Of group psychology and, well, some other things

Just saw an interesting situation yesterday – was in a pub, and Australian football was on. It’s the second or third time I happened to see a game of Australian football, and for the record I find it much more fun than either American football (helmets are for sissies, and the game is not fluid at all) or rugby. Anyway, the two teams (PER and WAR! were their shortened names on screen, and I can’t remember what those stand for) were unevenly matched apparently, when I started watching, 45 minutes into the game I think, the score was 6:32.

WAR were clearly constructing attacks better, were making fewer errors, and were able to advance very quick into PER’s territory; it seemed a done deal. However, something happened, PER scored, made the 4 + 2 points (for “try” and “goal”), and from this point onwards scored repeatedly until they equalized. Their game changed totally; they were the ones who could advance quickly, while WAR seemingly collapsed and were never able to score again. And those were teams that, just minutes before, were in completely opposite situations!

I am not sure if there is a group psychology mechanism that explains momentum; PER were in complete flow (as WAR had been before), so some kind of momentum determined – and reversed – this state. How can you trigger this momentum and maintain it is, to me, a mystery. It’s at the ‘group’ level – not individual, not mass. (don’t expect business school research to answer this though).

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Philip Zimbardo has a very interesting talk on TED about the structuring on time, which relates to Daniel Goleman’s EI; he calls them the time perspectives:

- past: focus on positives, focus on negatives

- present: hedonism, fatalism

- future: life goal-oriented, transcendental everlasting-life

Unsurprisingly (for a rational person, but alas, most people aren’t – and years ago I would have been surprised myself), the best mix is past heavily positive, present moderately hedonistic, future moderately high goal-oriented.

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And finally, also at TED, Don Norman (who I sent an e-mail to some years ago, that he actually replied to!) talks about how a state of well being encourages creative thought, wide, lateral thinking, while a state of stress (due to goal orientation and the presence of a deadline) determines deep but narrow, problem-solving thought.

TED itself has been criticized recently (although I just scanned the article and didn’t read it thoroughly) for its failure to be more incisive regarding the crisis. Perhaps due to its sponsors. I have always found two forces at play in society – one is the harmonization force, settled, conservative; the other is the revolutionary, change inducing one. Well, which is TED? It would perhaps want to be the second – a gathering of some of the smartest people to change the world. At the same time, it depends on the existing society in order to finance itself, and let’s not forget that most of the attendees, smart as they might be, are luminaries today’s mainstream society; so they can’t try to reform it (unless it’s in some important, but relatively harmless direction, such as Dawkins and his militant atheism; a banker can support that, but would probably be much less likely to support, say, the nationalization of the banking system).

I need to think about this some more, it is a very important topic – and one of the reasons I am dismissive of commentators from the old old country (several posts ago), as they are the two cent revolutionaries, relegated to blogs (yes, ironic, I know, to write about it in a blog) and chatrooms but with little else to show for their times. TED however is action.

Why Empedocles?

Ok my ‘tech’ blog is called Thales, in honor of the guy whose name used to sow terror in my soul in school, in the math classes – he has an important theorem in geometry.

So it was normal that for a more humanities-focused blog I’d choose another Greek philosopher’s name. Here is the story of Empedocles, who definitely had some almost Buddhist-leaning ideas.

I find the pre-Socratics fascinating. At that time, Western thought was new. I mean, tabula rasa, clean slate. These guys had a chance to affect how people two thousand years down the line would think. They were not burdened by millenia of detritus, like we are. They could just look at the Sun and decide if it is a star, an atom, a particle of fire, an illusion, a representation of something else, a god, or whatever. From their times, going back two thousand years there wasn’t just that much – maybe a few Sumerian cities, that was it. Before that it was the caves and the Iron Age, and the Snowman. They had a chance to shape the way the world (ok, the Western world) would turn out. Were they aware of it? I mean, if you’re Zeno or Anaxagoras sitting in the olive garden drinking wine and drawing some circles in the sand, do you feel a little uneasy that your thoughts might actually change the way the world will be?

An ancient snowman

Perhaps this is why Empedocles threw himself into the volcano?

The 3rd replicator, according to TED

From TED talks:

• variability + selection + heredity/propagation –> design (by evolution)… creator not needed
• three replicators: genes (biology), memes (ideas copied), and now temes (technology)
• the 3rd replicator, temes, currently needs us to replicate
• but this may not always be the case….

It’s more scary (if you take an anthropocentric view of the Universe)/enlightening (if you take a holistic, perhaps Dharmic, view) than it sounds.

