Category Archives: Explorations Outside the Box

Posts moving to New Site: “Exploring the Problem Space”

Explorations Outside the Box, Politics and Economics, Scientific Encounters, The Environment

From late 2016 on, this blog will only include posts on mindfulness and related subjects.

My new blog  Exploring the Problem Space will also cover mindfulness, as well as  politics, economics, science, and  the environment.  Topic areas  include:

  • Agriculture
  • Basic Income Guarantee/Universal Basic Income
  • Basic Principles and Useful Heuristics
  • Climate Change
  • Governance for a Better Tomorrow
  • Healthcare System
  • Ideology and Politics
  • Mindfulness, Religion, and Ideology
  • Mindfulness, Science, and the Enlightenment
  • Poverty and Inequality
  • Protecting the Environment
  • Psychology
  • The Virtues of Science
  • Trump
  • What are Thoughts?

 

Enlightenment and the Tyranny of Masters

Explorations Outside the Box, Observing Mindfulness

Kant defined enlightenment as humanity’s release from immaturity, defined as “the inability to use one’s own understanding without the guidance of another.” In other words, authority is all well and good but it’s not the be all/end all. Always leave room for one’s critical faculty to take a second look. In other words, leave room for skepticism, which values ‘what’ more than ‘who’.

Authority includes the most tyrannical of masters: our past selves. Just because something was crystal clear at 25 doesn’t mean it holds water now. Just because we were passionate doesn’t mean we were right.

Thoughts as Doors, Opening and Closing

Explorations Outside the Box, Observing Mindfulness

A thought is not an inert object. A thought is a living thing: it is both propelled and goal-directed. Thoughts bring into being the unanticipated. Thoughts activate neural connections and open up worlds. Reducing thoughts to objects takes the life out of them – stops them in their tracks, unable to continue on their path, unable to lead us to the unforeseeable.

Through thought, the implicit becomes explicit. Through thought, the explicit generates a new implicit.

To behold a thought, it has to hold still for a while.  It has to become a thing. Behold too long and it becomes a dead thing.

Sometimes we want thoughts to stop – but that is a matter of the particular case, not a general rule.

Status Aspirations

Explorations Outside the Box

Concern with status is part of our animal heritage.

The regard of others is a scarce resource; therefore, we compete for it.

Appealing and available mates are scarce: therefore, we compete for them.

To compete, we have to distinguish ourselves.

“Status” is the name we give to that quality that distinguishes us in a way that gives us social and sexual advantage.

The regard of others is not a scarce resource if we don’t care about it and/or any ol’ other will do…but good luck with that!

 

What Would Make You (Me) Wrong?

Explorations Outside the Box, Scientific Encounters

You think you have high standards for discerning the truth of the matter? Then you must be able to imagine counterevidence to your theories of how the world works. At the very least.

In the face of heartfelt conviction, I ask: what type of evidence would disconfirm your belief? (That applies to me as well – easier said than done, but I keep trying and sometimes succeed).

Falsify This!

Explorations Outside the Box, Scientific Encounters

In a variation on the “Wason selection task”, students in a research study were asked to test the rule “if a card has D on one side, it has a 3 on the other”. They were then shown four cards, which had either a letter (D or F) or a number (3 or 7) on them, and were asked which cards they would turn over to validate the rule.  The correct answer was the D and 7 cards. If a D card had anything other than a 3 on the other side, the rule was disconfirmed; ditto if a 7 had a D on the other side.

Most students got it wrong – they said they would look at the F and 3 cards*.  Their error was in seeking to confirm the rule, rather than disconfirm it. But a rule is only a rule if it applies across the board; therefore, all you have to do is find one instance where it doesn’t apply and the rule is invalidated.

The hopeful thing about this study is that if students were asked what cards they had to turn over to falsify the rule, they usually got it right. Moral of the story: it’s not all that hard to overcome our biases. There’s hope for humanity yet.

