Cuttings: April 2016

Social media as powerful method of learning: the evidence - blog post by Donald Clark,  referenced in Harold Jarche's blog. "The fact that social media is an act of expression, reflection, elaboration, retrieval and practice is of interest to those of us who like to see concrete evidence for powerful learning and retention. I often feel as though I remember more when I use social media, indeed have stronger memories of the things I posted than the original exposure. Tweeting during a conference helps me consolidate my thoughts and capture key insights. Facebook helps me share resources. LinkedIn is a useful professional tool. However, it is blogging, such as this post, that is by far my strongest form of learning, as it involves a number of things that are all supported by researched learning theory, and which improve memory and recall: (1) Reflection, (2) Generation, (3) Elaboration, (4) Retrieval, (5) Interleaved and varied practice, (6) Spaced practice, (7) Imagery, (8) Archiving."

Leadership in an age of pervasive networks - blog post by Harold Jarche. "From the perspective of Marshall McLuhan’s famous media tetrad..., explained by Derrick de Kerkchove, co-author of McLuhan for Managers — every technology has four effects: 1. extends a human property (the car extends the foot); 2. obsolesces the previous medium by turning it into a sport or a form of art (the automobile turns horses and carriages into sports); 3. retrieves a much older medium that was obsolesced before (the automobile brings back the shining armour of the knight); 4. flips or reverses its properties into the opposite effect when pushed to its limits (automobiles, when there are too many of them, create grid lock)."

Can two leftwing gurus save Europe? Chronicles by Thomas Piketty; And the Weak Suffer What They Must? by Yanis Varoufakis – reviews by Paul Mason in The Guardian. "To follow Piketty through the ups and downs of the post-Lehman era is to see an unwelcome issue for the left emerge. He asks: 'Will Europe manage to become the continental power and the space for democratic sovereignty that we’ll need in order to take control of a globalised capitalism gone mad?' Or will it facilitate the subjugation of governments to markets and, in the resulting chaos, fail? That sums up the left’s dilemma in 2016. It is posed in Britain through the Brexit referendum. In the rest of Europe it is posed, increasingly, by geopolitical pressure: the arrival of a million migrants; the swing to the authoritarian right in Poland; the surge of neo-Nazism in Hungary, Slovakia and France. And the ability of the bumbling despot in Ankara to dictate terms to an entire continent. ... Varoufakis [names] the danger that by going on the streets and influencing mainstream policy, the European far right has already achieved a position where it is 'in power but not in office'.... He concludes his book with an outline of his current project: to democratise Europe within 10 years or let the project lapse. Like Piketty, he retains an implicit 'optimism of the will', as Gramsci once put it, compared with a pessimism of the intellect."

It’s back to the future for Mashable - blog post by John Naughton. "[Quoting from Politico media website] 'As for the new direction of the company, Cashmore [Mashable’s CEO] hinted at the importance and influence of advertisers, noting that now advertisers are no longer separate from the story and want to be “telling stories with us”.' Well, well. Spool back to the early days of broadcast radio, when nobody could figure out a business model for the thing. I mean to say, you spend all that money setting up a station and creating ‘content’ and every Tom, Dick and Harry who had a radio receiver cold listen to it for free. And then along came Proctor and Gamble, a soap company, with the idea that if you sponsored compelling content — like a dramatic serial — and associated your name and brand with it, then good things would happen. Thus was born the ‘soap opera’. And this is the wheel that Mashable seems to have re-invented!"

The Abundance by Annie Dillard: a world of wonder, acutely observed - review by Gavin Francis in The Guardian. "For Annie Dillard there’s no realm of knowledge without its accompanying gasp of wonder; she has a mystic’s appreciation of the glory and plurality of the world, and a gift for communicating astonishment. This collection of essays has tremendous range: amoebae to the Andromeda galaxy; specks of dust to planetary motion; redemption to the brute facts of suffering. Dillard is a Pulitzer prize-winner with a huge following in the US, but her work has been something of a well-kept secret in the UK. With the release of this new volume, that should change.... The book opens with a quotation from the second sura of the Qur’an, explaining Dillard’s choice of title and demonstrating that it’s the spiritual dimension of her work that she is most at pains to convey: 'They will question thee concerning what they should expend. Say: The Abundance.' It’s in a passage from The Writing Life that the reasoning behind the collection’s title becomes clear: 'One of the few things I know about writing is this: spend it all, shoot it, play it, lose it, all, right away, every time. Don’t hoard what seems good for a later place in the book, or for another book; give it, give it all, give it now ... Anything you do not give freely and abundantly becomes lost to you.' ”

Forget mindfulness, stop trying to find yourself and start faking it - article by Michael Pueett and Christine Gross-Loh in The Guardian, based on their book The Path: What Chinese Philosophers Can Teach Us About the Good Life (Viking Penguin). "Unlike the philosophers we are more familiar with in the west, [classical] Chinese thinkers didn’t ask big questions. Theirs was an eminently pragmatic philosophy, based on deceptively small questions such as: 'How are you living your daily life?' These thinkers emphasised that great change only happens when we begin with the mundane and doable. Their teachings reveal that many of our most fundamental assumptions about how we ought to live have actually led us astray. So what are the ideas we hold dear, and what alternatives do Chinese philosophers offer in their place?... (1) Stop finding yourself. (2) Be inauthentic. (3) Do rituals. (4) See the world as capricious. (5) Stop deciding. (6) Be weak. (7) Don't play to your strengths. (8) Don't be mindful. (9) Rethink the traditional and the modern."

