THINKER'S ALMANAC - June 13

What was different about Charles Darwin's thinking process?

Subject:  Creative Problem Solving by Reversal (Inversion) - Munger’s prescription for a miserable life

Event:  Charlie Munger gives the commencement address to the Harvard School, 1986

Invert, always invert. -Carl Jacobi (1804 – 1851)

On this day in 1986, Billionaire businessman Charlie Munger presented a speech to the Harvard School.  Munger began by explaining that his speech was inspired by someone who had previously spoken at a Harvard School graduation ceremony, the television host and comedian Johnny Carson.  Following Carson’s example, Munger proclaimed that instead of presenting advice on how to live a happy life and to be a success, he would instead present advice on how to guarantee a life of misery.

As his first prescription for misery, Munger advised, “be unreliable.”  Second, he advised limiting your learning to only your personal experience rather than taking lessons vicariously from the good and bad experiences of others.  Unlike someone like Sir Isaac Newton who claimed that he “stood on the shoulders of giants,” Munger facetiously recommended ignoring “the best work done before yours” and becoming “as non-educated as you reasonably can.”  For his third prescription for misery, Munger addressed how to deal with life’s inevitable failures:  “Go down and stay down . . . .”

Munger ended his speech by critiquing the value of the “backward” thinking process he borrowed from Carson.  Citing the mathematician Carl Gustav Jacobi, Munger stated, “It is the nature of things, as Jacobi knew, that many hard problems are best solved only when they are addressed backward.”  As a prime example of “backward” or inverted thinking, Munger cited the revolutionary work of Charles Darwin:

Darwin’s result was due in large measure to his working method, which violated all my rules for misery and particularly emphasized a backward twist in that he always gave priority attention to evidence tending to disconfirm whatever cherished and hard-won theory he already had. In contrast, most people early achieve and later intensify a tendency to process new and disconfirming information so that any original conclusion remains intact. 

                                    CHARLES DARWIN - Image by Andrew Martin from Pixabay

You don’t need to be a scientific genius to employ Munger’s method.  Simply begin be identifying a problem you would like to solve.  For example, if you are a salesperson, you might seek out ways to make your customers feel more comfortable and welcome in your store.  Maybe you’ve thought about and brainstormed solutions to your problem many times and have not been able to come up with a viable idea.  This is the point where using reversal might give you a new perspective.    Begin by reversing the problem, by stating it in the opposite way, “How can I make my customers feel uncomfortable and unwelcome in my store?”  Now brainstorm a list of ideas to see if something new jumps out.

Sometimes reversal can yield results when it happens accidentally.  In 1968, after a long, late night recording session, John Lennon went home, carrying a tape of a song that The Beatles had been working on.  When he arrived home, he decided to listen to the tape.  Tired and not paying full attention to what he was doing, he accidentally spooled the audio tape on backward.  As he flipped on the play button, he became mesmerized by the novelty of the song’s vocals playing backward. In fact, he liked them even better than when the song was played forwards.  On May 30, 1966, The Beatles released their song “Rain,” the first song ever to feature backward vocals.

ALSO ON THIS DAY:

June 13, 1966:  Today is the anniversary of a landmark U.S. Supreme Court case Miranda v. Arizona.  The case involved a man convicted of rape and armed robbery, Ernesto Miranda.  His case was appealed, and his lawyers argued that he had not been advised of his rights before he signed a confession.  Miranda’s attorneys won the case by a narrow 5 to 4 vote.  The Miranda case changed the way police operate when taking a suspect into custody, compelling them to advise the accused of his or her Fifth Amendment rights against self-incrimination.

Sources:

1-https://www.biznews.com/thought-leaders/1986/06/13/charlie-mungers-speech-to-the-harvard-school-june-1986

THINKER'S ALMANAC - June 12

In ‘To Kill a Mockingbird,’ what was the one simple trick that Scout’s father taught her about how to get along with all kinds of people?

