In the nightly choice between reading a good book and watching a sitcom on television, we often [make the wrong choice] – although surveys show again and again that the average mood while watching sitcoms on television is mild depression.

Mean World Syndrome

People who watch a lot of television believe the world is more violent and intimidating than it actually is.

If you are growing up in a home where there is more than say three hours of television per day, for all practical purposes you live in a meaner world – and act accordingly – than your next-door neighbor who lives in the same world but watches less television.

Our surveys tell us that the more television people watch, the more they are likely to be afraid to go out on the street in their own community, especially at night. They are afraid of strangers and meeting other people.

George Gerbner

• George Gerbner articles on Mean World Syndrome
• Mean World Syndrome at Metafilter
• Mean World Syndrome at Wikipedia

Third-person effect

The belief that the mass media has a greater effect on others than it does on oneself. I like to call this the “adverts-don’t-affect-me” effect.

• Third Person Effect at Wikipedia

Television watching, one of the signature activities of our culture, correlates with brain problems.

How do we know this?

A recent study of more than 2,600 toddlers shows that early exposure to television between the ages of one and three correlates with problems paying attention and controlling impulses later in childhood.

For every hour of TV the toddlers watched each day, their chances of developing serious attentional difficulties at age seven increased by 10%.

Surely this only applies to children? No. Most of the book is about the recent discoveries that adult brains are also plastic, and how that is being used to treat stroke, alzheimer’s, and brain injuries.

Or you might be tempted to think that this applies only to children’s programming, and to MTV. Not so. In the words of Marshall McLuhan, “The medium is the message”:

Most people think that the dangers created by the media are a result of content. [..] Erica Michael and Marcel Just of Carnegie Mellon University did a brain scan study to test whether the medium is indeed the message. They showed that different brain areas are involved in hearing speech and reading it, and different comprehension centers in hearing words and reading them.

The pragmatic implication is that the medium is part of the message. [..] each medium creates a different sensory and semantic experience – and, we might add, develops different circuits in the brain.

Why and how does television alter your brain patterns?

It is the form of the television medium – cuts, edits, zooms, pans, and sudden noises – that alters the brain, by activating what Pavlov called the “orienting response”, which occurs whenever we sense a sudden change in the world around us, especially a sudden movement. We instinctively interrupt whatever we are doing to turn, pay attention, and get our bearings.

The result?

The response is physiological: the heart rate decreases for 4 or 5 seconds.Television triggers this response at a far more rapid rate than we experience it in life, which is why we can’t keep our eyes off the TV screen, even in the middle of an intimate conversation, and why people watch TV a lot longer than they intend.

Because typical music videos, action sequences, and commercials trigger orienting responses at a rate of one per second, watching them puts us into continuous orienting response with no recovery.

No wonder people report feeling drained from watching TV.

Yet we acquire a taste for it and find slower changes boring. The cost is that such activities such as reading, complex conversation, and listening to lectures becomes more difficult.

The Brain That Changes Itself is a fascinating book that will change the way you think about your brain, and how you go about your daily activities.

My short notes on Predictably Irrational, by Dan Ariely. An excellent book. Entertaining, and covers much fascinating ground from social psychology and behavioral economics. Some of the experiments Dan and his team designed are fiendish!

Value is relative

We only know what we want when we see it in context. The bike the Tour de France winner rides. A set of speakers compared to another.

We only know what something is worth, or how much we like it, when comparing to other similar things (purchases, partners, jobs, etc..

We tend to choose the middle option. A high price option on a restaurant menu increases average order price, because it makes the rest seem cheap in comparison.

If we have several difficult to compare items, but two are easily comparable and one of those two is clearly superior to the other, we will prefer that one to all the other options. We can introduce a ‘decoy’ version of one item, slightly less appealing, so that the target item is chosen. In A v B, introduce -A, and most people will choose B.

Video: The truth about relativity

Arbitrary coherence

When we seriously contemplate buying something at a given price, that price becomes our anchor. From then on we judge other similar items relative to that price. We are coherent with our first valuation of something, even if that price is now irrelevant, arbitrary.

Items on sale attempt to get you to anchor at the ‘pre-sale’ price, before introducing the sale price.

Video: Starbucks, Dunkin Donuts, and Anchors

Herding

Joining a queue because other people are in it. Preferring a busy restaurant. Assuming something is good (or bad) on the basis of other people’s behavior.

Self-herding is when you do what you did before, because, well, that’s what you do. (See also: commitment)

We are irrationally attracted to FREE(!) things. We often pay a high cost in time and opportunity cost for them. Discounting from cent to free has a much higher influence than 2 cents to 1 cent. Free is a whole different place than something that has a cost.

Social Norms vs Market Norms

Pay someone cheap, they don’t work much, because they use market norms and don’t feel it is worthwhile. Pay someone nothing, they work hard, because they use social norms.

Gifts stay within social norms, unless you mention the price of it, in which case people revert to market norms.

Thinking about money makes people more self-reliant, selfish, solitary, individualistic.

Counting money is a pain buffer, makes people feel more powerful.

If both are present, market norms displace social norms, and it is very difficult to get the social norm back.

With gifts, benefits, and a good atmosphere, companies try and create a social contract with their employees. The employees hence expect the other side, the company to be there for them when they needed. Social norms require a high level of commitment from the company. Google and lots of startups get this right.

Video: The Cost of Social Norms

Emotions

When not experiencing the emotion, we are bad at predicting our responses in a strong emotional state, such as sexual arousal, anger, hunger, excitement, jealousy, etc.

It is not easy to look from one emotional state to another.

Most people are aware that they procrastinate. Giving them tools to commit to a deadline helps them overcome it.

The best remedy for procrastination is an external force: Automatic payroll deductions for saving, teacher imposed assignment deadlines, exercising with a partner, etc.

Engineer the world to force you to achieve your goal.

Simpler schedules are easier to commit to and more likely to be followed.

Package actions up into something that feels important enough to avoid procrastination. The same way auto-dealers package up our servicing into large mileage increments, and do all of it at once.

Video: The Influence of Arousal

Endowment effect

We value what we own more than other people do. Sellers usually value their items more than buyers do.

The sellers focuses on the loss of the enjoyment of the item. The buyer focuses on alternate uses for the money. Seller and buyer expect the other to see things the same was as them.

The more work you put into something, the more ownership you feel. The Ikea Effect, because you assembled it yourself.

The endowment effect is why companies offer ‘trial’ rates and ‘money back guarantees’. Once we have something, own it, we value it more. A ‘virtual ownership’ applies to trying on clothes, and especially to online auctions.

The endowment effect applies to ideas too. We don’t want to let go of them, so they become a rigid ideology.

People dislike losing options, and will work quite hard to keep all their options open, eve if that means occasionally ignore their best option.

Often, we are presented with two or more very similar options. In this case the biggest cost is that of not choosing – the time spent deciding is time we are enjoying neither option.

Life usually conforms to our expectations, so you can influence results by setting expectations. Marketing sets expectations.

Video: Dating, doors, and loss aversion

Priming

Priming is putting thoughts into someones head.

Often, an experiment will ask people to unscramble a word, that word is chosen to make them think the priming thought.

Priming is a context effect: Being influenced by something irrelevant in our immediate environment.

Two parties in a conflict, having already strongly committed to one side, need a neutral third party to resolve their conflict.

Video: The Effect of Expectations

Placebos

Placebos are belief and conditioning. Many, maybe most, surgical procedures are not placebo tested.

Honesty

We internalize social virtues, so our conscience keeps us broadly honest.

Given the opportunity, most people will cheat a little bit. A greater potential and reward for cheating doesn’t increase the cheating. Being reminded of the Ten Commandments, or of honor systems, eliminates the cheating.

People are more likely to cheat for non-monetary items – steal a pen from work, but not the value of the pen from the petty cash box.

It seems that people will only cheat within the limits their conscience (super-ego) allows them. We cheat to the extent we can justify it to ourselves.

“It is difficult to get a man to understand something when his salary depends upon his not understanding it” – Upton Sinclair

Video: The Context of our Character

Dan Ariely maintains an excellent website with links to research papers from the book, and much more, here: http://www.predictablyirrational.com/.

As an Amazon reviews says, “arguably the best book ever on what is increasingly becoming the science of persuasion.”

If you want to understand why you felt compelled to give money to a Hare Krishna devotee, how car salesman or realtor’s work, and much more, you should read this.

It’s also a very easy and enjoyable read. These are my notes. They cover all the content in the book, but don’t link to research. In the book, most of the statements have links to research papers to back them up.

Get Influence: The Psychology of Persuasion from your local library, this has sold so many copies they are bound to have some.

