psychology – Techdirt (original) (raw)

DailyDirt: The Eyes Have It

from the urls-we-dug-up dept

Are the eyes the windows to the soul? Probably not — but that doesn’t mean they aren’t darn good indicators of a whole lot of things. Scientists in a variety of fields are still uncovering new secrets within these little wet orbs, often with potentially important medical or psychological implications. Here are some of the latest discoveries made by watching the watchers:

• When humans interact, we unconsciously mirror each others’ changing pupil sizes — and this might have to do with trust. A test involving a sharing game and an eye tracker revealed that the mirroring effect correlates with how much people trust each other — but oddly only within the same racial group. [url]
• Eye-rolling is a potent social signal that seems to be unique to humans, and studies confirm that teenage girls are the best at it. Unlike many facial expressions, it’s rarely involuntary — but people still do it when there’s nobody around to see. [url]
• An infant’s developing attention span may be impacted by how much their caregiver’s eyes wander while interacting with them. Though, there’s a strange attempt by the news release to shoehorn some techno-panic fearmongering into the findings. [url]
• Eye-tracking technology continues to provide deeper insight into autism, with a study focusing on conversations rather than photos and complex scenes. It may turn out that autism therapies stressing eye contact are not the way to go, if patients are in fact averting their eyes to conserve cognitive resources. [url]

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Filed Under: autism, child development, eye contact, eyes, facial expressions, kids, psychology

Court Tells State Psychology Board It Can't Use Its Powers To Regulate Protected Speech

from the derailing-a-power-trip dept

Oh, look. It’s the government getting in the way of itself.

A Kentucky psychiatry board cannot censor the nation’s longest-running newspaper columnist for providing advice as a “family psychologist,” a federal judge ruled.

John Rosemond, whose Dear Abby-style parenting column is syndicated in more than 200 newspapers, claims he received a threatening cease-and-desist letter from the Kentucky Board of Examiners of Psychology on May 7, 2013.

Rosemond, dubbed a family psychologist in his byline, holds a master’s degree in psychology and is licensed to practice North Carolina, but is not qualified to provide psychological services to Kentucky residents, according to the board.

The letter, signed by Assistant Attorney General Brian Judy, further alleged Rosemond’s advice that parents of a deadbeat teen confiscate their son’s cell phone as a “wake-up call,” amounted to professional services rendered.

DEAR GOD. The horror. It’s like something Ann Landers would say but without wandering off to briefly consider the social destruction wrought by cellphone use at the dinner table.

Yes, the Kentucky psychiatry board concern-trolled a syndicated advice columnist, presumably because it felt general advice dispensed across multiple states somehow threatened its rent-seeking regulatory apparatus. But it’s finding no comfort from the court, which has told it to stop using its powers to throttle protected speech.

The Board tried to argue that Rosemond’s column was unprotected “professional speech,” due to his byline as a psychologist. The court finds all kinds of problems with this argument.

This theory is both consistent with how the doctrine has been applied in the aforementioned cases addressing the professional speech doctrine, and is also sensible in light of the doctrine’s aims. Pursuant to this doctrine, the government is permitted to regulate speech in limited circumstances so as to protect the individual receiving advice— the client. As articulated by Justice White, without this professional-client relationship, the doctrine’s vices outweigh its virtues.

In this case, that “personal nexus between professional and client” does not exist. Neither party suggests that Rosemond has any idea who the teenager in his column is. In fact, nobody knows the individual who Rosemond was writing about or whether that person lives in Kentucky. Nobody knows if the teenager’s parents read the article or took the advice, much less if anyone was harmed. For all the Board knows, the “wakeup call” worked and, instead of harming the teenager, it served its purpose. Furthermore, Rosemond receives no compensation from any person in exchange for the advice offered in his columns. Put plainly, the question and answer format used by Rosemond is nothing more than a literary device. The relationship that is necessary between a professional and a client to trigger application of the professional speech doctrine just did not exist. This should not come as much of a surprise to the Board, who conceded in oral argument that it knew of no case that defined professional speech in the way the Board sought to apply the doctrine.

Once again, legal arguments best described as “novel” fail to score any points. An argument without precedent rarely holds up in court. Comparing the Board’s assertions to the actual facts of the case, the court calls the entity out for its transparent attempt at regulating protected speech.

