Month: April 2022

Leadership & thinking

Let’s start with how you don’t learn to think. A study by a team of researchers at Stanford came out a couple of months ago. The investigators wanted to figure out how today’s college students were able to multitask so much more effectively than adults. How do they manage to do it, the researchers asked? The answer, they discovered—and this is by no means what they expected—is that they don’t. The enhanced cognitive abilities the investigators expected to find, the mental faculties that enable people to multitask effectively, were simply not there. In other words, people do not multitask effectively. And here’s the really surprising finding: the more people multitask, the worse they are, not just at other mental abilities, but at multitasking itself…

They found that in every case the high multitaskers scored worse. They were worse at distinguishing between relevant and irrelevant information and ignoring the latter. In other words, they were more distractible. They were worse at what you might call “mental filing”: keeping information in the right conceptual boxes and being able to retrieve it quickly. In other words, their minds were more disorganized. And they were even worse at the very thing that defines multitasking itself: switching between tasks.

Multitasking, in short, is not only not thinking, it impairs your ability to think. Thinking means concentrating on one thing long enough to develop an idea about it. Not learning other people’s ideas, or memorizing a body of information, however much those may sometimes be useful. Developing your own ideas. In short, thinking for yourself. You simply cannot do that in bursts of 20 seconds at a time, constantly interrupted by Facebook messages or Twitter tweets, or fiddling with your iPod, or watching something on YouTube.

The full essay is eminently readable, and talks of many other things.

Becoming a Magician

It’s a little dense. But, we are all looking for that “magic” in some shape or form, in some part of our life. So, worth reading!

One of my heuristics for growth is to seek out the magicians, and find the magic. Often without noticing, your progress in aspects of life or all of it unconsciously becomes linear…But you are largely using the same tools to get 2x as you used to get x, and so you end up with diminishing marginal returns as you wring the remaining juice out of the initial strategy. The ‘describe the version of you that seems impossible right now’ trick…is largely an attempt to bypass that part of my brain that dismisses the work of magicians as crazy and starts allowing it to make the necessary shifts required to become the kind of magician I am envisioning.

The way to extraordinary growth and changes often involves a fundamental ontological or ‘lens’ shift in how you see the world. Magicians are wearing not just better, but fundamentally differently shaped lenses to the rest of us. And regardless of your skills and experience, it is likely that you are a magician to someone else…

Meeting magicians is the first step to becoming one – when you are attempting to learn implicit knowledge that by definition you don’t understand, it is important to have a bunch of examples in front of you to feed your brain’s pattern-recognition systems. This will start to change your worldview without the controlling ‘you’ explicitly approving or denying every new belief or framework…

Questions I like to ask myself include:

  • ‘What is the most capable version of me that I can imagine?’
  • ‘What would I be like/spend my time doing if all my current major problems had been solved?’
  • ‘What are the things I say I value but don’t act as if I value, and what would my life feel like on inside if I actually acted as if I valued those things?’
  • ‘What am I afraid of doing, and what would my life be like if I wasn’t afraid of doing those things?’.

Soldatov interview

I read this interview with fascination, and a growing trepidation. So much of it is possible in so many places, and there are signs of so many democracies going this way already!

  1. In 2012, a new Russian law expanded the definition of treason to include the sharing of any information the FSB (the successor to the KGB) deemed harmful to Russia’s national interests. The noose tightened further in 2020, when another law made it effectively illegal to write anything at all about the security services—a change that “basically cancelled our profession,” Soldatov says. But the last straw came later that same year, when the Russian government cancelled the media license for Soldatov’s website, citing the death of its editor—the very job Soldatov held at the time. Taking the hint, he and his partner Irina Borogan fled for London.
  2. in the 1990s, you had competing political forces in the country. You had opposition parties. You had oligarchs. You had very strong regional centers of powers, such as the mayor of Moscow. All of them were competing, so if a group of generals became unhappy with the president, they could rush to this group or that group for political support. That’s not the case anymore. There is no political force left in the country except for Vladimir Putin. The political opposition is either dead, in jail, or in exile. The oligarchs are extremely dependent on Putin and on the military-industrial complex. The regional governors are really scared, because a number of them have been thrown in prison.
  3. you cannot fix your intelligence problems with repression

Roger Clarke on Privacy

We hear this nonsense about the only people who’re concerned about privacy are people with something to hide. Well, yes. How about your password? How about your pin? How about various aspects of your physical person? How about various aspects of your health? Various aspects of your finances? The fact that you’ve got a really really valuable painting in a house that is really easy to break into and that doesn’t have a security system? How about the way your kids go to and from school? What your daughter drinks, and which drink to spike? There’s any number of things that people have to hide.

The Jews who lived in Holland in 1939 had nothing to fear from a database that identified them as being Jews. Well they don’t have anything to fear now ‘cause they’re all dead, with very few exceptions. The people who had reasonable educational qualifications in Cambodia in the 70s had nothing to fear. What’s there to fear about knowing that you’ve got a certificate of an advanced diploma? Well most of them are dead too. In Rwanda/Burundi it was being thought to be of a particular ethnic background. Now it’s not terribly easy for people to tell ethnic backgrounds when they’re tribal and they’re adjacent and they’ve been adjacent for hundreds and even thousands of years. But the decision was made that you were of that ethnic persuasion therefore you were dead. Now these are just the sharp end, where the worst case of invasion of privacy occurs and you get killed. There’s lots and lots of circumstances where obscure bits of information do harm the people that somewhat less than killing them.