Thought of the day: Taking a break from yourself

I was thinking that too much of our anxiety comes from living with ourselves 24/7 -- constantly being connected to our worries and feelings.  Maybe what we need is to take a break from ourselves.  Is that why people meditate?

Claire Danes the intelligent and self-aware actress

I find this happens to me over and over again. I crush on some Hollywood star and rush around the web reading all about them. Tina Fey [1], Jennifer Garner [2], and now Claire Danes [3]. All incredibly poised, thoughtful, intelligent actresses. In any industry, there are some exceptional people. Part of me is the ridiculous fan who wants to know the gossip about their lives, but the other part is the person who wants to know what they've learned about life and what they think of their art.

How many actresses use words like "avuncular" and "apoplectic"? Claire Danes! Okay, maybe the intellectual elitist in me is overly excited but that is pretty unique. It's not just the big words; her overall intelligence is striking in interviews. Critics, interviewers, and film industry colleagues have frequently marveled at her "maturity." I'm not sure that's the best word for it. She seems to be deep, thoughtful, intense, serious, and intellectual ("I want to read the great books and talk about ideas"). This kind of personality is uncommon among adults; Danes was already like this as a child. When she was nine, she thought about becoming a psychologist or therapist (in case she didn't make it as an actor). I think she's one of those rare people with a very high emotional IQ, sensitive and empathetic yet grounded by her intellect. She picks things up way faster than the average person. Check out this interview at the age of 18. She herself remarks that she's "always felt ancient."

Claire Danes seems pretty damn cool. And now I need to go out and find some friends who are just as awesome -- real people I can hang out with.

[1] Tina Fey is a media darling and willing to be brutally honest and insightful in interviews, so there is lots of good material. I like the part about having "a great house."

[2] I always thought it was amazing how Jennifer Garner would ask J.J. Abrams about his directing choices in the DVD commentary. A real student of the theater. I wrote a gushing review of her work on Alias.
[3] I didn't really know much about Claire Danes. My only exposure to her was when my high school English teacher showed Romeo and Juliet in class. Only recently did I take notice of her, in the Showtime cable TV series Homeland (which rocks).

Favorite TV shows as of 2011

I thought I'd quickly jot down my favorite TV shows by genre.

Drama
Battlestar Galactica, Homeland, Buffy the Vampire Slayer

Comedy
30 Rock (seasons 1-2), Scrubs (seasons 1-4)

Genre
Alias (action/espionage/drama, season 1), Chuck (action/espionage/comedy, seasons 1-2), Firefly (western/comedy/drama)

Procedural 
Bones (seasons 1-2)

Note: I realize my categories are a little subjective.  You could call Battlestar Galactica a military science fiction show, Homeland a spy show, and Buffy the Vampire Slayer a fantasy vampire show.  So they could also be called genre shows.  But these three shows use the genre merely as a context to drive intelligent storytelling and provoke strong emotions in the characters.  So I still call them dramas.

Quote of the day: Arnold Schwarzenegger on achieving goals unapologetically

During the last week, I got hooked on the TV show Homeland, a psychological thriller starring Claire Danes, Damian Lewis, and Mandy Patinkin. The acting on the show is outstanding and in particular, I feel a strong personal reaction to Danes's work. Poking around on the New York Times website [1], I found a profile on Ms. Danes and I liked the following quote:

My line about Arnold is that he doesn't get in his own way. He is not apologetic about achieving his goals. And when you have that attitude, it's amazing what one can accomplish. He wanted to give me relationship advice. I was having trouble with a female friend, and he said, be really forthright and do not accommodate her needs excessively. I took his advice [pause] and we're not friends anymore. So there you go.

[1] I've learned that you can only find interesting material on celebrities if you go to serious journalistic websites like the New York Times. Talk show appearances by celebrities are the worst. It's a bunch of air-headed, flirtatious talk.

Unexpected conversations in the medical library

I had heard about a new exhibit in the medical library. It's based upon the collection of a famous American neurosurgeon who lived around the turn of the 20th century. I visited at the spur of the moment, since I had just finished a workshop in the same building. There were hundreds of jars containing brains and brain tumors, even a technical document by the architectural firm that designed the exhibit. When I was about to leave the exhibit, a woman approached me and asked me if she could answer questions about the exhibit. She had been giving a tour while I was looking around.

