Paterson on Frost

if it’s going to leave your mind it’s probably not worth keeping anyway.

Muldoon interview


One of the risks is that one allows the poem to begin, as it were, too soon. The point at which the poem should really begin is often where, in some other intellection, it might have ended. I never, for example, save my “big” ideas for down the road. I start with the big idea and see how much further I can go.

One of the reasons why the sonnet has been such an enduring form is that it really is true to a way of thinking, within which one’s capable of doing an awful lot. Here we have A, by contrast with which we have B. That double whammy of the sonnet is integral to us. But one of the great dangers is of stopping the poem too soon. Of saying a much lesser thing, managing a much lesser revelation than it might otherwise.

power

When people have power, they act the part. Powerful people smile less, interrupt others, and speak in a louder voice. When people do not respect the basic rules of social behavior, they lead others to believe that they have power, according to a study in the current Social Psychological and Personality Science (published by SAGE).
People with power have a very different experience of the world than people without it. The powerful have fewer rules to follow, and they live in environments of money, knowledge and support. People without power live with threats of punishment and firm limits according to the research team lead by Gerben Van Kleef of the University of Amsterdam. Because the powerful are freer to break the rules—does breaking the rules seem more powerful?
People read about a visitor to an office who took a cup of employee coffee without asking or about a bookkeeper that bent accounting rules. The rule breakers were seen as more in control, and powerful compared to people who didn’t steal the coffee, or didn’t break bookkeeping rules.
Acting rudely also leads people to see power. People who saw a video of a man at a sidewalk café put his feet on another chair, drop cigarette ashes on the ground and order a meal brusquely thought the man was more likely to “get to make decisions” and able to “get people to listen to what he says” than the people who saw a video of the same man behaving politely.
What happens when people interact with a rule breaker? Van Kleef and colleagues had people come to the lab, and interact with a rule follower and a rule breaker. The rule follower was polite and acted normally, while the rule breaker arrived late, threw down his bag on a table and put up his feet. After the interaction, people thought the rule breaker had more power and was more likely to “get others to do what he wants.”
“Norm violators are perceived as having the capacity to act as they please” write the researchers. Power may be corrupting, but showing the outward signs of corruption makes people think you’re powerful.

smarts

Numberplay: The Danger of Praise from NYT
By GARY ANTONICK

“You’re really smart!”

We hear that kind of praise all the time. But it’s devastating.

Joshua Zucker is the director of the Julia Robinson Mathematics Festival. I had asked him about the role of praise in teaching. He continued:

I have no problem with praising effort. It’s praising intelligence by itself that’s the problem. That kind of praise will eventually shut you down.

This experiment is my favorite. A bunch of kids were given some fairly easy math problems. At the end, half the kids were told, “You must be really smart.” The other half was told, “You must have worked really hard.”

The kids were given another set of problems. These problems were a little bit harder. The kids who were initially told they were smart did very poorly. Of course. “Oh! I can’t do these. I must not be really smart.” They shut down and did miserably.

The kids who worked hard had the opposite reaction. “Wow. These are tough. But if I work hard, maybe I can figure them out too.” Then they did them.

There was a vastly significant difference in performance. All because of five words. “You must be really smart.” One shot of five words. Once.

Schools get this exactly wrong. Kids are taught the opposite. They’re told they’re smart. They think this means they should understand everything right away. But they won’t. And at some point they stop doing math.
I asked Mr. Zucker how he dealt with this growing up.

I was lucky. Just when I was beginning to think I was smart and didn’t really need to work hard— at age 14 or so — I started going to math summer camp. At camp, you would have 10 problems and eight hours to do them.

This was completely different from school. At school, you would have 30 exercises to do in 30 minutes. You could answer them all correctly. But at camp the problems were different. You would never understand them completely.

You were forced to realize that being smart wasn’t enough. You realized it would take a lot of hard work to succeed no matter who you were.

That’s what kids really need — stuff they’re not going to get to the end of. Then they’re really thinking. That’s my goal.

