40 Thoughts for 40 Years

Today is my 40th birthday and I thought I’d take the chance to share a collection of small thoughts I’ve had this year. As you can see in the history of this blog, I used to post much more of my thoughts online. However, as I got older, I realized people rarely change their minds. So I spent less time putting my thoughts on the internet.

But if you know me, then you know I still have a lot of thoughts and love to put them out there. So over the years, I’ve gotten in the habit of texting myself what I might otherwise posted online. It’s become a kind of miniature private blog to myself. So, for my 40th birthday, I got myself a present. The chance to share about 40 of the things I’ve texted myself over the last year (organized by date texted, not topic):


True greatness requires longevity.

Investment in institutions (government, school, business, communities) is the key to human thriving. Institutions attempt to systematize beyond the influence of individual human choices. In that way, they are also inherently dehumanizing.

The bias of the news is that there is always something newsworthy. You’ll never see the headline “Things are mostly the same as they were yesterday”. Daily news needs to talk less about the present. More about the past. And a lot less about what the future might hold.

Just because a habit was once adaptive, doesn’t mean it’s working for you now.

Religion can offer us an ancient sense of humility: Our free will is constrained by our weaknesses. I’m grateful it’s also constrained by a loving God.

Parent as if you knew your kids were going to be okay. You’ll push them less and enjoy them more. Then they’ll probably turn out okay.

Capitalism is said to have an invisible hand that guides markets. Democracy needs to have a visible hand that voters can see, appreciate, and want to support.

Move away from “is what I’m saying the most correct” to “is what I’m saying the most effective”.

It seems like Adam and Eve were never meant to die. Never meant to go to heaven. Maybe this is the purpose of the human story. To end up better than where we started.

The American empire will eventually fade. Instead of putting energy towards holding on to as much power for as long as possible. Maybe it’s more productive to put that energy towards supporting growing nations that might share our values (maybe like India, Brazil, Ethiopia, etc).

One of the best ways to make America more resistant to radicalism and more open to gradual change is to help us realize just how successful they we've already been.

Every piece of criticism needs to be couched in the context of predetermined acceptance.

If someone is primarily describes the “good news” of Christianity as just delayed gratification (wait for heaven), that is truly some very bad news.

Your emotions are true, but they might not be telling you the truth.

Avoid financial advice that sounds like easy money or a complicated workaround.

Unlikely benefits of having a lot of children younger: Every year early you have a child, is an extra year you are in their life. Every extra child you have is an extra family member for them after you are gone.

The tradeoff to the many benefits of the 18th-century Enlightenment was an over-reliance of what we can see and understand. Apparently there is a lot about the world we will never understand. Thinking otherwise turns us into skeptics and conspiracy theorists.

We should replace the phrase “I can’t do that” with “I don’t want to do that” (because the benefits of success aren’t worth the costs to try)

“Don’t worry what other people think. No one is keeping your score. They are only keeping their own score” -Jeff Probst

Maybe everyone everywhere is struggling and needs to be treated with kid gloves. If so, I’ve got a lot of more apologies to give.

When you compare men and women, remove the top 1% (which is mostly old white men). Then by almost all measures, women are doing just as well if not better than most men over the last 30 years. This is both a celebration of the progress made and a model for how we can help moving forward. This is a big idea I’ve gotten from listening to Scott Galloway

Immigrants are an incredible piece of positive social engineering. There’s something about the immigrant experience that even makes them perform better than other marginalized groups. Are Kamala Harris and Barack Obama successful people of color, or are they products of a family with an immigrant work ethic and talent?

I’m less afraid of AI taking over society like Terminator. I’m more afraid of AI negatively affecting the way humans actually live their lives in the real world. This is already happening with social media algorithms.

The average age of inaugurated Presidents when I was a kid (Clinton, Bush, Obama) was 49. The average of the next 3 presidents (Trump, Biden, Trump) is 75.

Cynicism is a type of cowardice.

“Identical twins, raised apart are more similar than fraternal twins raised together. The most important thing you give your children is genetics. The second is zip code” -Daniel Pink
I feel like this justifies my laissez-faire parenting and the fact that I’m so picky about houses. Note: I’ve been technically homeless for over 6 months.

When things are bad, just keep pushing. When things are good, slow down.