‘Why aren’t we earning enough to live?’: how [film] The Divide lays bare global inequality - article by Amelia Gentleman in The Guardian. "When The Spirit Level was published, it quickly attracted global attention to the ideas of its authors Richard Wilkinson and Kate Pickett. It argued that income inequality is the key cause of most modern social ills – violence, obesity, drug abuse, depression, ' teenage pregnancies, ill health.... No one said: 'This would make a great movie!' Apart from [Katharine] Round. 'It was a totally mad idea to get a book of graphs and make it into a feature film,' she concedes, acknowledging moments of doubt over the years spent researching and raising money for a documentary based on a book that sweeps through 27 different countries and grapples with huge, abstract concepts of capitalism, globalisation and inequality. She persisted, raising more than £120,000 of the total budget, from a successful crowdfunding exercise. The finished film gives moving portraits of the lives of seven people, five in the US and two in the UK, illustrating how economic division creates another division socially, with dangerous consequences for everyone. Its scope is ambitious, looking back over 35 years at the political and economic decisions that have caused the widening divide. The film races from person to person, from one side of the Atlantic to the other, giving sharp snapshots of the problems people encounter as they scrape along in economically divided nations. The documentary attempts to answer the teasing question in the film’s subtitle: 'What happens when the rich get richer?'”

Jane Eyre by Sarah Waters, Margaret Drabble, Jeanette Winterson and others - article in The Guardian. Sarah Waters: "I first read Jane Eyre as a teenager, but have returned to it many times since; it is one of those novels that, with each rereading, only seems to grow richer. My favourite lines come just over halfway through, when Jane is engaged in one of her many wrangles with the teasing Mr Rochester. 'Do you think,' she asks him, 'because I am poor, obscure, plain, and little, I am soulless and heartless? You think wrong!' The lines capture part of the appeal that the book has always had for me: the small, unglamorous, passionate figure staking her claim to equality, insisting on her right to feel, to act, to matter. Meanwhile, however, up on “the fateful third storey” of Thornfield Hall, the inconvenient first wife gives her 'goblin ha! ha!' … What I love most about Jane Eyre is the way it combines vastly different narrative registers, with mad Bertha Rochester prowling just below the realist surface and occasionally erupting though it to start a fire, bite a shoulder or rend a wedding veil. With her, Brontë created the sort of gothic icon – like Dracula or Mr Hyde – that it is now hard to imagine the world ever having been without."

Gillian Flynn: the book that inspired Gone Girl - article by Gillian Flynn in The Guardian. "Once a year, I read Ellen Raskin’s The Westing Game, because its twisty, weird plot about a pair of sisters and the other occupants of their strange lakeside apartment block. It sucked me in when I read it for the first time as a kid and it has influenced all my novels in some small way.... how clever Raskin was in her plotting. The game of the title is an elaborate puzzle filled with wordplay, but with a glorious plan behind it that makes it less whimsical and more diabolical. An eccentric millionaire has died and left his fortune to two of his 16 relatives, organised by him into eight mismatched and fractious pairs. The pair that uncovers his killer will win both his money and control of his company.... the thing that impresses me most is how she has said she didn’t know the outcome until she wrote the final pages. In a sense, reader and writer are figuring things out together, which is why I think there’s such a grown-up feeling. The author wasn’t pedantically planting clues for readers to pick up; she was really following the storyline." 

How to Avoid Empathy Burnout - article by Jamil Zaki in online magazine Nautlius, referenced in MindHacks blog. "[Emotional] contagion and concern—two dimensions of empathy—need not travel together. For one, they are only weakly associated across people. Individuals who report high levels of contagion do not necessarily say they are also high in concern, and vice versa. These states also inspire very different actions. In a classic series of studies done in the late 1980s, psychologist Dan Batson and his colleagues presented undergraduate psychology students with a video of another participant receiving mild electric shocks. Participants reported feeling distressed (related to contagion) when watching the person in pain and also concern for that student (expressed through terms such as 'moved' or 'sympathetic'). These states, however, were only weakly related across people, such that Batson could identify some people who predominantly felt concern, and others who predominantly felt distress. Batson then gave participants the chance to help the other student by trading places with her and “taking” the shocks on her behalf. Crucially, Batson set up the experiment so that some participants could easily avoid helping (for instance, if they chose not to help, they would be able to leave without watching the other student receive more shocks), whereas others could not. People who experienced more distress than concern avoided helping when they could, whereas people who experienced the opposite emotional profile helped in either case. It seems that immersing yourself in the pain of others can neutralize action as much as mobilize it. Batson argued that these data speak to the nature of empathy. In his view, distress points us inward, motivating us to feel better, whether by helping others or by avoiding them. Concern, though, keeps us focused outward. Nor is concern merely a diluted form of contagion. It drives us to approach others’ suffering even in cases where contagion would turn us away."

Not All Practice Makes Perfect - article by Anders Ericsson and Robert Pool in Nautilus, excerpted from their book PEAK: Secrets from the New Science of Expertise (Houghton Mifflin Harcourt Publishing Company, 2016), referenced in MindHacks blog. "I have devoted my career to understanding exactly how practice works to create new and expanded capabilities, with a particular focus on those people who have used practice to become among the best in the world at what they do. And after several decades of studying these best of the best—these 'expert performers,' to use the technical term—I have found that no matter what field you study, music or sports or chess or something else, the most effective types of practice all follow the same set of general principles.... There are various sorts of practice that can be effective to one degree or another, but one particular form—which I named 'deliberate practice' back in the early 1990s—is the gold standard. It is the most effective and powerful form of practice that we know of, and applying the principles of deliberate practice is the best way to design practice methods in any area.... Purposeful practice has several characteristics that set it apart from what we might call 'naive practice,' which is essentially just doing something repeatedly, and expecting that the repetition alone will improve one’s performance.... Purposeful practice has well-defined, specific goals.... Purposeful practice is focused.... Purposeful practice involves feedback.... Purposeful practice requires getting out of one’s comfort zone."