True contentment is a thing as active as agriculture. It is the power of getting out of any situation all that there is in it. It is arduous and it is rare.
— G.K. Chesterton (via Moment of Happiness Daily Quotation)

Work is busy. There are many things, each of them detailed investigations, that need to get done in a short amount of time. Customers expect that from us–and our competitors.

Normally, at lunch time, I’ll stay in and eat at my desk, usually surfing the web while doing this. Today, I decided to take a walk outside.

Outside was warmer than I expected, but still crisp. Yet, the pond was frozen. An usual but serendipitous combination. I took a nice, refreshing walk. I stretched on the grass.

I immediately forgot what was going on in my office. My mind cleared.

Today, getting all there is out of a frenzied situation means creating a calm moment.

When someone presents you with a new idea, you have all week to disagree.

When someone presents you with a new idea, you have all month to disagree.

When someone presents you with a new idea, you have all year to disagree.

You only have one chance to agree. One chance that matters.

People want to be heard. Don’t argue. It’ll be okay.

Thanks to Freud, catharsis theory and psychotherapy became part of psychology. Mental wellness, he reasoned, could be achieved by filtering away impurities in your mind through the siphon of a therapist.

He believed your psyche was poisoned by repressed fears and desires, unresolved arguments and unhealed wounds. The mind formed phobias and obsessions around these bits of mental detritus. You needed to rummage around in there, open up some windows and let some fresh air and sunlight in.

The hydraulic model of anger is just what it sounds like – anger builds up inside the mind until you let off some steam. If you don’t let off this steam, the boiler will burst. If you don’t vent the pressure, someone is going to get a beating.

He was wrong. Read more here: Catharsis « You Are Not So Smart.

Or buy this book.

• Wealth does not necessarily mean happiness. (In fact, relishing simple indulgences tends to make one happier than acquiring a sophisticated taste.)
• In order to be happy, you should surround yourself with friends.

This reads straight out of Seligman’s Authentic Happiness (among other places). So, basically, it took thousands of years for psychology/philosophy to re-deliver an ancient truth.

David Allen likes to say that psychologists use the term cognitive dissonance to refer to (for example) when you want to go to the movies but you aren’t there yet. While psychologists do use this term, that’s not what they’re talking about. Gary Marcus’ Kluge discusses the misuse of the term “cognitive dissonance” (albeit as a footnote):

The term cognitive dissonance has crossed over into popular culture, but its proper meaning hasn’t. People use it informally to refer to any situation that’s disturbing or unexpected. (“Dude, when he finds out we crashed his mother’s car, he’s going to be feeling some major cognitive dissonance.”) The original use of the term refers to something less obvious, but far more interesting: the tension we feel when we realize (however dimly) that two or more of our beliefs are in conflict.

So: wanting to go to the movies and not being there yet isn’t a cognitive dissonance (at least not in the psychological sense). Your brain can quite comfortably hold the thoughts that 1) “I want to be at the movies”, and 2) “I am not at the movies” quite well. In fact, if you didn’t have the 2nd thought, you probably wouldn’t have the first—or is it the other way around? I don’t doubt that David Allen is a victim of the lay definition. However, I wonder how many people (myself included) have inferred the wrong meaning from his discussion. Time to move on.

This got me wondering about why cognitive dissonance has a negative connotation. I believe that the human brain has an ability or need to utilize reason. And when two inconsistent thoughts are held at the same time, our internal computer raises an exception and says that one of these thoughts contradicts the other. OK: so consistency is good.

However, Martin Seligman’s Authentic Happiness talks about Learned Optimism. Optimistic people are happier. They have the ability to partition their mind when bad things happen. Yet they view good things as pervasive. (They also perceive good events as permanent and bad events as temporary.) OK: so inconsistency is good. You’ll be happier when you can partition your brain (sometimes) to relegate a bad event to one sphere of your life. You don’t want to infer a pattern.