Rosemond’s speech is neither commercial, nor professional. Instead, the Board used K.R.S. § 319.005 to restrict Rosemond’s speech because it took issue with the message he was conveying. Such government regulation is content-based, and only constitutional if it survives strict scrutiny.

The court also takes the time to criticize the board for its attempt to scuttle Rosemond’s tagline.

The Board also argues that the tagline at the bottom of Rosemond’s column is commercial speech, and further that Rosemond’s “unqualified use” of the term family psychologist is “potentially misleading, to the public’s detriment.” For the same reasons that the Board’s attempted regulation of the body of Rosemond’s column is content-based, so too is its regulation of his tagline. If Rosemond described himself as something other than a “family psychologist,” or qualified his statement, then the Board would not have pursued him. As discussed, supra, this is the hallmark of a content-based restriction.

The decision then goes on to point out that the Board’s actions seem particularly meritless and perhaps even a bit vindictive.

If the State’s interest is really in preventing persons unlicensed in the Commonwealth of Kentucky from holding themselves out as licensed professionals, it is difficult to understand how Dr. Phil, Dr. Oz, and countless other self-help gurus would not also be in the Government’s crosshairs. The Board has never investigated another newspaper columnist, nor book author for holding themselves out to be a “psychologist” without proper licensure in Kentucky. When asked how the Board would respond to a complaint if one were levied against Dr. Phil, the Board did not know. While there is no evidence in the record demonstrating that other public personalities similarly hold themselves out to be “psychologists” in Kentucky, it is hard to believe that others do not.

Finding in favor of the columnist, the court has ordered a permanent injunction against the Board’s use of its power to regulate protected speech. But why did it even get to this point?

Well, certain regulatory agencies have tried to expand their reach by regulating speech under the guise of public safety. A few years back, North Carolina tried to shut down a blogger extolling the virtues of the “paleolithic diet” by claiming he was dispensing dietary advice without a license. Some government agencies just want to have control. Others dislike outsiders who don’t “buy in” to the special “club.” (Licensing for psychologists in Kentucky runs 300initiallyand300 initially and 300initiallyand100 per year after that.)

In Rosemond’s case, a retired psychologist filed a complaint with the Board after reading one of Rosemond’s columns. This resulted in the Board’s serving of an affidavit demanding Rosemond pull his column. Rosemond refused and filed a suit against the Board instead, seeking declaratory judgment that the Board’s conduct violated his First Amendment rights. He won. And all of this can be traced back to a retired professional who disagreed with Rosemond’s advice, and an agency only too eager to flex its regulatory muscle. A complaint that should have been greeted with a shrug has resulted in a judicial smackdown that will prevent the Board from acting so stupidly in the future.

Filed Under: first amendment, free speech, john rosemond, kentucky, licensing, psychology

DailyDirt: No More Teachers' Dirty Looks…

from the urls-we-dig-up dept

School is out for most American kids right now, but that doesn’t mean parents and teachers aren’t still thinking about how schools could improve and how to get kids to learn better. There are plenty of problems that seem insurmountable in the US education system, but there could be some solutions that try to tackle them in limited trials. If these trials succeed, they might be expanded to more schools — and hopefully, over time, all schools can get better and learn from each other.

• The standard disciplinary methods in most schools don’t seem to be particularly good at improving problem behaviors, so maybe it’s time to try other strategies that try to teach kids how to control themselves — instead of having teachers handing out orders and punishments. A Collaborative and Proactive Solutions (CPS) program is trying to teach educators how to handle unruly students by helping kids to recognize and control their own frustrations and work towards managing their own emotions and actions. If it works as advertised, this could help reduce all kinds of problems before they grow out of control. [url]
• Letting students collaborate and set their own educational goals isn’t easy, but it might be the better way to prepare kids for the kind of independent learning they’ll need to do on their own when they’re done with school. Psychologists have learned a lot about how the brain learns, but teachers are only starting to incorporate brain-based strategies into lesson plans. [url]
• More and more kids seem to be diagnosed with attention issues and ADHD, and at the same time, kids are being forced to sit still for longer and longer periods of class time. Perhaps if kids had more exercise and were allowed to move around a lot more, they’d be better able to sit still during classes? A randomized controlled trial seems to be in order…. [url]

