Action Figure Daniel

Category: Reading

  • “Grit” by Angela Duckworth

    • Grit is determination and direction
    • Grit is more important than talent, but we tend to prefer the naturals
      • Tests of talent are poor at best
    • When we watch things become, we discount the awe of it
    • Exemplars are craftsmen who acquired skills
    • Talent is how fast we improve our skill
    • Effort builds skill and makes skill productive
    • Grit changes overtime
    • Keep asking ‘why’ you are doing something until you get to ‘because’, that is the peak
    • “Grit” is holding the same top-level goal for a long time
    • Foster a passion
      • Passion comes from exposure to new experiences and time
    • Boredom is always self-recognizable but interest is not
    • Start slow with beginners
    • Novelty for a beginner (newness) is different than novelty for an expert (nuance)
    • Be okay with changing your mind
    • Continuous improvement is crucial
    • Goals are important in addition to repetition
    • Deliberate practice
    • Immediate feedback and reflection are crucial for improvement
    • “Flow” is when your situation matches your skill
    • Practicing good habits make it really easy to get started
    • People learn to get (or be) helpless
    • Permanent and pervasive explanations are signs of pessimism
    • Seeing challenges as something to overcome promotes a growth mindset
    • Trauma without control is bad but with control is good
    • Ask for help getting back up
    • Respectful, supportive, and demanding is the ideal parenting and teacher
    • Grit can be transferred through culture

  • “iGen” by Jean M. Twenge

    • Kids are growing up slower
      • Teens take longer to try alcohol, sex, and driving
      • Teens have less disposal cash, in part because they do not have jobs
      • Learning to binge drink, the later the more damage
    • In general, iGen drinks less though
    • Gen X took longer to start adolescence but started adulthood earlier
      • iGen is delaying everything
    • Prefrontal cortex development needs experience, so delaying work and other experience may be detrimental to development
    • Disadvantaged kids spend about the same amount of time as privileged kids and electric devices
    • iGen parties less than Gen Me
    • Teen homicides are going down but suicide is going up
    • Social rejection can trigger the same pain centers as physical harm
    • FOBLO (Fear of Being Left Out) is replacing FOMO (Fear of Missing Out)
    • Boys are aggressive physically, girls are aggressive socially
    • Sleep deprivation kills mood
    • iGen is leaving religion because of the hypocritic messaging
    • Safety is a big deal
      • “Emotional safety” is the new thing
      • “Keep safe” and “stay safe” started being said a lot more in the mid-nineties
      • Marijuana is viewed as safe
    • Escalating to arbitration is particularly among high class, loosely connected individuals
    • iGen is more focused on money than prior generations, wanting to “close the gap”
    • iGen values helping others more but does less
    • We are returning to thinking of traditional gender roles
    • iGen is less tolerant of unfavorable speech
      • They believe in equality so much, talking about racial differences is forbidden
    • They align best with libertarianism
    • What to do
      • Delay a smart phone as long as possible
      • Prefer apps that are focused on individual communication
      • Get exercise
      • Only frame things as “safety” unless it is really about safety
      • Job security
      • Tell them, “I want you to succeed”

  • “The Coddling of the American Mind” by Greg Lukianoff and Jonathan Haidt

    • Definitions
      • Teacups are fragile: breaks easily and does not self-heal
      • Plastic is resilient: is not easy to break
      • People are anti-fragile: the may break easily the first time but can self-heal
    • Avoidance tends to make us more sensitive rather than protecting us
    • Things do not frighten or dismay us but our perception does
    • Feelings are compelling and are often unreasonable
    • The rider’s job is to justify the elephant’s actions
    • The propagation of “micro-aggressions” shifted focus from intent to impact
      • Focusing on impact while ignoring intent makes one responsible for the feelings of others
    • CARE
      • Conscious empathy
      • Active listening
      • Responsible reaction
      • Environmental awareness
    • Education is meant to make people think
    • Humans are wired for tribes and their morality
      • “Morality binds and blinds”
      • Identifying a common enemy is an easy way to expand your tribe, at least temporarily
    • Policies of pure tolerance generally only empowers the already powerful
    • Intersectionality requires looking at all classes, not just one
    • Anonymity allows one to lose their identity to the group, leveraging
      • Dogmatism
      • Crusaders
      • Groupthink
      • Anti-intellectuals
    • Concept creep is being used to normalize radical behaviors
    • Words do not cause stress directly, rather only to those who interpret them as stressful
    • Witch hunts
      • Come on suddenly
      • Crimes against the community
      • Infractions are trivial or fabricated
      • People are fearful to defend the accused
    • We have shifted from acting out of a love of our current tribe to a hatred of any other tribe
    • The less time a child has to be on their own, without a screen, the less capable of dealing with the world they are
      • While crime has decline dramatically since the 1970’s, our fears have not
    • Genes prime is but interaction finishes the learning process
    • We need rough and tumble play to become fully capable adults
    • “Perseverance without passion is drudgery.”
    • Free-play is critical for “the art of association” or, detecting how others are feeling and adjusting play to compensate
      • (Free-play for children is so important so they can learn how to keep the game going through their social interactions)
    • Thousands of small little hindrances can be worse than tyranny
    • Administrative interventions are required to support a culture of victimhood
    • “Fair” distributions in response to merit is the default for toddlers and most people
    • How the decision was made is important for justice, as is how people are treated
    • Intuitive Justice is an overlap of equity theory and process Justice
    • It is important for a Democratic society to open new inquiries about Justice debate them and act on them
      • (Active discussions is a consistent theme here; without discussion, we have little way to know see and hear new viewpoints)
    • Being wrong feels just like being right… The difference is the feeling when you realize you were wrong
    • Pay as much attention to what apps youth are using as how much they are using them
    • Your company should have a high tolerance for disagreement but no tolerance for violence or retribution