So, wouldn’t the ability to partition your mind facilitate many cognitive dissonances? Isn’t the elimination of cognitive dissonance a theme of cognitive behavioral therapy (which is supposed to alleviate mental illness)? Do we have two distinct, separate realms of psychology here? Should we only eliminate the cognitive dissonance of positive events but maintain a partitioning of negative events?

I can resolve all these thoughts with one conclusion: I must be a pessimist.

No: The fact that holding the thoughts—1) cognitive dissonance is a bad thing and 2) partitioning of thinking is a good thing—being a cognitive dissonance was not lost on me.

The conclusion is usually that we come up with some topology (let’s call it circuit X) that optimizes all the performance criteria. I walk away wanting to generalize the experience with the lesson that circuit X is the best circuit ever, and I want to use it everywhere.

Inevitably, I find that some other topology Y is better suited for some other application. There were some specific constraints or conditions on circuit X that don’t apply to circuit Y, and as a result, circuit Y is more optimal for application Y.

Looking back on this behavior, I think the main fault is the tendency to remember only the conclusions and not the assumptions. Why do we* do this? Well, because the assumptions are where we start. The lesson learned is where we end. We’d rather remember the finish line—the victory—rather than the starting line. It’s certainly more glorifying to remember your accomplishments rather than the mundane criteria that drive us to the goal. We are also rewarded for the results, not the specification of the problem.

I’ve periodically re-learned this tendency to form generalizations by forgetting assumptions and by only remembering the conclusion of the thought process.

footnotes

* Maybe I should say I, not we: perhaps I am generalizing again.

As Freud was displaced by biological psychiatry and cognitive psychology—and the massive data sets and double-blind trials that became the industry standard—Vaillant’s work risked obsolescence. But in the late 1990s, a tide called “positive psychology” came in, and lifted his boat. Driven by a savvy, brilliant psychologist at the University of Pennsylvania named Martin Seligman, the movement to create a scientific study of the good life has spread wildly through academia and popular culture dozens of books, a cover story in Time, attention from Oprah, etc..

Vaillant became a kind of godfather to the field, and a champion of its message that psychology can improve ordinary lives, not just treat disease. But in many ways, his role in the movement is as provocateur. Last October, I watched him give a lecture to Seligman’s graduate students on the power of positive emotions—awe, love, compassion, gratitude, forgiveness, joy, hope, and trust or faith. “The happiness books say, ‘Try happiness. You’ll like it a lot more than misery’—which is perfectly true,” he told them. But why, he asked, do people tell psychologists they’d cross the street to avoid someone who had given them a compliment the previous day?

via What Makes Us Happy? – The Atlantic June 2009.

A few things strike me about the results:

1. It meets the 80/20 90/10 rule.
2. Twitter is basically a broadcast service–not a one-on-one messaging tool.

#2 strikes me because I’ve always seen myself as an outsider. I’ve always felt that there must be a large contingent of twitter users that use twitter to tell their friends where they’re meeting for drinks tonight.

I’ve told friends that the only thing they’ll get from me on twitter is spam. (That’s a bit facetious: I’d like to think that my blog posts have intellectual value that informing people that they can proffer money in exchange for retail products advertisements do not.) If I were a corporation, they’d be filled with tons of marketing.

I suspected that I’m not getting this utility out of twitter because my friends aren’t on there, sharing in dialog.

What I realize now is that there’s a sort of myth behind twitter: it’s generally being used as a broadcast medium. In that respect, it seems less useful for my socializing: I don’t really care what most of my friends are doing each night in Chicago. I’m not in Chicago most nights. If I have a night available to meet up with friends, I’ve already pre-arranged it.

Incidently, I learned about this post from http://twitter.com/HarvardBiz/status/1995340326

Many people saw the line and just decided to come back later (I hope). Anyway, the quantitative analyst geek that I am, I started timing how long it took. I started the timer on my wristwatch and started counting people as they left the polling place.

In 45 minutes, I counted 38 people. That’s 1 minute 11 seconds per person.

