Your Daily Tao

Participants were privately asked their views on three politically heated topics: climate change, affirmative action, and same-sex partnerships. Then they were put into groups with others from their town, and asked to discuss the issues as a group. 14 Before these discussions, as one might expect, the people from Boulder tended to espouse left-wing views while the citizens of Colorado Springs tended to favor the views of the right. But there was a broad spread of views among each town’s citizens, and a substantial overlap between the groups: some people from liberal Boulder were to the right of some people from conservative Colorado Springs. After the discussions, the range of political views sharply changed. First, people were emboldened after discussing controversial issues with people who tended to hold similar views, and their views became more extreme. The Boulder groups moved a long way further to the left, and the Colorado Springs groups moved a long way further to the right. This was true not only of what people said in public, but also of what they told the researchers in private. Second, the diversity within each group was suppressed, so the spectrum of opinion was much narrower. The Boulder groups converged on left-wing views, of course, and the Colorado Springs groups converged on right-wing views. Given these two shifts in the groups’ views—more extreme, with less internal variety—the inevitable result was that the groups became sharply divided from each other.

It always feels more comforting to surround ourselves with those whom views are similar to ours. However, whenever we choose to do so, we end up reinforcing each other and end up with more extreme views. It is painful to do so, but the best way to ensure that one does not end up having radical views is to seek those whose opinions you disagree with and listen with an open mind.

In the past, I found myself thinking I had the answers to everything. Youthful exuberance tends to exaggerate one’s sense of righteousness and confidence. Forcing yourself to be your own devil’s advocate helps you see the nuances in issues, and you’ll find that maybe those who hold opposing views aren’t so different after all.

On a whole, this book speaks a lot about mindfully inserting a little chaos and disorder into your own life. When done so, it might compel you to take new perspectives, learn more about yourself and find new and better things. I’ll be featuring a few more passages from Messy in the upcoming days.

Analytic thought, which dissects the world into a limited number of discrete objects having particular attributes that can be categorized in clear ways, lends itself to being captured in language. Holistic thought, which responds to a much wider array of objects and their relations, and which makes fewer sharp distinctions among attributes or categories, is less well suited to linguistic representation. To test the possibility that Asians and Asian Americans in fact find it relatively difficult to use language to represent thought, Kim had people speak out loud as they solved various kinds of problems. This had no effect on the performance of European Americans. But the requirement to speak out loud had very deleterious effects on the performance of Asians and Asian Americans. This work is as convincing as any in this book about the different nature of thought for Asians and Westerners and its practical implications are extremely important. How should one educate Asians and Asian Americans in American classrooms? Is it a form of “colonialism” to demand that they perform verbally and share their thoughts with their classmates? Would it have the effect of undermining the skills that go with a holistic approach to the world? Or is it merely common sense to prepare them for a world in which verbal presentation skills, even if it might be difficult to achieve them, will come in handy?

I’ve always found it difficult to express my train of thought whenever I am thinking of a solution to a problem. It can be extremely difficult to put things into words, especially when one is considering many factors and 2nd order effects.

The tendency to focus on the holistic approach and think about the further impacts and relationships between the factors might possibly lead to more thoughtful outcomes, but it generally dosen’t lead to a good impression for your client in a meeting setting or your interviewer in a job interview setting.

While it is important that we all learn to constantly improve and communicate our thoughts better, I think it is good sometimes to give the benefit of doubt to someone whom might take their time and are unable to express their views on a subject clearly. While our tendency is to poorly judge on someone with unconfident speech and garbled thoughts, it could also be that their thought process does not lend itself for linguistic expression. Patience would really be of virtue in such cases.