Contrast principle: Two different things presented together or sequentially will feel more different than they really are. Hence sell the expensive item first, as the other items will seem cheap after that. Good cop / bad cop is about creating a contrast between the two, to increase liking of the ‘good cop’.

A fixed action pattern is an automatic behavior pattern often triggered by a single item in the information. Also known as a heuristic.

A Hare Krishna devotee presses a flower or a copy of the Bhagavad-gītā into your hand (that happened to me), or a store gives you free samples, and you feel awkward about taking it for free. You end up giving money or buying something you don’t want. That’s the norm of reciprocity at work.

We also reciprocate to concessions. Start witha large but not unreasonable request, which gets rejected, then ‘retreat’ to the target request. People who comply after this technique has been used on them feel more satisfied with their decision than those who agree straight away, because they ‘bargained’ for it. They shaped the outcome, so they feel ownership for it.

A recent research article I read (apologies, can’t locate link right now) supports this, by saying that when the seller of a product is the first to quote a price (typically quite high), the product sells for more than when the buyer opens the negotiation (with typically a low price).

Surprise increase the likelihood of the target using heuristics instead of controlled responding. A shaved headed person in orange robes shoving an ancient Indian text at you, that’s surprising.

We wish to think of ourselves, and appear to others, as being consistent in our behavior, we apply the consistency principle heuristic. We make up reasons to justify our behavior, to seem logical and in line with our previous behaviors.

Foot in the door technique: Start small and build. Extract a small inconsequential commitment, then a slightly bigger one, and so on.

Commitments are most effective when they are:

• Public: Forces us to stick to it to look consistent. Especially effective for those whith lots of pride or public self-consciousness.
• Active: Perform some action to take the commitment, such as writing, swearing an oath (also public), etc.
• Effort-full: The bigger the price the bigger the commitment. Hazing / initiation ceremonies. Extract a bigger effort with foor-in-the-door technique.
• Freely chosen:Avoid threats, or any external reward such as prizes. The commitment must feel freely chosen for the person to accept responsibility for it, it must feel internally motivated.

Caveat: If the commitment alone gets the same result as the goal, we may not pursue the goal. For example if you are going to attend law school so that people will think you are clever, and telling people you are going to attend gets the response and recognition desired, the motivation to actually attend is removed.

Commitments get internally justified, they grow their own legs. Car salesman will often low ball you, offer an artificially low price.
You gladly accept the low price. Time passes as you fill in some forms, test drive, etc. They take the paperwork to their manager for final approval. Manager comes out and explains the salesman made a mistake, the price is higher.
You would of refused the higher price originally, but now you are committed, and much more likely to accept the high price.

The greater the number of people who find any idea correct, the more a given individual will perceive the idea to be correct. This is the Social Proof heuristic.

We look to others for behavioral guidance when we are unsure, in an unclear, unfamiliar, or ambiguous situation. Often in such situations others do the same thing, which leads to pluralistic ignorance.

In an unclear emergency situation, a lone bystander will help, but a group looks to each other to decide how to act, and does nothing. This is the Bystander effect.

In an emergency situation you need to reduce the uncertainty experienced by bystanders:

• Pick one and speak directly to him
• Say you need help
• Tell him how to help (”Call an ambulance”, “Help me out of my car”, etc)

Social proof is strongest when the others we look to for guidance are similar to ourselves. Hence Joe Average in television adverts.

Individuals in psychological pain look to others in similar situations to see how to deal with it. After a widely reported high-profile suicide, suicides increase, often using a similar method. Copycat crimes work in a similar fashion.

Books, products, feature One Million Sold or New York Times Bestseller on the packaging. Informing someone that many people like him (NY Times readers) have adopted a certain behavior makes them more likely to also adopt that behavior. Testimonials.

It’s pretty shocking, I know, but the evidence is plentiful.

Physical attractiveness triggers the Halo Effect, where one positive characteristic dominates the way that person is viewed by others.

Similarity

We like people like us, whether that ‘like us’ is because they share opinions, personality traits, background, or lifestyle. To influence, try and match the target in as many ways as possible:

• Dress
• Interests
• Background
• Age, religion, politics, specific habits
• Posture, verbal style, mood, etc. See Mirroring.

Compliments

People want to be liked. Be nice, pay compliments, send a greeting card. There is evidence that positive comments make the giver more likable even when the receiver knows the compliment is not genuine.

Contact and co-operation

Positive familiarity. Familiarity caused by contact leads to liking, unless the contact occurs under unpleasant circumstances.

Here is a recipe for creating cross-group hatred: Split people into two groups. Name each one, to increase group identity (creating a minimum group). Wait. Then mix the two groups in competitive actions.

And here’s how to fix it: Successful joint ventures towards common goals.

Association

An innocent association with good or bad things will influence the way people think about that us

• Showing a credit card logo to people with positive associations to credit cards (most people) made them tip more, even when paying cash.
• Killing the messenger: An association with bad news, used to be bad news for the messenger.
• Celebrity endorsments. Sponsorship of the Olympics, or whatever cultural event is popular, even if the connection doesn’t make sense.
• Stand attractive people by your product. Their beauty somehow ‘rubs off’ to make your product more appealing.
• Hometown team victory makes us feel good, even though we obviously had no part in the victory.
• Reductio ad Hitlerum: “Hitler was a vegetarian, so vegetarianism is wrong.”

Taken to extremes this is a personality flaw, showing low self worth, exhibited by groupies, sports fans, etc.

The seminal research on obedience to authority, and probably the most famous study in social psychology, is the Stanley Milgram experiment.

Opportunities seem more valuable when they are less available. Scarcity heuristic applies to information and goods.

If something is in short supply, everyone else must of wanted it, so it must be good.
If something is in short supply, we are about to lose the freedom of acquiring it.

Reactance theory says that an attempt to restrict something makes us want it more, and hence assume it is more valuable and desirable than we previously thought.

Things that recently became scarce are perceived as more valuable than things that have been scarce a long time. We react to a freedom being taken away.

Competition for a scarce item increases perceived value of the item, beyond scarcity alone, or social proof alone. Hence: Auctions.

By Thomas Gilovich, social psychologist and CSI Fellow, this well written book explains some of the reasoning and deduction errors we make when trying to understand the world, and ways to avoid making those errors.

This is an easy and engaging read, and offers several straightforward techniques to avoid making common reasoning errors. I recommend you look up How We Know What Isn’t So: The Fallibility of Human Reason in Everyday Life in your local library, or get it second-hand from Amazon for less than a posh cup of coffee.

These are my notes / summary of the book.

I. Cognitive determinants of belief

2. Something out of nothing: The mis-perception and misinterpretation of random data

We are predisposed to see order, pattern, and meaning in the world, and we find randomness, chaos, and meaninglessness unsatisfying.
As a consequence we tend to ’see’ order where there is none, and we spot meaningful patterns where only the vagrancies of chance are operating.

Detecting patterns and seeing connections is very useful, leads to discovery and advance. But the tendency is so strong we sometimes do it when there was nothing to spot.

Example of hot hand in basketball. Why?

• Availability heuristic: We remember the long streaks, forget the single shots. Can interpret near-misses as evidence of ‘hot’ or ‘cold’ player.

• People have faulty intuitions about what chance sequences look like.

  See: R. Falk (1981) The perception of randomness. In Proceedings, Fifth international conference for the psychology of mathematics education.

  In a coin toss, people expect a near perfect alternation of heads and tails. In a series of 20 tosses, there is a 50/50 chance of getting 4 heads in a row, and 10% chance of six in a row. Clustering illusion.

St Louis Gateway Arch is one of the worlds largest optical illusion. It appears much taller than it is wide, yet height and base width are the same.

Representativeness heuristic: “Like goes with like”. We expect things that go together to look similar. We expect instances of a type (librarian) to look like the prototype (a cliche librarian). Complex effect stem from complex causes. Effects look like their causes: Jagged handwriting means jagged nerves, heartburn comes from hot/spicy foods, etc.

Representativeness usually very helpful. Occasionally mis-applied. The salient (’prominent or conspicuous’) feature of something is what we remember, and apply the representativeness heuristic to that. The salient feature of a random sequence is the even mix of all the outcomes.

Law of averages is, by statisticians, correctly called the law of large numbers. The even mix of outcomes is only true for very large random sample. There is no ‘law of small numbers’.

Stock market: Random walk, but chartists insist they see patterns in the randomness.

