Category Archives: Psychology and human nature

The Luck Factor

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Magician-turned-psychologist Richard Wiseman examines what makes people’s lives “lucky” or “unlucky” in his book The Luck Factor. In essence, “lucky” people are open to new experiences, listen to their intuitions, focus on the good things that could and did happen and the bad things that didn’t, and persevere in the face of setbacks. Nothing terribly surprising, but certainly a very useful reminder of how preparing for and reacting properly to the chance events creates the serendipity that can change our lives.

Check out my summary of the book below or the official website.

Intelligence and How to Get It

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I recently finished reading Richard E. Nisbett’s Intelligence and How to Get It. This is a compelling book on the factors that determine intelligence, academic and social achievement, and how these are measured. Nisbett refers to many studies and applies clear reasoning to argue that nurture is much more important than nature for thinking about and improving the intelligence and functionality of the population as a whole.

He talks about the effect of socioeconomic status. For example, the heritability of intelligence is much higher in upper-class families because their environments are already highly optimized to make people as smart as possible. In contrast, in more disadvantaged settings a small improvement in the environment has a much larger effect on intelligence than any congenital variation.

The book also analyzes how different social and cultural groups have been performing on intelligence and achievement metrics, and the apparent causes for those results. He touches on African-Americans, East Asians, and Jews as distinct groups in American society (as well as on previous groups that were the world’s intelligentsia in the past) to illustrate how cultural expectations play a role. He also mentions the juicy tidbit that we are getting smarter overall, probably due to the higher prevalence of cognitive tasks (such as reading and video game playing, for example!) in everyday life.

Nisbett discusses the child-rearing practices that foster intelligence. He emphasizes talking to one’s child in terms the child can understand, relating new ideas to old ones, and asking “known answer questions” where the child knows that the questioner knows the answer; this latter appears to be a big help in school. Most fundamental of all, however, is the knowledge that intelligence is malleable; those who believe this do in fact work harder and both measure higher in intelligence and achieve higher socially than those who think intelligence is intrinsically immutable.

It was very gratifying to read a solid book that confirms my opinions: intelligence and achievement, in the end, are largely a product of the environment. In the right setting, with hard work, people can indeed excel at cognitive tasks.

The Power of Now

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One of my pursuits these days is the cultivation of mindfulness. Life is rich and helter-skelter. Only by living in each fleeting now, it seems, is there hope of appreciating a journey that is already accelerating to its eventual conclusion. Existential crisis? Perhaps, but fairly benign as those go.

It was with some anticipation, then, that I picked up Eckhart Tolle’s acclaimed The Power of Now: A Guide To Spiritual Enlightenment. I tried to slog through it, really I did, but there was too little psychological wheat to be salvaged from all the pseudo-scientific chaff that pervades the book.

What am I talking about? Vague references to “vibrational frequencies” that, when elevated by mindfulness, allow one to not be affected by “negativity.” Ok, I can bend over backwards and internally translate this as a metaphor of psychological states one can reach and imagery that can take one there. But then he also rails against “thought” and “mind” trapping us and being the obstacles from which we must seek liberation. I don’t buy it; it is ego and anxiety and fixation on the past and future that bind us, and careful thought can often be a liberating tool. We probably do need to take a break from being analytical all the time—but the blanket statment that rationality is an obstacle to enlightenment hardly follows from that in my book, and that is a distinctinion Tolle makes hapharzadly at best. Sloppy language, in fact, pervades the book: Tolle’s statements that past and present don’t really exist certainly are phrased to explicitly mean that physical time is illusory, but then he inconsistently backtracks from this solipsism by occasionally making reasonable distinctions between “wall” and “psychological” time.

What else? The kicker is his use of pseudoscientific jargon in ways that are clearly not meant to be taken metaphorically (or if they are, they constitute a reckless indulgence in the fallacy of equivocation): “As there is more consciousness in the body, its molecular structure actually becomes less dense.” As a scientist, engineer, and humanist, I cannot just let that slide.

