Effort Heuristic 3: The more effort you invest in something, the more likely you will continue investing effort. This heuristic is more likely to be used when there is no clear endpoint to signal a goal has been reached.
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Explorations Outside
In mindfulness discourse, the central problem is suffering. Life is full of unavoidable suffering: we can’t hold onto happiness, everything changes, nothing lasts, everybody dies, pain in inevitable, we are endlessly seeking and desiring without lasting satisfaction; an inner emptiness haunts our every moment….
Effects alter the causal chain through feedback and feedforward mechanisms. Outputs generate data that become inputs for further causal processes and interactions. Causal links may be neutralized, reinforced or weakened by ongoing inputs and outputs.
These statements about company culture or core values reminded me of a post on patriotism that I did a few years ago. Not patriotism as easily mocked, condemned or dismissed - but patriotism as understood by people who embrace patriotic sentiments without apology or irony. Here are some excerpts:
In the early days of this blog, my posts were relatively brief, not quite right, but often onto something. A sampling: …
If I had to choose, I’d go with a meaningful life over a happy one. But that’s a false choice based on an idealized concept of happiness as pure lightness, unburdened by cares or worries. Not what I’m looking for. Wellbeing is more like it, at least wellbeing as the feeling that swells with autonomy (sense of agency, the ability to act on goals and values), competence (feeling able and effective), and relatedness (a sense of belonging and being connected to others). A feeling that grows stronger by overcoming challenge.
“Attempting recall of information from memory, as occurs when taking a practice test, is one of the most potent training techniques known to learning science. However, does testing yield learning that transfers to different contexts?” - Pan & Rickard, 2018.
A lot of people think healthy food is expensive and so either give up on the whole concept or take a bunch of vitamins and supplements and call it a day. Thing is, healthy food is not expensive. And by “healthy” I don’t mean organic or available only at the local farmers’ market. I mean at the very least 7 servings of fruit and vegetables, plus protein and carbohydrates. Some fresh produce is nice, but canned and frozen stuff will do too, nutritionally speaking. Like in this USDA table:
Secure attachment provides a foundation for resilience and a sense of control. A secure toddler can always return to home base, where she will be safe and loved. Or at least she will have faith that the caregiver will return. That certainty encourages exploratory behavior – going where baby has not gone before – which in turn increases tolerance of uncertainty and a willingness to power through anxiety....resulting in a succession of discoveries and delights, setting the stage for more confident explorations.
Of course, early experience is not destiny.
You can’t fix a problem you don’t understand correctly. And you can’t begin to understand a problem unless you see it as a problem. And you won’t perceive it as a problem unless it conflicts with some ideal of what you want the world to look like: a vision of the good (not just a vision of a fixed bad).
In that spirit, here’s an outline of my ideal society – at least today’s version…
…Put another way: emotions and values are part of a cognitive team that includes appraisal of the situation at hand, embedded in a wider understanding of how the world works in general.
Based on the above considerations, I’m going to guess that about half of self-described Black Americans would qualify for reparations - roughly 22,500, 000 individuals currently alive, plus 250,000 Black children born to eligible parents within the first 18 years of program implementation, after which the reparations program would no longer accept new applicants. A tax on households in the top 20% income bracket would pay for the reparations program…Here’s a possible budget…
According to John Zaller and Stanley Feldman in A Simple Theory of the Survey Response: Answering Questions versus Revealing Preferences, people normally don’t have a “single, fixed, and firm attitude on issues but instead have many, potentially opposing considerations”. That is, most people have mixed feelings about policies and political issues - not counting ideologues and political activists, who tend to view ambivalence as a weakness easily exploited by one’s adversaries.
In other words, Americans stayed home much more than normal in 2020. As a consequence, the potential victim pool shrank for burglars, robbers and thieves. But people aren’t just potential victims of crime; they are also potential witnesses and a lack of witnesses emboldens criminals. So even though most crimes went down in 2020, individuals who left the relative safety of their homes for the relatively empty streets (to and from bars, restaurants, work, parties, etc.) may have been more at risk of criminal victimhood than in prior years. At least in some areas, and especially in the evenings.
Affordances are properties of an environment that encourage particular behaviors. Affordances range from simple objects (e.g., glass of water) to complex social cues (e.g., come-hither look). They invite action (drink me! come over here!) but the invitation may be turned down or not even noticed. No surprise there: people enter situations with certain inclinations, desires, and expectations, which sensitizes them to some affordances and not others. Not everyone acts on a help-wanted sign, unguarded purse, or unfriendly comment. And those inclined to act may not behave the same way to the same affordance. A glass of water is generally for drinking but sometimes it’s for throwing in anger. An unguarded purse may be an invitation to grab some cash or turn it in to the lost-and-found office.
Experts are fallible. Experts often disagree with each other. How, then, does one go about trusting experts? And how do we figure out which experts to trust, or not? Take, for instance, medical doctors…
Emotional trust is the feeling we can count on someone, because they are fundamentally good and will not harm us. However, emotional trust doesn’t require that we agree with their opinions or follow their advice. Cognitive trust means we are confident of another’s competence in a some knowledge or skill area. We might even follow their guidance if we trust them on an emotional level as well.
When you have strong opinions, you may be wrong. When you have weak opinions, you may be wrong. When you think it's all too complicated to have an opinion, you may be wrong. If you keep having the same kinds of opinions (strong, weak, oppositional), you're probably over-relying on heuristics and not thinking hard enough.
Homeostatic balance is a perfectly respectable concept meaning a condition of equilibrium. But my interest is in the “use value” of the word ‘balance’: what it is meant to evoke and accomplish in discursive communities…Balance is often coupled with “delicate” (over 3 million results on Google!). Delicate balance implies fragility, vulnerability, and lurking danger. Hence, reference to a “delicate balance” as a call to action, often evoked in perceived threats to biological systems, especially from outsiders – whether those outsiders are unnatural chemicals or invasive species.
Minimalist synopsis of the Milgram and Stanford Prison Experiments: subjects were willing to hurt others if they thought this was what authority figures wanted from them. Both studies serve as cautionary tales of how easily humans can be manipulated by authority figures into committing atrocious acts against their fellows. For me, the main lesson of these studies is a bit different – it is the danger of living in totalitarian environments. By “totalitarian”, I mean a social environment where there are no dissenting views expressed.