Too much advice, even too much good advice, can create anxiety in the receiver and actually end up being taken incorrectly and become bad advice. If you feel that now, just stop reading this blog post ;)

People only get better when it’s easier to improve than to stay the way they are.

One of my greatest personal flaws is I love the simplicity of Checkers and I am easily tired from the complexity of Chess.

A good summary of the U.S. economy of my adult life: The price of non-essentials have gone down (TV’s, computers, air travel, etc) largely thanks to automation, but the price of essentials has gone up (housing, groceries, college, etc), largely due to fixed human labor costs. Curious how AI will affect this,.

There is never a more fickle mistress than the approval of others.

The bad times will come and go. So will the good times. It’s all about enduring and enjoying the now. If life is a gift, we’ve got to accept it all with gratefulness. Somehow.

Expectations are what drive us. They are also what drive us crazy.

My pitch for a new cult: “25 year Amish”. There are costs to living in the modern world. So instead of tying your culture to an arbitrary century like the Amish do, just delay all technology you use by 25 years. So go out and get a Blackberry and start ordering books from Amazon.

If you find yourself serving someone, something, or some group more than they serve you… great! That’s the purpose of life. To become a net positive on the world.

Negative emotions are key factor in human survival. Ignore them at your own peril.
That said, see above about the news high jacking your emotions.

People are not drawn to you. People are drawn to how they feel about themselves around you.

Earnestness is not a measure of whether what you are hearing is in fact correct. Earnestness is saying confidently what you think is correct. This is what makes Trump so believable, yet so incorrect.

It’s weird that as you get older your parents have less impact on your daily life. But it’s not until you’re older that you realize just how much they impact who you are.

I have found that my own lack of empathy is a lack of willingness to endure the feeling someone else in having right in front of me. It is brave to embrace the joy and sorrow of the world around you.

This NYT article is about how one of the most powerful things you can give children to increase their resiliency is an intergenerational self. An idea of how they fit into the larger narrative of their family history. A way to test this, is to see how much of the stories about their parents and grandparents they know. My wife and I played a trivia game asking our children these questions. They scored an average of 84%!

Career advice for my children: cast a wide net of hobbies and interests and then follow the ones that offer the lifestyle (money, hours, satisfaction) you desire.

You don’t get to choose who you are. That is largely a function of who you spend your time with. But you do get to choose who you spend your time with. I’d suggest regularly participating in more than just one group to ensure a healthy competition of ideas.

I’d like to increase not only my transparency, but also my vulnerability. One challenge for myself is to use more “I feel” statements. People will commonly respond incorrectly to vulnerability, but worst case scenario I’m just giving us all practice.

I’ve gotten very good at communicating with large groups. My challenge for the next decade of my life: give more individual attention.

Difference Between Humans and Animals, Part XXIX

The Earth Day "are you smarter than a chimpanzee" memory game edition:

The explanation:

This tells Japanese scholar Tetsuro Matsuzawa "that he has an actual picture memory, an eidetic memory. ... He takes a picture with his mind and holds it." Even if he turns away from the screen to do something else, the information stays in Ayumu's head. "You and I," says Matsuzawa, "we cannot do this. ... It is something special for the chimpanzee mind. It is not a matter of training for them. It is their way of seeing the world."

Emcee of TEDxGreenville

For someone who has a TED Talks tag on his blog, this is exciting news!

At last night’s TEDxGreenville salon, a preview party for TEDxGreenville 2014: Unzipped, Harrison Brookie was introduced as the emcee for this year’s April 11th all-day conference. 

Harrison may be familiar to many as the ring leader of an improv group that’s become quite popular in the last couple of years. Actually, rather than a ring leader, he’s more like a comedy super-hero. By day, Harrison Brookie is a social studies teacher at Southside International Baccalaureate High School. By night, he is the Executive Producer and Artistic Director of Alchemy Comedy Theater. In between all of that fun, he and his wife Traci have a daughter and, depending on when you read this, a new baby boy. 

