Category Archives: Language

Peanut Butter Burger

Why Giving Advice Sucks

One time I was supposed to meet a couple of friends in Scotland.

I had arrived a couple day earlier. It was for a three week backpacking trip.

However, I had arrived late at night, and I wasn’t sure where I was going to stay.

This was before smartphones, so I couldn’t look anything up easily.

As I was standing there, jet lagged (after flying for twelve hours and taking a train for another three), dazed and confused, an old guy came up.

“Son, you look lost,” he said. He sounded a lot like Sean Connery, but with a mouthful of marbles.

He showed me where a bunch of cheap hotels, for which I was grateful.

Most of the time, though, when some stranger comes out of nowhere to offer advice, it’s rarely taken with a hundred percent gratitude.

Especially if the advice has some kind of ulterior motive behind it.

Most people have heard that giving unasked for advice rarely works.

Why is this?

Consider the presuppositions.

Imagine you’re at the grocery store, looking at the different flavors of peanut butter. You’re going to go home and make a sandwich.

Then some goof comes out of nowhere and acts like he’s the holder of supreme peanut butter knowledge.

What does this presuppose?

It presupposes that before he even introduces himself, he looks at you and KNOWS that HE knows MORE about peanut butter than you do.

Which is kind of insulting.

AND it robs us of the pleasure of peanut butter discovery.

This is why it rarely feels good if somebody we don’t know gives us unasked for advice.

It presupposes they know more about the situation than we do.

Even when people we know give us advice, it still doesn’t feel right.

Because it has the same presupposition of “superiority.”

Unfortunately, for most of us, this ALL WE KNOW when it comes to influencing others.

Sure, we find out a little bit about what they want, but that’s usually just the tip of the iceberg.

Then we proceed to tell them (or suggest to them) why they should do what WE want based on the little information they’ve given us.

It still is kind of insulting.

We’re basically telling them that with only that LITTLE BIT of information, we know MORE about the situation than they do.

This is why any kind of sales always has both low conversation rates and high stress.

You’re GIVING ADIVCE to people hoping they’ll buy something.

Luckily, there is another way.

Not just in sales, but any time you want to influence others.

And it doesn’t rely on YOU at all.

All them. All their ideas. All you’ve got to do is turn off your brain and ask a few questions.

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Beware Of Ancient Fears Infecting Modern Language

Pistols At Dawn

I was talking to a friend of mine yesterday, and I noticed something interesting about her speech. She had always spoken like that, but I hadn’t talked to her in quite a while. Last time we spoke was before I had become interested in language, having read several books on linguistics and other interesting tricks of language, most notably books by Pinker, Lakoff, and Grinder/Bandler.

The thing I noticed now, that I didn’t notice before was her heavy use of indirect speech. For example, I would say “A,” and she would then think “Because of A, then B,” with “B” being something that didn’t sound like such a good thing. But because she didn’t want to (either consciously or unconsciously) blurt right out “B!” She would always hide it behind layers of presuppositions and vague references.

For example, she would mention wanting more money at work, and I would suggest asking her boss for a raise. Instead of saying the obvious “If I ask for a raise, he’ll say no, and think less of me for asking.”

Which is a common enough fear, and generally the immediate reaction of most people when thinking about asking for a raise. But instead of blurting that right out, she’d say something like:

“I’m not sure if I have the presence of mind right now to think of what would happen if I were to do that.”

Which sounds innocent enough, until you unpack that seemingly simple statement and see what she’s really saying:

She is assuming that “presence of mind,” (whatever that is) is something that is difficult to identify, as she’s not sure if she has it or not.

Something called “presence of mind,” is required to understand the result of a request for more money.

“If I were to do that,” is stated as a second conditional. A first conditional is an “if..then” statement using the present tense, which presumes it is something that is likely to occur.

If it rains, I will get wet.
If I spend my money, I won’t have any.
If I drive too fast, I may get a ticket.

While the second conditional, with the past tense, is used for things that we don’t expect will happen, or are impossible.

If I asked my boss for a raise, he would say no.
If I saw a UFO, I would run.

So in response to a suggestion to ask for more money, she hides her “no, I’m too afraid” behind about three layers of linguistic protection.

If you’ve ever listened to a politician speak, you can tell right away that there speech is usually filled with layers and layers of vague ambiguity, so nobody can ever pin them down on what they said, if things go wrong, and if things go right, they can claim they had something to do with it.

It’s no wonder the joke, “how do you tell a politician is lying – when his lips are moving,” is so funny.

In one of the aforementioned books, Pinker was talking about how in societies where they have a history of class distinction, where upper class people could legally kill lower class people, (or other upper class people if they situation warranted it) they have developed a very polite level of speech, which can exist hundreds of years after the threat of violence.

If you were talking to some guy that was carrying weapons, and by offending him you risked getting your head slice off, you’d quickly learn to speak politely. It doesn’t take long for such a society to develop polite language. The American South is one such example. If you said the wrong thing to the wrong person, he would demand “Satisfaction,” and you’d have a gunfight at twenty paces on your hands.

