Unlearned lessons about bullies

Hitler was a smalltime bully when he started. He got bigger, obviously. Want to know why? 

 

 

http://www.bookwormroom.com/2009/09/02/the-lessons-about-bullies-that-we-seem-determined-not-to-learn/

Diddly reads

I am reading a book called

Stumbling on Happiness

by Daniel Gilbert.  It certainly builds on the book that inspired Diddly by Cordelia Fine.

Below is a link to good review

 

http://jseliger.com/2009/04/23/stumbling-on-happiness-%E2%80%94-daniel-gilbert/

Not getting your way?

 

The next time you are upset, the question below may help you gain some perspective:

What in my life would improve so greatly  if I got it the way I want it?

An expert opinion about ‘experts’

This article is worth reading

http://www.nytimes.com/2009/03/26/opinion/26Kristof.html?_r=1&ref=todayspaper

The expert on experts is Philip Tetlock, a professor at the University of California, Berkeley. His 2005 book, “Expert Political Judgment,” is based on two decades of tracking some 82,000 predictions by 284 experts. The experts’ forecasts were tracked both on the subjects of their specialties and on subjects that they knew little about.

The result? The predictions of experts were, on average, only a tiny bit better than random guesses — the equivalent of a chimpanzee throwing darts at a board.

“It made virtually no difference whether participants had doctorates, whether they were economists, political scientists, journalists or historians, whether they had policy experience or access to classified information, or whether they had logged many or few years of experience,” Mr. Tetlock wrote.

The more famous experts did worse than unknown ones. That had to do with a fault in the media. Talent bookers for television shows and reporters tended to call up experts who provided strong, coherent points of view, who saw things in blacks and whites. People who shouted — like, yes, Jim Cramer!

Let your kids suffer

Here is the scenario:

Your kids is suffering or you anticipate  them suffering.

Seeing them suffer makes you suffer, and you can’t take it, so you do something to prevent their suffering.

You feel relieved. Your kid has no idea that they should feel relieved because you won’t ever allow them to suffer.

Your kid becomes even worse than you in that they are less able than you to handle the pain that goes along with being alive.

Your kid is still living with you when they are 30 years old.

You don’t understand how it could have turned out this way because you did everything a parent could do.

Grow up! And I am not talking to your kid.

The WORST call by a referee EVER

While I’m on the subject of not taking the time to think things through and rely on common sense, it is fitting to see that even in a situation as black and white as the following sports situation, we need to beware. Last night,

the Portland Trail Blazers accidentally put six men on the court against the Boston Celtics. The sixth man scored a basket. The referees acknowledged that he should not have been allowed on the floor. And then they permitted his basket to stand.

In other words, the officials rewarded a team for the most brazen form of cheating.

 The Celtics lost the game. Portland didn’ t do it on purpose, of course, they were embarrassed by it.

So how did this happen? Those refs must have feared somone more than the consequences of abandoning common sense. That fear seriously clouded their thinking. The NBA is a business after all. We are all aware of managers that don’t encourage or even allow people to think for themselves without being punished for it.

This is what  can happen.

Keeping our heads off the ground by having them up our ass

We’d never get through the world if we knew it as it is: enormous and chaotic. We’d need a brain so large that we couldn’t keep our heads off the ground. The brain’s simplification of reality means that anything that gets into the mind is immediately overemphasized, whether it is an emotional slight, a change in the weather, or a matter of statecraft. So we give the most recent news that greatest weight in decision making. This  leads to frequent  and dramatic fluctuations in our thoughts and moods, and our fragile minds almost leave us little choice but to delude ourselves most of the time.

NO ONE FACES REALITY.

We all react to a simplified, filtered model of the world, a personal story we tell ourselves with respect to the world and our place in it.

From Healthy Pleasures by Robert Ornstein and David Sobel.

See www.ishkbooks.com

Hudson’s research: Uncertainty’s influence on Pattern Creation

I heard this on NPR. A psychology researcher was interested in seeing how an emotional state of uncertainty might impact the tendency of people to make up patterns that have no obective basis in the outside world, including superstitions. She subjected one group to a sort of video game that just gave out random victories and defeats independent of the players actions, and the second group played a game where they had a lot of control. She also had the second group recall situations like car accidents where they had been comletely out of control of a situation. Afterwords, they put the people from each group in front of a video screen with simple static. The second group which had not been induced into a state of uncertainty saw nothing on the video screen except the static. The first group which had been put in a state of uncertainty insisted that they saw all kinds of patterns in the static.

Positive Test Strategy – positively deluded

How questions are posed to us has a major influence on which conclusions we come to? We generally take the hypothesis in question and search for evidence that it is correct. If we are asked if we are happy, we dutifully search for evidence that we are happy. If we are asked if we are unhappy, we just as dutifully search for evidence that we are unhappy. This is called the positive test strategy (PTA).

In a classic experiment, particpant were asked to evaluate to parents to decide on custody of their child. Parent A was moderately well-equipped to have custody in all respects: income, health, working hours, rapport with child, and parental profile. Parent B had a more sporadic profile – above average income and a close relationship with the child, BUT an extremely active social life, a good deal of work-related travel, and minor health problems. The initial question posed to the experiment participants was “who should have custody of the child?” They followed the positive test strategy of searching for evidence that each parentwould be a good custodian. As a result, parent B’s impressive credentials with regard to income and relationship with the child won out over parent A’s more modest abilities on these fronts, and nearly twothirds of participants voted for parent B as the best custodian.

Ask who should be DENIED custody, however, and the positive test strategy yielded evidence of parent B’s inadequacies as a guardian: th ebusy social and work life, and the health problems. By comparison, a PTA search of parent A’s more pedestrian profile offered no strong reasons for rejection as a guardian. the result, the majority of particpants decided to deny parent B custody.

You may be relieved to be assured that the positive strategy only has an effect if there is genuine uncertainty in your mind about the issue you’re considering.” (FINE)

So many things cut both ways, especially words. And they’ll make you bleed  if you don’t pay attention to all the angles.