 Harrison grew up in Greenville and returned home in 2011, after journeying to other locales to master his education and comedic skills, to found the Alchemy Comedy Theater, which produces weekly comedy shows. Those of us who’ve caught him and his cohorts in action on a Friday night at Coffee Underground might agree that, indeed, he’s a master of his art. Come cheer him on as this year’s emcee for TEDxGreenville 2014: Unzipped, Friday, April 11, at The Kroc Center in downtown Greenville. Come early. Registration begins at 8:00 am for what promises to be our most engaging TEDx event ever!

Birthday Wishes for a Proper Family Narrative

As is often the case every couple years on my birthday I take a self diagnostic and write a "Birthday Wishes for" post. Whether it was Happy Parenting in 2008, Political Perspective in 2010, or Empathy in 2011, the exercise has become a neat anti-New Year's Resolution (check my post history to see how those have worked out). This year, nothing seems more relevant than a simple wish for a happy family. From the NYT:

“There was a lot of research at the time into the dissipation of the family,” he told me at his home in suburban Atlanta. “But we were more interested in what families could do to counteract those forces.”

Around that time, Dr. Duke’s wife, Sara, a psychologist who works with children with learning disabilities, noticed something about her students.

“The ones who know a lot about their families tend to do better when they face challenges,” she said.

The uniqueness of the answer is concealed in just how simple "knowing" was measured:

Her husband was intrigued, and along with a colleague, Robyn Fivush, set out to test her hypothesis. They developed a measure called the “Do You Know?” scale that asked children to answer 20 questions.

Examples included: Do you know where your grandparents grew up? Do you know where your mom and dad went to high school? Do you know where your parents met? Do you know an illness or something really terrible that happened in your family? Do you know the story of your birth?

Dr. Duke and Dr. Fivush asked those questions of four dozen families in the summer of 2001, and taped several of their dinner table conversations. They then compared the children’s results to a battery of psychological tests the children had taken, and reached an overwhelming conclusion. The more children knew about their family’s history, the stronger their sense of control over their lives, the higher their self-esteem and the more successfully they believed their families functioned. The “Do You Know?” scale turned out to be the best single predictor of children’s emotional health and happiness.

Loyal blog readers may be thinking, but what about that whole Life's Not a Story, It's a Mess quarter-life epiphany. I am certainly still weary of creating overarching life patterns where none exist, but that doesn't mean we can't create some general narrative:

Psychologists have found that every family has a unifying narrative, he explained, and those narratives take one of three shapes.

First, the ascending family narrative: “Son, when we came to this country, we had nothing. Our family worked. We opened a store. Your grandfather went to high school. Your father went to college. And now you. ...” [sound famialiar? -HB]

Second is the descending narrative: “Sweetheart, we used to have it all. Then we lost everything.”

“The most healthful narrative,” Dr. Duke continued, “is the third one. It’s called the oscillating family narrative: ‘Dear, let me tell you, we’ve had ups and downs in our family. We built a family business. Your grandfather was a pillar of the community. Your mother was on the board of the hospital. But we also had setbacks. You had an uncle who was once arrested. We had a house burn down. Your father lost a job. But no matter what happened, we always stuck together as a family.’ ”

It's not about creating a false story that leaves out the gritty details. It's about creating an inter-generational understanding of the world. This seems to be the strength of long lasting institutions (think the military or the Catholic Church). In fact, one of the big realities of Biblical wisdom is having a God's eye view of history. This just seems like a healthy step in the right direction.

It also works for institutions like businesses. Which is why at our most recent State of the Theater meeting, in which we added several new members to Alchemy, I took a few minutes to put where we are going in context of where we have been.

This has also given me the idea of creating a new end of the year project for my US History courses. Every year we create a large timeline going around the room labeled by pictures of the presidents a graphic organizers of every topic. After exams this year I plan on assigning students to investigate their own family heritage and narrative and label our giant timeline with the names and stories. I look forward to completing it myself.

"Alchemy of Laughter"

As if improv company Alchemy Comedy performing at TEDx Greenville wasn't two worlds colliding enough, here's a TED talk about comedy that actually uses the phrase the "alchemy of laughter". Like me, what the comedian Chris Bliss wanted most in life was to influence people. But people don't like to be changed. Comedy, he found, was a way to speak truth into people's mouths while their open from laughter:



Hat tip to fellow comedian Ben Burris.

Worthwhile Sentences on Writing

From Hugh Hollowell: "The thing about founding a nonprofit is that, eventually, all your dreams turn into paperwork."

From Justin Landwehr: "Words are the waste products of our experiences."

From David Foster Wallace: "Writers have a queer blend of shyness and exhibitionism."

From Brene Brown: "Maybe stories are just data with a soul."

From Mark Twain: “A person who won’t read has no advantage over one who can’t read.”

The Past, Present, and Future of Greenville Manufacturing

I love it when NPR does a story on my hometown. Just this week Planet Money did a two part series on the history of American manufacturing through the lens of Greenville, SC. Here's my version of the story:

The Past

With several forces coming together at the right time, the early days of the Industrial Revolution brought about radical economic change. Work moved from the home to factories in cities, greatly improving human life, wealth, and morality. Which meant the late 1800's and early 1900's saw huge economic growth. These increases in production, and in turn increasing wages, didn't require very much expertise (assembly lines run themselves) and could often be created by a lone genius inventor.

The Present

Then we had The Great Stagnation. The Industrial Revolution picked up all the low-hanging fruit of innovation. Printing press, cheap western land, fossil fuel powered machines, penicillin, clean water, cars, planes, basic worker education, etc. all made life better quickly and relatively easily. Computers, cancer research, alternative forms of energy, college education for all, etc are all slow going and complicated to benefit from. Also, much of the innovation of machinery and globalization of trade has replaced the low skill industrial workers of the past and it's still happening (just check this old and new video of automobile manufacturing).

The Future

If you read the full Planet Money story in the Atlantic the future looks grim. Workers are suffering in the name of profit. The poor try, but can never succeed. The reality is a little more optimistic. Every time a human is replaced by a machine (or even a cheaper human) customers benefit. And since all workers are also customers, even the replaced workers' lives can improve. The unemployed of today probably have better living standards than the employed of the 1910's because of increases in productivity. That's why I support some kinds of social safety nets (especially the kind that retrains replaced workers). I also suggest that when choosing a career be sure you can't be replaced by a machine in your lifetime (hint: don't go into the toy assembling business).

The Distant Future

Though if I did have a worry about how technology impacts society, it would be about fertility. As technology improves, jobs become more complicated. That's why the return on education is actually greater than it used to be, even non-economically speaking (especially if you weren't "supposed to go"). This increase in complexity requires an increase in education. Which is usually fine because increases in education result in increases in pay that exceed the cost of that education. But what I'm specially worried that if jobs become so complicated that they require decades of education, they could delay plans for family past the point of our most fertile years. What if we have to learn so much we can't have babies anymore, increasing the future underpopulation bust? My guess is creating a family while still in school will become a more common trend.

Emptying the Bottle: Early January '12 Links

Here is the best of what I've shared on Twitter recently:

• Will our grandchildren be totally weirded out that shots used to hurt [audio]?
• What Washington crossing the Delaware really looked like.
• My career has a purpose! School raises IQ!
• Do you park to get there or park yo leave?
• The greatest creation of global capitalism or I, cheeseburger.
• The human transformer [video].
• How the weather affects us.
• 20GB in 30 years via Justin Scott.
• Role of charisma in politics [video] via Justin Wehr.
• There really are devices that can increase penis size.
• Sad thought, cognitive decline starts at 45 (earlier).
• Soap opera's freedom, gay candidate, justified Japanese internment and more!

As always, feel free to email me anything interesting you come across.

Difference Between Humans and Animals, Part XXVIII

Going back to part 1 of this series there is a difference in the way humans and animals learn. But perhaps the biggest difference isn't learning, but teaching:

I know this may come as a surprise, but it does so because we tend to mix up teaching and learning. A young chimpanzee can learn how to smash nuts on a rock by watching an older chimpanzee in action. And when she grows up, her own children can learn by watching her. But in these situations, the students are on their own. They have to watch an action and try to tease apart the underlying rules.

The article goes on to give some possible exceptions, but it's interesting to think I could be the missing link.

Dreams May Help Calm Us

By exposing us to our bad memories when our brain can better handle them:

During REM sleep, which is the dreaming stage of sleep, the brain stops releasing stress chemicals. Now a new study finds that as we dream we can even soothe our stressful associations to certain experiences. 