Those that study linguistics on a much deeper evolutionary level suggest that all indirect speech has its roots in ancient fears of immediate reprisals. It doesn’t sound dangerous in the least to ask your boss for a raise, at least not from the standpoint of physical violence, but nevertheless, those feelings of fear cause us to hide our real feelings beneath several layers of “politeness” and vague ambiguity.

There is a fascinating book called “Mean Genes,” which illustrates all the ways that our automatic impulses that helped us immensely in our evolutionary past can be a real pain in the you-know-what in modern society. Stuffing our face until we can’t move when we are in the presence of food is one example that you can see everywhere you look in modern western society.

In the past, the several thousand year ago past, that impulse was beneficial. People would go several days without food, and when they finally got some, all other concerns were put on the back burner, and it was time to eat until the food was gone.

Not so helpful when you pass by three McDonalds, two Dunkin Donuts and a Bakery on the way to work every morning.

Of course, the great hope of modern humankind is to rise above our evolutionary based fears, and the ability to use our rational, conscious minds to think our ways around those pesky impulses to plan our future, instead of letting our impulses plan it for us.

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The Hidden Secret Of Knowledge

Can You Repeat That Please?

I remember once I played a game with a group of highly educated, professional ESL students I was teaching. I’ve heard this game called “Chinese whispers,” or the “telephone game,” or other things. I even remember playing it once or twice as a kid. And even with a group of kids that are fluent in the language in which this game is being played, it is still funny to see.

Basically you get the group into a circle, and choose a simple enough phrase, and whisper it into the ear of the person on one end. The rules are that they can’t speak the phrase out loud, and they have to repeat it to the person next to them as soon as they hear it. You usually start out with a phrase like “banana ice cream,” and end up with something like “purple gorilla.”

It’s really fun to play with ESL students (English as a second language) because the end result often times doesn’t even qualify as an English word or phrase. But as a teaching tool, it helps to give students an opportunity to really practice their listening skills. The goal, the ultimate goal is to develop listening skills so that even passive listening will yield some understanding. I’ve you’ve ever studied a foreign language, and have listened to a dialogue or conversation that was even slightly above your comprehension level, you know how quickly you can get tired.

On this particular group, I started out with the phrase “blue truck.” Everybody got a kick out of the final answer, and it proved an interesting point.

Moving something from conscious competence to unconscious competence can take time, and come in stages, so doing this particular exercise is one drill, out of many, that can help to speed this process up.

I remember once I was at Griffith Park in Los Angeles, a friend of mine and I had just seen what we thought was going to be a Pink Floyd laser show, where they play a bunch of cool music, while you sit back and look at light show performed up above on a special dome. Only we misread the newspaper, and it was a classical music show instead. It was still worth the money, as a combination of good music through a really fantastic sound system, coupled with some skilled laser “shapes” that move around in sync with the music is pretty mesmerizing.

But afterward we noticed outside, on the grass they had some sort of meeting of a local astronomers club. There were several telescopes set up, all pointed at different celestial bodies. I’m pretty sure that was the only time I’d actually seen the rings of Saturn firsthand. After I looked, I had a question, something to do with the rings, and when they are visible. They owner of the telescope gave us a well informed and easy enough to understand answer (although I can’t remember exactly what it was.)

Later on that evening, as we were still wandering around, I heard somebody else ask the same question that I had asked a few minutes ago. With the answer still fresh in my short-term memory, I spit it out as if it were common knowledge. After we were out of earshot, my friend gave me a hard time for pretending to know something that I just learned only moments before. Bu then he made an interesting point.

“Isn’t that all knowledge is anyway, passing on information from one person to the next, in some long chain of people?”

You can spend a lot of time digging into that idea. When we are born, none of us know anything, other than our pre wired instincts, one of which is to learn as much as we can. Obviously, that comes second to survival, getting food and staying safe, but most of us are fortunate enough to grow up where our life doesn’t hang by a thread, so we have the luxury of motoring around and figuring out as much stuff as we can. (Which is really cute to our parents, until we learn to walk, but then it’s a completely different story).

But most of the stuff that we know today as adults came from others. Mathematics, science, history, rules of grammar, most of us didn’t invent these independently in our garage laboratory as children. We were taught these by other people. Who in turn were taught by others. I guess it’s lucky for most of us that ever generation, there are a few brilliant people like Einstein and Edison and Curie that spend their lives trying to figure out new stuff, instead of figuring out how to apply the old stuff.

I had a friend pose an interesting thought experiment to me once. He was giving a toastmasters speech on the illusion of civilization that we live in. None of the stuff we have is inherently known, as discussed before. Each generation passes on information it learned, and that information is filtered through the education system loosely made up of teachers and books and libraries.

But what would happen if all that were destroyed? What would happen to the human race if the only way we could transmit information was by word of mouth? No writing, no video, no audio. Only word of mouth. We still had all the same technology, but everything had to be built according to information passed on only face-to-face.