Looking from the outside

This is just great. My quote of the day:

The institutions of modernity often question and experiment with the way activities are assigned to moral spheres. Market economies tend to put everything up for sale. Science amoralizes the world by seeking to understand phenomena rather than pass judgment on them. Secular philosophy is in the business of scrutinizing all beliefs, including those entrenched by authority and tradition. It’s not surprising that these institutions are often seen to be morally corrosive.

Unconventional wisdom

Dan Ariely has more interesting things to say. Once again, this is serious academic research performed by people from Harvard Business School and MIT. It’s the type of stuff that I always somehow knew or felt instinctively, but the social pressure was to dismiss it as inappropriate.

- people believe that learning more about others leads to greater liking, but in fact acquiring more information about others leads to less liking. In the process of learning, dissimilarities are discovered and this leads to disliking. Of course, I mentioned just a few posts ago how sitting with someone you harbor a crush for makes that crush just go away. This is why strangers in the night/on the bus/on the plane are always attractive. Forcing individuals to interact with strongly disliked others does increase liking (regression to the mean), yet in real life such situations are avoided and a potential for defusing disliking is lost;

- at first acquaintance, individuals read into others what they wish;

- decisions are difficult because outcomes are uncertain (Kahneman and Tversky, 1979; these psychologists got the Nobel prize in economics for their insight into decision making, so this is not voodoo NLP ’science’);

- the excitement of anticipating a first encounter can heighten positive expectations;

- similarity to the self (from shared traits and values to trivial things like shared birthdays) his highly diagnostic of liking;

- in absence of information, people assume similarity with others, hence propensity to liking; however, initial evidence of dissimilarity causes subsequent information to be further evidence of dissimilarity and thus cause disliking;

(maybe this is the man without qualities? I should read Robert Musil perhaps).

- this bears repeating: the increase in knowledge leads to decrease in liking. More so for women than for men;

- knowledge is different from exposure without learning: sitting in the same room with someone repeatedly will create a kind of kinship which will increase liking. But that is not acquiring information about that person;

- propinquity – how near people live to each other – predicts the emergence of friendships, but even more so the emergence of enmities;

- partners (romantic and otherwise) who play hard to get are desirable; individuals who demonstrate unconcealed romantic interest seem desperate and unappealing; romantic interest should be dyadic – targeted at one individual and eliciting the same response (it does somehow) – rather then being broadcast… and this broadcasting may be unfortunately unconscious;

- people have limited insight into their own behavior under drive-states (e.g. obsessions, alcohol). Hence self control should be proactive – don’t put yourself in that situation – rather than reactive, assuming you will handle the situation well. Decisions will be stigmatized as immoral behavior by people who would themselves make the same mistake in the same drive-state.

Heady, crucial insights. My takeaway: never put yourself in a situation where you are not at overwhelming advantage. The Chinese strategists knew this all along but somehow in the West the romantic view of the heroic struggle is more widely disseminated – with disastrous effects.

Behavioral economics teaches us that you cannot be all that you want to be

Economists, sometimes, have interesting things to say. Especially the new(-ish) breed of Behaviorists, such as Kahneman, Tversy, and now Dan Ariely. Discovering the later, I have had a feeling I have experienced only a few times in life so far; last time when I discovered Osho. Society works based on certain assumptions that everyone (publicly) holds as self-evident, but which to me never seemed so: “work hard and you will succeed”, “love your country, respect your elders”, “happiness is marriage and family” and so on. Okay I can’t quite get the right quote for some of these, but you get the idea.

Anyway, when some or all of these “self-evident” truths fail to materialize, one’s belief in the orderliness of the world starts to shatter; one starts to believe that something is undermining the way things should be; that life is unfair; that there is some secret knowledge that is the true knowledge which helps one attain whatever one wishes. Hence conspiracy theories, doomsday cults, gurus, seekers, and depressed people – all of which are more mainstream that we perhaps accept.

And then here comes Dan Ariely, in a long line of nonconformist thinkers. Among his pearls of wisdom:

- go to a party with an ugly friend (wingman) if you want to hook up: because beauty/valor is relative, not absolute, and you will shine by comparison;

- procrastination is a natural tendency;

- in a free society which encourages “living life to the full”, people will simply have a hard time making any decisions, for fear of missing out on the alternative.

On emotional intelligence

Going through assigned readings sometimes yields useful information: such as, on Emotional Intelligence. One who is emotionally intelligent is…

• aware of emotions
• able to regulate emotions
• awareness and regulation are directed both inwards (towards self) and outwards (to others)

I assume #3 means awareness of one’s own state and of the state induced by others. This last item is tricky, I have always been fascinated by how difficult it can be to divest emotionally from the other. X irritates me, yet I it would be really good if I didn’t always shun X; Y makes me feel all warm and giddy (is it love), yet I really should not always say yes to Y. You mean, I can step outside myself and see that my behavior is not a given?