In any random distribution (e.g. x,y plots on a graph), there will be a way of segmenting it (along the axes, diagonally, in bands, etc) that will appear non-random. Carving up data after the fact is meaningless. If we think we see a pattern in the data, test that pattern on other independent sets of data.
Unfortunately, for most people hypotheses constructed on one set of data are considered proved by that same data. This is why medical trials announce their goal, the expected outcome, ahead of time.

Once we think we see order in randomness, humans are exceptionally good at justifying it with a post-hoc theory. Improv comedy teaches ‘jump and justify’; say something random then justify it, it’s surprisingly easy.
For example people let to believe they are above or below the average at some task can explain the difference quite easily, even when the experimenters assigned the above/below at random.
Experiments with split-brain patients, where they justify what the other part of the brain just did.

Once a person has (mis)identified a random pattern as a ‘real’ phenomenon, it will not exist as a puzzling, isolated fact about the world. Rather, it is quickly explained and readily integrated into the person’s pre-existing theories and beliefs. These theories then serve to bias that persons evaluation of new information. People cling tenaciously to their beliefs in the face of hostile evidence.

Regression to the mean: When two variables are related, but imperfectly so, an extreme value on one tends to be matched by a less extreme value on the other. A high number roll on the dice tends to be followed by a lower number, and a low number by a higher one. A companies disastrous years tend to be followed by betters ones. Students with exceptionally good grades in high-school tend to do slightly less well in college.

Regression can be understood than in any performance (game, test, financial year, etc) there is a part of talent and a part of chance. An very high score is more likely to be a good student with luck in their favor, rather than an extremely good student with luck working against them, simply because there are more ‘good’ students than ‘extremely good’ students. So a very high score is likely to be followed by a slightly lower one, because it is unlikely to get chance that much in favor two times in a row.

Most people understand regression, but make two mistakes:

• Insufficiently ‘regressive’ when making predictions. The ‘next’ value after an extreme one is closer to the average than they tend to predict.
• Regression fallacy: Fail to recognize statistical regression, and explain it away with a superfluous and often complex causal theory. Ad-hoc justification where none was needed.

The regression fallacy shapes people (parents and teachers, mostly) perception of the effectiveness of rewards and punishments. A good performance is likely to be followed by a less good one, and a bad one by a less bad one. If the good performance is rewarded, the reward will be perceived as ineffective because the good performance was not repeated. If a bad performance is punished the punishment will be perceived as effective because the bad performance will not be repeated.
That notwithstanding, psychologists have known for some time that rewarding desirable behavior is generally more effective in shaping behavior than punishing undesirable responses.
See: B. F. Skinner (1953) Science and human behavior.

3. Too much from too little: The misinterpretation of incomplete and unrepresentative data

Using empirical evidence as proof: “I’ve seen it happen”, “I know someone who did”, etc. If a phenomenon exists, there must be some positive evidence – ‘instances’ of its existence visible to us. So empirical positive statements are necessary for a belief to be true, but they are not sufficient. We also need to know what goes in the other boxes.

Many of the beliefs we hold are about the relationships between two variables (’takes vitamin C’ and ‘gets better’). Say we were investigating ‘vitamin C megadose’ on cancer patients. We notice some patients get better after taking mega-doses of vitamin C. That prompts us to start investigating. Positive outcomes under treatment are one box, we need to know the other three:

If we stop at noticing some patients getting better, all we have is box a. All we have is the ‘illusion of validity’.

For vitamin C to be effective, the probability of getting better after taking it [a / (a + b)] must be higher than the probability of getting better after not taking it [c / (c + d)].

This is often difficult to do intuitively, because box ‘a’ is the most salient. We notice things happening, not things not happening.

We often seek only evidence to confirm our beliefs; we should also seek information to disprove them, and only hold our beliefs if such evidence is not available.

Often the evidence in the other boxes is not available, particularly in evaluating selection criteria. How do we test whether a companies interview process is effective? We are asking the relationship between ‘passes interview’ and ‘performs well at job’. But it’s very nature, we don’t have the data on job performance for people who didn’t pass the interview.

The only data we have is a and c, we can only compare the success rate of those who pass the selection. If the base rate of success is high (most people could perform well, only the best performers apply, etc), a would be higher than c whatever the selection criteria, so we would spuriously conclude our criteria are good.

It is not possible to be confident about the selection process without the data on those who were not selected.

Furthermore, simply being accepted can give someone a competitive advantage. Being admitted to a better school, getting a research grant, or working with high-performing colleagues will all improve an individuals performance compared to someone of similar initial ability who didn’t get selected.

Effectiveness of public policy is similarly difficult to measure, because we can’t both set the policy and not set it.

Often the lifestyles we lead, the roles we play, and the positions we occupy in a social network, deny us access to important classes of information and thus distort our view of the world. Overcoming that bias is difficult: We must first recognize the existence of a class of information we have not been exposed to, and then accurately characterize what that information is like.

Self-fulfilling prophecies: Have got a lot of attention. For a prophecy to be self-fulfilling there must be a mechanism that translates the expectation into confirmatory action. They often serve to exagerate a belief that holds a kernel of truth.
Thinking a bank is in trouble (usually with good reason), creditors will withdraw their money, and the bank will really be in trouble. Behaving in an unfriendly and defensive manner because you think someone is hostile will often produce that very hostility.

True self-fulfilling prophecies are ones in which a persons belief elicits the very behavior originally anticipated.
A seemingly self-fulfilling prophecy is one which alters a persons world or limits their responses, in such a way to make it very difficult or impossible for that expectation to be proved wrong. If someone thinks that I am unfriendly, they will avoid me, so I will have no opportunity to prove them wrong. If a sports player is thought incompetent, he won’t get to play, so won’t be able to prove himself competent. The continued absence of positive contribution can easily be mistaken for an absence of talent, when it is simply an absence of opportunity.

Negative first-impressions are generally more stable than positive ones, because we keep interacting only with people who created positive first impressions.

4. Seeing what we expect to see: The biased evaluation of ambiguous and inconsistent data

Information consistent with our pre-existing beliefs is generally accepted at face value, whereas evidence that contradicts them is critically scrutinized and discounted. Our beliefs are much less responsive than they should be to the implications of new information. This is a sane and necessary strategy. If a belief has a lifetime of support, it is perfectly valid to be skeptical of evidence that contradicts it.
Well supported beliefs have earned their inertia. We need to be wary of the beliefs that don’t have a solid foundation, such as cultural stereotypes, social norms, and traditions.

Ambiguous information is usually perceived in a way that fits out expectations. We may not even be aware of the ambiguity – it gets resolved before reaching conscious awareness.

Gamblers tend to attribute their losses to outside forces (chance, the referee, a team injury), but their wins to themselves (knew the team well, studied the form). We re-write our history to discount our losses and bolster our wins.

By carefully scrutinizing information that does not fit our beliefs, we can usually find a way of either discounting or re-interpreting it.

Scientists use a set of formal safeguards to prevent their own erroneous thinking affecting their results:

• Statistical measures to guard against the mis-perception of randomness
• Control groups and random sampling to avoid drawing inference from incomplete or unrepresentative data
• ‘Blind’ observers to eliminate experimenter bias.
• Precisely specify in advance the meaning of various outcomes, and objectively determine those outcomes. These rules are the ‘context of justification’, used when testing an idea. Idea generating is much more open. Science works by flashes of inspiration followed by rigorous testing. The rigorous testing is what differentiates scientific inquiry from everyday life.

Multiple endpoints: By not precisely specifying an expected outcome, we can pick any one and claim it as success. Psychics will use very vague descriptions, so that we can apply them to our lives and perceive them as true. If the subject is fuzzy (’personal well-being’ for example), we are likely to seize upon any subsequent measure of it that fits our initial beliefs.

Variable windows: By not specifying an endpoint to a prediction, it stays ‘open’ until it comes true. ‘Thing happen in threes’ because we could ‘things happening’ after the third one has occured, whenever that may be. The third event defines the time window for our prediction. With a wide enough variable window, beliefs can only be confirmed.

Multi-faceted expectation: For any two sufficiently complex entities, we can produce a mapping of one onto the other that will produce a certain amount of overlap, and allows us to claim they are similar in some way. Often used with the representativeness heuristic.

You have a strong need for other people to like you and for them to admire you. At times you are extroverted, affable, and sociable, while at other times you are introverted, wary, and reserved. You have a great deal of unused energy which you have not turned to your advantage. While you have some personality weaknesses, yo are generally able to compensate for them. You prefer a certain amount of change and variety and become dissatisfied whne hemmed in by restrictions and limitations. You pride yourself on being an independent thinker and do not accept others opinions without satisfactory proof. You have a tendency to be critical of yourself. Some of your aspirations tend to be pretty unrealistic.