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Filed Under: child behavior, cps, education, k-12, psychology, ross greene, school, students, teaching

Stanford Prison Experiment Psychologist: You're Never Going To Get Laid, You Game-Playing, Porn-Watching Fat-Asses

from the alernately,-The-Stanford-Penis-Experiment dept

Oh, good. It’s time once again to hear how videogames are destroying society. This time, it’s Philip Zimbardo, the psychologist behind the controversial (putting it politely) Stanford Prison Experiment. Having driven the wheels off a much-debunked experiment, it appears Zimbardo’s looking for a career renaissance of sorts, using an issue that is a bit more timely. And what could be timelier than being about the thousandth person to declare videogames the end of the world as we know it?

Speaking to the BBC, Zimbardo said his research has uncovered something in those boys who are online up to 15 hours a day.

He described boys’ altered brain function like this: “When I’m in class, I’ll wish I was playing World of Warcraft. When I’m with a girl, I’ll wish I was watching pornography, because I’ll never get rejected.”

He says that such a mindset has been created because of the Web’s existence and the proliferation of particular entertainment sources on it.

While Zimbardo’s research would seem to be focused only on the extreme end of the human spectrum, he seems to think it applies to those who don’t engage in these activities at public servant/South Korean levels of engagement.

Zimbardo defines excessive porning and video gaming as more than five hours a day.

And already the scale has shifted massively. (Also: “porning?”) Now, it includes those who spend a quarter of the day engaged in some form of popular entertainment. He thinks it’s killing off more than males’ social drive. It’s also killing their sex drive.

Kids might find online porn exciting psychologically, but physiologically they are actually becoming less excited. They suffer, he said, from PIED. Porn-Induced Erectile Dysfunction.

And here we are at another area of sketchy research, most often touted by those with goods and services to sell. Unsurprisingly, Zimbardo has recently published a book dealing with these very issues.

Presumably because the evidence doesn’t match the assertions, Zimbardo’s claims as to how many hours are too many continues to shift, all within the space of a six-minute interview.

[H[e regards the addiction and the rewiring of the brain as being a factor of not merely the number of hours, but the obvious changes in mindset…

Now it’s any length of time, provided the “mindset” is “changed.” Zimbardo’s discussion of these males paints gamers/porn watchers as socially-stunted introverts whose hobbies are only making them more unable to deal with the outside world. And all it takes is (up to) 5 hours a day.

He does admit there’s an upside to gaming/porn watching. Criminal activity is on the wane and the amount of men drinking/using illicit drugs continues to fall. But even this upside is a downside. In Zimbardo’s mind, the world would be better served by an increase in drunken, drug-addled men looking to raise hell and get laid.

However, Zimbardo said: “They’re not violent because they’re alone in their room.”

He added that young men are drinking Coke instead of alcohol and becoming “fat-asses.” The chances of type-2 diabetes are increased, he said, which tends to decrease libido.

There are plenty of issues to be had with Zimbardo’s skewed portrait of male gamers, starting with the “male” part. Keith Stuart’s dismantling of Zimbardo’s assertions at The Guardian points out that males are only barely the majority.

Research by the Internet Advertising Bureau last year found that 52% of British gamers are women. This isn’t an isolated blip and it isn’t just down to “casual” phone games like Candy Crush Saga. In the US, research specialist Super Data found that just over 50% of PC gamers are women. Senior researcher Stephanie Llamas wrote about how her data challenged the cliche that women only play casual titles – her female subjects identified mostly as “mid-core” and hardcore players.

And his take on gaming is dated and — dare I say it — sexist. Zimbardo sees male gamers as translucent-skinned basement dwellers whose unblinking eyes are fixed on computer monitors and TV screens. It’s as if he’s never heard of social gaming. The games that routinely sell the most copies in any given year are heavily-focused on multiplayer interaction. Each iteration of the Call of Duty series is fine-tuned for online play. The single-player “experience” is usually a 4-6 hour afterthought that many purchasers completely ignore. The Grand Theft Auto series has made online multiplayer an option for the past couple of releases, and even included limited local multiplayer options back in the Playstation 2 days.