Westerners seem inclined to believe there is only one kind of relation between the individual and the state that is appropriate. Individuals are separate units and they enter into a social contract with one another and with the state that entails certain rights, freedoms, and obligations. But most peoples, including East Asians, view societies not as aggregates of individuals but as molecules, or organisms. As a consequence, there is little or no conception of rights that inhere in the individual. For the Chinese, any conception of rights is based on a part-whole as opposed to a one-many conception of society. To the extent that the individual has rights, they constitute the individual’s “share” of the total rights. When Westerners see East Asians treating people as if they had no rights as individuals, they tend to be able to view this only in moral terms. Whatever the moral appropriateness of the behavior of East Asian officials—and I share with most Westerners the view that there is such a thing as individual human rights and that they sometimes are violated in East Asia—it is important to understand that to behave differently would require not just a different moral code, but a different conception of the nature of the individual. A different conception of the individual would in turn rest on an inclination to think about the world in terms of individual units rather than continuous substances at the most basic metaphysical level. It is also important to recognize that East Asians and other interdependent peoples have their own moral objections to Western behavior. When East Asian students become comfortable enough to speak out in Western classrooms, they will often express bewilderment at how much disorder, crime, and exposure to violent and sexually explicit images in the media Westerners are willing to tolerate in the name of freedom. They perceive these issues as entailing human rights because rights are perceived as inhering in the collectivity rather than the individual.

Different cultures can ultimately lead to different moral values. The traditional concept of “for the good of family/society” lends to be a more of a utilitarian approach. Whereas western values sees individual liberties as a universal right that should not be compromised even for the common good.

That might explain the disconnect and the outrage that people from each culture might have when experiencing the other. It also reflects itself by generations. Millennials and young generations in Singapore might have grown up with greater exposure to western values, which might contrast strongly with that of their parent’s generation.

If your Asian and you ever feel you have a hard time explaining to your Asian parents your personal values and decisions, that’s just the way it is. There is just a huge disconnect born from centuries of culture and history. One that requires a really long bridge of effort and empathy for us to connect.

In this chapter we’ve seen that modern Asians, like the ancient Chinese, view the world in holistic terms: They see a great deal of the field, especially background events; they are skilled in observing relationships between events; they regard the world as complex and highly changeable and its components as interrelated; they see events as moving in cycles between extremes; and they feel that control over events requires coordination with others. Modern Westerners, like the ancient Greeks, see the world in analytic, atomistic terms; they see objects as discrete and separate from their environments; they see events as moving in linear fashion when they move at all; and they feel themselves to be personally in control of events even when they are not.

I remember reading about how different languages can affect the way you think. In this book, the author expands it towards different cultures, especially between the Western and the Asian world.

The differences in how both east and west sees the world also affects marketing decisions from corporations. In the book, Niabett talks about how advertisements that focuses on collective aspects (bringing people together) worked better in Korea while advertisements that focused on individual benefits yielded better results in the United States.

The different ways we behave, does extend further questions into the fields of education and business. How do we educate the various cultures in the same classroom (if we had to)? For workplace environments, how can we adjust and fit people from various cultures to have more diversity?

There are many more nuances into how we are different and I’ll be sharing more passages from this book for the next few days.

When the scandal over the large-scale theft of Bitcoins erupted, many saw in it proof that the currency was flawed because no one protects people using it from fraud and theft. If robbers break into a normal bank and leave with millions, the law ensures that your deposits are safe, but with Bitcoin being outside the jurisdiction of any state, no one will come to your rescue. This lack of a state-backed insurance scheme for users is a serious fault, no doubt. We might dislike it, but the state is ultimately our only insurance policy against organized crime. However, this is not the most serious weakness of stateless currencies such as Bitcoin. Their greatest and most dangerous weakness is that, because they are founded on the notion that no intervention in the money supply should be possible lest this intervention be manipulated by governments or bankers, it is impossible to adjust the total quantity of money in the system in response to a crisis—and this makes a crisis worse, as we have seen.

Cryptocurrency has been trending in crazy up and down movements in terms of value over the past few years. It is not hard to understand why. Amidst all the worries over privacy, especially as we are moving more and more into the world where digital transactions are the norm. There are also those who worry about the value of currency, especially when the United States will be taking on larger deficits and increasing money supply for stimulus in the pandemic.