If you see yourself in that description, you are not alone. It is multi-faceted, so most people will find the part that related to them the most salient, and the statements are so general (multiple endpoints) that they are bound to ring true. This is how horoscopes work.

One-sided versus two-sided events:

• One-sided events are ones that are memorable only when they turn out a certain way: ‘The phone always rings when I’m in the bath’, ‘You wait forever for a bus and three come along at once’, etc. If the phone does not ring whilst you are in the bath, the non-event does not register.
• Two-sided events are ones that register regardless of the outcome: Vacations, dates, gambling, buying a stock, etc. Both outcomes stand out from the stream of experience.

In two-sided events, often negative outcomes are remembered better than positive ones, as they require more rationalization to incorporate them into our self-image and understanding of the world.
In one-sided events, we are more likely to remember the ’side’ of events that has meaning to us, which is usually the one that reinforces our world-view. If I believe my dreams are prophetic, I will remember those much more than the other dreams. If I believe that strange things happen during a new moon, I will notice and remember the strange things, not the ordinary things (strange things not happening).

Many one-sided events only ‘exist’ when they are confirmed. If a fortune teller says you will have twins, and you have twins, you remember the fortune teller, link the two events, and form a strong memory. If you have one child, you probably won’t think of the fortune teller at all. And even if you did, the fortune is not contradicted, simple un-confirmed. You could have twins later in life.

One-sided events tend to be temporally unfocused, they have variable windows to be confirmed in. A ‘prophetic’ dream, a fortune, doesn’t have a fixed date, so only the positive outcome is acknowledged.
Two-sided events tend to have fixed windows: A sporting event, a vacation, a job interview. The closed window forces us to acknowledge both outcomes.

In two-sided events, both outcomes produce the same intensity of emotion (winning or losing a bet). In a one-sided event, only one of the outcomes has any emotional weight: It ‘always’ seems to rain when you forget your umbrella, because getting wet has an emotional attachment (hair ruined, clothes soaked, etc), whereas not-getting-wet doesn’t.

Definitional asymmetries: ‘American tourists in London are loud’, ‘I can always spot fake breasts’, ‘You need to hit rock-bottom to bounce back’. All of these are difficult or impossible to disprove: We only notice the loud people, we don’t notice fake breasts that we didn’t spot, and how can you say if someone has hit rock-bottom or not? Definitional asymmetries are all one-sided events.

One-sided events tend to have a ‘normal’ outcome with a high base rate, which we don’t notice because it is part of everyday life (’look, it’s not a full moon’), and an less usual more salient outcome (’o oh, it’s a full moon!’).

All of the above relate to the availability heuristic.

II. Motivational and social determinants of questionable beliefs

5. Seeing what we want to see: Motivational determinants of belief

Endowment effect: We value something more when it is ours. Ownership creates an inertia that prevents many potentially beneficial transactions from occurring.

The endowment effect applied to humans is the Lake Wobegon effect, or Illusory superiority. This is particularly true on ambiguous traits (’intelligence’, ’sensitivity’, ‘idealism’), and less true on more specific traits (’thriftiness’, ‘being well-read’). If a specific definition is given in the question, the above average effect tends to disappear: People are not lying or cheating, it’s just that the first thing that comes to mind when asked an ambiguous question is usually something they are good at, something salient in their lives.

We attribute success internally and failure externally. Thanks to their own resources, they succeeded. Because of the others/the environment, they failed.
Many psychologists hold that we do this to maintain self-esteem. There is also a cognitive explanation: Succeeding at something is at least partly due to our own effort, and thus warrants some internal attribution. Failing at something usually happens despite our best efforts, so often invovles an unfavorable external situation.

People are more likely to believe things they want to believe, but are constrained by objective evidence and the need to construct a justification that would presuade a dispassionate observer. We draw the desired conclusion only if we can muster up enough evidence to support it. It is in this sense that most people think of themselves are objective.
People often do not realize that their selection and interpretation of data is biased by their goals – the data could be interpreted a different way, and there is other data they ignored. They may well be able to justify opposite conclusions on different occasions.

How we ‘filter’ data to ensure it supports our goals:

• Seeking only to confirm
• Select who we consult. By judiciously choosing whom we consult on an issue, we can increase our chances of hearing what we want to hear.
• Amount of information: If the initial results confirm out expectations, we stop looking. If they don’t, we keep looking.

We should not stop at Can I believe this?, but should progress to Must I believe this?.

These are some of the ways we skew the evidence in the world, frame it to support our beliefs. This is healthy. People who can’t frame effectively run the risk of depression.

Beliefs are like possessions: We acquire the ones we think will make us feel good, and cling tightly to the ones we have.

6. Believing what we are told: The biasing effects of secondhand information

Telling a good story: The speaker needs their message to be worthy of the listeners attention. For the listener the interaction must be worthwhile in some way. The message must be understandable (not assume too much knowledge of the listener) and yet not too detailed (not assume too little knowledge of the listener).

Sharpening and Leveling: What the speaker construes as the gist of the message is emphasized, ’sharpened’, where are details thought to be less important are de-emphasized, ‘leveled’.

One results of sharpening and leveling is that we often develop exaggerated or extreme views of people we have only been told about.

One way to make a message more entertaining or seemingly informative is to increase it’s immediacy. Instead of the story happening to a friend of a friend’s colleague, have it happen directly to friend or family member, or even better, you. Often such alterations are intended for the self-aggrandizement of the speaker. It places them closer to center-stage. Other times it is simply an effort to make the story more salient, more vivid and concrete.

Increasing immediacy makes it difficult for the listener to accurately gauge the reliability of your message:

• Reducing the hops: We all know that the more hops a message has been through, the less reliable it is. Increasing the immediacy of a message for the sake of entertainment or self-aggrandizement also makes a message seem more reliable than it is.
• Changing the origination (’my brother’, instead of ‘my brother’s friend from work’): Your brother might be trustworthy, so we trust the message, but your brother’s friend is an inveterate liar. The original source of the message has been obscured.

Presenting and accepting remote accounts as secondhand is misleading when estimating the prevalence of a phenomenon in the general population. If something happened to lots of your friends cousins, it is happening a lot. If lots of your friends cousins heard a story about someone else’s friends cousin, and passed it on, there might be a single case.

In attempting to be informative, we might level some of the qualifications in the original message. This is often the case when scientific findings are reported in the news media.
Sometimes the facts are stretched to ‘help’ their audience get the message. This results in hysterical public service campaigns, that elicit far more fear than the original risk warranted (drugs, ’stranger danger’, terrorism, etc). The facts are stretched beyond recognition to make a more compelling story.
Parents are often guilty of this distortion in attempting to motivate behavior in their children.

The desire to entertain often creates a conflict for the speaker between satisfying the goal of accuracy and the goal of entertainment. There is often a tacit agreement between speaker and audience that the truth may be stretched: Tabloids and ‘light entertainment’ news shows are granted this permission. “One of the most common sources of such inaccuracy is the dissemination of unfounded or fallacious claims by news and other media organizations that try and entice by their ability to entertain.” The demand for news has been met by and artificial increase in supply.

Plausibility: Inaccurate or fictitious stories are sometimes told and retold because they just seem so plausible, that we let our critical guard down. Our standards for plausibility are often very low, a decent irony is often enough (the creator of the song “Don’t worry be happy” committing suicide, for example, or someone at the patent office resigning because there was nothing left to invent).

Summary: As we have seen in previous chapters, the data from our own experience is often biased and incomplete. In this chapter we saw that data from others is also. It is therefore important to locate unbiased, complete sources of base-rate data (scientific inquiry mainly), and use those to asses how likely it is that our own perceptions or those of our social group are true. If the base rate data and our personal experience concur, then we are likely correct. If they don’t a reliable base rate should be our guide. If the base rate data is to reliable, at least we know that we don’t know.

How to assess secondhand information:

• Consider the source: The New York Times or the National Enquirer? A rock star or a researcher? An actor who plays a doctor on TV, or a practicing medical doctor.
• Trust facts, distrust projections: Predicting the future is hard, even for an expert. What looks like an exponential curve can turn out to be sigmoidal.
• Watch for Sharpening and Leveling.
• Be wary of testimonials. One striking human interest story does not tell you anything about prevalence or risk.

7. The imagined agreement of others: Exaggerated impressions of social support

What we believe is heavily influenced by what we think others believe. This is usually a good strategy. However we often exaggerate the extent to which others hold the same beliefs as us. We think we have more social support for our opinions than we really do.

This is the false consensus effect: This is a relative effect. We realize if our belief is in the minority. We underestimate by how much in the minority.

