Category: Reading

• Search your feelings
  • Excited, for or against, can be a sign of bad data
• Ponder your personal experience
  • “Naïve reality” is when we think our perceptions are more accurate than they really are (most often because the news weights our perceptions to the novel)
  • We often substitute a hard question for an easier one, without knowing it
  • (Instead of “how many pregnant teenagers are there?” we ask “have I recently experienced a news story about pregnant teenagers”)
  • Be careful of how metrics are being leveraged
• Avoid premature enumeration
  • Definitions can skew enumerations
  • Start by understanding what was meant
  • Once you learn something, it is difficult to remember that everyone else is not familiar
  • Inference is an easy way
• Step back and enjoy the view
  • Carrying around reference numbers can help context
  • Good news tends to unfold slowly while bad news happens radiply
  • Reporting cadence can have a powerful effect on context
• Get the backstory
  • Survivorship bias pervades… No one is interested is the expected
  • This is especially true with replication studies
  • Be wary of hypothesis made after the study is started
• Ask who is missing
  • Females are almost always missing from studies
  • Almost every audience (especially “found” data) has response bias
  • “n=all” usually really means “n=all the people who do or have a thing“
• Demand transparency when the computer says “No”
  • Look for algorithm’s explanatory power or else they may be associating “winter trends” with flu cases
  • Algorithms are built by human and so can easily have bias built-in (hiring algorithms trained to hire men)
  • Transparency is what killed alchemy and brought science
  • We should question which algorithms we can trust
• Don’t take statistical bedrock for granted
  • Basic understandings are important for building senses of the world
• Remember that misinformation can be beautiful, too
  • Graphics lend authenticity, the more beautiful the more believable
  • Florence Nightingale was a statistician
• Keep an open mind
  • We naturally fill in data blanks
  • “Things are going badly, so do something different”
  • Making public commitments makes it harder to take back
  • When information changes, change your conclusions
• Be curious
  • Confirmation bias is real and powerful
  • Scientific curiosity is key (not scientific literacy)
  • Asking people to rate their knowledge, then explain how something works, can reduce stubbornness
  • “Please explain that” can do a lot to soften extreme stances

• “Ask yourself the question”
• For some, introspection is detrimental
• Our default state is non-present (future looking or past remembering; 30%-50% of our waking hours)
• Linguistic skills co-develop with self-control skills
• “Zooming out” helps calm out inner voices
• Time can be a natural way to zoom out
• “Invisible help” perseveres self-esteem
• Touch helps other’s manage their chatter
• Nature experiences (real or virtual, visual or auditory) create calm
  • The point is to create “awe”
• Voluntary attention exhausts quickly and needs to be recharged
• Imposing physical order creates calm
• Placebos, “good luck charms”, and rituals have a real affect on the brain
• Beliefs shape expectations which can hush the chatter

Tools

• Self-talk
  • User your name and 2nd person “you”
  • Ask what you would say to a friend in the same situation
  • Reframe the challenge is terms of situations you have handled before
  • Remind yourself that your body’s response to stress is there to help you
  • Normalize your situation
  • Think about future-you
  • Visualize the problem and zoom out
  • Write about your thoughts
  • Perform a ritual or hand a charm
• Tools that use other people
  • Address cognitive and emotional needs (validate their experiences and provide suggestions)
  • Invisibly support
  • Touch affectionately
  • Be someone else’s placebo
• Environment
  • Create order
  • Expose yourself to green space
  • Seek out awe-inspiring experiencing