Subject:  Egocentric Bias - Atticus’ Lesson

Event:  The New York Times publishes an article entitled, “A Bias Puts Self at the Center of Everything,” 1984

Don't over-estimate your own merits. . . . don't expect others to take as much interest in you as you do yourself.  And . . . don't imagine that most people give enough thought to you to have any special desire to persecute you.  -Bertrand Russell,

When you get an exam back with a bad grade, are you more likely to say the exam was a poor measure of your knowledge rather than that your poor grade was a result of your own poor preparation?

When your favorite sports team wins, do you say “We won!”?  When that same team loses, do you say “They lost”?

When you think about events from 5 years ago, are you more likely to remember events from your own experience rather than events that were in the news?

If you answered yes to these questions, you’re not alone.  They are a natural outgrowth of a phenomenon known as the egocentric bias, the tendency we all have to overestimate our own importance and influence, and to rely a bit too much on just our own point of view.

                                                        Image by Nimrod Oren from Pixabay

On this day in 1984, writer Daniel Goleman published an article in The New York Times on the egocentric bias entitled, “A Bias That Puts Self at the Center of Everything.” In the article, Goleman presented findings that revealed that the influence of egocentricity is much greater than psychologists had initially thought.  

In a study done at the University of Rochester, for example, subjects participated in group discussions.  After these discussions, individuals evaluated their own contributions to the group.  Based on these self-evaluations, researchers concluded that individuals consistently overestimated how much attention they received from others in the group, how much they influenced the opinions of others, and how much others in the group commented about them.

Another area where the egocentric bias plays a large role is in memory.  Studies reveal that people tend to revise recalled events, enhancing their own importance.  Like an author crafting a drama, they make themselves the protagonist.

According to Dr. Anthony Greewald:

The mind is organized to perceive and store information in terms of the egocentric bias. It serves an essential cognitive function: the bias organizes our experience in a stable and consistent way so that we can later recall it. The self is like the indexing system of a library. Once you arrange information according to one system - what happened to me - if you switch systems you'd be completely lost. (1)

Understanding the egocentric bias helps us realize that our perception of reality is a distorted one and that our memory is skewed by our own first person point of view.  It also helps us understand our tendency to take things more personally than we should. 

An illustration of the egocentric bias and an antidote for how to overcome it can be found in the opening chapters of Harper Lee’s novel To Kill a Mockingbird. On Scout’s first day of school, seemingly everything that could go wrong, goes wrong, especially when it comes to her relationship with her teacher, Miss Caroline. As Scout tearfully recounts her run-ins with her teacher to her father, she declares that she doesn’t ever want to return to school again.

At this point, Scout’s father, Atticus Finch, shares a valuable lesson with her:

`First of all,' he said, 'if you can learn a simple trick, Scout, you'll get along a lot better with all kinds of folks. You never really understand a person until you consider things from his point of view — until you climb into his skin and walk around in it.' (2)

What Atticus is doing is challenging Scout to overcome her egocentric point of view by expanding her perspective in order to see the world through someone else’s eyes.  The egocentric bias makes us perceive the world from a first person point of view; Atticus reminds us that we can expand our perspective of the world by considering alternative narratives from the points of view of other people. 

Recall, Retrieve, Recite, Ruminate, Reflect, Reason:  What is the egocentric bias, and how does it distort our perception of both the present and the past?

Challenge:  Literature other points of view - a character

ALSO ON THIS DAY:

June 12, 1942:  On this day a 13-year-old girl named Anne Frank received a birthday gift -- a red and white checkered autograph book.  Instead of collecting the signatures of others in the book, Anne decided to use it as a diary to record her own thoughts. She spent 25 months hiding in an annex above her father’s office in Amsterdam before she and her family were betrayed, arrested, and transported to Nazi concentration camps.  Anne died of typhus in 1945 while in the concentration camp at Bergen-Belsen.  In her diary, Anne’s remarkable courage and vivid insights into the human condition live on.  Anned’s diary has inspired millions of readers around the world and has been translated into 67 languages.