Reasons:

• Motivational: A desire to maintain a positive assessment of our own judgment.
• Social: We interact with people who agree with us
• Context interpretation: We assume that given the same context, everyone will infer the same thing. As we see others in the same context, we assume they come to the same conclusions as us. As a result the false consensus effect is strongest for beliefs we attribute to external factors (buy stock in Ford or Google), and weakest for ones we attribute internally (name your son Jacob or Ian). The context is often ambiguous, and different people resolve the ambiguity in different ways, often without noticing it.

Inadequate feedback from others: People are generally reluctant to openly question another person’s beliefs (Adults, that is. Children do it all the time). Only intimate friends and relatives can be counted upon for honest feedback. More casual acquaintances often side-step the awkwardness of disagreement and thus leave us without essential corrective feedback. Because so much disagreement remains hidden, our beliefs are not properly shaped by healthy scrutiny and debate.

III. Examples of questionable and erroneous beliefs

(not summarized)

IV. Where do we go from here

11. Challenging dubious beliefs: The roles of social science

The real purpose of [the] scientific method is to make sure Nature hasn’t misled you into thinking you know something you actually don’t know. R. Pirsig, Zen and the Art of Motorcycle Maintenance.

To avoid erroneous beliefs it is necessary that we deveop certain habits of mind that can shore up various deficiencies in our everyday inferential abilities. Fortunately, there is reason to believe that these corrective habits of mind are not difficult to develop. Students familiar with the work on errors and biases readily apply the learning to their everyday lives.

Most important mental habit is realizing the folly of trying to draw conclusions from incomplete and unrepresentative data.

Ask: What do the other three cells look like?

Information presented as firsthand is often secondhand or more remote, and from a less trustworthy source. Be sure you know where you information originated before assessing it’s value.

Many of these habits are core to scientific research. Familiarity with that world helps. Gives you valuable exposure to uncertainty and doubt, a healthy skepticism, and the awareness of how hard it can be to really know something with certainty.

Exposure to the ‘probabilistic’ sciences (psychology, economics, social sciences, etc) may be more effective in teaching these habits than the ‘deterministic’ (physics, chemistry, etc) sciences.
Probabilistic sciences deal with phenomena that are not perfectly predictable, and with causes that are generally neither necessary nor sufficient. The death of a spouse is associated with deterioration in health. However not all partners health deteriorates (not sufficient), and people’s health deteriorates for other reasons (not necessary).
To compensate for this lack of determinism, probabilistic sciencists must be aware of statistical regression, sample bias, and the importance of control groups.

Social sciences deal with everyday phenomenon, so it easier for them than physical sciences to make the probabilistic tools of reasoning readily understandable and available.

Social scientists should no longer suffer from physics envy. They cannot match their explanatory power or predictive precision, but specifically because of this, they are better equipped to deal with the messy, complex phenomena of real life. Their tools and process, rather than their content, may turn out to be the social sciences most valuable discoveries.

Last chance to invest in a firm favourite

They are covered again in more detail in this paragraph:

The x y z Fund only launched six months ago, but has already attracted considerable interest. To keep it small and flexible the number of units has been capped at 200 million. Last week they had reached two-thirds of that total and interest is intensifying. In the last two days alone they sold over 6 million units, so it is likely to close very soon.

Social Proof

The first principle is Social Proof. This fund is “a firm favorite” and “has already attracted considerable interest” and already “sold over 6 million units”. In other words, other people think it’s a very good idea to invest in this fund, so you should to.
Many of the top researchers in the field of influence (social psychology, behavioral economics, etc) worked with the Obama campaign, Their last minute get-out-the-vote message was “A Record Turnout Is Expected”. People are more likely to vote if they think other people will vote. The most beautiful part of social proof is that it is undetected – most people will deny that this is the case.

No-one know which fund to invest in, because most of them under-perform the index, and if the stock market really is a random walk, then there is no sane way to invest. It is in exactly that type of ambiguous situation where people look to other people to decide how to react.

Scarcity

We want what we may not be able to have in the future, that’s the Scarcity Principle. This is the “Last chance” to invest in this fund because it is “likely to close very soon”. Fear of losing out on something can be an extremely powerful motivator, and you see it every day when stores have end-of-line or closing-down sales, or when something is offer in ‘limited quantity’.

Invest with your calculator, not your heart

That email is an emotional appeal, not a rational one. Selling a new fund during a recession must be difficult, and there’s no reason to think this one is selling well. The language doesn’t promise anything concrete, so it doesn’t lie. It just influences. And that is good copy writing.

The seminal book on this topic is Robert Cialdini’s “Influence”, which I highly recommend. It’s a New York Times best seller, and Fortune Magazine lists Influence in their “75 Smartest Business Books.” You see what I did there? :-)

http://www.nytimes.com/2009/07/19/technology/19distracted.html

Here’s some excerpts:

in a survey of 1,506 people last year by Nationwide Mutual Insurance, 81 percent of cellphone owners acknowledged that they talk on phones while driving, and 98 percent considered themselves safe drivers. But 45 percent said they had been hit or nearly hit by a driver talking on a phone.

That’s the Lake Wobegon effect, the tendency for overestimate their capabilities in relation to others.

…research, showing that multitasking drivers are four times as likely to crash as people who are focused on driving, matches the findings of two studies, in Canada and in Australia, of drivers on actual roads.

The highway safety administration estimates that drivers using a hand-held device are at 1.3 times greater risk of a crash or near crash, and at three times the risk when dialing, compared with others who are simply driving. The agency based its conclusions on research from the Virginia Tech Transportation Institute, which placed cameras inside cars to monitor drivers for more than a year. The study found cellphones to be the most common cause of driver distraction.

Research also shows that drivers conversing with fellow passengers do not present the same danger, because adult riders help keep drivers alert and point out dangerous conditions and tend to talk less in heavy traffic or hazardous weather.

The research shows that having a conversation on a hands-free sets is as dangerous as a conversation on a handheld phone – the problem is that, unlike a passenger, the person on the phone doesn’t stop distracting you when road conditions change, and they aren’t a second pair of eyes compensating for your distraction.

So if the research is so strong, there are so many lives to be saved, how come we haven’t solved this one yet. Read on:

Joe Simitian, a state senator in California, managed to get his hands-free legislation, an effort he began in 2001, passed in 2006. He argued, based on data collected by the California Highway Patrol, that drivers using cellphones caused more fatalities than all the drivers distracted by eating, children, pets or personal hygiene.

In each previous year, the bill was killed — after lobbying by cellphone carriers, including Sprint, AT&T and T-Mobile. Mr. Simitian said that in the first two years, he would visit the offices of his colleagues on the Transportation Committee on the day of the vote and “find three cellphone industry lobbyists sitting in the legislator’s office,” Mr. Simitian said. “They’d just smile.”

If that sounds familiar, you’re not alone. There’s:

• a project to find uses for LinkedIn
• a book on finding a point to LinkedIn
• and the company itself had to blog about ten ways to use LinkedIn.

If it takes a blog post, a book, and a community project, to find a point to your web application, I think there may not be one.

LinkedIn tries to explain itself

Take the blog post for example. It says that LinkedIn is, and I quote, “a great way for professionals to strengthen their online brand reputation and leverage their professional network”. Huh?

How about the front page. I bet they have a super-succinct value proposition. It’ll be obvious once I get to the front page:

• Stay informed about your contacts and industry
• Find the people & knowledge you need to achieve your goals
• Control your professional identity online

Let’s be honest, the reason you are ‘connected’ to these people on LinkedIn, as opposed to Facebook, Bebo, Orkut, or Friendster, is because you don’t want to “stay informed” about them. You don’t want to know what movie they watched last night.

What about the second bullet point, finding people? That’s about recruitment, and the trouble is, recruitment has gone niche.

• If I need a Python programmer, I post on python.org,
• for Django I post on Django Gigs,
• front enders are on Authentic Jobs,
• and so on.

LinkedIn seems to be built around a 1940’s model where you hire someone because they went to the same college as you: “Cambridge lad eh? Jolly good. Welcome to the company. Scotch?”

Maybe it’s all about that last bullet point, your “professional online identity”? LinkedIn is your home on the web, a virtual calling card, MySpace without the teenage exuberance? Well, if you’re in tech and your only online presence is LinkedIn, that’s less than impressive. A bit like a graphic designer printing his business cards on that machine at the mall.

LinkedIn prevents people from contacting you

If you are trying to get in touch with someone, whom we’ll call Chris, you probably start with your favorite search engine. You type in his name. Chris’ LinkedIn profile comes up. You click on it. You now have three options:

• You can pay LinkedIn $25, and they’ll let you send Chris an email (an ‘InMail’).
• You ask your friend Alice to ask her friend Bob to introduce you to Chris.
• You do what I do. You hit Back. Click on the next search result, which is Chris’ blog, select the Contact or About page, and email him directly. LinkedIn just wasted your time.

