RSA Animate - The Truth About Dishonesty
In this RSA Animate, Dan Ariely explores the circumstances under which someone would lie and what effect deception has on society at large. Taken from a lecture given by Dan Ariely as part of the RSA’s free public events programme.
Do you have a lot of ideas but no clue how to organize them? Or maybe ideas come to you and by the time you have a chance to record them, you’ve forgotten? Enter the Spark File. As Alex Hillman explains, this tool doesn’t just capture half-baked ideas—it helps you turn small concepts into great things.
Where Good Ideas Come From in 4 Minutes
The Spark File, Steven describes, is a process/tool that he uses to collect “half-baked ideas” and then revisit them. For eight years, he’s maintained a single document with notes and ideas with zero organization or taxonomy, simply a chronology of thoughts. He calls this document his Spark File.
Once a month, he revisits the ENTIRE Spark File from top to bottom, revisiting old ideas and potentially combining them with newer ideas.
we don’t have ideas all at once and we certainly don’t have them in any particular order. Perhaps more importantly, we tend to either have a compulsion to_act_on our ideas immediately, or not at all.
This compulsion is blocking your greatest work.
By using a Spark File, I’m able to “act” on an idea simply by writing it down at the bottom of the document. Compulsion fulfilled.
Gorgeous Miniature Worlds Created from Hundreds of Photos
Sydney-based Catherine Nelson trained as a painter before branching out into photography and effects — she worked on the visual special effects for films like Moulin Rouge, Harry Potter, and 300 — and it shows. Nelson, whose work we spotted over at Colossal, stitches hundreds of images together to form these breathtaking miniature worlds, each blooming with its own specific kind of life. As Nelson explains, “Visual poetry, nature photography and digital techniques blend together to give shape to these transcendental landscapes. The result is a contemporary pictorial mythology that subtly reminds the viewer of a profound truth: that it is in the flourishing variety of the local that the fate of the world resides.” Click through to see some of our favorites of Nelson’s worlds, and then head on over to her website to see much more of her work.
Stoicism still has a tremendous amount to teach us, especially in these passion-saturated times. What’s more, the Stoic legacy has shaped our world in more ways than you might expect. Here are five reasons why Stoicism matters:
- It was built for hard times.
[…] Stoicism tells us that no happiness can be secure if it’s rooted in changeable, destructible things. Our bank accounts can grow or shrink, our careers can prosper or falter, even our loved ones can be taken from us. There is only one place the world can’t touch: our inner selves, our choice at every moment to be brave, to be reasonable, to be good.
- Stoicism is made for globalization.
The world that gave birth to Stoicism was a parochial, often xenophobic place: most people held fast to age-old divisions of nationality, religion, and status. If openly embracing those divisions sounds strange to us, we have Stoicism to thank. It was perhaps the first Western philosophy to preach universal brotherhood. […]
- If you’re Christian, you’re already part-Stoic.
[…] It makes sense that Christianity is a deeply Stoic religion. Stoicism dominated Roman culture for centuries—and Christianity went mainstream in the same culture. What’s more, many of the leaders of the early Christian church were former Stoics. Of course Christianity borrowed much of its thought and terminology from Stoicism–because thinking about religion in the early 1st millennium meant thinking like a Stoic. […]
- It’s the unofficial philosophy of the military.
[…] In her book The Stoic Warrior, Nancy Sherman, who taught philosophy at the Naval Academy, argued that Stoicism is a driving force behind the military mindset–especially in its emphasis on endurance, self-control, and inner strength. As Sherman writes, whenever her philosophy class at Annapolis turned to the Stoic thinkers, “many officers and students alike felt they had come home.”
- It’s a philosophy for leadership.
Stoicism teaches us that, before we try to control events, we have to control ourselves first. Our attempts to exert influence on the world are subject to chance, disappointment, and failure–but control of the self is the only kind that can succeed 100% of the time. From emperor Marcus Aurelius on, leaders have found that a Stoic attitude earns them respect in the face of failure, and guards against arrogance in the face of success.
Some of these reasons may appeal more than others, but old ideas can still be good ideas.
At a recent TED conference, psychologist Daniel Kahneman, Nobel Prize winner and one of the founders of behavioral economics, gave a talk on why our experiences and our memories can be so different. His concept provides important insights about all consumers, but especially for those who purchase luxury brands.
