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"Which is great when you're in one of the fields that's meant to serve as the grand and inspirational challenge. For the rest of us, though, this is trickle-down science: the best and the brightest get fired up to be rocket scientists, or high-energy particle physicists, and those who aren't quite the best or the brightest, well... they can study condensed matter physics, or something less inspirational. They'll still be an upgrade over the riff-raff who are presumably populating those fields now. You know, the ones motivated by wanting to save the world from cancer, or hunger, or pestilence.
Not only is this kind of insulting to those of us who have chosen to make careers in fields that aren't driven by Big Science, it's not remotely sustainable. If getting people to go into science and engineering is dependent on something as ephemeral as "inspiration," we're forever going to be careening from boom to bust."
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A sustainable solution to the supply of scientists and engineers can't be built around lightning-in-a-bottle scenarios like the Apollo era space race, where an exceptional combination of military goals and national pride happened to align with science for a time, spurring great progress. It's great if it happens, but as David Kaiser documents in How the Hippies Saved Physics, it had a cost for the generation of physicists who were coming along just as the national security establishment started to lose interest. It looks a little like the same sort of thing might be happening in the life sciences, where a huge influx of cash into the NIH drove unsustainable growth for a while, and the flattening out of those budgets is creating a big problem for young researchers.
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Summary for impatient readers: focus of attention physically determines which synapses in your brain get stronger, and which areas of your cortex physically grow in size. The implications of this provide direct guidance for alteration of behaviors and motivational patterns. This is used for this purpose extensively: for instance, many benefits of the Cognitive-Behavioral Therapy approach rely on this mechanism.
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Cognitive-Behavioral Therapy has a highly successful approach for breaking habits, which requires only a very subtle alteration to this process. You notice that you are biting your nails. You immediately focus your attention on what you are doing, and you stop doing it. No rage, no blaming yourself, no negative emotions. You just stop, and you focus all the attention you can on the act of stopping. You move your arm down, focusing your attention on the act of movement, on the feeling of your arm going down, away from your mouth. That’s it. You can go back to whatever you were doing.
Five minutes later, you notice yourself biting your nails again. You calmly repeat the procedure again.
By doing this, you are training yourself to perform a new behavior – the “stop and put the hand down” behavior – which is itself triggered by the nail-biting behavior. As you go along, you will get better and better at noticing that you have started to bite your nails. You will also get better and better at stopping and putting your hand down. After a while, this will become semi-automatic; you’ll notice that your hand went to your mouth, a nail touched your tooth, and the hand went back down before you could do anything. Don’t stop training: focus your attention on the “stop and drop” part of the action.
After a while, the nail-biting simply goes away. Of course, the more complex and more ingrained a habit is, the more effort and time will be needed to break it. But for most people, even strong habits can be relatively quickly weakened, or redirected into less destructive behaviors.
"That’s why I have a large poster of James Franco up next to my computer; to remind me that no matter what enticing career paths may arise in the short term, its vital to keep on the path and complete the PhD.
No, seriously, that’s really why I have a poster of Franco next to my computer…."
"R. W. White (1959) proposed that certain motives, such as curiosity, autonomy, and play (called intrinsic motives, or IMs), have common characteristics that distinguish them from drives. The evidence that mastery is common to IMs is anecdotal, not scientific. The assertion that "intrinsic enjoyment" is common to IMs exaggerates the significance of pleasure in human motivation and expresses the hedonistic fallacy of confusing consequence for cause. Nothing has been shown scientifically to be common to IMs that differentiates them from drives. An empirically testable theory of 16 basic desires is put forth based on psychometric research and subsequent behavior validation. The desires are largely unrelated to each other and may have different evolutionary histories. "
"We must therefore find another criterion, which I think is the motivated crowds. People who work on Wikipedia … are not the indiscriminate crowd [but] are the part of the crowd who feels motivated to work with Wikipedia. Here it is: I’d replace the theory of the “wisdom of the crowd” with the theory of the “wisdom of the motivated crowds.” The general crowd says we should not pay taxes; the motivated crowd says that it’s fair to pay them. In fact, it’s not the ditch diggers or illiterates who contribute to Wikipedia, but people who already belong to a cultural crowd for the very fact they’re using a computer."