I may of mentioned this before, but this is not the 1940’s. We Internet types are comfortable talking to strangers. All I want is an email address, and that’s what LinkedIn doesn’t give me.

Let’s recap

You go to LinkedIn. You declare all your connections. You complete your profile, recommend people, answer questions, and so on. You give them a lot. And what does LinkedIn do for you? They prevent people contacting you. So, what, exactly, is the point of LinkedIn?

It was an unreal, frightening time, and it was predictable that people would flee the airports. Perhaps surprisingly, though, they didn’t start digging backyard bomb shelters. Instead, most went to work and carried on living. They just didn’t fly. They drove instead.
Politicians worried what the mass exodus of Americans from planes to cars would do to the airline industry, so a bailout was put together. But no one talked about the surge in car travel. Why would they? It was trivia. There were deadly threats to worry about.
But what no politician mentioned is that air travel is safer than driving. Dramatically safer – so much so that the most dangerous part of a typical commercial flight is the drive to the airport.
The safety gap is so large, in fact, that planes would still be safer than cars if the threat of terrorism were unimaginably worse than it actually is: An American professor calculated that even if terrorists were hijacking and crashing one passenger jet a week in the United States, a person who took one flight a month for a year would a have only a 1-in-135,000 chance of being killed in a hijacking – a trivial risk compared to the annual 1-in-6,000 odds of being killed in a car crash.
Risk analysts knew all about this safety gap. And they understood what a large-scale shift from planes to cars would mean. It’s simple mathematics. If one person gives up the relative safety of flying and drives instead, it’s not a big deal. He will almost certainly survive. But if millions of people take the same risk, it is just as likely that some of them will lose the gamble and their lives.
But car crashes aren’t like terrorist hijackings. They aren’t covered live on CNN. They aren’t discussed endlessly by pundits. They don’t inspire Hollywood movies and television shows. They aren’t fodder for campaigning politicians. And so in the months following the September 11 attacks, as politicians and journalists worried endlessly about terrorism, anthrax, and dirty bombs, people who fled the airports to be safe from terrorism crashed and bled to death on America’s roads. And nobody noticed.

This is exactly why I setup the Rational Fear website. This looks to be a very good book.

The comparison of the risks of air versus car travel (‘An American professor’) comes from an op-ed piece by Michael Rothschild, emeritus professor at the University of Wisconsin, first published in the Washington Post on November 25th 2001. Thanks to Dan Gardner for providing me with the reference.

E-mail

I use GMail via Google Apps For Your Domain. I have my own domain name, so my e-mail address would not change if I hosted my own e-mail.

I would run Postfix. Before migrated to GMail I used to run Exim, which worked very well but the configuration file was baroque. The interface would be web-only, using SquirrelMail. I used to run an IMAP server, but I no longer see the need for it. Those two parts are easy, but the much harder part is spam reduction. That is really the benefit you are getting by having a large professional organization host your mail. I would use Realtime BlackLists (RBLs), then SpamAssasin, and ClamAV for virus scanning. If this didn’t stop enough spam I would use greylisting.

Pictures gallery

I use Flickr, which I love.

I’d replace it with Gallery, which last time I set it up had the best install process of any software I have ever used (possible tie with Wordpress). I’d miss the social aspects of Flickr. The technical challenge would be getting all my pictures off of it. I should really be backing them up more often.

Online notebook

I maintain some notes online in a private Wiki. When I think of something I browse over to my online notebook and jot it down. I use it for everything from planning Christmas presents to organizing vacations and personal projects. Last week I moved this over to Google Sites. I’m not yet sure it’s going to stay there, as Sites is too much like a WYSIWYG web editor and not enough like a Wiki for my liking.

I wrote my own tiny Wiki in Python called Scribble. I’ll probably go back to that. MediaWiki is the one wiki to rule them all (mainly because it powers Wikipedia), but it’s far too complex for my needs.

Mailing list

I setup a mailing list to stay in touch with friends and organise events. We use Google Groups.

It used to be on Mailman, and I would probably go back to that. It was a bit fiddly to run, but it’s the gold standard in mailing list software, so it’s probably me not grokking it rather than it being difficult.

Chat

I use Google Talk via Google Apps For Your Domain, so like my e-mail I own the domain and my chat address wouldn’t change.

The reason I use Google Talk is that it uses the Jabber / XMPP standard. I would run my own Jabber server, probably jabberd14 because it is simple and stable. Openfire is a much more complete Jabber server which I prefer, but it is written in Java so the memory requirements aren’t compatible with a virtual server.

Web chatback

One of my sites has a widget on it which allows visitors to chat live to me. I switched this yesterday to Google Talk Chatback.

I would replace that with what I used to use; a custom Flex client. Flex runs in the Flash player. The XIFF library allows Flex to talk XMPP. This is technologically a better solution than Google Talk Chatback because the client receives presence messages, so it will update your status without a page refresh (yes it’s push technology for the web, see here). The widget would talk to my Jabber server.

Calendar

I use Google Calendar, and have never hosted my own equivalent, so this is tricky. I would look for something that integrated with the Evolution calendar, because that integrates will with the Ubuntu desktop (my distro of choice). The only web based calendar a short search turns up is webcalendar, so I’d try that first.

Bookmarks

Before I switched to del.ico.us, I had a frightening mess of bookmarks stored locally in Firefox.

Using del.ico.us really comes into its own when paired with the Firefox plugin. I really don’t know what I’d use. I might have to write my own, and hack the Firefox plugin to work with that. If I ever needed to write my own, hopefully other people would be in the same situation, so we’d have us a project and a community.

If you really don’t want to watch it, read the transcript of Clay Shirky’s talk at Web2.0 Expo.

Cheers! Graham

Timestream is a fun, free, web based tool to analyse how your spend your time. You record in your Timestream what tasks you are working on throughout the day – it’s quick and painless. You can then look back and see where your time is going.

I’ve been working on it and using it for almost six months now, and I think it could be useful to other people. It is free software (licensed under the GPL). If you need to know how you’re spending your (work) day, give it a try:

http://www.mytimestream.com

It’s a really simple, easy, online tool. You can enter as little or as much information as you like about your activities – you can enter the information after the fact, or edit the information later. It makes some nice reports. It’s colorful ! It’s fun ! Isn’t it time you found out where your life is going ? :-)

Happy tracking !

• Open questions invite the other person to express their thinking freely rather than allowing a “yes” or “no” response. Open questions usually begin with Who, Why, When, Where or How. For example:

  • “How much petrol do you use per week ?”
  • “Where do you normally get your petrol from ?”

• Closed questions can be answered with a yes or no. They tend to close a conversation down. However, they can be useful for checking facts, clarifying a point, or deliberately finishing a conversation. They can also control the length and form of the reply and allow a “yes” or “no” or brief response. They can be useful on the streets, especially as an opening line.

• Multiple Questions combine many questions together, making it unclear which question to respond to. People can become confused. Less is more ! For example:

  • “Have you seen, heard or know about Greenpeace ?”
  • “Do you think Esso is bad, or just like the others, or what ?”

• Leading Questions reflect an assumption, or give an obvious direction to the reply, indicating the desired response. Leading questions hint at what you want the answer to be. They don’t allow a person freedom of expression, or require them to really engage or think. They should usually be avoided and certainly abandonded if they are met with any resistance. For example:

  • “You like peace don’t you ?”
  • “It’s the only way, isn’t it ?”

• Hypothetical Questions can be good for opening up options and helping people to explore possibilities. However answers bear little relation to what would actually hapen. For example:

  • “If I could prove to you that Esso have absolutely no commitment to the environment, would we get your support ?”

• Probing Questions are good for following up information already received but can lead to a lengthy conversation which should be avoided! For example:

  • “Why do you say that ?”

  More details on the campaign to boycott Esso

Before we start, we’ll need a couple of definitions.
Continuous Operations: Operations that extend over 24 hours at a normal rate. Each individual works a usual amount of hours, and is relieved at the end of a shift to return later. As the operation runs round-the-clock an individual will work different hours which may conflict with circadian rhythms, and disrupt sleep patterns.
Sustained Operations: Involve continuous performance longer than 24 hours. Work is continued until a goal is reached. Sleep deprivation is common. Prevalent in ground warfare.

After a night without sleep mental and motor skill performance degrades to that of an individual who is considered to be legally drunk, (i.e. blood alcohol content (BAC) of 0.10 %). Even 18 hours of wakefulness equates to BAC of 0.05%.