His theory was that we are really only a generation or two, at most, away from a complete and utter breakdown of society. With no books to refer to, most of the information we take for granted would quickly be lost. I think his underlying point was that people were completely evil, and we would quickly revert to the futuristic world of “Escape from New York” or any other futuristic movie where society breaks down and only the most barbaric can survive. I’m not so sure, but I am sure that we do depend on information passed down from generation to generation. So much so that some believe this has as much effect on human development as the day-to-day survival pressures that shaped human evolution thousands of years ago.

And the interesting concept that my ESL group illustrated was how much quicker digital information is passed than analogue information. Once one of them latched onto a phrase that she not only understood, but could easily repeat well enough to be understood, that phrase quickly passed unchanged to the last person. It was interesting to watch the spread of information. Before that moment of recognition it was slow, and unsure. But as soon as she latched onto that one phrase (which of course had nothing to do with the original phrase) it flowed like water.

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The Secret Behind Human Intelligence

Captain, That Is Illogical

Here’s an interesting mind experiment. Ready? Here is the situation; you have four cards, with the following faces showing. D, 7, 3, F. You are told that each card has a number on one side, and a letter on the other. Now you are given a statement:

On every card that shows a “D” on one side, there is a “3” on the other side.

Here is the challenge: How many cards do you need to turn over, and which cards, to conclusively prove or disprove the following statement, and which cards do you turn over?

While you may find this easy (I didn’t I had to cheat and read the logic behind the explanation to get it,) most people don’t. In face, when this study was first concocted by a couple of professors at Stanford (where you’d think there’s be some smart people) only about one out of four got the answer right.

Now here’s the same question, presented another way:

You are a bouncer at a bar. The rules are that you can’t drink unless you are twenty-one. Now the cards are “drinking coke, drinking beer, 16 years old, 25 years old.” Or if you prefer, there are four people sitting at the bar. One is drinking beer (you don’t know how old they are) one is drinking coke (you don’t know how old they are) one is 25 (you don’t know what they are drinking) and one is sixteen (you don’t know what they are drinking).

From a logical standpoint, the problem is identical, yet when presented the second way, most people quickly realize that in order to figure out if anybody is breaking any laws, all you do is card the person drinking beer, and quickly check what the sixteen year old is drinking. In effect, turning over two cards to see what is on the other side.

As in the case above, you turn over the “D” to verify it if has a three on the other side, and you turn over the “7” to make sure it doesn’t have a “D” on the other side. If the D has a 3, and the 7 doesn’t have a D, then the statement is correct. If the D doesn’t have a three, and the 7 has a D, then the statement is incorrect.

The underlying problem is why, when the logic is identical, do so many people have a hard time (as I did) with the first question, and a much easier time (as I did) with the second question?

One answer could be that we aren’t as logically thinking as we’d like to believe. It may be that our brains aren’t designed to think in terms of Vulcan logic like Mr. Spock, but to think only in terms of social interactions, specifically to uncover social “cheats,” those that would break unwritten social contracts.

The thinking behind this idea goes like this. Humans lived in small groups for a couple hundred thousand years. That’s when we developed our “humanness” so to speak. One thing that evolutionary biologists think is one of the major driving forces behind the massive growth of the human brain during our history was social pressure from within the group. Our brains, our language, our thinking was all developed to outsmart each other within that small group of wandering nomads all those years ago.

Numerous studies of chimps and various apes have shown this to be a major portion for the need for their large brains as well. Most of them have plenty of food where they live, don’t need to organize sophisticated hunting parties, or come with complex methods of evading predators. Most of their thinking power, many believe, is so they can outsmart each other and rise as high in the social order as possible.

When humans developed language many, many years ago, we just took it a couple notches higher (to say the least) and developed all kinds of conscious and unconscious social skills. We learned to read facial expressions and body language, learned how to tell when somebody is cheating or lying, and be able to cheat and lie ourselves.

Many species have a specific feature, which is there solely for sexual competition within the species. The most often given example is the peacock’s tail. When peahens get together to choose their mate, they choose the male with the most flamboyant tail. Interestingly, the more flamboyant the tail, the dangerous it is for the peacock, as he is a much easier prey for predators, as well as having to lug that huge thing around should he have to run away.

In other species, they have other aspects. Bull seals have their size and strength, gorilla’s have their silver stripe of hair on their back, different birds have various ways to strut their stuff, from colored feathers to singing ability.

In humans, it is our brains, more specifically our verbal and social skills that became the driving force of sexual selection. Those that were the most eloquent, and the most persuasive, were the most prolific, and left the most offspring. Those offspring, having inherited slightly higher skills for eloquence and social prowess, in turn competed with each other. Continue that process for a few hundred thousand years, and you’ve got these big-brained humans walking around.

Us.

Something to think about yet next time you’re at a bar or club or other social gathering, and watching the vast throng trying to talk their genes into eternity.

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How To Learn Anything

Teach An Old Dog New Tricks?

The other night, I decided to go out for a walk. I recently moved to new part of town, and decided to go and check things out. The sun has been setting later and later recently, and I had gotten off a little earlier than normal from work, so I figured I’d just go wandering about and see if anything interesting happened.

