Emotionally intelligent leader are consistently authentic

/

An emotionally intelligent leader is always clear about their intentions and where they are coming from. This means employees don’t have to worry about deciphering messages from leadership and keeps them best informed about the organization’s goals and motives. 

Authentic emotionally intelligent leaders share as much as they are able to with their people at all times and expect the same from others in their circle. They don’t feel the need to hide things from others, cover up their mistakes, or play favorites in their workplace. They treat everyone the same, regardless of their position or station in life.  

Harvey Deutschendorf writing in Fast Company

How Generative AI could spawn a new generation of Disinformation  

/

There is reason to believe that AI could really be the new variant of disinformation that makes lies about future elections, protests, or mass shootings both more contagious and immune-resistant. Consider, for example, the raging bird-flu outbreak, which has not yet begun spreading from human to human. A political operative—or a simple conspiracist—could use programs similar to ChatGPT and DALL-E 2 to easily generate and publish a huge number of stories about Chinese, World Health Organization, or Pentagon labs tinkering with the virus, backdated to various points in the past and complete with fake “leaked” documents, audio and video recordings, and expert commentary. A synthetic history in which a government-weaponized bird flu would be ready to go if avian flu ever began circulating among humans. A propagandist could simply connect the news to their entirely fabricated—but fully formed and seemingly well-documented—backstory seeded across the internet, spreading a fiction that could consume the nation’s politics and public-health response. The power of AI-generated histories, Horvitz told me, lies in “deepfakes on a timeline intermixed with real events to build a story.”

Matteo Wong writing in The Atlantic

We mistakenly conclude that we will feel tomorrow as we feel today

/

You’ve had an awful day—the cat peed on the rug, the dog peed on the cat, the washing machine is busted, World Wrestling has been preempted by Masterpiece Theatre—and you naturally feel out of sorts.

If at that moment you try to imagine how much you would enjoy playing cards with your buddies the next evening, you may mistakenly attribute feelings that are due to the misbehavior of real pets and real appliances ("I feel annoyed") to your imaginary companions ("I don't think I'll go because Nick always ticks me off").

Indeed, one of the hallmarks of depression is that when depressed people think about future events, they cannot imagine liking them very much.

Vacation? Romance? A night on the town? No thanks, I'll just sit here in the dark.

Their friends get tired of seeing them flail about in a thick blue funk, and they tell them that this too shall pass, that it is always darkest before the dawn, that every dog has its day, and several other important cliches. But from the depressed person's point of view, all the flailing makes perfectly good sense because when she imagines the future, she finds it difficult to feel happy today and thus difficult to believe that she will feel happy tomorrow.

We cannot feel good about an imaginary future when we are busy feeling bad about an actual present. But rather than recognizing that this is the inevitable result of the Reality First policy, we mistakenly assume that the future event is the cause of the unhappiness we feel when we think about it.

Our confusion seems terribly obvious to those who are standing on the sidelines, saying things like "You're feeling low right now because Pa got drunk and fell off the porch, Ma went to jail for whupping Pa, and your pickup truck got repossessed—but everything will seem different next week and you'll really wish you'd decided to go with us to the opera."

At some level we recognize that our friends are probably right. Nonetheless, when we try to overlook, ignore, or set aside our current gloomy state and make a forecast about how we will feel tomorrow, we find that it's a lot like trying to imagine the taste of marshmallow while chewing liver. It is only natural that we should imagine the future and then consider how doing so makes us feel, but because our brains are hell-bent on responding to current events, we mistakenly conclude that we will feel tomorrow as we feel today.

Daniel Gilbert, Stumbling on Happiness

Open People

/

By virtue of the fact that their maps are continually being challenged, open people are continually growing people. Because they never speak falsely they can be secure and proud in the knowledge that they have done nothing to contribute to the confusion of the world, but have served as sources of illuminations and clarification.

