it is perhaps worth considering what the affect it has on our own remaining awareness of that information, once we have successfully 'shelved' it. Indeed she even mentions a study which suggested that people are far less able to recall information that they expect to be able to have access to in the future. Socrates on Google, now that's prescient....

On writing, memory, and forgetting: Socrates and Hemingway take on Zeigarnik
Some extracts from Konnikova 's article :

• I can't help but think of an admonition that came centuries before Ms. Zeigarnik sat down to her Viennese coffee: Socrates? reproach in The Phaedrus that the written word is the enemy of memory. In the dialogue, Socrates recounts the story of the god Theuth, or Ammon, who offers the king Thamus the gift of letters:

 This, said Theuth, will make the Egyptians wiser and give them better memories; it is a specific both for the memory and for the wit. Thamus replied: O most ingenious Theuth, the parent or inventor of an art is not always the best judge of the utility or inutility of his own inventions to the users of them. And in this instance, you who are the father of letters, from a paternal love of your own children have been led to attribute to them a quality which they cannot have; for this discovery of yours will create forgetfulness in the learners? souls, because they will not use their memories; they will trust to the external written characters and not remember of themselves. The specific which you have discovered is an aid not to memory, but to reminiscence, and you give your disciples not truth, but only the semblance of truth; they will be hearers of many things and will have learned nothing; they will appear to be omniscient and will generally know nothing; they will be tiresome company, having the show of wisdom without the reality.

• In this [Hemingway's] view, talking something through?completing it, so to speak, off the page?impedes the ability to actually create it to its fullest potential. Somehow, that act of closure, of having talked through a piece of work, takes away the motivation to finish.
• the advice offered by the author Justin Taylor: "Don't take notes. This is counterintuitive, but bear with me. You only get one shot at a first draft, and if you write yourself a note to look at later then that's what your first draft was?a shorthand, cryptic, half-baked fragment"
• Hemingway seems to be, in many ways, on the same page as Socrates and the same page as Zeigarnik and her foundational studies of our memories? curious quirks. What's more, the more we know about memory, the more true it seems to be that we somehow let go of the information that we no longer feel we absolutely must hold on to. Last year, a study by Betsy Sparrow and colleagues, published in Science, suggested that people are far less able to recall information that they expect to be able to have access to in the future. Instead, they remember where and how to find that information.- I would never give up the ability to record, to access, to research endless topics at the click of a button. But, with Hemingway and Socrates never far from mind, I may be slightly more cautious about how I use that ability.

note : the paper "Google Effects on Memory" is discussed in this article, and the abstract is :


Google Effects on Memory: Cognitive Consequences of Having Information at Our Fingertips
Betsy Sparrow1,*,Jenny Liu2,Daniel M. Wegner
The advent of the Internet, with sophisticated algorithmic search engines, has made accessing information as easy as lifting a finger. No longer do we have to make costly efforts to find the things we want. We can ?Google? the old classmate, find articles online, or look up the actor who was on the tip of our tongue. The results of four studies suggest that when faced with difficult questions, people are primed to think about computers and that when people expect to have future access to information, they have lower rates of recall of the information itself and enhanced recall instead for where to access it. The Internet has become a primary form of external or transactive memory, where information is stored collectively outside ourselves.

news nibbling - think before you read

Throughout history information has been the driver of progress-  the more we knew, the more we could do. While in previous ages it was only a lucky elite who had the time and resources to be involved in this process , the impetus was always a common human drive, which is why the internet, perhaps the ultimate information gathering and disseminating technology, has been seized upon and spread into every area of modern life. We are hard wired by evolution, and encouraged by culture, to discover and learn, and the one hunger which is considered always 'good', is the hunger for knowledge.

But is it possible that we could have too much of a good thing? Reading an piece on concentration recently I identified all too well with the statistics on how much time is diverted into online distraction. While of course we all click occasionally on light and meaningless topics, funny youtube links etc. the real point is that most of this time is not necessarily spent on such frivolous 'junk' but on seemingly worthwhile matter, like news, comment or reports. But the article's description of 'the long tail of information porn' made me realise that ultimately there might be not too much difference between this supposedly worthy weighty stuff, and the lighter dross, since both tap into innate urges for the novel, the desire for new facts to tickle our fancy, even if an intellectual one. These cravings are now amply catered to via the internet, and it is perhaps worth considering if there are parallels between the way we satisfy, and satiate, ourselves informationally, and how modern advances allowed us to go from simply providing for, to pandering to, other urges. Our dispositions were shaped by our evolutionary history, and the problem arises when a drive matched to a scarce natural resource, is confronted with artificial plenty. The classic example of this is our taste for sugary and fat things, and how this healthy drive is driven unhealthily  haywire by the hyper-sources of these substances modern society has created: fast food to sweets. Even though we know too much is bad for us, we are driven to start, for evolutionary emotional reasons, and find it hard to stop for rational ones.