—

* Neither the F nor 3 card had any bearing on the question because nothing on the other side could disconfirm the rule.

Reference:

Feist, Gregory J. (2006) The Psychology of Science and the Origins of the Scientific Mind. New Haven: The University Press

Label and Dismiss – Or Not

Explorations Outside the Box, Observing Mindfulness

Sometimes labeling, reducing (making little and laughable), and purposely ignoring complexity can be useful. We don’t have to give our full attention and cognitive resources to everything.  We have to choose: does this matter enough?  Do I want to linger here for awhile, hear it out for awhile? Sometimes, sometimes not. Psychological distancing can be  the best option (e.g. Kross et al 2012). Sometimes, when you’ve heard it all before, many times, sure – nod, label and dismiss, then redirect your attentional resources elsewhere. I’m talking about what we say to ourselves and others.

Reference:

Kross, Ethan; Gard, David; Deldin, Patricia; Clifton, Jessica; Ayduk, Ozlem “Asking why” from a distance: Its cognitive and emotional consequences for people with major depressive disorder. Journal of Abnormal Psychology, Vol 121(3), Aug 2012, 559-569. doi: 10.1037/a0028808

 

Can We Live without an Army of Convictions?

Explorations Outside the Box, Observing Mindfulness

As previous posts have amply shown, I’m not a big fan of mindfulness  as a quasi-religious ideology.   I’m not going to propose a specific counter-ideology. Sure, I have beliefs about what makes life worthwhile, what matters, the is and the ought.  Merely having beliefs is not the same as adhering to an ideology. To the extent that we think, feel, perceive, speak, or move, our brains are assuming a version of reality. To the extent that we are ethical and goal-directed creatures, we have a sense of what is good and desirable. To the extent that we are able to articulate our assumptions, values and goals, you could say we have “beliefs”.  Run-of-the-mill beliefs are held with more or less conviction, are more or less systematized and are more or less contradicted by other beliefs produced inside the same head. Beliefs surface and then sink into cognitive obscurity. Beliefs are often wimpy cognitions without allies.  In contrast, ideologies are convictions bolstered by an army of related convictions.

All hail the engineer’s approach to problem solving!

Explorations Outside the Box, Politics and Economics

All hail the engineer’s approach to problem solving!

  1. Recognize a need
  2. Define the problem, the objectives and the constraints
  3. Collect information and data
  4. Generate alternative solutions
  5.  Evaluate the consequence of different solutions
  6. Decide
  7. Evaluate the consequences of decisions

I’d add these three principles to complete the recipe:

  1. Whenever possible, insure that decisions are reversible after a sufficient period of observation and analysis.
  2.  At every step, appreciate that one lives in a world of probabilities, not certainties.
  3. At every step, appreciate the limits of one’s knowledge and understanding of the world.

Politicians and civil servants who favor an engineering approach to problem-solving may be dismissed as “mere technocrats”. The assumption here is that either one is the methodical, step-by-step sort, or you are a Big Picture Person – a visionary.  Granted, at any moment, if one is counting trees, one is unlikely to be seeing the forest. But that doesn’t mean an engineer can’t be a visionary. You just have to switch processing modes.

Reference:

James J. Sharp (1991) Methodologies for problem solving: An engineering approach, The Vocational Aspect of Education, 42:114, 147-157, DOI: 10.1080/10408347308003631

Such a Romantic!

Explorations Outside the Box

In “The Age of Wonder”, Richard Holmes writes that “the idea of the exploratory voyage, often lonely and perilous, is in one form or another a central and defining metaphor of Romantic science.”

Metaphors reveal truths and inspire action. We are still in the Romantic Age. And in some other Age as well,  as yet unlabeled,  one that recognizes that romance can be married to pragmatism.  (I have no illusions about being singular).

Reference:

The Age of Wonder: The Romantic Generation and the Discovery of the Beauty and Terror of Science Paperback by Richard Holmes (2010) Vintage Press, New York, New York