Tag: Connections

More on Modern Myths - Yuval Noah Harari - Sapiens - Joe Abittan

More on Modern Myths

Posted on by jabittan
In the book Sapiens, Yuval Noah Harari writes, “People easily acknowledge that primitive tribes cement their social order by believing in ghosts and spirits, and gathering each full moon to dance together around the campfire. What we fail to appreciate is that our modern institutions function on exactly the same basis.”
My post yesterday gave several examples of modern myths that we believe in, even though we don’t recognize them as such. Harari focuses on the things in our world that are not tangible, but nevertheless are agreed to and recognized by humans across the globe. Many of our institutions are based on little more than trust and agreement, but those two factors, shared among enough people, are able to create shared myths. These shared myths allow us to make real, tangible objects. They allow us to organize and manage huge numbers of people. And they also allow us to come together, enjoy being social humans, and to have shared stories and legends.
I think the easiest way to see how modern humans are not much different than primitive tribes in terms of myths and community cementation is within sports, especially college sports. We will root for a team, often unreasonably given a team’s performance, and come together in unison to yell special chants meant to boost our team’s performance while hindering the performance of the other team. After the game we will discuss miracle plays, debate the performance of gifted, sometimes god-like individuals, and we will share the experience of being present to watch the special ritual of a comeback win or buzzer beater. The part of humanity which brought primitive tribes together around a campfire for bonding is still on full display in sports stadiums and college towns around the country.
But Harari goes further in his book than sports fanatics when exploring institutions, human organizations, and myths. Yesterday’s post referenced corporations, nations, and even human rights as being myths that humans have developed to bring people together around something intangible. Harari explains that human rights have been invented and agreed upon, that you cannot find human rights inside a person the way you can find lungs, bones, or livers. They exist because we agree that they do, much like the deities of ancient civilizations.
Harari also compares lawyers to shamans in his book. A corporate lawyer tells a story by making an argument from a certain point of view. Their words, how they phrase, present, and describe certain actions and situations, can ultimately change the reality of the world. It is not unreasonable, even if it is a creative stretch, to compare a modern lawyer to an ancient shaman who could mutter special incantations to cure the sick or bring rain.
What Harari is ultimately trying to argue is that the myths which helped kickstart societies and human cooperation never really left our human species. The myths changed over time, perhaps became less mystical and less magical, but still exist. We still rely on rituals and hidden forces to bring humans together, but we have shaped them as specific institutions that feel more grounded in reason and rationality than the institutions present in ancient myths. Ultimately, we still depend on stories to hold our societies together and connect millions and billions of humans peacefully and cooperatively.
The Emotional Support of Family

The Emotional Support of Family

Posted on by jabittan
Like many people, my family is complex. I have two uncles who have finally re-connected after at least 20 years of not talking to each other. At the same time, one of those uncles and another are now no longer talking to each other even though they have been business partners for over 20 years. Half of my family doesn’t talk to the other half, and one Grandma only speaks with me, though she mostly only asks me about my siblings. The relationships are challenging, often frustrating, but like virtually all humans, we all still find emotional support in the form of family.
Regardless as to whether family members are living or deceased, whether we know our ancestors or have no knowledge of our familial roots, and whether we have close relationships with family or whether our ties have faded, we all seem to be primed to find emotional support in family and in the idea of family. I really only recently learned about the heritage of my family from my dad’s side, and while I have lived most of my life without knowing any of that heritage, I am now able to find pride in the roots of that side of my family. I also look back at my dad’s dad, a troubled man who made some bold choices to get our family to the United States, and I find emotional support in his story, even if the man was not ultimately the best role model one could have. The point is that despite the contradictions in people and in families, despite the distance in time and space that arise between family members, we hold on to our families as something special, and find support in them, even if they are not around to actually support us.
Elliot Liebow writes about this phenomenon in the case of homeless women in Washington DC in the early 90’s in his book Tell Them Who I Am. Many of the women who he met were divorced, some had kids, and many had lost almost all connections with family. Nevertheless, family, the stories they had about their families, and the ideas and memories of family gave the women emotional suppport. The women didn’t want to burden their families with their own homelessness, demonstrating a real respect for their family members who were doing better than they were. They were impressed by children whose lives were on better paths, and they even sometimes remembered former spouses in a positive light. For women who had few deep connections or meaningful relationships in their homeless lives, the past relationships and memories of deep connections still fueled them to keep moving and surviving each day.
Humans need connections and families are the first connections we form. Even though today the families we chose are sometimes closer to us than the families we are born into, our original and genetic families are still a strong force in our lives. We are predisposed to care about our families and find emotional support within them, even when they are not physically close by or emotionally near us.
Individual Costs of Eviction

