Possibility and Despair

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Possibility … is to human existence what vowels are to speech. To live in pure possibility is like an infants utterance of vowel sounds, which fail to express something that is definite and clear. Vowels alone do not make for articulate speech, although without them nothing can be said at all. Similarly, “if a human existence is brought to the point where it lacks possibility, then it is in despair and is in deeper every moment it lacks possibility.” One cannot breathe without oxygen, but it is also impossible to breathe pure oxygen. Possibility is a kind of spiritual oxygen that a person cannot live without, but one cannot live on pure possibility either.

C. Stephen Evans, Kierkegaard: An Introduction

Think of AI as a tool

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The most pragmatic position is to think of A.I. as a tool, not a creature.

Mythologizing the technology only makes it more likely that we’ll fail to operate it well—and this kind of thinking limits our imaginations, tying them to yesterday’s dreams.  

If the new tech isn’t true artificial intelligence, then what is it? In my view, the most accurate way to understand what we are building today is as an innovative form of social collaboration.

A program like OpenAI’s GPT-4, which can write sentences to order, is something like a version of Wikipedia that includes much more data, mashed together using statistics. Programs that create images to order are something like a version of online image search, but with a system for combining the pictures.

Jaron Lanier writing in The New Yorker

My Life with One Arm

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Two months to the day after my accident, I went to see a therapist for the first time in my life. I didn’t know where to begin. We discussed loss and resilience and the will to live and adapt. But when I started talking about the outpouring of love and support that I had received since my accident, I began weeping uncontrollably. I realized that for the first time in my life, I was truly letting love into my heart. Losing an arm has connected me to others in a way I have never felt. Yes, I have suffered a tremendous loss, but in a way, I feel as if I have gained much more.

Miles O’Brian, Writing in New York Magazine

The Vacuum Cleaner Method

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I know a man who is a tremendous asset to his organization, not because of any extraordinary ability, but because he invariably demonstrates a triumphant thought pattern. Perhaps his associates view a proposition pessimistically, so he employs what he calls the “vacuum cleaner method.” That is, by a series of questions he “sucks the dust” out of his associates’ minds; he draws out their negative attitudes. Then quietly he suggests positive ideas concerning the proposition until a new set of attitudes gives them a new concept of the facts.

They often comment upon how different facts appear when this man “goes to work on them.” It’s the confidence attitude that makes the difference. This doesn’t rule out objectively appraising of facts. The inferiority complex victim sees all facts through discolored attitudes. The secret of correction is simply to gain a normal view, and that is always slanted on the positive side.

Norman Vincent Peale, The Power of Positive Thinking

The Power of Lonely

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The nice thing about medicine is it comes with instructions. Not so with solitude, which may be tremendously good for one’s health when taken in the right doses, but is about as user-friendly as an unmarked white pill. Too much solitude is unequivocally harmful and broadly debilitating, decades of research show. But one person’s “too much” might be someone else’s “just enough,” and eyeballing the difference with any precision is next to impossible.

People should be mindfully setting aside chunks of every day when they are not engaged in so-called social snacking activities like texting, g-chatting, and talking on the phone. For teenagers, it may help to understand that feeling a little lonely at times may simply be the price of forging a clearer identity.

“People make this error, thinking that being alone means being lonely, and not being alone means being with other people,” John Cacioppo of the University of Chicago, said. “You need to be able to recharge on your own sometimes. Part of being able to connect is being available to other people, and no one can do that without a break.”

Leon Neyfakh, writing in the Boston Globe

When to Ignore The Customers

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In 2009, Walmart lost a tremendous amount of money after having launched “an uncluttering project” and asking their customers whether they’d like “Walmart aisles to be less cluttered?”. An obvious “yes” costed the corporation a billion dollars: sure, customers were happy to see clean isles, but the sales quickly went down.

There are good examples when listening to what the customer wants leads to wrong conclusions: take a New Coke or a 1992 Shevy Caprice for example. Sometimes, running focus groups, testing in the usability lab, facilitating interviews may yield misleading results. Sometimes, ignoring what your customers say is the best course of action.