However, as Varoufakis mentions, one key thing is that it is impossible to have central intervention if we were to rely on cryptocurrency as a source of transfer. When the “madness of crowds” happen during an economic downturn, and people no longer choose to spend, it will not be possible to stimulate the economy by increasing the money supply. It is probably unlikely that any form of cryptocurrency, in their current form, will be able to sufficiently perform the role of an actual currency in the future.

Greg had been aware of Elizabeth’s fascination with Jobs. She referred to him as “Steve” as if they were close friends. At one point, she’d told him that a documentary espousing a 9/11 conspiracy theory wouldn’t have been available on iTunes if “Steve” hadn’t believed there was something to it. Greg thought that was silly. He was pretty sure Jobs hadn’t personally screened all the movies for rent or sale on iTunes. Elizabeth seemed to have this exaggerated image of him as an all-seeing and all-knowing being. A month or two after Jobs’s death, some of Greg’s colleagues in the engineering department began to notice that Elizabeth was borrowing behaviors and management techniques described in Walter Isaacson’s biography of the late Apple founder. They were all reading the book too and could pinpoint which chapter she was on based on which period of Jobs’s career she was impersonating. Elizabeth even gave the miniLab a Jobs-inspired code name: the 4S. It was a reference to the iPhone 4S, which Apple had coincidentally unveiled the day before Jobs passed away

An interesting anecdote from Bad Blood, the book covering the story of Theranos. With the recent wave of high profile startups that have gone bust such as WeWork, reading this book really gives an interesting insight into the perspective and mentality of working with/under such founders.

I’ve always felt that most startup “founders” always had to be mini egomaniacs. After all, how big is someone’s ego that they felt that that could possibly deliver a better/new product or company and go against decades of experiences and billions of resources in big multinational companies. When channeled right, such a person can be inspiring and really attract talent and drive the team to the next level.

Bad Blood was a story of a founder who believed too much in their own “bullshit” and channeled that immense self-confidence in the wrong way. In many ways, I’ve also felt that overt projection of authority and confidence from such personalities could also be an over-correction to their own insecurities.

Scarcity has a profound impact on one’s worldview. Eldar Shafir, a Princeton psychologist, and Sendhil Mullainathan, a Harvard economist, conducted a series of studies on the effects of various forms of scarcity on the poor. They found that poor people and well-off people perform very similarly on tests of fluid intelligence, a generalized measurement that corresponds to IQ. But if each group was forced to consider how to pay an unexpected car repair bill of $3,000 just before taking the test, the poor group would underperform by the equivalent of 13 IQ points, almost one full standard deviation. Just having to think about how to pay a hypothetical expense was enough to derail their performance on a general IQ test and send them from “superior” to “average” or from “average” to “borderline deficient.” Activating scarcity through a hypothetical expense was also found to reduce correct responses on a self-control test from 83 to 63 percent among the less well-off participants, with no effect on the well-off.

I’m no follower of politics, especially in America and I try not to be a fan of any politician as I think we should judge people by their actions and policies rather than fall for a cult of personality.

Nevertheless, Andrew Yang was one of my favorite candidates simply for speaking about automation and how it could impact the future of our economy. In this, one particular point I thought was interesting was how people in financial stress could get stuck in kind of like a “poverty trap”.

If being under financial stress causes someone to make poor decisions with less discipline, then this certainly cascades further into them making poorer choices in other aspects of life. This could have major impacts on things such as physical or mental health, financial stability and could send someone on a downward spiral.

This naturally calls for solutions to break this negative feedback loop such as welfare payments, unemployment benefits and others. Yang proposes a universal basic income, which I feel is going to be inevitable at some point in our future.