Individual Costs of Eviction

Posted on by jabittan
People who don’t live in poverty often don’t realize just how costly poverty can be. Living in poverty can be very costly in terms of money and also in terms of time, energy, and overall quality of life. While I don’t think anyone would expect the quality of life for those in poverty to be good, I think many would be surprised to see just how bad it can be, and how limiting it can be for maintaining even simple enjoyable aspects of life that are in many ways essential for being human and are necessary for living responsibly and improving one’s situation.
In his book Evicted, Matthew Desmond writes the following to show just how costly poverty can be:
“If Arleen and Vanetta didn’t have to dedicate 70 or 80 percent of their income to rent, they could keep their kids fed and clothed and off the streets. They could settle down in one neighborhood and enroll their children in one school, providing them opportunity to form long-lasting relationships with friends, role models, and teachers. They could start a savings account or buy their children toys and books, perhaps even a home computer. Their time and emotional energy they spent making rent, delaying eviction, or finding another place to live when homeless could instead be spent on things that enriched their lives: community college classes, exercise, finding a good job, maybe a good man too.”
There are a few notable points in this quote. When people hit rock bottom poverty and face eviction, they lose the ability to maintain a job, to keep their kids (or themselves) in a stable location, and run out of energy to take the additional steps they would have to take to improve their situation. Because they are evicted (or otherwise left with no option but to move) frequently, they cannot build strong connections with other people. They cannot find mentors, find additional support and encouragement from caring people, and cannot get an extra hand in paying for groceries or networking for a stable job. Things like human connection are things that all of us want and need in life and that greatly contribute to our overall life satisfaction, but which are denied to those in deep poverty who face eviction.
These deep costs of poverty work against the individuals who have the least among us. Low wages and high rents mean that there is no way to have enough money left over to be responsible and plan ahead for the costs of life. Time spent on busses, time spent searching for another place to live once evicted, and time spent commuting long distances to places to work or receive aid add up on the costs of poverty, making life even more difficult and making escape even harder. It is important to acknowledge and think about all these costs. With such low levels of life satisfaction and no conceivable way to make life better, can we ever hope that anyone will pull themselves up by their own bootstrap to improve their lives? People need support, and they need systems that reduce the costs of poverty, or they can never escape.
Scrutinizing Causal Assumptions

Scrutinizing Causal Assumptions

Posted on by jabittan
Recently I have been writing about my biggest take-away from The Book of Why by Judea Pearl. The book is more technical than I can fully understand and grasp since it is written for a primarily academic audience with some knowledge of the fields that Pearl dives into, but I felt that I still was able to gain some insights from the book. Particularly, Pearl’s idea that humans are better causal thinkers than we typically give ourselves credit for was a big lesson for me. In thinking back on the book, I have been trying to recognize our powerful causal intuitions and to understand the ways in which our causal thinking can be trusted. Still, for me it feels that it can be dangerous to indulge our natural causal thinking tendencies.
However, Pearl offers guidance on how and when we can trust our causal instincts. he writes, “causal assumptions cannot be invented at our whim; they are subject to the scrutiny of data and can be falsified.”
Our ability to imagine different future states and to understand causality at an instinctual level has allowed our human species to move form hunter-gatherer groups to massive cities connected by electricity and Wi-Fi. However, our collective minds have also drawn causal connections between unfortunate events and imagined demons. Dictators have used implausible causal connections to justify eugenics and genocide and still to this day society is hampered by conspiracy theories that posit improbable causal links between disparate events.
The important thing to note, as Pearl demonstrates, is that causal assumptions can be falsified and must be supported with data. Supernatural demons cannot be falsified and wild conspiracy theories often lack any supporting data or evidence. We can intuit causal relations, but we must be able to test them in situations that would falsify our assumptions if we are to truly believe them. Pearl doesn’t simply argue that we are good causal thinkers and that we should blindly trust the causal assumptions that come naturally to our mind. Instead, he suggests that we lean into our causal faculties and test causal relationships and assumptions that are falsifiable and can be either supported or disproven by data. Statistics still has a role in this world, but importantly we are not looking at the data without making causal assumptions. We are making predictions and determining whether the data falsifies those predictions.
Patterns of Associated Ideas