Finally, they are totally free to be. They are not burdened by any need to hide. They do not have to slink around in the shadows. They do not have to construct new lies to hide old ones. They need waste no effort covering tracks or maintaining disguise. And ultimately they find that the energy required for the self-discipline of honesty is far less than the energy required for secretiveness.

The more honest one is, the easier it is to continue being honest, just as the more lies one has told, the more necessary it is to lie again. By their openness, people dedicated to the truth live in the open, and through the exercise of their courage to live in the open, they become free from fear.

M Scott Peck
The Road Less Traveled

Cruelty wears justice as a disguise

/

The “No one to blame but themselves” rule “implies that once someone breaks a rule, you can do whatever you want to them and you cannot be blamed. We need that one mortal sin which will let us revoke a person's status as a human worthy of dignity, respect, empathy or anything else.

I think the reason so many racists could pass an ‘Are you a racist?’ polygraph test is that they don't think minorities are inhuman due to their color, but rather their supposed criminality. The single hint of a single minor crime meant absolutely anything done in response is justified. They all think their daily cruelty is in response to some extreme provocation.

If cruelty wears justice as a disguise, then anyone who believes in justice is at risk.”

David Wong writing for Cracked

Get inside your box!

/

Do you know one of the "box people"? When they meet someone new, the “box people” immediately ask a question to identify which box the person belongs inside. "What do you do?" “Where are you from?” the “box people” want to stick a label on each person. Once they know the "box" (based on class, politics, religious affiliation, race, etc.), they can avoid the work of getting to know someone and treating them as an individual.

Meeting someone living outside the set of predetermined boxes is a challenge to the arrangement of tidy little containers. This affront will be met with increasing demands to "Get inside a box!” There’s a difference between asking honest questions to understand someone because you see them as an end in themselves, and asking questions as a result of treating people as means to an end.

Each of us has the same decision to make: Whether or not to treat others as unique individuals.

Stephen Goforth

The value of arguing with your parents

/

Arguing with your parents as a teenager trains you to reject peer pressure. University of Virginia researchers observed more than 150 13-year-olds as they disputed issues like grades and chores with their mothers. Checking back in with the teens several years later, they discovered that those who had argued the longest and most convincingly—without yelling or whining—were also 40 percent less likely to have accepted offers of drugs and alcohol than the teens who were required to simply obey their mothers. Study author Joseph P. Allen says constructive debates with parents are “a critical training ground” for independent decision-making.

The Week Magazine

The Green Lumber Fallacy

/

A fellow made in fortune in green lumber without knowing what appears to be essential details about the product he traded—he wasn’t aware that green lumber stood for freshly cut wood, not lumber that was painted green.  

Meanwhile, by contrast, the person who related the story went bankrupt while knowing every intimate detail about the green lumber, which includes the physical, economic, and other aspects of the commodity.

The fallacy is that what one may need to know in the real world does not necessarily match what one can perceive through intellect: it doesn’t mean that details are not relevant, only that those we tend to believe are important constitute a distraction away from more central attributes to the price mechanism.  

Nassim Nicholas Taleb

 

The Deepfake Dangers Ahead

/

Because of advances in computing power, smarter machine learning algorithms and larger data sets, we will soon share digital space with a sinister array of AI-generated news articles and podcasts, deepfake images and videos—all produced at a once unthinkable scale and speed. As of 2018, according to one study, fewer than 10,000 deepfakes had been detected online. Today the number of deepfakes online is almost certainly in the millions. Deepfakes pose not only criminal risks but also threats to national security.

Read more at the Wall Street Journal

Emotionally intelligent leaders are willing to step out of their comfort zones

/

Growth and development require that we continue to push the boundaries of what we feel comfortable doing. Emotionally strong leaders recognize this and continue to push themselves and encourage those around them to go beyond what they already know and are familiar with. 

Emotionally intelligent leaders recognize that change is constant and that their success, the success of their people, and the success of the organization requires constant advancements and adjustments. 

Harvey Deutschendorf writing in Fast Company