Show two groups of people a blurry image of a fire hydrant, blurry enough for them not to recognize what it is. For one group, increase the resolution slowly, in ten steps. For the second, do it faster, in five steps. Stop at a point where both groups have been presented an identical image and ask each of them to identify what they see. The members of the group that saw fewer intermediate steps are likely to recognize the hydrant much faster. Moral? The more information you give someone, the more hypotheses they will formulate along the way, and the worse off they will be. They see more random noise and mistake it for information. The problem is that our ideas are sticky: once we produce a theory, we are not likely to change our minds—so those who delay developing their theories are better off. When you develop your opinions on the basis of weak evidence, you will have difficulty interpreting subsequent information that contradicts these opinions, even if this new information is obviously more accurate.

The perils of making judgements. Decide on something too quickly, and you run the risk of being wrong. Absorb new evidence like a sponge, and you might seem indecisive and tentative.

I still find myself floating from ideas to ideas. There is also a very thin line separating someone from being principled or just plain obstinate. And I also wonder whether I should stick to my opinion when contrasting viewpoints arise, as I tend to accept whatever the other person is saying too often.

As we grow, these are the quandaries that we find ourselves in. As a general rule, more often than not, I found that accepting new viewpoints and evidence tend to be for the better, not least because the other party will also like you more.

Ultimately, I believe that it is key to understand what are your motivations, rational or irrational, behind your original view point. Understand that, and I think we’ll learn a lot more about ourselves and can make better, more informed judgements from there.

Yet our entire past, which we feel (in many ways correctly) is responsible for how we behave today, is itself just a story we are telling ourselves in the here and now. We join the dots to tell one tale when we consider how, for example, we came to this point in our career, another when we consider how we developed our psychological foibles or strengths. It is hard to think about your past without tidying it up into a kind of story: one in which you are cast as the hero or victim. Invariably we ignore the regular dice-rolls of chance or random luck; successful high-flyers are typically prone to ignoring the interplay of blind fortune when they credit their career trajectories to their canny business sense or brute self-belief.

The power of narratives. We tell the story we want to tell, and we live out these stories everyday. We can’t live without narratives to explains and simplify the vast amount of events we have in our lives. Yet, it is precisely because of this that we sometimes reinforce our own narratives.

A businessman might have succeeded due to his perseverance and hard work ; A politician believes he/she was elected due to charisma and genuine story; An innovator believes she creates amazing things due to her innate creativity. These are stories of how we developed ourselves, and how we tell them. But they usually only reflect a modicum of truth. Too many factors, right from when and where we were born, are out of our control.

Nevertheless, we are what we tell ourselves. When in success, take note of all the other factors that have to fall into place for you to succeed, and learn humility. When you feel like you’re at the bottom, keep in mind about “learned helplessness” and know that you are what your narrative sets you to be. Darren Brown believes that we can learn to control ourselves, make plans without “undue emotion in their outcomes” and live in the present while planning for the future.

To give you just one sense of the mastery of Mullainathan’s machine, it flagged 1 percent of all the defendants as “high risk.” These are the people the computer thought should never be released prior to trial. According to the machine’s calculations, well over half of the people in that high-risk group would commit another crime if let out on bail. When the human judges looked at that same group of bad apples, though, they didn’t identify them as dangerous at all. They released 48.5 percent of them! “Many of the defendants flagged by the algorithm as high risk are treated by the judge as if they were low risk,” Team Mullainathan concluded in a particularly devastating passage. “Performing this exercise suggests that judges are not simply setting a high threshold for detention but are mis-ranking defendants.…The marginal defendants they select to detain are drawn from throughout the entire predicted risk distribution.”

Yet another statistic that shows how leaving things to the machines can lead to generally better outcomes as it is difficult for us to overcome our human biases when making decisions.

I’m not advocating for AI to replace judges though, I just simply think that this is a good illustration of how even the most experienced of us can be prone to making bad decisions. This is especially so when we make decisions where feedback is not immediate or obvious, such as in the case of a judge choosing release someone on bail. I don’t think there are data analysts waiting to give each judge statistics of their own performance detailing what factors they have missed. But maybe we should.

The bigger lesson is how we should learn to be more open to judging others. Just like how we can be complex creatures, and both good and bad, others can too. Demonizing the other side like what we see in our political sphere today is extremely unhealthy in a democracy.