Sources:

1-Goleman, Daniel. “A BIAS PUTS SELF AT CENTER OF EVERYTHING.”  The New York Times, 12 June 1984.

2-Lee, Harper. To Kill a Mockingbird. New York :Harper Perennial Modern Classics, 2006.

THINKER'S ALMANAC - June 11

How can unconscious bias be deadly?

Subject:  Unconscious Bias - Hurricane Study

Event:  Nicholas Kristof penned a column entitled, “She Gets No Respect,” 2014

It is easier for a man to burn down his own house than to get rid of his prejudices. -Roger Bacon

Why would a hurricane named Alexandra be deadlier than an identical hurricane named Alexander?

This is the question that syndicated columnist Nicholas Kristof asked at the beginning of an editorial published in The New York Times on this day in 2014.

The answer to the question comes from a study by researchers from the University of Illinois at Urbana-Champaign and Arizona State University.  What the researchers found studying the data on over sixty hurricanes was that female-named hurricanes resulted in twice as many casualties as male-named hurricanes.  In addition to looking at actual casualties in hurricanes, the researchers also asked people to hypothetically predict how intense and risky a female-named hurricane might be versus a male-named hurricane.  Consistently people -- including women -- predicted that a male hurricane would be more violent than a female hurricane.

                                                            Image by WikiImages from Pixabay

What this study illustrates is that our prejudices and biases related to gender or race are not always overt; instead, these biases are frequently unconscious, even, as Kristof says, “among well-meaning, enlightened people who embrace equality.”  

Other studies asked professors to evaluate mythical candidate applications for a laboratory position at a university.  The only difference between the otherwise identical applications was that some had male names and some had female names.  The male names were not only rated higher, but they were also recommended for a significantly higher salary (1).

In a 2014 interview, U.S. Supreme Court Justice Ruth Bader Ginsberg shared her concerns about unconscious bias as well as a method by which it might be eliminated:

I think unconscious bias is one of the hardest things to get at. My favorite example is the symphony orchestra. When I was growing up, there were no women in orchestras. Auditioners thought they could tell the difference between a woman playing and a man. Some intelligent person devised a simple solution: Drop a curtain between the auditioners and the people trying out. And, lo and behold, women began to get jobs in symphony orchestras. (2)

Like Ginsberg, Nicholas Kristof believes that the hidden nature of unconscious bias makes it difficult to detect; nevertheless, he believes it must still be confronted:

This deep bias is as elusive as it is pernicious, but a start is to confront and discuss it.  Perhaps hurricanes, by catching us out, can help us face our own chauvinism.

Recall, Retrieve, Recite, Ruminate, Reflect, Reason:  How do the names of hurricanes relate to unconscious bias?

Challenge:   Similar by Not Synonymous

“Bias” and “prejudice” are two words that are frequently used interchangeably; however, they are different.  Do some research on the definitions of these two words and write a paragraph where you compare their meanings, making a distinction between how the words are different.

Sources:

1-Kristof, Nicholas.  “She Gets No Respect.”  The New York Times 11 June 2014.

2-Weisberg, Jessica. “Remembering Ruth Bader Ginsburg In Her Own Words.”  Elle magazine September 2020.

THINKER'S ALMANAC - June 10

When Alexander the Great visited the cynic philosopher Diogenes and asked if there was anything that he wanted, what did Diogenes request?

Subject:  Cynicism - The Meeting of Diogenes and Alexander

Event:  Both Alexander and Diogenes die, 323 B.C.

Alexander died, Alexander was buried, Alexander returneth to dust, the dust is earth, of earth we make loam—and why of that loam, whereto he was converted, might they not stop a beer barrel?  -Hamlet in William Shakespeare’s Hamlet, the Tragedy of the Prince of Denmark

On this day in 323 BC, according to legend, an ancient king and an ancient philosopher died.

The king was Alexander the Great, the Macedonian general who conquered most of the ancient world.  As a youth, Alexander was tutored by the philosopher Aristotle, and his favorite author was Homer. Legend says that he slept with a copy of the Iliad and a dagger under his pillow.  After earning his first military victory at the age of 18, Alexander fought for the next 15 years with an undefeated record in battle.  When Alexander realized there were no more worlds to conquer, he wept.