Looking back, it was a serendipitous conversation. I didn't expect to run into an artist who was working on the exhibit and who taught photography at the art school I had attended (she doesn't teach there anymore). She was an exceptional conversationalist. She was receptive, open-minded, and kept the focus of the conversation on me for the first ten minutes. Can you think of anyone who does that? I can't.

I asked her why put so much effort into this exhibit. She said that a lot of medical collections like this have been thrown away. So it's important to preserve this particular collection.

I also asked her a lot of questions about photography. She told me that if you are a good wet lab printer, you'll be a good digital printer. The terminology is the same. She showed me some prints she made for the exhibit and I couldn't tell the difference from the silver nitrate prints (the gold standard for film). The quality is that good.

She made some interesting remarks about art education. I told her about how frustrated I felt when learning how to draw. I always felt like my work wasn't very good. She said that her friends in art education find that even children are expressing the same "I'm-not-good-enough" attitude by fifth grade. She also mentioned that today's children are constantly presented with processed 2D images on a screen, to the point that they don't know how to think spatially before. Drawing is the process of observing a 3D scene, interpreting it, and rendering it on a 2D surface. This makes me think that more kids should learn drawing.

We spent a long time talking and I'm grateful that she took the time to enlighten me.

Ramit Sethi, empathy, the value of mistakes, and the perfect mentor

In the last five years, I've noticed the rise of what I call "internet personalities." Just like Oprah on TV, there are people who give advice on the best ways to manage your life. Their advice is aimed at the highly educated, tech savvy audience. A few examples of internet personalities: Tim Ferriss of the Four Hour Work Week, Leo Babauta of Zen Habits, etc. They build up a big audience on the internet, write a book and market the hell out of it to get it on the New York Times Bestseller list, and then repeat.

Recently, I've been reading Ramit Sethi's blog, which has the outrageous title, "I Will Teach You To Be Rich." Ramit's goal is to teach young (relatively well-educated) people how to manage their lives. The world is changing so fast, we are bombarded with information, and we are overwhelmed by choices. Our parents can't help us because frankly, they don't know anything. Ramit's particular angle is to use his educational background in behavioral psychology to reach young people.

You can find lots of life management advice scattered across the internet, but that is a time-consuming way to learn. Ramit packages his advice in a way that is accessible and shows empathy for young people. I find that our so-called elders can be pretty arrogant and dismissive of young people's concerns. They don't understand what we go through. Ramit does. He expresses sympathyand then yells at his audience (something along the lines of "wake up, what you're doing is stupid, stop doing that and do this.") This strange combination of empathy, admonishment, and enthusiasm is somehow endearing and persuasive.

Ramit started his blog in personal finance, but now he has turned to the greater challenge of leading people to their "dream job." I've talked to various middle-aged people about the career search and they are uniformly dismissive of the anxiety us young people have about the job search. Some of these people are really nice but it's clear that in the back of their minds, they think that the anxiety is really cowardice. I suppose that's easy to think when they were able to get their first couple jobs without any significant roadbumps. Ramit actually takes the time to talk about the psychological barriers we face when embarking on a job search: "I'm not qualified", "I don't like networking", "I don't want to rule out jobs because I'm closing doors," etc. Our "old-fogey" elders would find this kind of stuff is stupid, but Ramit takes the time to explain why these barriers don't make sense.

For example, one thing I always wondered about is why do people (even students from Ivy League schools) have so much trouble finding jobs. Ramit explains that they are wasting time on ineffective techniques like polishing their resume or shotgunning their resume on monster.com. They should really be networking to find jobs they are excited about. It seems paradoxical that eliminating choiceis the right way, but it works because when you focus on just a few jobs and companies, you can research the hell out of these places and tailor your approach to the specific job title/company, rather than submitting a generic resume that is sure to be rejected.

Ramit recently talked about "the top seven mistakes for finding a dream job." I like how he focused on mistakes as opposed to telling you what to do. I frequently find that it's more valuable to find out what not to do rather than what to do. It's much easier for me to remember people's mistakes and avoid them (my mind is screaming "no, no, no"). If someone tells me to do something that I don't want to do, I just feel annoyed (my mind is going "nag, nag, nag").