1. “Do not carelessly denigrate social institutions or creative achievement”
   • Most of us think by talking, few ever do
   • Social interactions help keep us sane by providing interaction bumpers
   • Individuals have to balance what is good for themselves and what is good for the whole
   • Games have to be iterable to be durable (things can change and adapt over time)
   • It is important that we play the game fairly
   • When an authority, it is important to let the lessors control play and win often (1/3 or more)
   • Authority comes from competence while power compels
   • Liberal and conservative views are both important and need constraint
   • Understand the rules well enough to know when to change or break them
2. “Imagine who you could be, and then aim single-mindedly at that”
   • Humans are really good at imitating
   • We need experience before we can recognize a pattern and progress it
   • When ignorance demolishes culture, monsters emerge
   • We love a good hero story
   • “What we need most to find is in the place we least wish to look.”
   • We can imitate more than we can explain
3. “Do not hide unwanted things in the fog”
   • Do not pretend to be happy with something you are not
   • “Have the damn fight”
   • Life is what repeats and it is worth repeating it right
   • Leaning one way causes something else to balance the other side
   • The thing said is translated through a lens of all things that have ever been said in the relationship
   • “When ignorance is blessed to be wise as folly”
   • Is it scary or am I afraid?
4. “Notice that oppurtunity lurks where responsibility has been abdicated”
   • Do the useful things that no one else is doing
   • Slay the right sized dragons… They have enough gold to make it worth while
   • Games only work if we accept the constraints of the rules
   • “Sin” is often better translated as “missed the target”
   • It is not cool to be the oldest person at the great party
   • Peter Pan, the youthful wild, refused to grow up, thus missing out of life itself
   • The hero is often sent to rescue his father
   • Voluntarily addressing of challenges is clinically curative
   • I, myself, are a community when considered across time
   • Happiness is inherently present-time focused and thus the pursuit of happiness does not produce sustained, long-term outcomes
5. “Do not do what you hate”
   • Stupid things drain us
   • Hearken to your still small voice
6. “Abandon ideology”
   • Ideologs reduce and oversimplify the world to reduce opposition
   • No group guilt should be assumed, especially multi-generational
7. “Work as hard as you possibly can on at least one thing and see what happens”
   • The conflicted person cannot negotiate with anything, including themselves
   • You need to aim at something to keep you moving
   • Enduring something of value fortifies the self
   • Potential, never applied, is worth less than the potential applied suboptimaly
   • Child need to be self-organized and integratable by 4 years-old
   • Without a playable game, only chaos can persist
   • Growth is learning to integrate our different selves into a single being
8. “Try to make one room in your home as beautiful as possible”
   • This establishes a relationship with the divine
   • This beauty can then pervade your life
   • Without art, we stop seeing the world and start only seeing pieces
   • Artistry is to contend with something you cannot express at a higher level
   • Lions attack the wildebeest they can identify
   • Art is not a decoration but an exploration
9. “If old memories still upset you, write them down carefully and completely”
   • When trauma revisits us, it is because we refuse to actively and completely process them
   • Bad memories often do not mature as we do
   • We relive our traumas until we review them thoroughly
   • Worry is a consequence and investigation of future possibilities
   • We are all plagued by the memories of what we did wrong or failed to do right
   • Power comes when we realize that we each create our future from the raw time and space given us
   • God leverages “The Word” in crafting reality
10. “Plan and work diligently to maintain that romance in your relationship”
    • Decide to not lie to your partner
    • Devote some time to maintaining the romance
    • Each should be subordinate to a single, higher power
    • “You do not find so much as make”
    • If there is an escape, there is not likely to be enough heat to burn through the dross
    • “I am going to kill you… It is just going to take a lifetime”
    • Tyranny is not good for anyone
    • If you’re not negotiating then you’re tyrannical or enslaved
    • If you do not know, then you should at least guess
    • Push through the dismissals
    • Red faced tears are often anger and not sadness
    • Nice is not the same as good
    • “Sins of the fathers” will echo through the generations
    • We need to tell our story to know it
    • It is easy to get vacations and special events right but harder to get the daily chores satisfactory every time
    • What matters is not the fight, but making peace
    • Never punish your partner for doing something you want them to continue doing
11. “Do not allow yourself to become resentful, deceitful, or arrogant”
    • Why waste time perceiving when you can just remember?
    • Conceptualize life through stories
    • There are always monsters in the dark… until we are big enough to defend ourselves
    • Invite the evil queen because she will arrive either way
    • Lying is an attempt to alter the realities
12. “Be grateful in spite of your suffering”
    • Have an informed optimism