  • “The Righteous Mind” by Jonathan Haidt

    • The six dimensions of morality
    • Kids tend to figure out morality on their own (rationally, neither nature nor nurture)
    • Human tends to create supernatural beings to help control the group
    • Moral conventions have a strong rooting in cultural conventions
    • We search for a rational reason to validate our moral feelings, after we have decided it is immoral
    • Our reasoning is driven by pattern matching: when something matches a pattern of disgust, we reject it
    • We use moral reason to come up with the best possible reason for someone else to join us
    • The Rider is useful for justifying what the elephant (intuition) just did and wants to do next
      • To change minds, you needs to trigger new intuition rather than challenge reasons
      • Intuitions comes first, reasoning come second
    • Affects (“afacts” not “affects”) are micro-emotional flashes that determine our intuitions
    • Disgusting smells or washing hands triggers our morals
    • Infants have an intuition about morals, for example, people being nice to other people
    • The elephant can listen to reason from other people, but struggle to listen to their own rider
    • Putting reputation on the line encourages ethical behavior
    • Accountability increases exploratory thought when they know in advance they will have to present to an audience, when that audience’s views are unknown, and they believe the audience is well informed on the subject matter
    • Self-esteem is really personal assessments of the perceptions of others
    • When not being monitored, most people will cheat a little
    • We ask “Can I believe it?” when we want to (low burden of proof) and “Must I believe it?” when we do not (high burden of proof)
      • (This is why Occam’s razor fails in reality; “simplicity” is the in words of the explainer)
    • We tend to be generous with people at first, but stop when it is not repaid
    • Competition increases tribal attitudes
    • Authority requires all to support all legitimate hierarchy
    • Feeling of disgust can be warnings that we are pushing too far
    • Disgust is a luxury
    • Everyone cares but conservatives also value loyalty and authority
    • Is the basis of society family or community?
    • The Alpha is more of a bully than a caretaker
      • (They take as much from society as they can before society deals with them)
    • Gossip is used to communicate displeasure through the community
    • We are 90% chimp and 10% bee; We do a lot of self-serving socializing but sometimes we click into hive mode
      • “Muscular bonding” is using physical effort to suspend the individual to contribute to the hive
      • We are conditional hive creatures… we mirror those who we confirm to our morals and ignore those who do not
    • Foster cooperation
      • Ramp up similarities, down play differences
      • Called “Smoothing,” it’s not the best way to overcome conflicts/differences
      • Synchronized motion
      • Competition among groups, not individuals
      • Understand Derkine
    • Religion is a team sport
      • God, trust, and trade
      • Religion is an accomplice to atrocities but rarely the progenitor
    • Genetics explains a quarter to a third of chance of political alignment
      • High dopamine tends to bring openness for new experiences and liberism
      • High serotonin tends to bring desire for stability and conservatism
    • The brain is a story processor not a logic processor
    • Increasingly levels of trust bring an increase in social openness

  • “The Tyranny of Merit” by Michael J Sandel

    • To reward on merit is to assume an equal distribution of skill
    • Failure in merit is to imply they did not try hard enough
    • Technocratic leadership removes moral; the technical aspects dictate choices and decisions
    • Merit is important to efficiency
    • Meritocracy allows us to believe we get what we deserve
    • The protestants celebrated that we were predestined and focused on manifesting their election through their intense work
      • Belief in Providence became spiritual sanctions for the status quo
      • Wealth is the confluence of personal effort and providential benefit
    • “Right side of history” is a moral call that assumes that history is an unbiased telling of events, not a narrative written by the victor, and is used to supplant the notion of Providence
    • “America is great because America is good”
    • If I am successful because of my work then others have failed because their lack of work
    • “Markets give people what they deserve”
    • Meritocracy leads to a sense of deserving things
    • “Credentialism: the last acceptable prejudice”
    • “Smart” is the merit based replacement for moral (much like “right side of history”)
    • Incentivizing side-steps governance and persuasion
    • Persuasion is critical to democratic processes
    • Education is not the problem (people who are more scientifically literate are more likely to have polarized views on climate change)
    • An aristocracy dismisses the illusion that the successful deserve their status; workers do not disparage themselves because they were not able to succeed
    • If I do not deserve benefit from my birth, then why would I deserve benefit from my talents
    • Wages are not rewards for character or merit but rather economic value
    • Equal opportunity does make things just because of the unequal distribution in abilities
    • Economic value is not the same as moral values
    • Education for the past two century have been focused on “sorting” the population based on intelligence
    • Colleges tend to consolidate privilege and not provide opportunity
    • We should focus on repairing the conditioning from which people want to flee rather than just enabling their movement