The first thing I noticed was this big park on the other side of my apartment building. Bunch of kids playing, lots of toys based on animals. Big gorillas, zebras, elephants that were made into slides and other playground equipment. I stopped to watch, as there were a few benches, and there was this huge grass area adjacent to the playground, so it was a pretty good spot to chill for a bit.

One thing about kids is when they play, they really play. They don’t play, but at the same time worry about their homework or whether or not their shoes really match the rest of their outfit, and if not will anybody notice. They seem to be pre set for a couple things, which seem to be completely opposite, at first glance.

On the one hand, they are pre wired to be automatic learning machines. The amount of things a kid learns between the age of two and ten is simply staggering. If you tried to learn the same amount of information in the same amount of time, you’d be a nervous wreck. They learn an entire language, complete with tens of thousands of new vocabulary words, in about five years. Any that has attempted to learn a foreign language as an adult would be lucky to retain five new words a week.

But on the other hand, they completely forget everything they are “supposed” to learn when it’s time to play. When they see a cool slide or a gorilla swing set, proper subject-verb agreement is the furthest thing from their minds. You’d think that as adults, the extra stress and worry we put into learning new things would help. But it doesn’t seem to. It seems to have the opposite effect.

They say that a kids learning capacity is different simply because they are a kid. That learning a language is easy for kids, but hard for adults, due to some pre wired brain structure due to millions of years of evolution. Some window of opportunity that once is closed, is closed for good. While that’s interesting from an objective biological point of view, it doesn’t sound too promising from a human potential point of view.

This is observable in other animals. Birds will “imprint” to their “mother” within a certain time frame, and they can be tricked into “imprinting” on an imposter if done at the right time. Certain birds learn to sing, but only between two weeks and two months old, and only if they hear another one of their kind singing. If they aren’t exposed to another one of their kind singing during that critical time period, they’ll never learn to sing properly. (Of course when I say, “sing properly” I mean sing well enough to attract a mate.) As for myself, I can only sing properly after sufficient alcohol, and a high-end voice synthesizer, but I digress.

The Jesuits used to say, (and probably still do) that if you give them a child when he is born, he will be a soldier for Christ for life by the time he’s seven. What this really means is that kids can be taught any number of beliefs when they are young, and can take a lifetime of effort to “unlearn” them. It takes a significantly life altering event, to cause an appreciable change in religious beliefs in most people. Not too many people who grow up in strong fundamentalist Christian households decide later in life to worship Zeus.

If I had my druthers, I’d like to conduct a language learning experiment. They say kids can learn languages much better than adults. Two, three, even four languages are a snap for kids so long as they are exposed to them early enough. It is assumed there is some kind of genetic “switch” that makes it harder to learn as adults, but I’m not so sure. Enter my experiment.

Take a bunch of adults, and separate them in three different groups. The first group has to learn the new language the regular way. After they finish their day job, they go to their once or twice a week at some local junior college, and then study the language whenever they have free time. Weekends, during commercials, whenever. These people are only exposed to the target language when they are in class, or they are listening to language tapes, or when (if) they bravely seek out native speakers of their target language.

The second group gets a free pass from work for a year. They are told they still have the obligations as an adult, they have to cook for themselves and maintain their household, but they get a stipend that will allow them to study on their own, along with the use of whatever material they think will help them. They of course, are only exposed to their target language when they organize their environment accordingly. Language tapes, private tutors, whatever they can afford. But when they go shopping, or watch TV, everything is in English.

The third group, I think, would be the most interesting. They are surrounded only by their target language. They never hear English (which in this case is assumed to be their native tongue.) They are surrounded by helpful speakers of the target language who buy and cook all their food (and whatever they want provided they know how to say it), drive them everywhere they want to go (provided they know how to say it), and give them massive amounts of happy praise, including generous physical, non-sexual touching and caressing (like quick back massages and what-not) whenever they speak the target language correctly. They never criticize for mistakes; only give continued encouragement to keep you going. Their only job is to learn the target language, and follow their “keepers” around whenever they go out to buy food and take care of normal, everyday housekeeping matters. And plenty of time for playing, so long as it’s in the target language (video games and what-not).

I think these “experiments” would show that there is a lot more to the change in environment, from child to adult, which makes learning harder rather than some genetic switch that makes it mentally impossible.

Obviously, as adults, unless you are super rich, you can’t really afford to learn things as described in group number three. But you’ll notice some similar advice given by various gurus who teach learning to be successful in any endeavor as an adult.

Surround yourself with people that are already proficient in what you want to learn. Give yourself rewards for every little success, no matter how small. Don’t put too much pressure on yourself, and go easy on yourself when you make the “mistakes” that are absolutely necessary for growth and improvement. And give yourself time to play. The only real difference in being an adult rather than a kid is you’ve got to nurture yourself. Try it and what happens.

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Portugese Surfers

Organized Randomness

So the other day I was out riding my bike, and I took a wrong turn. I was in my old neighborhood, but it had been a while, so I was busy kind of looking around and not really paying attention to where I was going. I saw these kids jumping rope, and they stopped and looked at me when I rode past, so I slowed down to get a look at them. They acted as if they’d seen me before, or knew me from somewhere, but I didn’t recognize them at all. I waited for them to say something to indicate why they were looking at me with such familiarity. That’s when I heard that creepy voice from behind me. I almost fell off my bike when I made out the words, he/she didn’t really mean that, did they?