As for the porn claims, the verdict’s still mostly out. While there are a number of psychologists who link porn-watching to erectile dysfunction, it’s tenuous at best and purely correlative at worst. With porn easily available online, the number of people partaking has undoubtedly gone up. But have erectile dysfunction cases climbed at the same rate?

It’s the same logic hole that trips up arguments that violent videogames result in violent crime. While there may be some negative effects in a few members of the population, one would expect the hundreds of millions of gamers who play violent videogames to have produced an appreciable spike in violent crime — if we’re to believe violent videogames lead to violent acts. But that simply hasn’t happened. Granted, numbers on reported erectile problems are far harder to come by (pun not not intended but not totally intended) than crime stats and game sales figures, but if it were approaching the apparently epidemic level of porn intake, you’d think there would be a bit more credible reporting on the link between the two.

But perhaps more troubling than the male gamer cliches and the touting of questionable correlations is Zimbardo’s other ideas — ones that don’t receive quite as much play in most of the coverage. Zimbardo seems to feel porn and games (and soda, I guess) are undercutting what it means to be male and producing an inferior iteration — at least as compared to the manlier men of the past.

[W]hile girls are increasingly succeeding in the real world, boys are retreating into cyberspace, seeking online the security and validation they can’t get anywhere else. They are bored at school, increasingly have no father figures to motivate them, don’t have the skills to form real romantic relationships, feel entitled to have things done for them (usually by their parents) and seek to avoid a looming adulthood of debt, unfulfilling work and other irksome responsibilities. As a result, they disappear into their bedrooms where, he argues, they risk becoming addicted to porn, video games and Ritalin.

Zimbardo proposes a set of “fixes” that rely heavily on turning men into men by interfacing with other men — presumably all in a very heterosexual way. (Zimbardo’s research apparently didn’t cover those who don’t fall under the “straight” umbrella…)

Zimbardo has lots of suggestions: more male teachers, more incentives for men to establish boys’ and men’s groups so that the former can get the masculine mentoring they otherwise lack, welfare reform to encourage fathers to remain in the family loop, crowdsourcing initiatives to fund video games that are less violent and require more co-operation, parents to talk to their sons about sex and relationships so they don’t take porn to represent real life.

The suggestions improve as the list goes on, but Zimbardo seems to fear a world of feminized, antisocial fat-asses (he refers to today’s male role models as “man poodles” or “infantilized jerks”) who aren’t going to find the masculinity they apparently need with one hand on a controller and the other on manual override.

Then there’s this:

Zimbardo contends that immersion in online technology means that boys never learn basic social communication skills, still less how to flirt, risk rejection or ask for a date. As a result, boys are hobbled by a new form of social shyness.

But wouldn’t this online technology also facilitate flirting, social communication and asking for dates? Social communication is changing, but Zimbardo still wants it to resemble the sort of thing he grew up with. And this perception of unsociable losers is mostly false, but it gets perpetuated every time some axe-grinding moral panicist or book-peddling psychologist takes an inadvertent shoulder from a teenager staring a cellphone, rather than where he or she is going.

If porn/videogames were really that destructive, the world would be a complete mess. Both are ubiquitous and enjoyed by millions of people around the world, by a wide range of ages. And yet, for the most part, life is still recognizable as life, even by those who’ve been around since the “better days” when people talked “face to face” and waited until the newspaper arrived in the morning to discover what had happened yesterday.

Filed Under: exaggeration, internet, philip zimbardo, porn, psychology, stanford prison experiment, video games

DailyDirt: Celebrating Valentine's Day… Or Not

from the urls-we-dig-up dept

Some folks say romance is dead, but maybe it’s just in a deep meditative trance. In any case, it’s almost that time of year again when chocolates and flowers and possibly awkward marriage proposals are being considered. For the romantic souls, this is an annual tradition that shouldn’t be missed. For the more cynical, it’s just another commercial holiday to boost sales of various pink-heart themed items.