This distinction between experience and memory is especially important as related to luxury brands. Unlike supermarket products and neighborhood restaurants, for which price, utility, and availability are important; the vital ingredient for success in luxury product and service segments is consumer experience.
Most consumers have a list of things they would like to purchase. However, affluent consumers are more interested in new and better experiences. Across all categories, Sacks’ research reveals that the affluent are looking for deeper and more meaningful experiences in their interactions with the products and services they buy. They view these experiences as enhancing their day-to-day living as well as contributing to the long-term quality of their lives.
The lesson for luxury goods marketers is that they need to satisfy the needs of the Experiencing Self so that consumers are drawn to them; while they also provide experiential change that the Remembering Self can use to create memories which will bring those consumers back again.
Kahneman made the following distinction about how experience and memory affect our future behavior: “We actually don’t choose between experiences, we choose between memories of experiences. And even when we think about the future, we don’t think of our future normally as experiences. We think of our future as anticipated memories.”
Want to bounce back better and faster when life hits you with unexpected surprises?
Here’s a quick list of some of the most useful tips to get back on your feet.
Acknowledge what is in front of you.
Realize that change is always going to be in your life.
Learn to be an optimist.
Be nice to yourself.
Let it go.
Have a tribe.
Look for the silver lining.
Develop post-traumatic growth.
Find a mentor.
Look at problems from different angles.
Remember that you’ve made it through tough times before.
Think about kaleidoscopes.
Take a break.
Remember that you already are resilient.
Common humanity.
No one said you have to like it.
Look up.
Simply notice.
Be kind.
Be sure to read the article for explanations of each item.
One paradox of good fiction is that it centers on sadness. If fiction gives us pleasure, then why are we drawn towards what’s gravely unpleasant? Think about classics in the Western cannon. Romeo and Juliet ends with a double suicide; Anna Karenina throws herself in front of an oncoming train; in versions of Goethe’s Faust the Devil carries the protagonist off to hell; Santiago returns empty handed in The Old Man and the Sea.
There are few possible reasons why we’re suckers for sorrow. Sad stories make us feel better because they give us a chance to compare ourselves to individuals and circumstances that are worse than our own - life might be tough, but at least I’m not dead like Romeo and Juliet. Some research proposes that sorrow in fiction might be a form of psychological relief. A more fruitful explanation is that important virtues, values and morals that elicit uplifting emotions accompany sad moments in fiction.
[…] People flock to sad stories not for the sadness, Oliver says, but to experience these feel-good moments that sadness brings out.
[T]he enjoyment of many examples of entertainment that have been labeled as ‘‘sad’’ or as ‘‘tear-jerkers’’ may be described, in part, in terms of the experience of elevation in response to meaningful entertainment—an affective state associated with unique elicitors, emotional and physical responses, and motivational outcomes.
They discovered that elevation is not just a form of happiness but a distinct physiological reaction where people describe themselves as “moved” and wanting to help others. As Haidt says, “these emotional reactions involved warm or pleasant feelings in the chest and conscious desire to help others or become a better person.” This helps explain the sad-film paradox. Sad films display instances of moral beauty and moral excellence that implant a powerful need to “do good” in the moviegoer. Despite the sorrow, we’re elevated for a few moments before returning to everyday life
One hypothesis is that stories allow us to mentally rehearse moments of adversity without the consequences. Like a flight simulator, fiction generates virtual experiences of adversity for the benefit of practice. Steven Pinker put forth a version of this theory in his 1997 book How the Mind Works: “Fictional narratives supply us with a mental catalogue of the fatal conundrums we might face someday and the outcomes of strategies we could deploy in them… the cliché that life imitates art is true because the function of some kinds of art is for life to imitate it.”
The results from Oliver’s study go one step further. “Rather than only providing viewers with models of prosocial behavior, eliciting elevation may further increase the likelihood of engaging in these behaviors, as elevation entails motivational enhancement.” In other words, a tragic moment on the big screen or on the page makes us want to be better people.
We know that meditation is beneficial. It’s hard nowadays to escape the ever present pictures of the smiling Buddha, and the articles praising meditations efficacy, reaching from calming the mind to lowering blood pressure.