                                                    Image by Alexander from Pixabay

The ancient philosopher was Diogenes the Cynic.  Diogenes believed in living a life free of conventions and constraints.  He eschewed possessions and famously made his home in a large discarded clay jar.  He once owned a wooden cup, but discarded it one day when he witnessed a young boy using his cupped bare hands to drink water.  Diogenes was known to walk through the marketplace in the middle of the day carrying a lighted lamp. When asked why he carried the lamp and inspected the faces of those he met, Diogenes answered, “I am trying to find a man.”

Although these two men died in separate parts of the world — Alexander in Babylon and Diogenes in Corinth — the two men are connected in cultural memory through one of history’s best-known anecdotes.

The story goes that the young Alexander once made a visit to Diogenes’ hometown of Corinth.  Everyone flocked to catch a glimpse of the great leader, to hear him speak, and to gain his favor — everyone that is but Diogenes.  Since Diogenes did not come to see him, Alexander was determined to make a personal visit to see the philosopher. Accompanied by a throng of admirers, Alexander approached Diogenes’ home, the large barrel-shaped jar.  Diogenes did not greet the young conqueror; in fact, he didn’t even stand. Instead, he simply sat up on one elbow. After a short period of awkward silence, Alexander asked: “Diogenes, is there anything I can do for you?”

“Yes,” Diogenes replied, “Stand to one side.  You’re blocking the sunlight.”

The crowd was hushed and amazed at Diogenes’ insolence, but Alexander was unphased.  He simply turned away and said quietly, “If I were not Alexander, I should be Diogenes.”

More than one ancient biographer wrote that Alexander and Diogenes died on the same day, June 10, 323 BC.  The exact cause of the two men’s deaths is not exactly clear. Although it might be expected that the warrior Alexander died in battle, no such report exists.  Instead accounts of his death conflict. Some say he died of poisoning, others of malaria or typhoid fever. Only 32 years of age at his death, Alexander’s body was submerged in a vat of honey to stave off decay.

As for the death of Diogenes, there are also conflicting accounts.  One account claims he simply held his breath, another claims he became ill after eating raw octopus, and still another claims he died of infection from a dog bite.

This last possibility is especially ironic, considering that Diogenes’ creed of Cynicism means “doggishness.”  In his History of Cynicism, the scholar R. Dudley explains why the Cynics embraced a dog’s life:

There are four reasons why the Cynics are so named. First because of the indifference of their way of life, for they make a cult of indifference and, like dogs, eat and make love in public, go barefoot, and sleep in tubs and at crossroads. The second reason is that the dog is a shameless animal, and they make a cult of shamelessness, not as being beneath modesty, but as superior to it. The third reason is that the dog is a good guard, and they guard the tenets of their philosophy. The fourth reason is that the dog is a discriminating animal which can distinguish between its friends and enemies. So do they recognize as friends those who are suited to philosophy, and receive them kindly, while those unfitted they drive away, like dogs, by barking at them. (2)

Recall, Retrieve, Recite, Ruminate, Reflect, Reason:  From what animal does the school of philosophers called the Cynics take its name, and why is this appropriate?

Challenge - From History to Story:  Who are some great people from the past who you would like to know more about?  What are some specific stories that include one or more of these individuals?  Brainstorm a list of people who are of interest to you.  Do a bit of research to discover an anecdote about one of them. Before you begin writing, however, note the difference between the words “historical” and “historic.”  “Historical” refers to anything or anyone from the past; “historic,” in contrast, refers to something or someone important from the past. Therefore, when you do your research on a “historic anecdote” focus on important or famous people from the past.  Tell the story of a single specific incident using your own words. 

Sources:

 1-Highet, Gilbert.  “Diogenes And Alexander."

2-Dudley, R. A History of Cynicism.  Cambridge University Press, 1937.