Scientists scanned the brains of 35 subjects while they viewed emotionally arousing images. Half of the subjects viewed the images in the morning and again in the evening of the same day. The other half viewed the same images in the evening and then again the next morning after sleeping. 

Those who slept between viewings reported a significant decrease in their emotional reaction to seeing the images the second time. And brain scans corroborated the self-reports, showing a reduction of activity in the amygdala, an area responsible for processing emotions.

So it helps us learn emotionally and intellectually. I wonder if this a reason to argue with your wife before you got to bed or to definitely not argue with your wife before you go to bed.

Culture of Economics Today

This has been my experience as well:

Economists don’t have to be free-marketers. But that ends up being the canonical model, and then everything else ends up being a departure from the canonical model, which you’ve then got to explain why you’re departing from. It’s not because the canonical model is right, it’s because you ask most economists and they’ll say, “At least we understand how that economy works very, very well. So you want to tell me that we’re going to move away from this one and move to something else, that’s fine, but you have to explain why you’re putting in all of these imperfections.” So it’s not that you can’t write those things down, it’s just that there is less of a standard way of doing it. 

Economists essentially have a sophisticated lack of understanding of economics, especially macroeconomics. I know it sounds ridiculous. But the reason why I tell people they should study economics is not so they’ll know something at the end—because I don’t think we know much—but because we’re good at thinking. Economics teaches you to think things through. What you see a lot of times in economics is disdain for other's lack of thinking. You have to think about the ramifications of policies in the short run, the medium run, and the long run. Economists think they’re good at doing that, but they’re good at doing that in the sense that they can write down a model that will help them think about it—not in terms of empirically knowing what the answers are. And we have gotten so enamored of thinking things through that the fact that we don’t know anything needs to bother us more.

What's Wrong with America

Here's what the other half of the economics blog Marginal Revolution says in his new book published by TED:

Unemployment, fear, and fitful growth tell us the economy is stagnating. The recession, however, is just the tip of iceberg. We have deeper problems. Most importantly, the rate of innovation is down. Patents, which were designed to promote the progress of science and the useful arts, have instead become weapons in a war for competitive advantage with innovation as collateral damage. College, once a foundation for innovation, has been oversold. We have more students in college than ever before, for example, but fewer science majors. Regulations, passed with the best of intentions, have spread like kudzu and now impede progress to everyone's detriment [the worst he seems to claim is limits on immigration]. Launching the Innovation Renaissance [link] is a fast-paced look at how we can accelerate innovation and build a solid 21st-century economy.

Emptying the Bottle: Early December '11 Links

Here is the best of what I've shared on Twitter recently:

• People with sweet tooths may be sweeter and night owls are smarter.
• The world's underground economy is $10 trillion.
• "Renewable energy" doesn't exist (earlier).
• In college, follow your dreams, but be sure the dream can pay the bill.
• Education is more important than economic growth in creating democracy.
• In the future (present?), neuroscience will blur the guilty and not guilty.
• Six ideas Tyler Cowen wants to see die.
• In the world of Facebook, a friend of your friend knows a friend of their friend.
• Triumph the Insult Comic at Occupy Wall Street [video] via Justin.
• Don't tell my students, chewing gum helps you learn (earlier).
• Why we always root for the underdog.
• Liberalism increases the chance people will feel good AND Conservatism makes people less likely to feel bad (earlier).

As always, feel free to email me anything interesting you come across.

Costs and Benefits of Chunking

Chunking has nothing to do those several huge Thanksgiving dinners I have each year. Here's what it is:

This mental process is known as “chunking” and it’s a crucial element of human cognition. As de Groot demonstrated, chess grandmasters automatically chunk the board into a set of known patterns, which allow them to instantly sort through the messy details of the game. And chunking isn’t just for chess experts: While reading this sentence, your brain is effortlessly chunking the letters, grouping the symbols into lumps of meaning. As a result, you don’t have to sound out each syllable, or analyze the phonetics; your literate brain is able to skip that stage of perception. This is what expertise is: the ability to rely on learned patterns to compensate for the inherent limitations of information processing in the brain. As George Miller famously observed, we can only consciously make sense of about seven bits of information (plus or minus two) at any given moment. Chunking allows us to escape this cognitive trap.

But there are draw backs to creating patterns (dare I say stories) to understand information:

Now for the bad news: Expertise might also come with a dark side, as all those learned patterns make it harder for us to integrate wholly new knowledge. 