• The Secretary Problem (aka the Marriage Problem) is a challenge to find an optimization strategy for the situation of having to choose the most satisfactory option among a series of candidates — without being able to return to a previous candidate and once a candidate is chosen the decision is final. Mathematician Martin Gardner states that the optimal solution is to interview/date the first 36.8% of candidates, and then as soon as you encounter a candidate that appears better than that first group, you hire/marry that person (which may result in getting stuck with the last candidate). QED. Very romantic, yes? [url]
• If you’re following the solution to the Secretary Problem, you might want to employ another technique when you’ve decided. Forget love potions, just answer a few dozen questions with a potential partner and then stare into her eyes for 4 minutes. [url]
• The commercial Anti-Valentine’s Day is actually November 11th — aka Singles Day. It’s the world’s biggest online retail sales day that dates back to about 1993, and it’s really big in China. [url]

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Filed Under: love, martin gardner, math, optimization, psychology, retail holiday, romance, secretary problem, singles day, valentine's day

DailyDirt: Data Is Everywhere, Let's Use It

from the urls-we-dig-up dept

If you’ve been reading Techdirt for a while, you probably know that we’re not big fans of this myth: “If you’re not paying for the product, you are the product.” Regardless of whether or not you pay for something, some companies will still treat their customers horribly. Likewise, there are also some corporations that try to treat customers (or users) with respect without expectation of payment for the favor. That said, it’s easy to make mistakes that get mis-interpreted when it comes to analyzing consumer behavior. An unintentional email message to a targeted (or even un-targeted) group of customers can enrage a whole community. Consumer data is available to a lot of companies, but it might be wise for these companies to tread lightly with their data scientists. Here are just a few cases that data miners might want to check out.

• Facebook participated in some social experiments, but creating an “emotional contagion” resulted in some unwanted public attention. The actual ability for a social network to measure or effect various emotions is far from proven, but the potential to cause widespread distress through a social network is probably something users should be concerned about. [url]
• Shutterfly made a seemingly small mistake in mass-emailing a bunch of its customers a congratulatory message about an upcoming newborn. The photo printing service wasn’t even using data mining techniques (eg Target) to try to figure out who might be pregnant, but in this data-driven world, folks are trained to expect that companies may be trying to pry into their personal lives. [url]
• Social psychology has had some problems with scientific fraud, and thankfully, there are some investigators who are developing methods to find fake or massaged data. It’s hard enough to actually design psych experiments that have conclusive results, but sometimes the data can’t lie. [url]
• OKCupid admits to experimenting on its users, too. The difference with dating sites is that the people using them seem to be tacitly agreeing to be experimented upon. [url]

If you’d like to read more awesome and interesting stuff, check out this unrelated (but not entirely random!) Techdirt post via StumbleUpon.

Filed Under: advertising, consumer behavior, data, data mining, emotional contagion, marketing, psychology, reputation, social experiments
Companies: facebook, okcupid, shutterfly, target

DailyDirt: Animals Behave Like People Sometimes

from the urls-we-dig-up dept

Animal behavior is getting more and more attention as researchers discover that our animal friends exhibit emotional responses seemingly similar to ours. It’s hard to “prove” animals experience complex emotions or thoughts (in fact, you never prove anything in science… you can only disprove things), but mounting evidence seems to suggest that many animals have reactions that we might predict based on our own psychological knowledge. Here are just a few interesting studies on animals acting like us somehow.

• Do animals worry like we do? Elephants have been observed to suffer symptoms similar to PTSD after traumatic experiences. Traumatized chimpanzees also appear to have mood and anxiety disorders, and various pet owners have reported anecdotal evidence of domestic animals with separation anxiety and other fears. [url]
• Dog owners probably don’t think scientists needed to perform an experiment to determine if dogs feel jealousy, but now there’s published evidence for this canine emotion. Not all of the dogs in the study showed signs of jealousy, but a majority did. Anyone want to try this experiment with cats? [url]
• There’s actually a “mouse grimace scale” that measures several features such as ear and whisker positions and eye squinting to estimate a distress level for a lab mouse. Researchers have discovered that lab mice react differently to pain, depending on whether men or women are present during a grimace measurement. When men are around, mice seem to suppress their distress. (But it should be noted that it’s not just men causing this effect. Items of fabric that have the residual scent of men or male animals also produce similar results.) [url]

If you’d like to read more awesome and interesting stuff, check out this unrelated (but not entirely random!) Techdirt post via StumbleUpon.