It is possible that a similar (if much weaker) story is now starting to play out with information. Last year I encountered for the first time the phrase 'psychological obesity' and it struck me as encapsulating the dangers perfectly. Could it be that we are getting so used to gorging ourselves on information, and over relying on the mechanisms which deliver it, that we are at risk of missing out on the real benefits that underlie it, and which made it an evolutionary goal? It seems ludicrous to suggest that more information is anything but a good thing, but maybe in harsher times and societies the same could be thought about food, and what would seem to be the insane possibility of eating too much. The point is what we learn is only in important in so far as it contributes to what we actually know, and what we can do with it. Just as food is only a resource to enable the production of energy, to be able to DO things, information and even knowledge itself is only a means to an end. Since it worked for most of our evolutionary history nature has used the shortcut of embedding in us the emotional drive for the means, but now that the normally required levels can be surpassed, we must use our rational self-control to focus on the meaning instead.  We need to realise that we cannot drift through the new oceans of information scooping up data like whales with plankton, since as in all areas, we can over consume and like the obese body disabled by too much resources, we won't be able to use even some of them properly.

There is however probably a psychological side to this problem, since apart from the drive for gain, their is our powerful aversion to loss. Faced with a deluge of data we need to choose what is most important and relevant to us, but to choose somethings is to discard others, and this we hate doing. In the material domain we (mostly) have grown to appreciate we can't actually have it all, at the same time, but we are less used to such limitations in our mental worlds. Furthermore this involves one of the more personal and poignant kinds of loss, since to choose to know is to choose what to be, and we are particularly reluctant to close off possible futures, possible selves. Choice is hard, which is why we find it easier to surf endlessly on the tsunami of information, rather than swim in any particular direction. We feel like we're doing valid travelling, but really we're going nowhere.

To really move forward we not only need to obtain information, we need to process it, and apart from the requirement of manageable amounts, we also need to develop the mental mechanisms and habits to do so properly. Again the internet and other technology are a double-edged sword, since while they provide us with valid and valuable tools and shortcuts, they do not (yet, and for the foreseeable future) provide the complete answer. To use data we need to know more than just how to access it, which webpage or search tool will find it for us, but how to interpret it, and how it relates. While I may not need to know the exact dates of events leading up to say the first world war, knowing where to find them will never allow me apply this information in another area. Only if I have analyzed the history, thought about the chronology, recognize the patterns, will I actually UNDERSTAND what is otherwise simply a sequence of events, and be able, for example, to spot parallels and resonances in current situations. Wikipedia means I do not need to clutter my mind with the minutiae, but I can only use it do to help me once I have already understood the meaning.

Unfortunately this takes time, and effort. We must choose what we want to know, and then educate ourselves, and there is no taskbar which can speed this process up for us, since we need to allow our minds to mull and manipulate the data, and bring its unparalleled pattern matching powers to bear. But in this too the mood of the internet is against us, because the constant drive for the new, means constant changeover, and little time for such consideration. I was struck once by a comment a travel blogger made to me about how even when writing about places and societies that were hundreds or even thousands of years old, in the blogosphere there was a mentality that if it was not immediate, not in real time, it somehow was less relevant. When writing about a trip along the ancient route of the silk road, he felt like there was a demand for him to post while on the move,, from phone or netcafe, even though the thing being written about had not changed for centuries. The web audience feels that anything written in the past or retrospect, is somehow already dated, and this is not just removed from what is needed for proper knowledge, but anathema to it.  I admit I succumb to this prejudice myself often enough, for example if choosing a new psychology book to read anything more than 10 years old feels somehow outdated and less worthwhile than a newer text. While of course theories develop, a classic remains a classic just because it achieves an insight that lasts, and it could be argued that a decade old book that is still around, has proved its worth by its endurance against something new which might be a flash in the pan. Ironically the effect of the modern zeitgeist is to trap us in the now, while the point of deep knowledge is to allow us to escape to the past and future as well.

So, the upshot of this is I feel that it wouldn't be a bad thing to impose on myself a bit of a 'digital diet'. Just as one can count calories to manage one's weight, I think one needs to become an information connoisseur. To know anything I need to accept I cannot know everything.