Tag: Potential

The Potential & Danger of Taboos

The Potential & Danger of Taboos

Posted on by jabittan
In the United States, there are many things that have been taboo throughout our country’s history. Today, saying that something is retarded is taboo, a positive development to reduce the stigma around cognitive disabilities by preventing people from using the word as an insult. However, in our not too distant past interracial marriages were taboo. Black men could be jailed and worse for entering into a consenting relationship with a white woman. Maintaining social order with taboos can push us in positive directions, but it can also push us in very negative directions. Steven Pinker writes about this in his book The Better Angels of Our Nature,
 
 
“The mentality of taboo, like the mentality of morality of which it is part, also can pull in either direction. It can turn religious or sexual nonconformity into an outrage that calls for ghastly punishment, but it can also prevent the mind from sliding into dangerous territory such as wars of conquest, the use of chemical and nuclear weapons, dehumanizing racial stereotypes, casual allusions to rape, and the taking of identifiable human lives.”
 
 
It is hard, even in a world where our digital footprint leaves a trail of everything we do, to police everyone all the time. It is hard to create rules that everyone can follow and obey to help society reach desired outcomes. Taboos are not set in stone and can’t be controlled the way laws can, but they generally do a better job of shaping behavior and desired outcomes than our laws. They don’t require constant policing, but instead rely on feedback that individuals receive when they step close to a taboo or cross the line.
 
 
The problem is that taboos can arise and disappear without us fully understanding where they came from and why they disappeared. A law is clearly visible and its destruction or elimination marks a clear turning point. Taboos are harder to control and shape. This is an important thing for us to think about and consider as we engage in society. Do we want to accept politicians who make fun of people with disabilities, even if they are our preferred candidate, or do we want to “cancel” them because they have violated a taboo? Do we want to allow violence in some cases but not others, or do we want to enforce an all-out taboo against violence? These are real questions we face today. Framing them in terms of absolute taboos may or may not be appropriate, but it does change the parameters of the debates and decisions. Taboos have great potential, but also great danger.
What Do We Want to Want?

What Do We Want To Want?

Posted on by jabittan
Yuval Noah Harari ends his book Sapiens by asking his readers to consider the following, “the only thing we can try to do is to influence the direction scientists are taking. … the real question facing us is not what do we want to become?, but what do we want to want?“
 
 
For all of human existence, up to this point, human lives have been defined by scarcity and physical limitations. The vast majority of humans who have ever lived were only able to do a limited amount with the objects available to them in their environment. But modern humans may be on the cusp of effectively becoming gods. We are at a point where we can build both real and imagined (virtual) worlds where we are no longer limited in meaningful ways by resources. We are harnessing huge amounts of energy, figuring out how to do so in a more environmentally friendly and sustainable way, and we may be able to soon engineer human beings to be whatever we want them to be. Harari describes our current path as guiding us to become “self-made gods with only the laws of physics to keep us company, we are accountable to no one.”
 
 
And so Harari’s initial question becomes ever more important. What do we want to want? Suppose that we can geo-engineer the planet to always have the weather conditions and hospitable planetary needs for human survival. Suppose we can get a surplus of cheap energy from renewable sources without damaging the planet. Suppose we can conquer biology and even death. What will it mean to be human? What will we want, and what should we want when the only limits are the limits of the extremes of space?
 
 
Harari continues, “is there anything more dangerous than dissatisfied and irresponsible gods who don’t know what they want?” This is a question that I cannot answer on my own in a single blog post. I can hardly decide what I want to want in my own personal life. I certainly cannot think about what other people should want in their own lives. It is easy to say we should all want happiness, peace, and flourishing for all humans on the planet, but that is so broad that it means nothing. A scientist engineering the human mind could say that is what they work toward while creating something that makes humans something other than human. An engineer moving mountains could believe they are doing it for all the reasons I laid out, but who is to say that moving mountains is really what we want or should want? Humans are on the cusp of merging with machine, controlling our biology, and becoming gods, but we don’t even have a way to think about whether we should want to be doing these things. We certainly can’t accurately judge whether the outcomes will be in the best interest of humans. It is also possible that none of this will matter if the future of humanity is to become something other than humans. However, it is dangerous for humans to amass essentially unlimited power and to not know what to want to do with it.

To Wear a Sweater or Not?

Posted on by jabittan
There is a story that I hear from time to time in different contexts. Depending on the context, it is framed as either positive or negative, with different ideas about what our future holds and how we should behave. The story manages to hit political and social identities, aspirations and fears for the future, and concerns over self-sufficiency and parochialism. The story is about a president who encouraged us to wear sweaters during the winter.