Filed Under: animals, behavior, chimpanzees, dogs, elephants, emotions, mice, pets, psychology, ptsd

Dilbert's Scott Adams Has The Best Explanation Of Innovation In Silicon Valley Today That You'll Read

from the it's-all-psychology dept

Having spent nearly two decades in Silicon Valley, it’s always interesting to see how different people try to understand or explain the innovative process that happens here. Remember last week’s discussion on “disruptive innovation?” That’s just a small part of the larger debate, often perpetrated by folks who have little sense of what’s often going on in the startup and innovation world. So I find it interesting that after reading a bunch of opinions on that debate, a totally unrelated discussion hit home as being a hell of a lot more insightful and relevant to understanding a lot (though not all) of the innovation happening in Silicon Valley today, and it comes from Scott Adams, of Dilbert fame.

Adams, of course, is more than “just” a comic strip author, even if that’s what he’s most known for. He’s started a few other businesses over time and is apparently hard at work on an internet startup. He also tends to post thought-provoking posts to his blog pretty frequently, even if he admits that much of the time he’s just trolling to get responses out of people. Sometimes I strongly agree with him, and at other times, I vehemently disagree. But one of his recent posts on the nature of innovation in Silicon Valley is really worth reading.

It starts out by clearly setting itself up to mock the overused and overhyped concept among startups of the pivot — a startup totally changing product direction after realizing its existing offering was unlikely to go anywhere. This concept has often been mocked (perhaps rightfully so) as highlighting entrepreneurs who either lack the courage of their conviction, or who are unwilling to put in the long slog of building a real business. But while Adams could take the easy mocking route, he actually provides a lot more insight into what’s really happening, first highlighting how much of success in Silicon Valley is really due to luck.

The valley attracts some of the smartest humans on Earth, and each of those humans, being otherwise normal, probably assumed they could use their talent, brains, and hard work to achieve specific business goals, such as building product X and selling the company to Google for a billion dollars.

And then they find out that success in the start-up realm is mostly luck. They discover this by trying great ideas coupled with great execution and failing. And they further discover it by observing unexpected successes at other start-ups. Success simply can’t be predicted to any level of statistical comfort.

Smart observers in the valley look for the “tell” that an early stage start-up will be a winner, but none can be found. Oh, sure, the team needs to be smart, talented, and willing to work long hours. But nearly every start-up has that going for it. Most have great ideas as well. None of it predicts success.

This is an exaggeration, of course. A skilled and ready team executing well is better situated to capitalize on good luck — and there is a big variance in skills and execution among teams. But it is depressing how little people recognize or admit the role of luck in a successful startup. In my experience, first-time entrepreneurs who succeed take way too much credit for their own work. Those who struggled to build their business or who have a failure or two under their belts are much more willing to admit the role of luck (good or bad) in their eventual results.

But rather than taking this to the next expected place of laughing off the whole situation as an effort in being lucky, Adams points out that with the basic infrastructure of building a startup so commoditized, it changes the nature of innovation on the internet, such that it’s no longer about a technological advantage or innovation, but about psychology:

In an environment in which start-up resources are not limited, and no one can predict the next winner, and it is easy to measure customer behavior in great detail, the Internet is no longer a technology.

The Internet is a psychology experiment.

Building a product for the Internet is now the easy part. Getting people to understand the product and use it is the hard part. And the only way to make the hard part work is by testing one psychological hypothesis after another.

Every entrepreneur is now a psychologist by trade. The ONLY thing that matters to success in our anything-is-buildable Internet world is psychology. How does the customer perceive this product? What causes someone to share? What makes virality happen? What makes something sticky?

And that’s why you see so many companies “pivot.” Because as a psychology experiment, it becomes clear that the early results aren’t good, so it’s time to try something else. Whether or not this seems exciting or depressing to you may depend on your perspective, but Adams isn’t taking an opinion on the subject so much as describing what he’s observing, and it seems fairly accurate in my experience.

