What does procrastination tell us about ourselves? by James Surowiecki

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Published on: November 5, 2010

An interesting article by J. Surowieki (the author of Wisdom of Crowds) in the newyorker about procrastination – what does it tell us about ourselves. Few snippets here:

  • procrastination is the quintessential modern problem.
  • Philosophers are interested in procrastination for another reason. It’s a powerful example of what the Greeks called akrasia—doing something against one’s own better judgment.
  • this peculiar irrationality (procrastination) stems from our relationship to time—in particular, from a tendency that economists call “hyperbolic discounting.”
    • The lesson of these experiments is not that people are shortsighted or shallow but that their preferences aren’t consistent over time. We want to watch the Bergman masterpiece, to give ourselves enough time to write the report properly, to set aside money for retirement. But our desires shift as the long run becomes the short run.
  • One common answer is ignorance.
    • procrastinator as led astray by the “visceral” rewards of the present. As the nineteenth-century Scottish economist John Rae put it, “The prospects of future good, which future years may hold on us, seem at such a moment dull and dubious, and are apt to be slighted, for objects on which the daylight is falling strongly, and showing us in all their freshness just within our grasp.”
    • Ignorance might also affect procrastination through “the planning fallacy.” People underestimate the time “it will take them to complete a given task, partly because they fail to take account of how long it has taken them to complete similar projects in the past and partly because they rely on smooth scenarios in which accidents or unforeseen problems never occur.”
  • People do learn from experience: procrastinators know all too well the allures of the salient present, and they want to resist them. They just don’t.
    • “There is an immobility here that exceeds all that any man can conceive of. It requires the lever of Archimedes to move this inert mass.”
    • Lack of confidence, sometimes alternating with unrealistic dreams of heroic success, often leads to procrastination, and many studies suggest that procrastinators are self-handicappers: rather than risk failure, they prefer to create conditions that make success impossible, a reflex that of course creates a vicious cycle. McClellan was also given to excessive planning, as if only the ideal battle plan were worth acting on. Procrastinators often succumb to this sort of perfectionism.
  • Some of the philosophers in “The Thief of Time” have a more radical explanation for the gap between what we want to do and what we end up doing: the person who makes plans and the person who fails to carry them out are not really the same person: they’re different parts of what the game theorist Thomas Schelling called “the divided self.”

“Procrastination most often arises from a sense that there is too much to do, and hence no single aspect of the to-do worth doing. . . . Underneath this rather antic form of action-as-inaction is the much more unsettling question whether anything is worth doing at all.” In that sense, it might be useful to think about two kinds of procrastination: the kind that is genuinely akratic and the kind that’s telling you that what you’re supposed to be doing has, deep down, no real point. The procrastinator’s challenge, and perhaps the philosopher’s, too, is to figure out which is which.

More about this here: [The Link]

Small Change, why the revolution will not be retweeted, by M. Gladwell

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Published on: October 25, 2010

Continuing the story on social networks, recently came across a thought provoking article from M. Gladwell in the newyorker. The central thesis is that social networks alone will not be able to bring about real (social) changes [e.g. to the scale of civil rights movement].

  • High-risk activism is a “strong-tie” phenomenon.

The kind of activism associated with social media isn’t like this at all. The platforms of social media are built around weak ties. Twitter is a way of following (or being followed by) people you may never have met. Facebook is a tool for efficiently managing your acquaintances, for keeping up with the people you would not otherwise be able to stay in touch with. That’s why you can have a thousand “friends” on Facebook, as you never could in real life. This is in many ways a wonderful thing. There is strength in weak ties, as the sociologist Mark Granovetter has observed. Our acquaintances—not our friends—are our greatest source of new ideas and information. The Internet lets us exploit the power of these kinds of distant connections with marvellous efficiency. It’s terrific at the diffusion of innovation, interdisciplinary collaboration, seamlessly matching up buyers and sellers, and the logistical functions of the dating world. But weak ties seldom lead to high-risk activism.

  • Need for hierarchical structures rather than networks

This is the second crucial distinction between traditional activism and its online variant: social media are not about this kind of hierarchical organization. Facebook and the like are tools for building networks, which are the opposite, in structure and character, of hierarchies. Unlike hierarchies, with their rules and procedures, networks aren’t controlled by a single central authority. Decisions are made through consensus, and the ties that bind people to the group are loose. This structure makes networks enormously resilient and adaptable in low-risk situations. Wikipedia is a perfect example. It doesn’t have an editor, sitting in New York, who directs and corrects each entry. The effort of putting together each entry is self-organized. If every entry in Wikipedia were to be erased tomorrow, the content would swiftly be restored, because that’s what happens when a network of thousands spontaneously devote their time to a task.

Read more about this here: [The Link]

Impact of being connected on social skills/relationships

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Published on: October 21, 2010

Real friendship involves risk. If a computer screen you ultimately control comes between you and your “friend,” then it was not authentic friendship in the first place… More about this here: [The Link]

Even as they become more connected, young people are caring less about others ..More about this here: [The Link]

The business of software

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Published on: October 5, 2010

Seth’s Blog

via The business of software.

Writing software used to be hard, sort of like erecting a building used to be hundreds of years ago. When you set out to build an audacious building, there were real doubts about whether you might succeed. It was considered a marvel if your building was a little taller and didn’t fall down. Now, of course, the hard part of real estate development has nothing to do with whether or not your building is going to collapse.

The same thing is true of software. It’s a given that a professionally run project will create something that runs. Good (not great) software is a matter of will, mostly.

The question used to be: Does it run? That was enough, because software that worked was scarce.

Now, the amount of high utility freeware and useful free websites is soaring. Clearly, just writing a piece of software no longer makes it a business.

So if it’s not about avoiding fatal bugs, what’s the business of software?