Patterns of Associated Ideas

Posted on by jabittan
In Thinking Fast and Slow, Daniel Kahneman argues that our brains try to conserve energy by operating on what he calls System 1. The part of our brain that is intuitive, automatic, and makes quick assessments of the world is System 1. It doesn’t require intense focus, it quickly scans our environment, and it simply ignores stimuli that are not crucially important to our survival or the task at hand. System 1 is our low-power resting mode, saving energy so that when we need to, we can activate System 2 for more important mental tasks.

 

Without our conscious recognition, System 1 builds mental mental models of the world that shape the narrative that we use to understand everything that happens around us. It develops simple association and expectations for things like when we eat, what we expect people to look like, and how we expect the world to react when we move through it. Kahneman writes, “as these links are formed and strengthened, the pattern of associated ideas comes to represent the structure of events in your life, and determines your interpretations of the present as well as your expectations of the future.”

 

It isn’t uncommon for people different people to watch the same TV show, read the same news article, or witness the same event and walk away with completely different interpretations. We might not like a TV show that everyone else loves. We might reach a vastly different conclusion from reading a news article about global warming, and we might interpret the actions or words of another person completely differently. Part of why we don’t all see things the same, Kahneman might argue, is because we have all trained our System 1 in unique ways. We have different patterns of associated ideas that we use to fit information into a comprehensive narrative.

 

If you never have interactions with people who are different than you are, then you might be surprised when people don’t behave the way you expect. When you have a limited background and experience, then your System 1 will develop a pattern of associated ideas that might not generalize to situations that are new for you. How you see and understand the world is in some ways automatic, determined by the pattern of associated ideas that your System 1 has built over the years. It is unique to you, and won’t fit perfectly with the associated ideas that other people develop.

 

We don’t have control over System 1. If we active our System 2, we can start  to influence what factors stand out to System 1, but under normal circumstances, System 1 will move along building the world that fits its experiences and expectations. This works if we want to move through the world on auto-pilot with few new experiences, but if we want to be more engaged in the world and want to better understand the variety of humanity that exists in the world, our System 1 on its own will never be enough, and it will continually let us down.
Associative Thinking

Associative Thinking

Posted on by jabittan
I had a few linguistics classes in college and I remember really enjoying studies about associative thinking, or priming, where one word would trigger thoughts about another related thing. If you read stop sign, and someone then asked you to name a color, you are likely to say red. Our minds hover around a set of words associated with a topic, and words further away from the topic probably won’t register as quickly. If you read jellyfish then your mind is going to be set up for more ocean words like water, seaweed, or Nemo. Words like cactus, x-ray, or eviction, would take an extra second for your brain to register because they don’t seem to belong with jellyfish. If you watch Family Feud, then you will get to see great examples of linguistic priming and associative thinking in process. The first person in a family will say their answer, and it will be hard for the rest of the family to jump into a different category to get the final item on the list.

 

Associative thinking is even more interesting and complicated than just linguistic priming. Daniel Kahneman writes about it in his book Thinking Fast and Slow:

 

“An idea that has been activated does not merely evoke one other idea. It activates many ideas, which in turn activate others. Furthermore, only a few of the activated ideas will register in consciousness; most of the work of associative thinking is silent, hidden from our conscious selves. The notion that we have limited access to the workings of our minds is difficult to accept because, naturally, it is alien to our experience, but it is true: you know far less about yourself than you feel you do.”

 

Associative thinking reveals a lot about our minds that we don’t have access to. This is why implicit association tests (IAT) have been used to measure things like racial bias in individuals and societies. Your conscious mind might know it is wrong to think of people of color as criminals, but your unconscious mind might implicitly connect words like crime, drugs, or violence to certain racial groups. Even though you can consciously overcome these biases, your immediate reaction to other people might be enough to show them that you don’t trust them and might reveal implicit fears or negative biases. A clenching fist, a narrowing gaze, or an almost imperceptible backing away from someone might not be conscious, but might be enough for someone to register a sense of unease.