“What Do You Care What Other People Think?” by Richard P Feynman

• All humans have the same problems, they just wear different costumes
• Ignore who said it and pay attention to what they said
• A lack of definition does not mean it does not have form
• Understand your weaknesses
• Talking details can put people at ease
• “It’s not the paint… It’s the paperwork.”
• Astronauts manually deploy landing gear so they can feel like they contribute to the operation
• Risk fatigue can cause us to ignore continued risk
• Previous success has no affect on current success

“Surely you’re joking, Mr. Feynman” by Richard P Feynman

• If it is good for you, what else matters?
• It is the things that everyone knows nothing about that everyone can talk about

Note: This was a fascinating read about the history of student loans and a prime example of how misaligned incentive can drive us so far astray.

• Student debt hits black household hardest
• Universities have the third largest lobbyist group
• The cold war led to needing more education
• Hard work used to be the ticket to the American Dream
• The GI Bill was meant to slow the return to work of veterans
• Johnson leaned on banks so the debt would stay off the Federal books
• Walker wanted a system backed by the Fed but with no oversight
• Inflation ran out of control, causing a raise in interest and loans
• Sallie Mae (SLM) was created to take federal money to forward to banks and was authorized to cover at nearly the same level as the Federal Reserve
  • This created “moral hazard” in which banks too bigger risks because they were fully insured
• Mid-1980’s students started defaulting more frequently
• Fox, CEO of SLM, convinced congress to guarantee profit, exploding the student loan market even more
• Then SLM severed ties with the government… going public
• Everyone made a lot of money… Private banks, SLM, and states
• Then came Student Loan Consolidation which let students combine loans then pay over 30 years
• US News college rankings started the arms race for prestige
• Higher tuition started raising prices to indicate quality
• 1989 WSJ reported 23 universities meeting to compare notes on students to maximize profits
• Accreditors were self-regulated and poorly funded so tons of random, bad schools popped up everywhere
• 1990 saw large reforms including better accounting and fewer student discharge rights
  • Tuition went up 120%-150% in a decade
• 1991 introduced Direct Loans for the first time (Fed paying schools directly, cutting SLM out of the picture) but also solidified debt vs grants by raising the cap but broadening availability
• Clinton launched direct loans that included income based repayment and eventual forgiveness
• Congress never required review of student’s ability to repay
• 1996 Al Lord got congress to disavow ownership of SLM so they could change their charter to lend directly to student, letting them profit from origination fees
• SLM started offering discounts to shut out the Clinton’s direct funding program
• For-profit schools could not earn more than 90% of their profit from federal loans
  • Schools accomplished this by keeping tuition low enough that 90% could be covered by federal loans
  • Growth came from the for-profit sector putting pressure to make more loans
• 1996 American Bar Association was sued, and lost, for cartel-like behavior; professors on the accreditation boards would require universities to pay higher wages to stay accredited, they would comply then raise tuition to cover the costs
• 1998 Federal government uncapped Grad loans
• 2006 SLM tried to go private but congress scraped the interest subsidies, cratering the value of SLM
• 2008 SLM was the first bail-out of the housing crash
• Obama pushed for the American Dream to be college instead of home ownership
• We encouraged people on the dole to get educated
• 2010 Federal government ended student loan guarantees and made them all Fed issued
  • Part of the savings paid for Obamacare
  • Debt raised fastest among black families
• 2011 Fed realized banks failed to correctly enforce loan criteria, the sudden enforcement meant a lot of students and parents could not get loans
  • Student aid became a form of welfare
• 2012 loosened the qualifications criteria
• 2014 lowered the income based repayment
• The housing bust enabled for-profit school to soar, capitalizing heavy-hit areas
• 2010 we start seeing “Disney-brand State U”
  • University of Alabama started aggressively marketing to out of state students who paid more
  • SLM pioneered “enrollment management”; how much to charge each student
• Student loans passed debt to future generations
• Many students were worse off from having gone to school, they made more but owed more
• Preventing discharge through bankruptcy meant Congress could show more profit from the Student Loan programs
• DeVoss engaged JP Morgan CEO to help investigate the Student Loan program and found the continuous interest charging was not sustainable