Sleep cannot be stored up prior to a continuous or sustained operation. Sleep loss, circadian rhythm disruption and hard work combine to produce fatigue. Fatigue is not due to lack of motivation or attitude. Fatigue needs to be managed.

The planning and organisation required prior to the start of an operation may mean a team is already tired. This is referred to as preload.

Prior experience with sleep loss does not provide training to maintain performance. Resistance to fatigue varies between individuals.

Combat naps, the military equivalent of a power nap, help to maintain performance. After a power nap, individuals may experience 5 – 20 minutes of sleep inertia characterized by confusion and sluggishness. Taking more naps (practicing) appears to reduce this problem. During sustained or continuous operations, power naps should be encouraged and sometimes mandated.
Power naps should last less than 40 minutes from the time one begins to attempt sleep to the time of awakening. It is designed to be too short to allow the individual to enter slow wave sleep (SWS) and yet still get a brief, hopefully restorative, nap. The first SWS epoch occurs within about 60 minutes.
Research suggests that these naps can provide between 2 to 4 hours of useful physical and mental activity, for about 2-3 days, sometimes longer. After a few days however, cumulative sleep debt would be overwhelming.

A short sleep is best when more time is available for rest during a mission but not enough for a full sleep. Short sleeps are recommended to be at least 3-4 hours in duration. They are designed to allow the individual to progress through and avoid the SWS epochs. These sleep periods can maintain useful waking performance levels for 4-10 hours and perhaps longer. Although few studies have been done, anecdotal military evidence suggests that 3-4 hour naps can maintain crews for 4-5 days before sleep debt becomes overwhelming.

The minimum amount of sleep required to maintain performance during sustained operations is 4 – 5 hours per day. Fragmented sleep is less effective.

A ‘normal’ sleep is generally accepted as being 8 hours. Whatever the length of sleep, it should occur in 90 – 100 minute increments to avoid awakening during the deeper stages of sleep. This will minimize sleep inertia. Sleep should occur at the same time every day (including weekends), in a dedicated, quiet and dark place.

Sleeping more than 10 hours may cause sleep drunkenness and should be discouraged, even after a period of sleep deprivation.

There are numerous cyclic body rhythms in humans that collectively are described as circadian rhythms. Isolated from all external clues, humans seem to operate on a 25 hour cycle. External clues such as light and darkness (the most powerful cues), sleep, meals, social activities and clocks, reset the biological clock daily.

On an average circadian cycle, performance peaks between 12:00 and 21:00 hours (normally around 16:00), and falls to a minimum between 03:00 and 06:00 hours.

Continuous or sustained operations, trans-meridian travel (jet lag) and sleep deprivation all force the rhythmic systems of the body to re-adapt. They become out of phase with local time and with each other. Some phases will be delayed and others advanced. Seven continuous days of shift work are required to adjust the body temperature cycle. A single period of night work, or seven in a row, is more easily tolerated than three of four consecutive nights (which starts the process of circadian desynchronisation). If a round-the-clock operation is needed teams should specialise in either days or nights.

Extroverts, younger people, and those living on a more regimented schedule tend to have an easier time adjusting. As a general rule the body will adapt 40 minutes/day when traveling east and 60 minutes/day when traveling west. Westward travel requires lest time to acclimate. Bright lights maintain alertness and are a strong factor in accelerating circadian adaption.

It is easiest to initiate sleep twice a day; in the early afternoon and just before normal sleep time. Alcohol, while initially relaxing, significantly worsens the duration and quality of sleep. Caffeine interferes with sleep, and prevents effective napping. A nap or short sleep is most effective during the low point of the circadian cycle (03:00 – 06:00 hours).

Fatigue is both physical and mental. Physical aspects involve a loss of the power of muscles and sensors to respond. Mental fatigue includes the subjective feeling of weariness followed by worsening performance of cognitive tasks. This subjective sense of fatigue is the first indicator that people are getting tired. A useful external indicator is that the fatigued person loses their sense of humour.

During the Falklands conflict sedatives were used by the British to regulate sleep for pilots. Amphetamines were used by the British and Germans in WWII. During Vietnam both the American Air Force and Navy made amphetamines available to aviators. Intermittently since Vietnam up through Desert Storm the Air Force has used both amphetamines and sedatives in selected aircraft for specific missions. A combination of dextro-amphetamine (Dexedrine) and scopalomine are used by the Navy and NASA to combat motion sickness.

5mg of dextro-amphetamine (Dexedrine) help maintain alertness without causing other changes in mood and perception. 200mg caffeine compares favorably to amphetamine in improving cognitive performance but is less effective in maintaining alertness. 5mg of Dexedrine can be taken every 2 hours if required; dose should not exceed 30mg per 24 hour period.

Benzodiazepines produce the ‘most natural’ quality of sleep, and are used as sleep initiators. 5mg of zolpidem (Ambien) or 15mg of temazepam (Restoril) is used as an aide to sleep. A 7 - 8 hour period of restriction from higher cognitive activities is needed after taking this medication. No more than 10mg of zolpidem or 15mg of temazepam can be taken per 24 hour period.

Medication should be tested prior to it being needed, to allow individuals to adapt and gain familiarity with it. The Navy states that the use of stimulants or sedatives is appropriate only in combat or during exceptional circumstances of operational necessity.

Merge two previously separate concepts that are in conflict with one another. For example, combinations such as ‘friendly enemy’ and ‘healthful illness’. The more discrepant the concepts, the more likely they are to result in novel properties.

Tom Ward, senior research fellow in the Center for Creative Media at the University of Alabama, Tuscaloosa, and editor of the Journal of Creative Behaviour.

Get a really good part-time job, preferably to do something you like. For example, if you like reading, work in a book shop and do lots of evening classes.

Tracey Emin, artist, London.

Creativity demands that you leave your comfort zone, that you continually challenge yourself and be prepared to confront conventional wisdom. When you become an expert, move on. Especially, engage in that for which you have not been schooled.

Allan Synder, director of Centre for the Mind, Australian National University, Canberra, and University of Sydney.

Creativity is fostered by a particular, if poorly understood, brain state. It often seems to be induced when you feel under pressure to perform and at the same time free to let your mind wander. Some authors go to the mountains or the seashore, others take a walk in a park. But this might be easiest to do by simply going to bed. As our brain cycles through REM and non-REM sleep, it appears to go in and out of this state.

Robert Stickgold, associate professor of psychiatry, Harvard Medical School.

I have a great big cupboard stuffed with ideas, and when I want one I open the door and take the first one that falls out. Alternatively, if you want and idea, do the following. Close your eyes, put your left hand on the ground, raise our right hand into the air. You are now a conductor.The ideas will pass through you. Sooner or later one will pass through your brain. It never fails, though the waiting times vary and sometimes lunch intervenes.

Margaret Atwood, novelist, Toronto.

Hold the intention or the question. Trust it and will it to happen. Leave a space – daydream, relax, doze… you’ll be amazed because you are not doing it.

F. David Peat, author and physicist, director of the Pari Centre for New Learning near Siena, Italy.

The main ingredients in science are intensive immersion in a problem, fanatical desire to solve it (big problems are rarely solved by accident), familiarity with previous attempts leading to an original critique of where they went wrong, reckless disregard for what other experts think, and the courage to overcome your own doubts and hesitations, which are much scarier than anything anyone else can say because you know best how vulnerable your new idea is.

Lee Smolin, theoretical physicist at the Perimeter Institute for Theoretical Physics in Waterloo, Ontario.

Think about the big problems while working on the small ones and vice versa. A larger perspective can be the best guide when approaching a detailed problem. On the other hand, details can reveal profound insights about larger questions. Listen carefully and pay close attention. You might learn more than people, or the objects you’re studying, superficially reveal.

Lisa Randall, professor of physics at Harvard University.

Creativity is enhanced by having a prepared mind, and then being stuck on a problem. I also need a space of silence and calm, where I am free from distractions.

Alan Lightman, novelist and physicist at the Massachusetts Institute of Technology.

Know your stuff: creativity requires expertise; but don’t know it too well: overspecialisation puts blinders on. Imagine the impossible: many breakthrough ideas at first seem outright crazy; but you have to be able to impose your idea: crazy ideas remain crazy if they cannot survive critical evaluation. Finally, be persistent: big problems are seldom solved on the first try, or the second, or the third; but remember to take a break: you may be barking up the wrong tree, so incubate a bit to get a fresh start.

Dean Simonton, professor of psychology at the University of California, Davis.