Interesting appeal to activist impulses.
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Left fuming, impassioned or just plain-inspired by a story of eco-injustice? Eager to do something about it? Something a little more substantial than firing off a comment into the tweet-o-sphere - or a throwing a few dollars at the charity of choice? Then may be it is time to join the army!
The army of of eco-citizen scientists, that is - volunteers who are increasingly making a real difference at the front-line of ecological research. Earthwatch - the research charity that broke ground on the idea of getting the publics hands dirty, in the service of ecology - has just finished hosting a session promoting the value of 'citizen science', to a gathering of ecologists in Spain.
"1. The costs of protesting for a week - to take Brian Haw’s example cited by David - are high; the inconvenience and loss of wages. But the gains from changing policy - even if this happens - are spread over everyone. Narrow instrumental rationality will only very rarely tell us to be a sustained activist.
2. To undertake such a sacrifice, one must have a huge belief not only in the rightness of one’s cause, and in the chances of its success, but also in its importance. Such beliefs will very often owe more to over-confidence and fanaticism than to pure rationality. "
"the theory of the moral economy. In its essence, the theory holds that the fact of sustained violation of a person's moral expectations of the society around him or her is a decisive factor in collective mobilization in many historical circumstances. Later theorists of political activism have downplayed the idea of moral outrage, preferring more material motivations based on self-interest. But the current round of activism and protest around the globe seems to point back in the direction of these more normative motivations -- combined, of course, with material interests. So it is worth reexamining the idea that a society that badly offends the sense of justice of segments of its population is likely to stimulate resistance."
"So part of the answer is, I do this because I stumbled upon this thing called writing, after trying a couple of different career fields. And three days into my first job as a writer, I felt, in the same way people feel a sofa is the perfect sofa, one particular house is the one they want to buy, or a partner is “the one” they want to grow old with, that I had come home. That I had found a craft I could imagine working at, day after day, and year after year, without ever tiring of it or wishing to retire from it. And, equally importantly, that writing was perhaps the best and most unique gift I could contribute to the world."
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Fear - of failure, of risk, of others, of uncertainty and of change—is, I believe, one of the most lethal forces in existence. It leads people to live lives proscribed by timid and heart-deadening limits, instead of lives inspired by possibility. It constantly shrinks the size the world in which we feel comfortable. It robs us of our ability to think rationally and creatively, or to encourage those traits in others. What’s more, it forms the basis of the far more damaging feelings and actions of prejudice and hatred. If I do nothing else in my writing and on this website, I hope that I provide a touch of inspiration or motivation for readers to keep that force of fear in check in their lives, rethink some fear-driven ideas, and believe more strongly in their own strength and the many possibilities life holds, instead.
"Long before "Survivor," the eccentric who created "The Gong Show" discovered that people will do anything to get on TV, and others will watch them."
Picoeconomics (micro-micro-economics) explores the implications of an experimental discovery: that people (often) and lower animals (always) discount the prospect of future rewards in a curve that is more deeply bowed than a "rational," exponential curve. Over a range of delays from seconds to decades, there are pairs of alternative rewards such that subjects prefer the smaller, earlier reward over the larger, later alternative when delay to the smaller reward will be short, but prefer the larger, later reward when the smaller alternative will be more delayed, even though the time from the earlier to the later reward stays the same. The curves that fit the observed data best are hyperbolic, that is, show value as inversely proportional to delay.
What, then, is leadership in the cloud? It is not like leadership in the tower. It is not a position wrought from power, but authority in its other, and more primary meaning, ‘to be the master of’. Authority in the cloud is drawn from dedication, or, to use rather more precise language, love. Love is what holds the cloud together. People are attracted to the cloud because they are in love with the aim of the cloud.
This post is a table of contents for finding the postings I’ve written over the years on the topic of pico-economics, i.e. George Ainslie’s model of what a horribly difficult time we have with impulse control.
National Blog Posting Month is the epicenter of daily blogging! People who want to set the habit of blogging by doing it every day for a month, including weekends, can come here for moral support, inspiration, and the camaraderie that only marathon blogging can provide.
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