 

I’ll start off with the negative view, one perspective of which Tyler Cowen expresses in his book The Complacent Class. He writes, “Jimmy Carter put on a sweater and urged Americans to turn down the thermostat, representing a new era of lowered aspirations. In other words, the American response to economic adversity was to seek to restore comfort more than dynamism, and Americans pushed their culture in this direction all the more in the 1980s.”

 

Cowen’s critique is that as a response to inflation and oil insecurity from foreign oil dependence, Carter suggested we accept limitations and lower expectations. Our president at the time did not encouraging Americans to find new ways to make the world the way they want it. I think this critique is fair. Instead of imagining that the world could be better, that we could be comfortably warm and energy independent through new technology, the story suggest we should just deal with some level of discomfort.

 

I’ve heard others reflect on this story in a similar way. They criticize Carter for a defeatist attitude and for thinking small. People don’t like the parochial feeling of having an elitist person tell them to be tougher and to put on another layer rather than be comfortable but use more resources. Its easy to understand why someone might have the mindset that they deserve to run the heat, even if it is wasteful, because they worked hard to be comfortable and they can afford it.

 

I also think there is value to having our top political leaders signal that we can be more and that we can use science, technology, innovations, and a sense of purpose to make the world a better place. Perhaps encouraging us to keep the thermostats where they were, but also encouraging us to, as the line from the movie The Martian says, “science the shit out of this” would have landed us in a better place than where we are now.

 

But on the other hand, perhaps Carter was right. I have heard people praise Carter for being honest and realistic with the American public. I have heard people criticize Reagan, Carter’s successor, as being an out of touch elitist wearing a suit 24/7. I think people today desire a president like Carter who would signal that they were more in touch with America by turning down the temperature in the White House, making a personal sacrifice themselves before asking others to do the same.

 

Carter’s statement that we need to conserve resources and think critically suggest that we should not just use resources in a wanton fashion. This is a sentiment that climate activists today are trying to mainstream, and perhaps if we had listened more carefully to Carter, we could have shifted our technology to be more green, less resource demanding, and less polluting. After all, who are we to decide that the world should perfectly suit us for every moment of our existence? Isn’t a little discomfort OK, and isn’t it a good thing for us to recognize that the world doesn’t revolve around us? Is it better if we turn the thermostat down, put on a sweater, and pull out a board game to play with friends and family rather than crank up the heat and stare at our screens?

 

My takeaway from this story almost has nothing to do with the story itself. Whether we decide Carter was right probably has more to do with who we want to be, who we want the world to see us as, and what is in our self-interest than it does with whether we truly believe his attitude reflected and encouraged complacency. My takeaway is that events happen in this world, and we attach stories and meanings to the events that can be understood in different ways depending on our background and context. The narrative we create and attach to an event matters, and it shapes what we see, what we believe, and in some ways how we feel about the things that happen in the world. Think deeply about your goals, what you want to achieve, and how a narrative can help you reach those goals, and you will find the ways to tie that narrative into an event. At the same time, watch for how others do the same thing, and when you have discussions with others and want to change their mind, be cognizant of the narratives at play before you go about throwing statistics and facts at someone. Maybe a new narrative will be more effective than a bunch of economics and math.

What Coaching Does

Posted on by jabittan
Michael Bungay Stanier explains why coaching is such a positive force for those receiving coaching, and why we should invest more of our time and effort into learning to be a great coach. He writes, “Coaching can fuel the courage to step out beyond the comfortable and familiar, can help people learn from their experiences and can literally and metaphorically increase and help fulfill a person’s potential.” The three areas he identifies in which coaching makes an impact on our life are key to growth and development and are some of the hardest areas in life to harness and improve.

 

Bungay Stanier’s book, The Coaching Habit, demonstrates ways to develop other people and outlines the benefits that coaches, teams, and individuals receive from good coaching. As I wrote before, it is not just the individual who benefits from good coaching, but also the coach who develops a stronger team and is able to empower the individual to do and take on more. Good coaching maximizes the individual and helps them take what are often scary steps toward improvement.

 

When I think about the three areas that Bungay Stanier identifies in good coaching, I think about how anyone becomes successful and how often as individuals we fail to take big steps toward our goals and fail to learn from our experiences. Research has shown that many people, particularly people of color, do not actually apply their talents to the best of their ability and do not step out to take on new and larger roles for themselves. I study political science and one of things that researches have found is that there are many good candidates out there from minority populations, but that many of them never think they have a chance and never run for office. A simple invitation and a little coaching to encourage political participation makes a big difference in terms of who runs for office and who steps out of their comfort zone to try running for office. Simply on our own it is hard to step forward and drive toward the things we want when the future is muddy and complicated.