There’s one other bit of Adam’s post that is worth highlighting, because it’s something that people outside of the startup world almost never understand: the fact that while highly competitive, the level of “helping each other out” that goes on in Silicon Valley is quite incredible:

Another fascinating phenomenon in the valley is that every entrepreneur and investor seems genuinely interested in helping strangers succeed. I would go so far as to call it the defining feature of the start-up culture. Some of it has to do with the nature of entrepreneurs as serial problem-solvers. If you tell me what problem your start-up is experiencing, my reflex is to offer a suggestion or to connect you to someone who can help. And creating social capital makes a lot of sense when teams are fluid and who-you-know always matters. But beyond the practical and selfish benefits of being helpful, the dominant worldview in Silicon Valley is that if you aren’t trying to make the world better, you’re in the wrong line of work. The net effect is that the start-up culture is shockingly generous. If you need something for your start-up, folks will happily help you find it. I would have predicted the opposite.

Adams is not the only one who would have predicted the opposite. Time and time again, I hear outside observers believe that the startup world is very insular and only focused on their own goals. People frequently like to mock the “change the world” attitude of many entrepreneurs, finding it difficult to believe it’s sincere or genuine, rather than pure marketing hype. And, sure, there are some carpetbaggers who don’t believe it at all, but the degrees to which many in the Valley are legitimately trying to do amazing things and change the world is part of what’s so inspiring in an age where cynicism and protectionism is so prevalent elsewhere.

We’ve talked in the past about all the research that shows how widespread information sharing and job hopping made Silicon Valley into the innovative center of the world, and this is just an extension of that. Rather than creating silos inside big firms, Silicon Valley has long been about sharing ideas among a wide group of people, which actually helps accelerate the pace of those “psychological experiments” to figure out what works, and what will actually build a better, more innovative product.

It’s a really useful way of understanding Silicon Valley for those who haven’t lived it.

Filed Under: change the world, experimentation, innovation, pivot, psychology, scott adams

DailyDirt: Who Needs A Neural Interface?

from the urls-we-dig-up dept

Discussions about technology’s impact on the brain are all too often couched in fear-mongering and sensationalism, but the truth remains that, like all human habits and activities, our use of devices does affect the way we think. It’s difficult to say much more than that with any level of certainty, but as with all great mysteries, scientists continue to gradually chip away at it one question at a time — and sometimes figuring out how to put what they learn to work. We might not be plugging our brains directly into computers yet, but here are a few ways the two have become connected anyway:

• A growing number of studies are uncovering various specific ways that technology usage is changing human behavior and cognition. Of course, the studies vary in terms of scale and quality, and shouldn’t all necessarily be taken at face value as facts. [url]
• “Brain training games” make a lot of grandiose promises about improving abilities and staving off deterioration — but do they really work? Any mental challenge is probably better than none at all, but many of these brain games may not be improving anything but your ability to play brain games. [url]
• Some mathematicians claim to have solved the problem of jet lag with an app that helps train your circadian rhythms before traveling. Supposedly it doesn’t require you to adjust your sleep schedule in advance, just the light levels you are exposed too, which it helps you optimize based on carefully-tuned formulas. [url]

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Filed Under: brain, jet lag, neurology, psychology, technology

DailyDirt: Time Flies When You're…

from the urls-we-dig-up dept

There are a lot of myths and aphorisms about the passage of time. A watched kettle never boils. Time flies when you’re having fun. However, these observations could lead to some important discoveries about human psychology and how our brains perceive and remember various events in our lives. Does “proportionality theory” really explain why 8yo kids and 80yo senior citizens judge time differently? Here are just a few links on the topic of time.

• Does the perception of time really speed up as you get older? It depends on the time frame — days and weeks may pass at a normal speed, but it’s the years that seem to fly by. [url]
• The perception of time passing can be changed by emotions (fear seems to slow time down), disrupted routines and new experiences. Also, drugs that affect dopamine function in the brain (eg. Ritalin, Adderall and anti-psychotic drugs) can speed up or slow down how a person perceives time. [url]
• If the maximum sentence for criminals is life in prison, could we make the punishment worse by giving inmates drugs that make the time seem to pass more slowly? Obviously, there are some serious ethical questions about customizing punishments with technology, but it’s an issue that should be debated as medicine comes up with ever more ways to extend human lifespans. [url]

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Filed Under: aging, drugs, lifespan, perception, psychology, punishment, time