What is left after ignoring, sighing, or eye-rolling through the pseudo-science is nothing that I haven’t encountered elsewhere: One must get beyond ego. While there’s no need to be passive, one must accept what is. Wherever you are, be there. I was hoping perhaps there would be some concrete practical guides to mindfulness practice, but no. It’s just your standard breathing practice and everyday presence, and more description of what mindfulness is rather than how to get it.

I’ve found better mindfulness books that are practical, focused, and secular. Jon Kabat Zinn’s Wherever You Go, There You Are is one; Mindfulness in Plain English is another. They seem mostly (but certainly not exclusively) focused on sitting practice, for which I struggle and fail to set aside time. I seem to be leaning more towards “everyday mindfulness,” re-focusing on the wide-eyed wonder and joy that I felt not that long ago when everyday life was (or just seemed) less hectic.

Financial Gedankenexperiment

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A friend at work suggested the following thought experiment with regards to the current financial crisis:

We are currently considering a $700B bailout for Wall Street. Assume that the value of the homes being foreclosed because of the crisis is the same order of magnitude (more on this below, but that’s tangential to the thought experiment).

An alternative solution could be for the government to take the money that it is about to give to Wall Street, and instead buy out all the bad debt directly from citizens: in other words, give people with bad debts the money to purchase their homes outright. If you prefer, give them just enough money to bring their debt down to a manageable level, and leave them to pay the rest off. Depending on how the numbers work out, this could be cheaper or about the same as the Wall Street bailout. For the sake of argument, assume this alternative is cheaper. Question: why not implement this?

Under these assumptions, this bailout costs taxpayers less than the Wall Street solution. The beneficiaries of the government largesse would be individuals rather than corporations. The profit from the bailout would not go to the companies that would remain solvent and still require payment of their loans; the profit would go to individuals who have part or all of their debt paid off (though the companies would continue to stay afloat because any remaining consumer debt would now be serviceable).

I doubt this proposal would fly, however. I suspect people would resent that neighbors who got into debt over their heads are now being rewarded with a handout from the government that enables them to own too-expensive-for-their-means houses, while responsible folks who bought only as much house as they could afford receive no such gift and are stuck with more debt for less floor space.

But how is this different than the corporate handout? The companies that issued loans to risky borrowers are rewarded with the higher profits of the bubble and the government cash to survive the crash. Responsible companies that did not profiteer from questionable loans did not get the extravagant bubble profits and need no government handouts to survive the crisis.

Something seems wrong, no? Discuss.

[Here's a back-of-the-envelope calculation: One source cites approximately 300,000 foreclosures in August, so estimate twelve times that for the year: 3,600,000 foreclosures. The mean home price in the US is $212,000. Multiplying these two figures, we can estimate that the current value of foreclosed properties is about $763B (actually, slightly higher, since a large fraction occur in CA, where the mean house cost is higher). If we say that only half the mortgage debt needs to paid off for the remaining debt to be viable, we arrive at a $380B bailout, cheaper than but still the same order of magnitude as the current plan in DC.]

UPDATE: DailyKos came out with its own estimate of the numbers, lower than the one I present above.

Marriage Equity

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Our marriage is less than a month away. Life feels full, as we try to juggle wedding tasks (the meeting of the parents went well), errands we want to get done beforehand (the picket fence is still an abstraction), and relaxation (hah!)

Obviously, I have marriage on the brain, but it seems like I’m not the only one. The New York Times has a retrospective on four years of gay marriage in Massachusetts, complete with a multimedia feature. Then, same-sex marriages are held up as examples of more equitable and non-gender-based power dynamics. And finally, in a shocking development, it seems that heterosexuals themselves are discovering equitable marriage roles.

These last two leave me shaking my head. Obviously in a same-sex marriage gender is not part of the power dynamics, but why should the power dynamics be affected by gender in the first place? And is it really that novel that some straight couples eschew gender roles? I certainly grew up with the expectation that both partners in a marriage share responsibilities equally, and that’s the norm among my friends, too.