It was like the other day when I was sitting in one of those government offices to get some government paperwork down. You can always tell you are in a government office (in case you happen to suddenly appear inside of one and you aren’t sure where you are) because the people seem to have a certain “aura” about them, and the office furniture and equipment is usually a couple steps behind the times.

If you strolled into some modern research facility, or the office of a successful construction company, you’d likely find plenty of modern up to date people wearing modern, up to date clothes using modern, up to date equipment. But government office building people and equipment look like they only get upgraded once a decade or so.

So there I was, looking at all the government office people with all the forms scattered about their desks. I zeroed in on this one guy (I was waiting for my number to be called, like it I was a deli or something) and I watched him work for a bit. He’d pick up a piece of paper, read over it for a minute or so, check something on his computer screen, then scribble something on the paper, then put the paper off to one side. Then he’d pick up another piece and do the same thing. He didn’t appear to be doing this in any sort of predetermined order, it seemed completely random. And the place the put the papers down were never the exact same place from where he picked it up. There didn’t seem to be any progression of movement, either. It wasn’t like the finished papers were somehow migrating to some predestined spot on his desk. It seemed to be a pile of randomness that was turning into more randomness.

Of course I’m sure he knew exactly what he was doing, and exactly where everything was, and exactly how far he’d progressed on all of his various tasks that were scattered about his desk. One thing that is always satisfying is having a heap of randomness, and being accused of not having any idea where anything is, and then pulling out exactly what somebody asked for without even a second thought. That’s always a good trick.

Scientists that study randomness tell us that everything is random, and only because we live inside of familiarity do we convince ourselves that there is some order. Of course, everything in the universe follows certain laws (though not of course to some) and everything that exists now, however it exists, from your desk to your brainwaves are due only to what happened before.

The problem is that many times the “what happened before” is sometimes so complex and unknowable that things can appear to happen for no reason at all. Mathematical chaos theory tries to explain this. If you knew everything about the current state of affairs (down to every last movement of every last molecule) you could theoretically predict exactly what would unfold. But knowing everything of the current state of affairs is absolutely impossible. So when things happen, things we don’t expect, it can seem like they just popped out of nowhere.

I read some book once that talked about planning for randomness like a skilled surfer can handle any wave that comes in. If you are expecting a certain wave that will break a certain way, you aren’t likely to have much fun. But if you stay flexible, and learn enough skills to ride whatever wave comes in, for as long as it lasts, you can maximize your enjoyment, and minimize any frustration of wiping out.

This requires knowing what the bottom looks like, so you know exactly when you bail out. It’s probably a better idea to bail out before you get to the jagged coral on the bottom, lest you bash your skull in and suddenly wake up in some government office in a parallel universe.

Many frustrations occur because people try and ride a wave longer than they should. They have a couple of good moves, a few moments of bliss, and stay on too long. While they seldom wipe out from staying on too long, it just takes a long time to paddle out to where the waves are breaking, wasting valuable time. If you only have a couple hours of surfing time, it’s best to make the most of it.

Finally my number was called, and luckily I had all the paperwork filled out in the correct way. Sometimes, especially in government offices, they make you fill out all the paperwork again if you make even one mistake.

“I told you, I can’t eat the spicy stuff. My doctor says I have ulcers.”

I had to stop and process that before I turned around. The old man that was behind me (it was thought to tell from his voice) started telling me that the last time I brought him a pizza, there was too much Portuguese sausage on it. I guess that’s why those kids had stopped jumping rope and were looking at me funny. Just as I was about to respond to he strange old guy, the pizza delivery guy showed up. He looked a lot like me, and he waved at everybody like he knew them. He then proceeded to tell the old guy that he went easy on the sausage this time.

So, he’s got that going for him, which is nice.

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Love The Plateau

The Juggler

I had this friend once that was really into juggling. He wasn’t that good, but for some reason he had always wanted to become a really good juggler. The kind of guy that would be able to pick up any three or four objects and juggle them for an amount of time without any problem. He’d bought several DVDs on how to juggle, and even took a workshop once at some juggling school. I hadn’t been aware that there even was juggling schools.

He studied for several weeks, and finally he was comfortable enough to start juggling in front of strangers. He usually got a pretty good reception, and for a while he even went downtown where they allowed various performers to do their thing on the street in hopes for a few spare coins. On some nights, he developed a pretty big crowd. But most of the time, there were only a few people that would stay and watch for more than a few minutes.

After a while he noticed the same people would pass by, make a comment like “oh, there’s that juggler, he’s pretty good,’ and then they’d keep walking. It got to the point where most of the people that went downtown on a regular basis got to know him, and acknowledged that he was a highly skilled juggler, but didn’t hang around to watch him. He thought about traveling to neighboring cities, where they hadn’t yet been exposed to his juggling skills, but then he began to question his whole reason for becoming a skilled juggler.