 

I think we also fail to learn well from our experiences. It is not that we are ignorant, self-centered, and think we are flawless, but rather that life is busy and distracting, and pausing to think critically of an event from our past is hard to do. As Bungay Stanier explains, good coaches ask more questions than they provide answers, and their questions are often reflective in nature. Good coaches encourage us to think about our experiences in a way that we normally would not, and they help us make new connections and discoveries from the things we have done and experienced. Encouraging us to take chances and helping us think more critically about our past is what allows us to unlock our potential, and it is why good coaching is so valuable and should be practiced by more people.

The Essence of Coaching

Posted on by jabittan
While I was working on my undergraduate degree at the University of Nevada I spent some time coaching cross country and track and field at Reno High School. I really enjoyed coaching and had a great time working with the runners, helping them compete for state championships, and compete at their best. What I never really asked myself, however, is what I thought coaching was all about.

I tried to be a good role model for the kids and show them how to work hard and improve their running, but I never thought deeply about what my role as a coach should be. In his book The Coaching Habit, Michael Bungay Stanier takes a deep look at coaching (mostly from a professional workplace standpoint rather than a sports standpoint) to understand what coaching is truly all about. “The essence of coaching,” writes Stanier, “lies in helping others and unlocking their potential.” A coach is committed to being helpful and focusing on helping others become the best version of themselves that they can be. This is something I think I understood at an intuitive level, but I never really stepped back to think about my role as a coach in this way, and it certainly was not at the front of my mind ever day when I arrived at practice.

Coaching was partly a way for me to continue getting good workouts in with people I enjoyed. It was partly about me demonstrating something positive about myself in terms of leadership, loyalty to the school form which I graduated, and my ability to serve as a positive role model. These hidden motives were not the only drivers of my coaching decision, I really did enjoy working as part of a team toward a big goal and I appreciated having the chance to help our head coach and help our athletes improve and push themselves. But I am certain that I would have developed a different coaching style if every day before practice I through to myself “the essence of coaching lies in helping others and unlocking their potential.” Everything from my conversations, to how I participated in workouts, and to who I spoke with at practice would have shifted as I tried to unlock the most potential in the most kids.

I don’t think I was a poor coach because I partly participated for my own hidden motives (hidden even to myself). But I certainly don’t think I was the best coach I could have been, and that is because I lacked self-awareness and my coaching focus was not dialed in on what is the most essential element of coaching. What coaches must remember is that while they benefit personally and may have hidden motives of their own, coaching needs to be about another person and about unlocking greater potential in the world.

Girls’ Education

Posted on by jabittan
Searching for the most effective means of using ones resources to help others is a cornerstone idea in the philosophy of effective altruism.  Throughout his book The Most Good You Can Do Peter Singer examines what this means, what we spend our money on, and how we can redirect our limited resources so that we guide a maximal amount toward causes that have meaningful and life-changing impacts.

 

One of the areas that effective altruists may decide to direct their monetary donations is toward girls’ education in the developing world. Singer explains the benefits of educating more girls and looks at why it is such an important issue in the world today.  He looks at several popular methods for addressing girls’ education and ways in which we have tried to improve girls’ attendance and completion rates in school. By outlining several strategies Signer invites the reader to consider which strategy seems the most obvious, which seems like it would have the greatest benefit, and which strategy seems like it would not be as useful as the others.  He then explains the results of a study from the Jameel Poverty Action Lab and shows the reader that the most effective way to improve education is to provide information to parents about the increased wages of those who stay at school. What Singer explains is that for each $100 dollars spent educating parents, daughters spend an additional 20.7 years in school, which results in girls being able to reach their full potential.

 

What I found particularly interesting is the fact that Singer focused on the well being of the individual girl as opposed to the society as a whole. Often when we look at things like girls’ education, we focus on the benefits it will produce for society such as a reduced birthrate, fewer single mothers, and fewer children in foster care.  We don’t often focus on the well being of the individual woman whose life we want to change. “…for every $100 spent on one of the least effective methods, $99.50 is wasted. When resources are limited and educations is so important to the future of children, that waste means that many human beings do not achieve their full potential.” This quote shows the mindset behind effective altruists who expect to use resources to better others, and want to ensure that their resources have the greatest impact possible because it allows others to live lives to their full potential.