[...] 

The problem with our cognitive chunks is that they’re fully formed – an inflexible pattern we impose on the world – which means they tend to be resistant to sudden changes, such as a street detour in central London. They also are a practiced habit, and so we tend to rely on them even when they might not be applicable. (A chess grandmaster has to be careful about applying his chess chunks to checkers.)

And here's how this applies to everything from improv, to our personal narratives, and even to politics:

So if you’re an expert, be proud: You’ve learned to perceive the world in a useful way. Your training has changed the structure of your brain. But don’t forget to think about your blind spots, about all those new patterns that you must struggle to see.

Frank Deford on the Economics of Minor College Sports

Even though I'm not the biggest sports fan, I must confess I've been listening to sport commentary. But before you get surprised, it's from NPR. For the past few months Frank Deford has been enlightening me to the drama that is organized sports. This week is no exception. Listen here as he takes on the complicated relationship of college academics and college sports.

Multiple Choice Question Paradox

From The American Pageant textbook:

Earth Shattering Odds

As I was catching up on my blog reading tonight (still yet to completely get there since Europe) I came across an article comparing the different proposed methods for dealing with an asteroid headed for Earth. Here's how it closes:

The researchers do note that the asteroids they used in their calculations are not immediate threats. The asteroid Apophis is expected to fly harmlessly by Earth on April 13, 2036, with only a 1-in-233,000 chance of hitting our plane

When I saw that number I wasn't comforted. It felt a little too likely. So I compared it to the chances of winning the South Carolina Education Lottery:

Not sure if this makes me more nervous about asteroids or people who play the lottery.

Emptying the Bottle: Late-August '11 Links

Here is a list of the worthwhile links I've Bookmarked recently:

• Exchangeable credits for skipping class to prevent skipping class.
• The misunderstood history of negative campaign ads [video].
• Turning good workers into criminals and criminals into bad workers.
• Ability to change your mind = Ability to Reason [graphic].
• Less than 3 percent of spending in the U.S. goes to China.
• How a secret roll of the dice can account for lying in large samples.
• Wishing someone luck (if they believe in it) can improve performance.
• Explainxkcd.com, explaining nerd humor to the rest us (via Justin).
• When it comes to group work, be sure to put someone in charge.
• Are youth the most discriminated people in America today [video]?
• Spoiling the ending makes for a better story [audio].
• The richer you are the busier you are (earlier).

As always, feel free to email me anything interesting you come across.

Great Television Shows Make You Smarter

Whether it's LOST, The Wire, or my recent European trip find Mad Men, complex TV series' may be more than just entertaining. In a recent post Jonah Lehrer shows how the Flynn Effect, the measurable increase in IQ from generation to generation, is not just because of improvements in education and diet. If the top 5%, who have had access to plenty of food and education for decades,  has also increased, then there must be some other "environmental stimulation”:

One frequently cited factor is the increasing complexity of entertainment, which might enhance abstract problem solving skills. (As Flynn himself noted, “The very fact that children are better and better at IQ test problems logically entails that they have learned at least that kind of problem-solving skill better, and it must have been learned somewhere.”) This suggests that, because people are now forced to make sense of Lost or the Harry Potter series or World of Warcraft, they’re also better able to handle hard logic puzzles. (The effect is probably indirect, with the difficult forms of culture enhancing working memory and the allocation of attention.) As Steven Johnson argued, everything bad is good for us, especially when the bad stuff has lots of minor characters and subplots.

In the name of self improvement, is there any other "homework" I should be watching?

Life Update and a Short Break

Wanted to do a quick recap of what has been going on for me personally the last month, since the blog has been on hold. As you already know my life has been going through some pretty big transitions. I had my last shows at the Dirty South Improv Theater, I moved all of my belongings to Greenville, and I left my old high school. The good news is I'm in talks with some close improv friends about starting a company in Greenville and I've gotten a new high school teaching job. I will continue teaching US History and AP US History at Southside High School. Also for the next three weeks I'll be going on a European tour for my wedding anniversary and to visit family. If you have any tips we'll be in Madrid, Granada, Tangier, and Amsterdam (with some possible day visits to Paris and Brussels). See you in late July!