Ramit is a guy who is really putting his psychology skills to work and I admire him for that. Personally, I think mentoring and giving advice is very hard [1]. The perfect, ideal mentor would give you the exact advice you needed at exactly the right time and avoid burdening you with irrelevant or anxiety-provoking thoughts. That is hard. An example of what is not good mentoring: your mother shrieking in your ear about how you'll be robbed by gypsies if you travel to Europe. Maybe those guys and gals in artificial intelligence should program the perfect mentor.

[1] This reminds me of a post I wrote about the book A River Runs Through It.

Link of the day: Khan's Academy

Lately, I've tired of TED talks. They were bold and exciting when they first appeared online (3-5 years ago?), but now people just seem to be selling their ideas whether they are merely good or truly brilliant. It's important to have inspirational meetings, but I think they should also be authentic and realistic.

There is one recent TED talk that I do like very much. Salman Khan, a former hedge fund analyst, spoke about how video can re-invent education. Originally, Khan recorded videos to help tutor his cousins in math. He posted the videos on YouTube and left them publicly available, in case someone else might find them useful. His cousins told him that they preferred their "virtual" cousin on video than the real thing! They found the video less intimidating because they could stop and repeat it without appearing stupid; they could learn at their own pace.  Other people discovered Khan's videos and gave him so much positive feedback that he quit his finance job and started producing videos all the time. (Khan does all the math and science videos, and he hired experts to do the videos on humanities subjects.  The scope of this project is astounding: 2000+ videos.)

That alone would have been an outstanding accomplishment, but Khan didn't stop there.  He tried to track learning outcomes.  He associated each video with a particular concept and made tree diagrams showing which concepts were prerequisites for other concepts.  Khan calls this a "knowledge map."  Students can work on modules.  When they get enough problems from the module correct, they can move onto another module.  When they master the prequisite modules, they can move on to a more advanced module, and so on.

This systematic tracking of the student's progress is invaluable to a teacher in charge of 30 students.  The teacher can see how the class is doing.  Moreover, if a student is struggling with a particular module, the teacher can find another student who mastered it and have that student teach the other one.  Peer learning!  (I discussed this topic in an earlier post about a Harvard professor struggling to teach first-year physics.)  Now, at least one school district (in Los Altos, California) is trying out Khan's system in the classroom.

When the system was used in the classroom, it showed that different people find different concepts easy and different concepts hard.  In Khan's words:

Because every time we've done this, in every classroom we've done, over and over again, if you go five days into it, there's a group of kids who've raced ahead and there's a group of kids who are a little bit slower. And in a traditional model, if you did a snapshot assessment, you say, "These are the gifted kids, these are the slow kids. Maybe they should be tracked differently. Maybe we should put them in different classes." But when you let every student work at their own pace -- and we see it over and over and over again -- you see students who took a little bit extra time on one concept or the other, but once they get through that concept, they just race ahead. And so the same kids that you thought were slow six weeks ago, you now would think are gifted. And we're seeing it over and over and over again. And it makes you really wonder how much all of the labels maybe a lot of us have benefitted from were really just due to a coincidence of time.

I found this very interesting.  I'm guessing that a lot of teachers and coaches know that student learning is much more complicated than "gifted" and not gifted.  It's nice that Khan can actually provide hard evidence establishing this fact.

Khan's work is amazing and inspiring. I do have a few questions. Using technology to tailor education is not a new idea. Why did Khan succeed? Is it because students are more comfortable with technology compared to students of the past? Why is video better than a textbook? A textbook is also non-intimidating and self-paced.  Maybe it's because Khan is a great tutor who is both a talented teacher and entertainer?  (I briefly viewed one of his videos and he seemed funny and charismatic.)  In an ideal world, each student would have a one-on-one tutor.  This isn't realistic.  However, if we have a great tutor like Khan and he makes free videos available to anyone on almost every possible math and science topic from kindergarten to high school, this tutoring database is a pretty good, though imperfect solution.  It's reminiscent of an idea in artificial intelligence.  You can have a computer that isn't smart in the human sense, but if you program it with an astronomical amount of information, it can be very useful.