At first he just wanted to juggle, and he had some vague imagination of juggling in front of people. Then when he got a taste of how good it felt to actually do that, he wanted to juggle in front of bigger and bigger crowds. But when it go to the point where he was thinking of actively seeking out bigger and bigger crowds, rather than just spontaneously juggling wherever he happened to be, it became more of a chore, or a job, than fun hobby. Soon he went back to only juggling whenever he happened to think about it, instead of purposely setting out to juggle in front of weekend crowds.

It reminds me a little bit of the law of diminishing returns. When you first put in a little bit of effort, you get a lot of results. But as you start to put in more and more effort, you start to get less and less results. If you’ve ever gone on a diet you know what I’m talking about. It’s pretty easy to lose that first couple of pounds, but after that it just keeps getting harder and harder. Eventually you hit a plateau, and if you keep at it, your successes are really a serious of longer and longer plateaus, with intermittent jumps in success levels.

There’s even been books written about how the plateau is really where all your skills and abilities are forged. If you look at life a series of long plateaus, with intermittent jumps in skill level, it makes I easier to keep on moving forward when it often appears as though you aren’t making any progress.

This structure may have some kind of biological origin. Evolution is thought to be a series of plateaus, with intermittent jumps in mutations that over time significantly change a particular species. Even the evolution of language is thought to follow this same pattern. There are certain points in the growth of a language where it changes significantly in a relatively short amount of time, due to a variety of circumstances.

For example, English underwent a huge change around the 1400’s, known as the great tonal shift. The way English vowels are pronounced changed significantly in a couple generations. It is said that somebody speaking English after this tonal shift would not be able to communicate with someone speaking English before this tonal shift.

Even at the quantum level, the energy levels of electrons don’t change from gradually from one energy state to another. There is huge jump (the word “quantum” simply means “discrete”) from one energy level to the next. There is no in between.

It’s as if the whole basis of physical reality follows the model of plateaus in energy levels or states of matter punctuated by large intermittent changes in state. The reason behind all of this is of course a mystery, to even the smartest theoretical physicists. It just seems completely strange, and pretty cool, how whatever law that makes an electron follow the discreet energy level model lead to somebody being on a plateau punctuated by intermittent successes in weight loss.

They say that the universe is a hologram of itself. If you take any small piece of matter, and look at it, it will be of the same structure and makeup as the whole system. Electrons orbiting atomic nuclei behave the same way as planets orbiting a sun. Just like there are discreet energy levels of electrons in a hydrogen atom, there are discreet elliptical orbital paths of the planets in our solar system.

So next time you feel “stuck” on a plateau, know that you are in good company.

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Powerful Metaphysics

Powerful Metaphysics

Are You Hungry?

Beware Of Equality

So the other day I was waiting in line at the movies, which was surprising. Not that I was at the movies, but that I was waiting in line. I don’t particularly like crowded movie theaters, so I usually try and go during off peak hours. One reason is I always seem to time leaving my apartment, so after I take the train, walk to the theater, buy my ticket and my popcorn, and get to my seat, the trailers have just finished, and the main feature is starting.

When I show up and there’s a bunch of people, it throws off my schedule. Of course I can’t get too angry, because if nobody ever went to the movies, they’d close down the theater and put up some huge karaoke bar or bowling alley or something. And because I thoroughly suck at both karaoke and bowling, I wouldn’t likely participate in either of those two activities, leaving me with a blank space in my mental entertainment schedule where the movie used to be. Or would have used to have been. Or whatever. So while I appreciate the need for a steady stream of customers, I try to avoid them at all costs. Which is why I was surprised that so many people were waiting on such an off peak time.

I think there was some school related activity or something, as they all had on their school uniforms, and I overheard people talking about some project or something. I seem to remember once in high school when we were studying “Heart of Darkness,” by Conrad, we all watched the movie “Apocalypse Now,” which was based on the story. So perhaps that is what they were doing.

I overheard two guys behind me talking about grammar, and I wondered what movie they were seeing that had anything to do with grammar. Most movies are about car chases and bank robberies, and metaphorical aliens, but not dangling participles or split infinitives. So I asked them what they were talking about.

They said they were talking about their teacher, who is kind of a language zealot. Now I’ve heard about self-professed language “mavens,” those guys that like to write articles about how famous people misuse grammar, but I’ve never heard of a language zealot before. So naturally, I asked them to please elaborate on this.

I turns out this guy is part of the anti “be verb” movement. Some of the crowd he runs with would like to remove the “be” verb from our vocabulary all-together. Others say that it does have its uses, like when describing static things like an address or a phone number. Since I have no idea what this means, I asked them to please elaborate further, seeing as how the line didn’t seem to be moving at all. Somebody must have been making a special popcorn order or something.

Whenever you use a be word, you’re basically using the linguistic equivalent of an equals sign. Like if you say “I am hungry,” then mentally, you are saying that your entire entity, collection of molecules and atoms and beliefs and experiences are all collectively equal to the state of wanting to eat something. Now I didn’t know that people did so much thinking when they made simple statements like this, but according to this professor, it all happens subconsciously in a split second or so.

