going to places where you don’t normally go

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An old joke says that if you torture the data long enough, it will confess. With enough work, you can distort data to make it say what you want it to say.

We all hold some beliefs, and that’s fine. It’s all part of being human. What’s not OK, though, is when we let those beliefs inadvertently come into the way we form our hypotheses.

We can see this tendency in our everyday lives. We often interpret new information in such a way that it becomes compatible with our own beliefs. We read the news on the site that conforms most closely to our beliefs. We talk to people who are like us and hold similar views. We don’t want to get disconcerting evidence because that might lead us to change our worldview, which we might be afraid to do.

One way to fight this bias is to critically examine all your beliefs and try to find disconcerting evidence about each of your theories. By that, I mean actively seeking out evidence by going to places where you don’t normally go, talking to people you don’t normally talk to, and generally keeping an open mind.

Rahul Agarwal writing in Built in

The qualities of creative people

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Some observers have been led to comment on a certain “childlike” or “primitive” quality in creative individuals. They are childlike and primitive in the sense that they have not been trapped by the learned rigidities that immobilize the rest of us. In their chosen field they do not have the brittle knowingness and sophistication of people who think they know all the answers. The advantage of this fluidity is that it permits all kinds of combinations and recombinations of experience with a minimum of rigidity.

One could list a number of other traits that have been ascribed to the creative individual by research workers. Almost all observer have noted a remarkable zeal or dive in creative individuals. They are wholly absorbed in their work.

Anne Roe, in her study of gifted scientists, found that one of their most striking traits was a willingness to work hard and for long hours. The energy they bring to their work is not only intense but sustained. Most of the great creative performances grow out of years of arduous application.

Other observers have commented on the confidence, self-assertiveness or, as one investigator put it, the “sense of destiny” in creative persons. They have faith in their capacity to do the things they want and need to do in the area of their chosen work.

John Gardner, Self-Renewal

The Caring Effect

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Patients with irritable bowel syndrome were told they'd be participating in a study of the benefits of a acupuncture—and one group, which received the treatment from a warm, friendly researcher who asked detailed questions about their lives, did report a marked reduction in symptoms, equivalent to what might result from any drug on the market. Unbeknokwnst to them, the researchers used trick needles that didn’t pierce the skin.

Now here’s the interesting part. The same sham treatment was given to another group of subjects—but performed brusquely, without conversation. The benefits largely disappeared. It was the empathetic exchange between paractictioner and patient. Kaptchuk concluded, that made the difference.

What Kaptchuk demonstrated is what some medical thinkers have begun to call the “care effect”—the idea that the opportunity for patients to feel heard and cared for can improve their health. Scientific or no, alternative practitioners tend to express empathy, to allow for unhurried silences, and to ask what the meaning patients make of their pain. Kaptchuk’s study was a breakthrough: It showed that randomized, controlled trials could measure the effect of caring.

Nathanael Johnson, Writing in Wired magazine

Loving too much

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It is probably impossible to love any human being simply 'too much.'  We may love him too much in proportion to our love for God; but it is the smallness of our love for God, not the greatness of our love for the man, that constitutes the inordinacy.

But even this must be refined upon. Otherwise we shall trouble some who are very much on the right road but alarmed because they cannot feel towards God so warm a sensible emotion as they feel for the earthly Beloved. It is much to be wished--at least I think so--that we all, at all times, could. We must pray that this gift should be given us. But the question whether we are loving God or the earthly Beloved "more" is not, so far as concerns our Christian duty, a question about the comparative intensity of the two feelings. The real question is, which (when the alternative comes) do you serve, or choose, to put first? To which claim does your will, in the last resort, yield?

CS Lewis, The Four Loves

What’s behind Anger

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According to Albert Ellis, the most common irrational ideas behind anger are the following:

1. I must do well and win the approval of others for my performances, or else I will rate as a rotten person.

2. Others must treat me considerately and kindly and in precisely the way I want them to treat me.

3. The world (and the people in it) must arrange conditions under which I live, so that I get everything that I want when I want it.

Mark Cosgrove, Counseling for Anger

The persecuted victim

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Conspiracy theorists perceive and present themselves as the victim of organized persecution. At the same time, they see themselves as brave antagonists taking on the villainous conspirators. Conspiratorial thinking involves a self-perception of simultaneously being a victim and a hero.

Stephan Lewandowsky & John Cook, The Conspiracy Theory Handbook

Here's what I'm thinking

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"If you walk into a room as a senior person and innocently say, 'Here's what I'm thinking about this,' you've already skewed people's thinking," says Marine Gen. Peter Pace. His approach: "Start out with a question and don't voice an opinion."

Why? Because people can't line up behind you if they don't know where you stand. And if you present subordinates with an intellectual challenge, they feel freer to offer their opinions without fear of giving offense. "If you are looking for answers, ask the question," advises Pace, and "if you are looking for an honest critique, you ought to be the first person to self-critique." 

Michael Useem writing in Fortune Magazine

The Creative Process

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The creative process is often not responsive to conscious efforts to initiate or control it. It does not proceed methodically or in programmatic fashion. It meanders. It is unpredictable, digressive, capricious. As one scientist put it, “I can schedule my lab hours, but I can’t schedule my best ideas.”

Creative individuals have the capacity to free themselves from the web of social pressures in which the rest of us are caught. They don’t spend much time asking “What will people say?” The fact that “everybody’s doing it” doesn’t mean they’re doing it. They question assumptions that the rest of us accept. As J. P. Guilford has pointed out, they are particularly gifted in seeing the gap between what is and what could be (which means, of course, that they have achieved a certain measure of detachment from what is.

It is easy to fall into the romantic exaggeration in speaking of the capacity of people of originality to stand apart. Those who are responsible for the great innovative performances have always built on the work of others, and have enjoyed many kinds of social support, stimulation and communication. They are independent but they are not adrift.

John Gardner, Self-Renewal