One thing that seems to do work in the first case is spending some time one on one with the object of one’s irritation. It worked for me in the past; all the irritation melted. Also, the same worked in the second case – spending personal time with an object of one’s affection makes one remove the said object from the pedestal.

On books and things

In the last few years I have found a few books that really changed the way I look at things. Other than all of Osho’s collected speeches (and there are so many of them), these are Alistair Horne’s A savage war of peace and Basil Liddell Hart’s Strategy. I think these two are fundamental reading for understanding the nature of the conflict world in our day and age. It is beyond me how a commentator of current events can, well, comment, without a knowledge of the theories (and facts) exposed in these books.

Moving on. Even if I grew up in an artistical wasteland, I have also always enjoyed literature; initially it was a form of escapism, then I started looking for meaning, but now I am slowly moving away from that too. I’m not so much interested in beautiful writing (I prefer witty), but rather in the whole narrative. Whereas before I searched for the message, now I think that a focus on message reduces the value of the text. Reality does not have a meaning, why would a book/a story have one? I’d rather the story seeped in my subconsciousness and influenced me in more subtle ways.

For example I could not really say why Philip K. Dick’s Ubik had such an influence on me. I was comparatively underwhelmed by anything that Robert Heinlein wrote; Ubik is one of those total books to me that left me changed once I finished reading (perhaps only Salman Rushdie’s Satanic Verses comes close; and a special mention goes to Bulgakov’s The Master and Margarita, a zany, zany story if there ever was one).

Yet, there are books whose influence on me I can explain: and thus, I can explain what literature means to me now. Alex Garland’s The Beach (actually it is the whole package; book, movie – not so much for the narrative but the visuals – and Moby’s Porcelain from the movie soundtrack) puts me in the otherwise indescribable mood of escape that Thailand always induces me (additional soundtrack: The Future Sound of London’s Papua New Guinea, which I always listen to upon landing at Suvarnabhumi Airport). It’s a mood thing, as close to pure happiness as I can conceive.

Then: certainly, one can read about Julian the Apostate (such a towering figure in such a crucial era – it determined the future of the Western civilization), but only Gore Vidal’s novel can make the character and his times and struggles come alive.

What else? Kafka’s Metamorphosis must have the most heartbreaking ending I have ever read. It is an overquoted work (I would guess, much more talked about than read), but to me it pretty much summed up my own experiences growing up in interesting times.

The Master and Margarita

As I walk through the valley of the shadow…

When not stylin’ and loungin’, I am an occasional highfallutin’ thinker; I just read the whole Ecclesiastes the other day. Not being religious, I only had a cursory knowledge of it until now, but now I can say I was very impressed. The style is beautiful, and the contents is about as close to Buddhism’s main tenets (as espoused in the Four Noble Truths) as it can be (there are some unpleasant mysoginistic paragraphs; if considered poetically, they are ok, but I’m afraid there are enough believers who took them at face value). I was also amazed at how many popular sayings are borrowed from Ecclesiastes, things I had heard many times in daily usage before but had no idea where they were coming from.

At the same time this is stuff that seems so remote from the further Christian utterances, that it got me thinking. And yes, it appears that Christianity actually had to embrace the Old Testament and make it hers in order to convince the Roman authorities (who prized long established order and religions) that it was no threat to the system; in time, becoming the system. Nice move, Ratzinger.

And yes, wish I could find the time to read this.

The Closing of the Western Mind

More on Strategy

Liddell Hart’s book. The more I read it the less I understand how can someone write history without an understanding and a deep study of military strategy. Anyway, here are some ideas that go contrary to what is perhaps common thinking:

• in WW2, the Germans vastly outmaneuvred and resisted the Allies, sometimes to a ratio of 1:6 to 1:12. Also they inflicted significantly higher casualties on the Russians, whose army was anything but nimble or subtle;
• the Allied strategy of bombing the populated areas and of demanding unconditional surrender was ineffective and lengthened the war significantly;
• the British-supported guerilla wars (in occupied France, Yugoslavia, etc) would prove extremely costly for the Western world in the long run as they would encourage the post war ‘liberation’ movements and struggles that continue sometimes to this day. Waging war outside the official boundaries of war will in fact instill a mentality of lawlessness and a encourage a breakdown of social order that will be hard to heal (perhaps this is why the Middle East is a mess – remember T.E. Lawrence?).