Since the brain is based on a categorical representational system, it immediately goes off on a search for everything else that could be considered “hungry,” since you are saying “I am hungry,” your brain figures that it had better equate you with anything else it can find in your history that “is hungry.”

The reason this is a bad thing is that it creates a lot of static labels that clog up our neural pathways. Like a bunch of sticky notes all stuck inside your brain that never get cleaned out. Like if you said “I’m hungry” and then a couple minutes later said “I’m angry,” that would set up another equal sign in your head that “hungry” = “angry.” So maybe two weeks later, if you said “I’m hungry,” your brain would remember the “angry = hungry” definition you gave it a couple weeks ago. If you weren’t really angry, it might look around to find something for you to be angry at.

To make it even more confusing. If one day you said “I’m angry,” and then a minute later said “I’m angry,” but then two days later you said “I’m hungry,” and then said “I’m happy” you brain would go into a never ending tail spin, trying to figure out how “angry = happy” which would likely make you feel very confused, at least on a subconscious level. It’s basically like having about a hundred adware programs running on your computer simultaneously, clogging up your resources and making your computer run really slow. If you run some anti-adware software, your computer will run much faster.

This guy was trying to teach his students to say things more accurately, that way you can slowly get rid of those linguistic equals signs clogging up your mental processing speed. So instead of saying “I’m hungry,” say “I feel hungry,” because everybody knows feelings change all the time. So even if you said “I feel hungry,” and right after that said “I feel angry” your brain would see them as mere coincidences, rather than trying to force them into the same category in your brain.

Some other examples that they gave me.

I’m angry à I feel angry
I’m tall à My height measures 89 inches.
I’m fat à The scale reads 250 pounds when I step on it.
I’m broke à My bank account contains $2.45
I’m shy à I don’t feel like talking to people right now

And so on. Notice the verb changes? From a “be” verb to feel, measures, reads, contains, feel. All these verbs can easily change state based on the situation, and won’t clog your brain with useless equivalencies.

And just as they finished explaining all this too me, I turned out that all those high school students were in line for a different movie, and I was able to watch my movie in a relatively empty theater, just how I like it.

Coefficient Of Correlation

Pure Randomness

I used to have this neighbor that was quite eccentric. She had all these different hats that she would wear for all different kinds of occasions. I don’t think I ever saw her wear the same hat twice. I never saw the inside of her apartment, but I suspect that it was filled with hats. Personally, I don’t think I’ve ever bought hat before. Maybe a couple baseball hats, and some ski hats for skiing, hiking, and robbing banks, but those don’t really count.

These were hardcore, fashion-oriented hats. The kind that you would see on some French aristocrat at a horserace. Assuming of course that French aristocrats have horses races. I’m not sure that they do, but it would seem logical. I never really thought about the psychology of hats until I lived next door to this lady. I never saw any kids or grandkids, so I assumed she lived alone.

I remember reading an essay once that destroyed the urban legend and often repeated myth that Americans stopped wearing hats when JFK was president. The common belief is that before he was president, everybody wore hats. Then when he, as president, went everywhere without a hat, the trend quickly caught on.

The truth of the matter, however, is far less interesting. Hats, gloves, other clothing items that are purely ornamental had been falling out of fashion steadily since the turn of the century. Hats were just another example of this. When Kennedy was not wearing his hat, he was just one example of the growing trend of hatless men.

Of course, the human brain comes pre wired to find cause effect relationships. Something like suddenly noticing people aren’t wearing hats, and then noticing a prominent figure like JFK isn’t wearing one, the easiest conclusion is that one thing caused the other. More often than not, they are merely related, and some other factor is causing them both.

Now I’m not particularly qualified nor well read enough to comment on the reason for the decline in hats, gloves etc. There are several theories, some make sense, and some don’t, depending on your social philosophy. Whatever that means.

They’ve done some pretty interesting experiments to study the brains propensity to find cause and effect relationships between random objects. They show random objects moving around on a computer screen to a baby, and the baby quickly assumes that one “shape” is chasing the other. They suspect this because they show one shape moving around by itself, and then stop it. They babies interest doesn’t change much. One object stopping and starting by itself is no big deal.

But then they show two objects moving around, and pretty soon the baby assumes there is a cause/effect relationship between the two objects. They stop one of the objects from moving, and the baby gets confused and looks back and forth between the stopped object and the moving object as if something is wrong. Why did one stop and the other didn’t? They suppose that if there weren’t any assumed cause/effect relationship between the shapes, then the reaction of two moving objects with one stopping would be the same as one moving object and then stopping. It isn’t.

One explanation for this is that back in the old days, when daily living was a life and death struggle against the environment, humans didn’t have time to sit around and do double blind studies every time they saw a tiger coming at them.

The cause/effect relationship was simple:

Tiger = Danger

Those who needed to learn that every time didn’t live long enough to pass on the need to scrutinize every decision. Those that had the capability to make snap cause/effect judgments on the world around them lived long enough to reproduce.

So here we are, thousands of years later, with that circuitry still firmly wired into our brains. We see two events, and immediately come to the conclusion that one is causing the other, or one has an impact on the other.