At its heart, you need to imagine (and then execute) a business that just happens to involve a piece of software, because it’s become clear that software alone isn’t the point. There isn’t a supply issue–it’s about demand. The business of software is now marketing (which includes design).

The internet has transformed the software industry in two vaguely related ways:

1. It makes it far more efficient to communicate with people who might buy your software and,
2. It enables software’s most powerful function: communication between users

…. more in Seth’s Blog: The business of software.

Predictable critiques of any new Technology

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Published on: October 5, 2010

Any new technology faces criticisms, they are often predictable and go through phases. Here are some common criticisms in order.

1. What the hell is it good for?
2. Who wants it any way?
3. The only people who want this innovation are dubious or privileged minorities
4. Its only a fad, it will not last very long
5. This will not change things one bit [invention is only a fancy gadget with no practical consequences]
6. This is not good enough… it costs too much
7. Those weaker than I am can’t handle it!
8. Etiquette. Its bad manners to use it here [cell phones are NOT to be used in trains]
9. If the new technology has to do with thinking, writing or reading, then it will most certainly change our techniques of thinking, writing or reading for the worse

A very interesting article describing these critiques with various interesting tit-bits from history. Must read….
More of this article here: [The Link]

Getting better at seeing

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Published on: September 30, 2010

Seth’s Blog

via Getting better at seeing.

A giant pitfall in the way small companies and individuals market themselves, particularly online or in presentations, is that they’re often cheesy, ugly or unreadable.

I don’t think people deliberately set out to be ugly, but they end up that way. And a quick look at your own buying behavior should tell you that you don’t often buy from the sketchy-looking sites, ads and media that are often pitched at you.

No, I think the problem is that people don’t realize that their work is ugly. They don’t see it. Just like the close-talker down the hall from your cube doesn’t realize that he’s a close-talker. I’m not talking about skill or talent or even guts. I’m talking about learning to see what others see.

John McWade taught me how to see. I’m not great at it, I’m certainly guilty of designing my own not-so-ideal materials. But the gap between the one-eyed man and the blind is pretty big.

It might take a few weeks of hard work to start to notice what looks right in the world (and why). I think it’s worth it.

(Easy to recommend books from Nancy Duarte and Garr Reynolds too)

-Seth Godin

Arts & Letters Daily 29 Sep 2010

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Published on: September 29, 2010

Arts & Letters Daily – ideas, criticism, debate

via Arts & Letters Daily 29 Sep 2010.

What are books good for? Every book by a single author is a particular performance, a story told as only one storyteller could recount it… more

Intellectuals tend to see what they want in the world, which is that their biases are confirmed. How does that make them so different from other mortals?… more

The forever recession (Seth Godin)

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Published on: September 21, 2010

Seth’s Blog

via The forever recession.

There are two recessions going on.

One is gradually ending. This is the cyclical recession, we have them all the time, they come and they go. Not fun, but not permanent.

The other one, I fear, is here forever. This is the recession of the industrial age, the receding wave of bounty that workers and businesses got as a result of rising productivity but imperfect market communication.

In short: if you’re local, we need to buy from you. If you work in town, we need to hire you. If you can do a craft, we can’t replace you with a machine.

No longer.

The lowest price for any good worth pricing is now available to anyone, anywhere. Which makes the market for boring stuff a lot more perfect than it used to be.

Since the ‘factory’ work we did is now being mechanized, outsourced or eliminated, it’s hard to pay extra for it. And since buyers have so many choices (and much more perfect information about pricing and availability) it’s hard to charge extra.

Thus, middle class jobs that existed because companies had no choice are now gone.

Protectionism isn’t going to fix this problem. Neither is stimulus of old factories or yelling in frustration and anger. No, the only useful response is to view this as an opportunity. To poorly paraphrase Clay Shirky, every revolution destroys the last thing before it turns a profit on a new thing.

The networked revolution is creating huge profits, significant opportunities and a lot of change. What it’s not doing is providing millions of brain-dead, corner office, follow-the-manual middle class jobs. And it’s not going to.

Fast, smart and flexible are embraced by the network. Linchpin behavior. People and companies we can’t live without (because if I can live without you, I’m sure going to try if the alternative is to save money).

The sad irony is that everything we do to prop up the last economy (more obedience, more compliance, cheaper yet average) gets in the way of profiting from this one.

The Medium – Is Learning by Rote Memorization So Bad? – NYTimes.com

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Published on: September 20, 2010

The Medium – Is Learning by Rote Memorization So Bad? – NYTimes.com.

The word “drill” has come to define bad teaching. The piercing violence that “drilling” evokes just seems not to belong in sensitive pedagogy. Good teachers don’t fire off quiz questions and catechize kids about facts. They don’t plop students at computers to drill themselves on spelling or arithmetic. Drilling seems unimaginative and antisocial. It might even be harmful.

But while drilling might not look pretty — students doing drills don’t tend terrariums or don wigs to re-enact the Constitutional Convention — might it nonetheless be a useful way for some students to learn some things? By e-mail, E. D. Hirsch Jr., the distinguished literary critic and education reformer, told me that far from rejecting drilling, he considers “distributed practice,” the official term for drilling, essential. A distributed practice system, Hirsch explained, “is helpful in making the procedures second nature, which allows you to focus on the structural elements of the problem.”

… for more check the article.

Arts & Letters Daily 18 Sep 2010

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Published on: September 18, 2010

Arts & Letters Daily – ideas, criticism, debate

via Arts & Letters Daily 18 Sep 2010.

In online debates, we not only fail to cultivate charity and humility, we even think of them as vices: forms of weakness that compromise our advocacy… more

Numbers don’t lie, but are the best kind of facts we have. Oh, yeah? Charles Seife shows how numbers are being twisted to erode our democracy… more

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