Kristian Mikhel writing in the UX Collective

Fake scientific papers are alarmingly common ­­­

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When neuropsychologist Bernhard Sabel put his new fake-paper detector to work, he was “shocked” by what it found. After screening some 5000 papers, he estimates up to 34% of neuroscience papers published in 2020 were likely made up or plagiarized; in medicine, the figure was 24%.

Jeffrey Barinard writing in Science Magazine

What the Surgeon General Misses about Loneliness

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US Surgeon General Vivek Murthy wrote a New York Times opinion piece two weeks ago about loneliness. He called it a “public health” problem and suggested the cause is isolation.  

The Washington Post published a follow-up article based on the significant response it got to the advisory, noting: 

Some (readers) pushed back on the notion that isolation was bad for them, describing themselves as introverts who prefer solitude or distrust others in their community.

So, on the one hand, you have people being told they are lonely, and they must be fixed, who do not see a problem themselves and aren't asking to be fixed. On the other hand, as noted by a sociologist in a Psychology Today article, the surgeon general's advisory reduces loneliness to "something people often bring on themselves." The fix for this lack of social interaction is, therefore, more social interaction. But there are "many outgoing people with active social lives (who) are lonely."  

Symptoms interpreted as caused by a lack of interaction may actually be caused by estrangement. This alienation would not be solved by additional interaction but by more meaningful connections. That is, quality instead of quantity. 

Stephen Goforth

 

 

You can’t Rush it

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When something changes in your life—you leave a job, end a relationship, or lose someone you love—recognize that you’re now in a transition. Transitions take time to move through, and they can’t be rushed. Your identity (as an employee, partner, or friend, perhaps) will have to shift and change, as well. Be kind and accepting, and don’t expect too much of yourself as you struggle through this time.

Kira Newman writing in Greater Good

How Emotionally intelligent leaders deal with failure and setbacks

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Emotionally intelligent leaders expect there to be roadblocks and emotionally prepare for them. They look for the lesson learned and don’t take setbacks personally.   To emotionally intelligent leaders, disappointments are part of their learning and development journey. They understand that these moments will ultimately help them to reach their goals.

Harvey Deutschendorf writing in Fast Company

Imagining the Future

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I often ask people to tell me how they think they would feel two years after the sudden death of an eldest child. As you can probably guess, this makes me quite popular at parties. I know, I know—this is a gruesome exercise and I’m not asking you to do it. But the fact is that if you did it, you would probably give me the answer that almost everyone gives me, which is some variation on "Are you out of your damned mind? I’d be devastated—totally devastated. I wouldn’t be able to get out of bed in the morning. I might even kill myself. So who invited you to this party anyway?"

If at this point I’m not actually wearing the person’s cocktail, I usually probe a bit further and ask how he came to his conclusion. What thoughts or images came to mind, what information did he consider? People typically tell me that they imagined hearing the news, or they imagined opening the door to an empty bedroom.

But in my long history of asking this question and thereby excluding myself from every social circle to which I formerly belonged, I have yet to hear a single person tell me that in addition to these heartbreaking, morbid images, they also imagined the other things that would inevitably happen in the two years following the death of their child.

Indeed, not one person has ever mentioned attending another child’s school play, or making love with his spouse, or eating a taffy apple on a warm summer evening, or reading a book, or writing a book, or riding a bicycle, or any of the many activities that we—and that they—would expect to happen in those two years.

Now, I am in no way, shape, or form suggesting that a bite of gooey candy compensates for the loss of a child. That isn’t the point. What I am suggesting is that the two-year period following a tragic event has to contain something—that is, it must be filled with episodes and occurrences of some kind—and these episodes and occurrences must have some emotional consequences.

Regardless of whether those consequences are large or small, negative or positive, one cannot answer my question accurately without considering them. And yet, not one person I know has ever imagined anything other than the single, awful event suggested by my question. When they imagine the future, there is a whole lot missing, and the things that are missing matter.

Daniel Gilbert, Stumbling on Happiness

If I Really Cared

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If I really cared . . .
I’d look you in the eyes when you talk to me;
I’d think about what you’re saying rather than what I’m going to say next;
I’d hear your feelings as well as your words.

If I really cared . . .
I’d listen without defending;
I’d hear without deciding whether you’re right or wrong;
I’d ask you why, not just how and when and where.

If I really cared . . .

More of Ruth Senter’s poem