But how do we get ourselves to fit yet another chore that’s “good for you” into our schedule?
First and foremost: Forget that your mind will be quiet. It won’t. It takes many years of consistent practice to come to a place of emptiness of thought.
In the meantime, look at it this way: Your thoughts will not be eliminated, but they will slow down, and that in itself will feel like a relief.
Allow your thoughts to be chaotic. How can we expect perfection without any or little training? We don’t expect it when it comes to our bodies. Or our professional skills. We know that it takes hard work to come to a place of mastery.
Some tips:
Make your meditation a routine activity. Do it in the morning. If you postpone it until bedtime, you’ll most likely never do it.
Integrate it into your day. Instead of pulling out your smart phone on the bus, just sit and close your eyes.
Find an external trigger to remind you to focus on your breath. For example, in the car, every time you stop at a red traffic light, keep your eyes on the light and breath deeply.
Begin to associate positive feelings with meditation. Shift your perspective from seeing it as a chore, to viewing it as something that makes you feel just a little bit lighter.
The mind is a powerful tool. Use it to your advantage.
Synopsis
Many creativity research programs are narrowly focused on one aspect of creativity to the exclusion of others; an integrative focus will help move the field forward.
The study of creativity is sometimes classified as focusing on the little c, everyday creativity; or as aiming to entangle the enigma of genius or the big C creativity. In a recent post, I extended this to a middle c research paradigm where the focus is on mechanisms underlying the creative process. I aptly labelled the three paradigms, as focusing on Products, People and Processes. Today I want to extend this further by adding to this mix, a research paradigm that focuses on micro and macro environmental causes or conditions that encourage / inhibit creativity. This is also known as a focus on the environmental Press , thus completing our four P’s.
Products:
[…] Creativity (of Products) = surprise + originality + utility + beauty.
Process:
The middle C creativity, or the study of normal creatives and how they create on a daily basis, shed light on the creative Process. […]
People:
Coming to big C creativity, here the focus is squarely on People and what makes some people eminent or genius or more creative than the rest of us. […]
Press:
Teresa Amabile, amongst others, has studied the conditions conducive/ prohibitive for creativity, a lot. Some of her research paradigm focuses on the effect of environments on middle c normal creative types or little c everyday creative persons- like the employees and managers in an organisation. To some, such an organizational focus, on creativity exhibited in everyday work context, may be trivially useful or attractive, but I think the basic principles of environmental influences on historical creativity can be easily extrapolated from the principles involved in everyday creativity. […]
In the end, it is important to realize that creativity is all things to all people, but still needs desperately, and would benefit from immensely, an integrative research paradigm; otherwise like the proverbial blind men and the elephant, we may end up getting narrow and useless conceptions of creativity and ignore the big elephant in the room.
As we think through the role that algorithms should play in our lives—and the various feats of automation that they enable—two questions are particularly important. First, is a given instance of automation feasible? Second, is it desirable? Computer scientists have been asking both questions for decades in the context of artificial intelligence.
The author explains “the algorithmic takeover” of the past three decades by linking it to Wall Street’s fascination with algorithmic trading, whereby traders recede into the background and leave it to the algorithms to identify and act on arbitrage opportunities. Judging by the recent Knight Capital debacle—one of the main cheerleaders for algorithmic trading squandered $440 million when one of its algorithms went rogue—this is, indeed, an important subject. But is Wall Street the driving force behind the culture-wide algorithmic fetish so aptly diagnosed by Mr. Steiner? Or is it just along for the ride?
While “Automate This” hints at some of these thorny issues, it says very little about the ways to resolve them. The real question isn’t whether to live with algorithms—the Sumerians got that much right—but how to live with them. As Vonnegut understood over a half-century ago, an uncritical embrace of automation, for all the efficiency that it offers, is just a prelude to dystopia.
Interesting food for thought. I’ve been programming since I was in my mid-teens. But that doesn’t mean I support automation just for the sake of it. For example, I believe Google’s project for self-driven cars solves the wrong problem: we don’t need to outsource driving just so we can spend more time surfing the net, video chatting, playing games, etc. What we really need to do is either reduce the need to drive anywhere in the first place, or provide quality public transport when we do. Maybe self-driven cars are a solution for a billionaire’s problem? So, important questions for any proposed automation projects include:
