Stepping on soil in a completely different part of the world is much like how you feel on your birthday.
It’s pretty sweet… but you don’t really feel any different than before.
But it is still pretty sweet.
My friend and I landed in Quito, the capital of Ecuador (on the upper-west coast of South America) last night at 11:30pm. A quick taxi ride to the La Marsical area – Gringo central, full of hostels and restaurants – where we found the first hostel with available rooms and immediately fell asleep, exhausted from a full day of flights and 7-hour layovers.
The image above is our view from the hostel balcony in the morning.
Today we genuinely relaxed, walking around a little, reading for hours in parks/cafes/hostels and getting some food.
We found a cheaper hostel for tonight. $15 total for a room with two beds and private bathroom!… though very shoody electrical wiring right above the shower head is a little sketchy.
The next few days will also be spend really taking it easy to let our bodies adjust to the high altitude and get our bearings.
After that, assuming I don’t get zapped in my morning shower, who knows!? :)
///
A friend pointed out this article from Jonah Lehrer at The New Yorker about Daniel Kahneman’s new book, “Thinking, Fast and Slow” (already pre-ordered for my Kindle!).
Some good lines from it:
Unlike homo economicus, that imaginary species featured in macroeconomics textbooks, Kahneman and Tversky demonstrated that real people don’t deal with uncertainty by carefully evaluating all of the relevant information. They stink at statistics and rarely maximize utility. Instead, their choices depend on a long list of mental short cuts and intemperate emotions, which often lead them to pick the wrong options.
And this:
It’s impossible to overstate the influence of Kahneman and Tversky. Like Darwin, they helped to dismantle a longstanding myth of human exceptionalism. Although we’d always seen ourselves as rational creatures—this was our Promethean gift—it turns out that human reason is rather feeble, easily overwhelmed by ancient instincts and lazy biases. The mind is a deeply flawed machine.
And this:
As Kahneman and Tversky noted in the final sentence of their classic 1974 paper, “A better understanding of these heuristics and of the biases to which they lead could improve judgments and decisions in situations of uncertainty.” Unfortunately, such hopes appear to be unfounded. Self-knowledge isn’t a cure for irrationality; even when we know why we stumble, we still find a way to fall.
The article goes on to say that “self-knowledge is surprisingly useless.” An unfortunate discovery by Kahneman is that awareness of these problems does nothing to prevent them happening in an individual. Even Kahneman himself admits that he is just as succeptible as the rest:
“My intuitive thinking is just as prone to overconfidence, extreme predictions, and the planning fallacy”—a tendency to underestimate how long it will take to complete a task—“as it was before I made a study of these issues.”
My only nitpick with the article is that to say self-knowledge is overrated may give the sense that it isn’t valuable. It is important to clarify that self-awareness may be overrated because it is not sufficient, but it is certainly still necessary. True, someone who sees it as the source of solving all one’s problems is in for an unpleasant surprise. But someone who disregards it because it alone doesn’t solve their problems is missing out on a big opportunity.
There is much to be done regarding using this knowledge to find ways to improve our lives and decision-making, of which I will be writing about more.
Thoughts? Is self-knowledge overrated?
Read the full New Yorker article here: Is Self-knowledge Overrated?
///
There is a great clip from this Carol Tavris interview on For Good Reason about her book Mistakes Were Made (But Not by Me), right near the end (~46:40), where D.J. Grothe and Carol Tavris talk about what skepticism is and what it’s really for.
D.J. Grothe:
Skepticism, it’s affirmative, you’re saying. It’s not just naysaying, it’s not just cynicism, it’s skepticism in maybe the clasical sense of the term which means to inquire, to find things out, to look for the best evidence for things. For you … skepticism is not just used as a weapon to konk others over the head with, it’s an affirmative approach and it’s best when it’s self-applied.
Carol Tavris:
That is the heart and soul of my life and of this book.
Don’t we want doctors to wash their hands because it will save lives?
Don’t we want psychologicsts to have better ways of interviewing children so that we don’t put innocent people in prison?
Don’t we want better methods of determining whether a suspect is guilty or innocent so that we don’t have people in prison for thirty years for a crime they didn’t commit?
Don’t we want better ways of running companys and improving our cars?
Only when we’re able to say—to admit—that we were doing things the wrong way, becuase the evidence shows us it was the wrong way, can we determine the right way and the better way.
Awesome.
///
Pwno over at Less Wrong has written a cool post on how to understand people better. From the introduction:
I’ve been taking notes on how I empathize, considering I seem to be more successful at it than others. I broke down my thought-patterns, implied beliefs, and techniques, hoping to unveil the mechanism behind the magic. I shared my findings with a few friends and noticed something interesting: They were becoming noticeably better empathizers.
I realized the route to improving one’s ability to understand what people feel and think is not a foreign one. Empathy is a skill; with some guidance and lots of practice, anyone can make drastic improvements.
I want to impart the more fruitful methods/mind-sets and exercises I’ve collected over time.
And the conclusion:
Here’s a short checklist of the different techniques to use whenever you’re confronted with confusing behavior. Run through the list until you feel confident about your conclusion.
- Put yourself in their shoes
- Think of times you’ve been in a similar situation and explain your reaction
- Can the behavior be explained by a more “universal” model than a person-specific one?
- How are they empathizing with you, given they are projecting?
- How are they empathizing with you, given what you know about how they perceive others?
- What successful model have you used to explain similar behavior for similar people?
- Is your conclusion affected by your attitude towards the subject?
Read the full post here: How to Understand People Better.
///