In the book “Fooled By Randomness,” by Taleb, he shows how often completely random events with no statistical causal relationships are often mistaken to be linked somehow.

In the book “Mind Lines,” Dr. Hall illustrates how we have a capacity to witness or experience an event, and quickly give it meaning. That event causes this, or this event means that. We then react not to the event itself, but the meaning we give it. In the language of NLP, that’s called a complex equivalent. Something that we think is a simple cause/effect relationship, but in reality has several layers of subconscious thought and judgment between the event (the cause) and the perceived outcome (the effect).

So what does this all mean? Just be careful when you assume any cause/effect relationship. We live in big cities now, and we don’t have to hunt for our food anymore. It’s ok to take a few moments to use your brain to make a decision, instead of reacting right away.

And if you bump into some lady that is wearing a different hat every time you see her, tell her I want my can opener back.

One World, One Culture, One People?

We’re the Same, You And Me

Recently I’ve been reading this fascinating book by Steven Pinker, called “The Language Instinct.” If you are at all interested in language, psychology, or how the human brain is structured, you can’t go wrong with this book. In it he treats language as an instinct, rather than a learned ability. One of his supporting arguments is the existence of what seems to be a universal grammar that is common throughout all languages. There is an underlying structure that all languages follow, regardless of how isolated the culture is, how advanced or how archaic. This suggests that we have some kind of structure pre-wired into our brains for learning language.

There have been many scientists and psychologists who maintained that the human mind was a relatively blank slate, and it could be filled in depending on the environment and the surrounding adults. This argument holds that children need to be explicitly taught things like grammar and word order, and how to correctly identify dogs and trees. What Pinker argues very successfully in “The Language Instinct,” is that there is a structure that already exists, a structure that already has the blueprint for nouns, verbs adjectives and so out.

While there are about a billion different tangents I could go off on, there is one thing in particular that I’d like to talk about in today’s post. Chomsky is a linguist who made fantastic advanced in linguistic theory. He was the one that first suggested that if an alien came to Earth, and analyzed all the world’s languages, they would determine that we all speak the same language, just many different dialects. The structure of all of the world’s languages can easily described as on similarly structured language.

Other scientists have studied various cultures, with the intent to find, or uncover a “universal culture” like the “universal grammar” described by Chomsky and others. The results are striking. If you’ve ever traveled to another country, especially one where English wasn’t the primary language, perhaps you’ve experienced some kind of “culture shock.” Or even if you’ve watched documentaries on TV of some guys running around in loincloths in the jungle, still living like they did hundreds of generations ago. You might come to the conclusion that those cultures can’t be more different than modern western culture.

In Pinker’s book, he lists two full pages of elements of the “universal culture” on Earth (determined by anthropologist Donald E. Brown), and here are some highlights (purely chosen at random):

Language

Value placed on articulateness, gossip, lying, manipulation, humor, humorous insults, poetry with respective words of similar nature (e.g. rhymes).

Non Verbal Communication

Meaningless sounds used to convey meaning (e.g. cries, squeals, etc), generalized facial expressions communicating basic emotions (fear, happiness etc), guessing intent from actions, flirtation with the eyes, use of smiles as a friendly greeting.

Sex

Huge interest in sex, various methods of expressing sexual attraction, sexual jealousy.

Family

Families centered around the mother and the children, and one or more men.

Fears

Fear of loud noises, fear of snakes, fear of strangers.

Status

Social status based on age, and economic achievement. A fair amount of economic inequality, division of labor by sex and age. Domination of men in the public sphere.

Government

Coalitions, reasoning, generally non dictatorial leaders, (usually temporary, e.g. new leaders every so often), a common agreement of right and wrong, laws, retaliation, punishment, the existence of conflict (which is usually avoided at all costs). Property, inheritance of property.

Etiquette/Beliefs

Hospitality, special feast days, sexual modesty (e.g. sex in private), discrete elimination of bodily wastes, supernatural beliefs, magic to sustain and increase life, and to attract the opposite sex, rituals, rites of passage, dream interpretation.

I’m reminded of a story (passed around on the Internet, sourced to some book on sociology) of a strange culture that practiced a particularly odd custom. It was described in great detail and sounded very strange and out there. Until the end, when you read the punch line. It was a description of the procedure westerners use when we go to the bathroom to take a dump. But the way it was described sounded like supremely spiritual and superstitions custom that only some goofball tribesmen do in National Geographic.

The takeaway, at least for me, is that no matter who you compare yourself to, some guy chasing his dinner with a poison blow dart gun in some South American jungle, or some uptight trader on Wall Street wearing a five thousand dollar suit, you can’t help but to realize that we humans are much, much more similar that we are different.

As Joseph Campbell concluded after his life’s work studying the world’s various mythological stories, we all come from the same factory. We all have the same hopes, fears, dreams and obstacles to overcome in our daily life. In every chest, beats the same heart. At the end of the day, we all just want some peace and safety, and hopefully a few people to share it with. Something to think about when you bump into that weird guy on the street that you swear is from another planet.