 

I don’t know enough about the benefits of racial bias training to say if it is effective in counteracting these implicit associations or immediate and unconscious reactions. I don’t know just how truly bad it is that we harbor such implicit associations, but I think it is important that we recognize they are there. It is important to know how the brain works, and important that we think about how much thinking takes place behind the scenes, without us recognizing it. Self-awareness and knowledge about associative thinking can help us understand just how we behave and interact with others, so that hopefully we can bring our best selves to the conversations and interactions we have with people who are different from us.
Rich Representations of Things

Making Connections From Rich Representations of Things

Posted on by jabittan
On August 12th, Tyler Cowen released a podcast interview with Stanford Economics Professor Nicholas Bloom on his podcast Conversations with Tyler. In response to a question from Cowen about making adjustments in his life, Bloom said the following:

 

“For me, I really like to read broadly rather than deeply — sounds an odd thing to say. Every Monday, for example, or Sunday night, the National Bureau of Economic Research has this vast email of all the recent papers. I tend to try and scan every title and abstract. I read the papers. I like the Economist magazine. It’s good. It’s often been a source of ideas, actually.
We were talking before the call — I listen to your podcast. I actually listen to a lot of podcasts because I try and go out for a walk or a run for about an hour every day. I mostly listen to podcasts. [laughs] If I’m getting too tired, I have to switch to music. For me, that’s been helpful for coming up with new research ideas.” 

 

The quote from Bloom came back to mind this morning as I looked over a quote I highlighted in Daniel Kahneman’s book Thinking Fast and Slow. Kahneman’s quote is about connections in the mind, and how having a rich set of connections can help us have better representations of the world. When people are asked questions about Michigan, research in Kahneman’s book shows, they have different responses depending on whether they remember that Detroit is in Michigan. People with more knowledge of the state think differently of it compared to people with minimal knowledge of Michigan. Kahneman writes,

 

“More intelligent individuals are more likely than others to have rich representations of most things. Intelligence is not only the ability to reason; it is also the ability to find relevant material in memory and to deploy attention when needed.” 

 

This idea relates to what Bloom said in the interview with Cowen. Bloom was asked about his productivity, and how he is able to keep up a high level of publications with co-authors across a wide range of academic institutions, geographic locations, and subjects. Bloom responded that he is developing rich representations of most things through broad, but not necessarily deep, investigations of a wide range of topics.

 

By taking in a wide range of information, Bloom is able to pick out the important connections between disparate topics. This gives him an ability to deploy attention where there is a lack of study on certain topics. By reading across many fields, he is able to look at current developments in economics, news, and society to find relevant material that can generate useful knowledge for the world of economics.

 

Not all of us are ever going to be economists, and not all of us will be in a place where we can publish academic articles on lots of topics. But all of us are asked by social media every day to offer our opinion on something. If we have a narrow and limited knowledge base, then our opinions and ideas are going to also be narrow and limited. If, however, we can work to broaden our horizons and work to focus our memory and attention on relevant material, then we can start to offer better opinions about the world, and we can start to move discussions forward in a better direction.
Friendships

Friendships

Posted on by jabittan
Friendships for children always seem so easy, but as we get older, friendships seem to grow more and more difficult. One reason for why it may be so difficult to keep friends as adults is that we are just so busy and have to manage all our resources. We have to keep track of our time, our money, keep-up the space where we live, fix and repair things that break with our cars, and replace worn-out items and consumer goods. We get used to thinking of things in terms of what we get from them, and it is easy for us to start thinking of our friends in the same way.

 

In Letters from a Stoic, Seneca writes, “one who is chosen for the sake of utility will be satisfactory only so long as he is useful.”

 

The problem for us is that friendships are about more than just utility. Having lots of friends just because you receive some benefit from their friendship leaves you with a series of superficial relationships, none of them robust enough or strong enough to actually provide you any real utility during a time of hardship. In this way, a utility approach to friends backfires. If you only remain friends with someone when they have something they can provide for you, then you won’t actually have a real friendship.

 

The reality is that friendships require work and effort. Seneca also quotes a philosopher named Attalus in writing, “It is more pleasant to make than to keep a friend, as it is more pleasant to the artist to paint than to have finished painting.” New friendships are exciting, spontaneous, and offer promise of new allies for future situations. Maintaining a friendship requires lugging around baggage and figuring out how to adjust as people, times, and places change. Friendship requires real effort to stay invested in the lives of others.