The process was as follows:

1. Wait in line for about 50 minutes
2. Wait at the door of the voting room until there’s an open spot at the table
3. Go to the table and sign a little sheet of paper; hand it to the clerk
4. The clerk at the table compares your signature to your photo ID and looks up your name in the database
5. You are given a 4-digit access code by another clerk
6. You wait for an available voting machine
7. You punch in your access code into the machine
8. You vote
9. You confirm your votes, see a print-out scroll through a window confirming your votes
10. You leave

There were 4 voting machines at the polling place. This number is likely a lower than would be there on election day, so it’s likely that things will get done quicker on election day. For example, if there were 8 machines, I’d imagine that they could process votes at a period of 36 seconds per person.

The clerks who had to sign me in and hand me the access code wasn’t a bottleneck at all. It took people longer to actually vote at the machines (4 at a time) than it took the clerk to process people coming in. But we can safely assume that there will be more people around on election day. Keeping the ratio of clerks to voting machines at 2:4 would be safe. So, to process 36 seconds per person, they would need two clerks and 8 voting machines. Let’s hope they have enough.

In total, it took me about an hour from when I got in line to when I was done voting.

I am recording my rambling thoughts on the psychological effects on the election. Your constructive feedback, as always, is welcome. No flames, please.

I started reading Kluge: The Haphazard Construction of the Human Mind yesterday. While Gary Marcus was going through the lists of cognitive errors to which the human mind is prone, I couldn’t help thinking of the election. It seemed at first that pretty much every error would go in John McCain’s favor. Namely:

1. Memory Priming: There have been some pre-election associations with the name “Barack Obama” and the characterizations “Muslim” and “terrorist”.
2. Attachment to the familiar: “If it’s in place, it must be working.” Evolution seems to have preferred sticking with the status quo rather than accepting change. This is especially true in stressful times (think credit crisis). Curiously, McCain’s attempt to disassociate himself with Bush might not be the best strategy. Obama seems to be trying to leverage this association, but it might not be in his best interest. Indeed, I think most people associate Bush with a present national crisis, but there is a irrational human tendency to stick with precedence (regardless of its flaws).
3. Minority effect: voters tend to vote for candidates in the “majority” demographic rather than “minorities”. This prejudice includes voters in the minority.

The one thing that might curb all these effects is that I think the Barack Obama campaign understands these phenomena. They’re not relying on a seemingly large lead in the polls to materialize on election day.

Further inspection reveals that McCain is also susceptible to similar errors:

1. Memory Priming: By associating McCain with Bush (and therefore a sad state of national affairs), the Obama campaign is priming the voters’ memories. One could make the case that this association is valid. However, it is not necessary to correlate McCain’s and Bush’s votes to prove a correlation between the economic or political state of the country and McCain’s past votes.
2. Minority effect: McCain’s age gets very little discussion as a minority segment. However, there is an association here that McCain will under-perform as a president due to his age. Note that I believe the actuarial risk that Palin might become a president to be a valid risk; whether Palin will be a good president is separate issue than whether McCain will be a good president.

There’s another problem that plagues supporters of either party (Conservative/Republican | Liberal/Democrat)–especially the most passionate: motivated reasoning. It is far easier to prove an idea that you already believe in, rather than to search for all the available material out there to disprove any idea. This consideration brings back memories of the 2000 election, when the votes were in dispute. I remember seeing pictures of Republicans and Democrats screaming at each other. Each side had convinced itself very passionately that it was right–no doubt by invoking some amount of motivated reasoning. It’s clear that each side thought if the other’s candidate won, the nation would immediately plummet into disrepair. Of course, that didn’t happen.

Instead, it took 8 years. Ha!

My point is that we should each beware of the heavy marketing that we are being fed as voters. We should each try to see the other points in any argument. Keep an open mind. Each of us should remember that we are all American…

Except Joe Biden: He’s a puppy-killing Communist, and Joe is not even his real first name.

By the way, the book is not particularly generous to George Bush.