I think that doing online homework is becoming more popular as teachers realize that there is simply not enough time in the classroom to do everything.  There are a lot of things students can do on their own with a "computerized" tutor.  By "outsourcing" this teaching and doing it outside the classroom, the human teacher has more time to teach things that are hard for computers.  Like having students discuss problems together.  Or showing how many seemingly disparate concepts unify into a larger concept.  Or doing hands-on science experiments.  I know that for first-year physics courses, some universities assign online homework several times a week.  This forces students to read the book and work on problems at home so that the lecturer can spend time explaining concepts rather than writing 20 equations on the blackboard.

What Salman Khan is doing is incredible work and I wish him the very best.

Link of the day: How to be a good conversationalist

I recently read an outstanding post about "The Art of Conversation: How to Avoid Conversational Narcissism. The authors deconstruct how conversations work. A good conversation has give and take. You try to grab the other person's attention sometimes and other times you support that person. I found this post really useful because my social skills aren't the best. Between being glued to the computer and writing electronic messages, I don't have enough social contact to practice. It's good to be reminded of what we should and shouldn't do in conversations.

According to researcher Charles Derber, one can answer a statement with either a shift-response or a support-response. An example of a shift-response would be changing topics to put the focus on yourself. An example of a support-response is to ask a followup question related to what the person said. A good conversationalist will answer with more support-responses whereas a conversational narcissist will keep throwing out shift-responses until the other person gives in. Conversational narcissism can be even more subtle. The narcissist can withhold support-responses or providing minimal acknowledgement ("uh huh") until the other person feels like they are being boring and allows the narcissist to take the floor.  My discussion is abstract, so read the post to see some good examples.

The point is not to rail about the conversational narcissists you've wasted your time on, but to recognize how easy it is to be a narcissist yourself. We should be careful about our speech and strive towards sharing a good conversation.

Link of the day: Steve Jobs the tweaker

Steve Jobs's passing prompted a deluge of news articles from all corners of the world, it seemed. I was never happy about the cult of Apple. The company makes good products but there is far too much hype. Why do people pay so much attention to computing products when the world is dealing with economic crises and environmental destruction? Computing technology make some things more efficient, but also saddle us with information overload, invasion of privacy, security problems, and too much email. The world is definitely changing, but is it becoming better? I don't know the answer to that question, but I also don't blindly believe that more technology is always good.

One of my favorite writers, Malcolm Gladwell, argued in, The New Yorker, that Steve Jobs wasn't an innovator, he was a tweaker. He had really good taste in ideas and had an incredible talent for transforming good technology into a beautifully designed status symbol. But he was not some kind of Einstein who came up with ideas that no one had even remotely thought about. I don't denigrate Jobs's accomplishments, but I don't think they should be the object of worship either.

Link of the day: Bill Gates tries to save the world through vaccines

I find it demoralizing to read about the plight of the world economy, skyrocketing health care costs, and disregard for environmental and climate issues.  It makes me think that the only solution is to reduce the world's population.  Suddenly, those evil antagonists in movies who want to destroy everything don't seem so bad. Fortunately, I read this Forbes article about how Bill Gates is trying to reduce the world's population by distributing vaccines to Africa. If that didn't make sense to you, Gates felt the same way at first:

So in 1997, when he and Melinda first ventured into public health... they focused on birth control... The logic was crisp and Bill Gates-friendly. Health = resources ÷ people. And since resources, as Gates noted, are relatively fixed, the answer lay in population control. Thus, vaccines made no sense to him: Why save kids only to consign them to life in overcrowded countries where they risked starving to death or being killed in civil war?

The problem was that people were having huge families because so many children died in infancy. Vaccines drastically reduce the child mortality rate so that families can plan. The end result is a suppression of population growth. It's not obvious to me that this is true, but if Bill Gates did his homework and is spending millions of dollars to distribute vaccine, I'm inclined to believe in it. The cool thing is that Gates is putting his business skills to use. By guaranteeing a market for vaccines in developing countries, drug companies are competing to supply the product and this is driving the cost of vaccines down. Clever man!