This system takes the e-mails in your In-box, the ideas and reminders in your head, on scraps of paper, in your notebook, your PDA, wherever, and organizes them so that none of them get lots, and the important ones get acted upon.

h2. Gather everything together

Make or buy an in-tray. Then gather those unpaid bills, scraps of paper, books, printouts, TO-DO lists, jot down the ideas from your head, and pile it all in the in-tray. Next do the same for your electronic data, using your e-mail In-box. Most likely there will already be quite a few e-mails in there. E-mail yourself with anything else you need recorded and processed.

Make two special folders in you mail client – one called @action and one @waiting. Make or buy two similar trays for the real world. Buy a sectioned / expanding file. If you haven’t already got a diary, get one.

h2. Process

Once you have everything gathered take e-mails or pieces of paper one by one and run through this diagram:

Everything starts at stuff and ends up in one of the circles.

Calendar should be only actions with a hard date / time (meetings, appointments, birthdays). Things that you would like to get done on a particular day go into Actions.

If needed, Actions can be split by location: Calls, At Computer, Errands, At Office, At Home, Read / Review.

Look at the Calendar daily, first thing. Then look at the Actions list.

Do a Weekly Review of everything – this is whatever needs doing to keep the system up to date – get the ideas in the world onto paper. In a business context, Friday early afternoon is good for this.

Most teams have no explicitly defined, full-blooded, decision-making apparatus. Yet the quality of life of that team is determined by the choices they make. Every meeting, and each creative act, expresses a team choice. Without a clear process for making decisions the choices are often incoherent, to the point of team members not knowing exactly who decided what, when.

The Decider protocol is a decision making process. It provides a formal way for teams to achieve unanimous decisions in an efficient manner.

The Decider Protocol

The proposer says, “I propose…”.

The proposer offers a concise, actionable proposal.
No more than one issue is resolved per proposal. The behavior expected of the voters if the proposal is accepted is clearly specified.

The proposer says “1-2-3”, then all team members vote simultaneously in one of three ways:

• Yes voters give a thumbs-up.
• No voters give a thumbs-down.
• Support-it voters show a hand flat.

Voters requiring more information must vote “no” to stop the proposal before seeking information. Passing is not allowed.
A yes vote means “yes I support this proposal and I am ready to champion it”.
A support-it vote can be translated as “I believe that this proposal is probably the best way for us to proceed now. I support it, though I have some reservations. I don’t believe I can lead the implementation of this proposal, but I commit not to sabotage it”.
A no vote means “No, right now I can’t support this proposal”, because it is plain wrong, because some details need clearing up and looking into, or because I don’t understand it.

Once the vote is taken, the proposer counts the votes and takes a decision:

• If the combination of “no” and “support-it” votes is too great (> 30%, as determined by the proposer), the proposer drops the proposal.
• If any of the “no” votes states their absolute opposition to the proposal, the proposal is dead. An absolute “no” means that there is no condition that the voter can imagine that would change their vote. It is a tradition, though not mandatory, for an absolute “no” voter to make a new proposal following the death of the proposal killed by their vote.
• If there are just a few “no” voters (outliers) the proposer uses the Resolution protocol to resolve those people’s concerns.
• Otherwise, i.e. if everyone voted “yes” or “support-it”, the proposal passes, and becomes part of the team’s plan of record.

Voters do not state why they voted as they did.

During the proposal no-one speaks except:

• the proposer when stating the proposal or using Resolution
• any no-votes when using Resolution or declaring their “no” an absolute one.

Any absent team members are responsible for acquiring information about the vote, and are bound by the decision as if they voted for it. If the person would of voted “no”, they must now make a new proposal as soon as possible.

Once a proposal passes, each team member is accountable for personally carrying out behaviors specified in the Decider decision, and no member has more or less accountability than any other. Each is also accountable for insisting that the behavior is carried out by the other team members.

Resolution

When there are only a few “no” votes (outliers), the team uses the Resolution protocol to attempt to bring those outliers in.

The proposer asks each outlier in turn: “*What will it take to get you to endorse the proposal ?*”

The outlier may state at any time, but no later than in response to the above question, that his vote is an absolute “no”. The proposal is then dead.

More often, the outlier states succinctly, declaratively, and precisely what he requires to endorse the proposal. If given what he requires, the outlier promises to drop all resistance to the proposal and to provide affirmation and support for it instead.

As needed and as possible, the proposer makes an offer to the outlier.
If in the judgment of the proposer the adaptations to the proposal are minor, the proposer may employ an unofficial ‘eye-check’ of the non-outliers to see if there is general acceptance to the changed proposal.
If you are opposed to this implicit new proposal or require a formal re-statement and a new vote, you make make this requirement know during this interval.
If the required changes are more complex, the proposer makes a new proposal, and the Decider protocol starts again.

“Yes” and “support-it” voters do not speak during Resolution.

If the outlier changes his vote to “yes” or “support-it”, then the decision to adopt the proposal is committed, and becomes part of their plan of record.

Other protocols

Decider and Resolution are part of The Core.
The other protocols are here: Core protocols (pdf)
The authors website is here: McCarthy Technologies

The best advice I have ever heard is the now famous speech below:

Ladies and gentlemen of the class of ‘97:

Wear sunscreen.

If I could offer you only one tip for the future, sunscreen would be it. The long-term benefits of sunscreen have been proved by scientists, whereas the rest of my advice has no basis more reliable than my own meandering experience. I will dispense this advice now.

Enjoy the power and beauty of your youth. Oh, never mind. You will not understand the power and beauty of your youth until they’ve faded. But trust me, in 20 years, you’ll look back at photos of yourself and recall in a way you can’t grasp now how much possibility lay before you and how fabulous you really looked. You are not as fat as you imagine.

Don’t worry about the future. Or worry, but know that worrying is as effective as trying to solve an algebra equation by chewing bubble gum. The real troubles in your life are apt to be things that never crossed your worried mind, the kind that blindside you at 4 pm on some idle Tuesday.

Do one thing every day that scares you.

Sing.

Don’t be reckless with other people’s hearts. Don’t put up with people who are reckless with yours.

Floss.

Don’t waste your time on jealousy. Sometimes you’re ahead, sometimes you’re behind. The race is long and, in the end, it’s only with yourself.

Remember compliments you receive. Forget the insults. If you succeed in doing this, tell me how.

Keep your old love letters. Throw away your old bank statements.

Stretch.

Don’t feel guilty if you don’t know what you want to do with your life. The most interesting people I know didn’t know at 22 what they wanted to do with their lives. Some of the most interesting 40-year-olds I know still don’t.

Get plenty of calcium. Be kind to your knees. You’ll miss them when they’re gone.

Maybe you’ll marry, maybe you won’t. Maybe you’ll have children, maybe you won’t. Maybe you’ll divorce at 40, maybe you’ll dance the funky chicken on your 75th wedding anniversary. Whatever you do, don’t congratulate yourself too much, or berate yoursel f either. Your choices are half chance. So are everybody else’s.

Enjoy your body. Use it every way you can. Don’t be afraid of it or of what other people think of it. It’s the greatest instrument you’ll ever own.

Dance, even if you have nowhere to do it but your living room.

Read the directions, even if you don’t follow them.

Do not read beauty magazines. They will only make you feel ugly.

Get to know your parents. You never know when they’ll be gone for good. Be nice to your siblings. They’re your best link to your past and the people most likely to stick with you in the future.

Understand that friends come and go, but with a precious few you should hold on. Work hard to bridge the gaps in geography and lifestyle, because the older you get, the more you need the people who knew you when you were young.

Live in New York City once, but leave before it makes you hard. Live in Northern California once, but leave before it makes you soft. Travel.

Accept certain inalienable truths: Prices will rise. Politicians will philander. You, too, will get old. And when you do, you’ll fantasize that when you were young, prices were reasonable, politicians were noble and children respected their elders.

Respect your elders.

Don’t expect anyone else to support you. Maybe you have a trust fund. Maybe you’ll have a wealthy spouse. But you never know when either one might run out.

Don’t mess too much with your hair or by the time you’re 40 it will look 85.

Be careful whose advice you buy, but be patient with those who supply it. Advice is a form of nostalgia. Dispensing it is a way of fishing the past from the disposal, wiping it off, painting over the ugly parts, and recycling it for more than it’s worth .

But trust me on the sunscreen.

This speech was set to music Baz Luhrmann and performed by Quindon Tarver, and called ‘EVERYBODY’S FREE (to wear sunscreen)’.

An e-mail hoax claimed that this speech was made by Kurt Vonnegut to the MIT class of 1997. The actual commencement address was made by Kofi Annan, Secretary General of the United Nations, and can be found here.