 

But in the end, keeping a friend helps us better understand ourselves, helps us develop better understandings and connections with other people, and makes us more pleasant and thoughtful human beings. Keeping a friend requires that we think about more than just ourselves and what we get from a friendship. It requires that we think about what we can do for others, knowing that we might not get the same material benefits back from the other. This is why friendships are hard as you get further into your busy and hectic life, but the same challenges reveal why friendships are so valuable.
An Epidemic of Disconnection

An Epidemic of Disconnection

Posted on by jabittan
Over the last few years I have become increasingly aware of the importance of developing real senses of community and connection between everyone in our societies. Johann Hari’s book Chasing the Scream was one of the books that kickstarted these ideas in my mind. We are social creatures, and we create the worlds we live in together, through shared efforts and visions. As we have lost our shared visions and isolated our efforts, our communities have suffered, and people have responded with drugs, addiction, and further isolation. We have created an epidemic of disconnection, and we have been facing the consequences for the last several years.

 

In his book, Hari writes, “The places with the biggest opioid crises are also the places with the highest suicide rates and the highest antidepressant prescriptions—which help us to see that what is really going on is an epidemic of deep disconnection.”

 

Drug abuse, addiction, and overdose are common across the country, but are not evenly distributed. There are parts of our country where deaths of despair are a major concern and are so prevalent that among some demographics overall life expectancy is decreasing. People are facing incredible challenges, and don’t have the support systems and communities that they need to help them through their challenges. Drugs are a way to blunt the pain, to numb the constant worry, and to try turn off the part of the mind that only sees life as downward spiral. The epidemic of disconnection that we see in our country is self-reinforcing and threatens lives and communities.

 

We need to find more ways for people to belong, for people to matter, and for people to be engaged in creative endeavors in their community. Isolating ourselves with Netflix, gating off our communities, and building walls between ourselves, our property and the outside world of trouble will only exacerbate the epidemic of disconnection and further the inequalities which lead to our societal problems. We have to find more ways to invest in our communities, to do things together (even in a pandemic), and help encourage people to be responsible to each other and society. We cannot only be responsible to our own homes, families, and bank accounts. In order to combat the opioid crisis, we have to reconnect with people who feel disconnected and isolated, and help fill their lives in ways that opioids never will.
Addiction and Community

A Final Thought on Addiction and Community

Posted on by jabittan
In the afterword of his book Dreamland, author Sam Quinones includes a quote from an obituary written for a 24-year-old man who lived in Avon Lake, a town of about 24,000 people just west of Cleveland. The parents of the young man who died from addiction wrote in their son’s obituary, “They say it takes a community to raise a child. It takes a community to battle addiction.”

 

Everyone, including those of us who are not parents, know that it is true when we say it takes a community to raise a child. Historically, new parents have been in their early to mid twenties (this is changing now – possibly for these communal reasons), and with lower incomes in early stages of their careers and fewer immediate resources, new parents have relied on family members and friends to help with child rearing. As kids get older, they enter public schools, where everyone, parents and non-parents, contribute financially, typically through local property taxes. We know that it is hard to raise a kid on your own, and that it makes a big difference to live near family, to have close friends who are raising kids at the same time, and to have supports from work for the times when our kids are sick and need extra love and attention.

 

The quote from the parents in their son’s obituary, and all of Dreamland demonstrate that the same is true for how we should approach addiction. Asking someone to overcome addiction on their own is like asking a child to raise themselves. It can happen, but it doesn’t often turn out well. People battling addiction need supportive relationships in their lives. The family members and friends of people with addiction need help, because it can be challenging and taxing to help someone else stay sober and find meaning in life beyond addiction. We need communities where we can help each other, watch out for one-another, and provide support in times of need. Many of us have lost this along our way, as our culture has pushed us toward staying inside, watching TV in our own homes, and filling our lives with stuff rather than with the people we love and care about.

 

This is a tough time to find new connections and community as we work to prevent the rapid spread of a new virus, but we should be thinking forward nonetheless to a time where we can better connect with those around us and find new ways to live in community with those who matter. It might just save the life of someone we know whose struggle with addiction has been hidden from us.