Princess Alice is watching you”: Children’s belief in an invisible person inhibits cheating

Jared Piazzaa, , , Jesse M. Beringb and Gordon Ingramc
a School of Psychology, University of Kent, Keynes College, Canterbury, Kent CT2 7NP, UK
b Institute of Cognition and Culture, Queen’s University Belfast, Belfast BT7 1NN, Northern Ireland, UK
c Interactions Lab, School of Management, University of Bath, Bath BA2 7AY, UK
Received 13 August 2010; revised 2 February 2011. Available online 5 March 2011.
Abstract
Two child groups (5–6 and 8–9 years of age) participated in a challenging rule-following task while they were (a) told that they were in the presence of a watchful invisible person (“Princess Alice”), (b) observed by a real adult, or (c) unsupervised. Children were covertly videotaped performing the task in the experimenter’s absence. Older children had an easier time at following the rules but engaged in equal levels of purposeful cheating as the younger children. Importantly, children’s expressed belief in the invisible person significantly determined their cheating latency, and this was true even after controlling for individual differences in temperament. When “skeptical” children were omitted from the analysis, the inhibitory effects of being told about Princess Alice were equivalent to having a real adult present. Furthermore, skeptical children cheated only after having first behaviorally disconfirmed the “presence” of Princess Alice. The findings suggest that children’s belief in a watchful invisible person tends to deter cheating.
Keywords: Supernatural beliefs; Cheating; Rule following; Moral development; Inhibitory control; Invisible
Article Outline

Cultural Attractors

From Derek Bownds

Dan Sperber - Cultural Attractors
In 1967, Richard Dawkins introduced the idea of a meme: a unit of cultural transmission capable of replicating itself and of undergoing Darwinian selection...I want to suggest that the concept of a meme should be, if not replaced, at least supplemented with that of a cultural attractor.

...bits of culture — memes if you want to dilute the notion and call them that — remain self-similar not because they are replicated again and again but because variations that occur at almost every turn in their repeated transmission, rather than resulting in "random walks" drifting away in all directions from an initial model, tend to gravitate around cultural attractors. Ending Little Red Riding Hood when the wolf eats the child would make for a simpler story to remember, but a Happy Ending is too powerful a cultural attractor.

...Why should there be cultural attractors at all? Because there are in our minds, our bodies, and our environment biasing factors that affect the way we interpret and re-produce ideas and behaviors...When these biasing factors are shared in a population, cultural attractors emerge.

...Rounded numbers are cultural attractors: they are easier to remember and provide better symbols for magnitudes. So, we celebrate twentieth wedding anniversaries, hundredth issue of journals, millionth copy sold of a record, and so on.

...In the diffusion of techniques and artifacts, efficiency is a powerful cultural attractor...Much more than faithful replication, this attraction of efficiency when there aren't that many ways of being efficient, explains the cultural stability (and also the historical transformations) of various technical traditions.

...And what is the attractor around which the "meme" meme gravitate? The meme idea — or rather a constellation of trivialized versions of it — has become an extraordinarily successful bit of contemporary culture not because it has been faithfully replicated again and again, but because our conversation often does revolve — and here is the cultural attractor — around remarkably successful bits of culture that, in the time of mass media and the internet, pop up more and more frequently and are indeed quite relevant to our understanding of the world we live in.

hearts on fire

Amazing observations on the annual fire walking ritual in the Spanish village of San Pedro Manrique. Researchers were stymied in their efforts to measure physiological parameters such as blood pressure, cortisol levels, or pain tolerance in individuals as they were walking across a bed of hot coals, but were able to put heart rate monitors on both fire-walkers and spectators. It was a small study, monitoring heart rates of 12 fire-walkers, 9 spectators related to fire-walkers, and 17 unrelated spectators who were just visiting.
The heart rates of relatives and friends of the fire-walkers followed an almost identical pattern to the fire-walkers’ rates, spiking and dropping almost in synchrony. The heart rates of visiting spectators did not. The relatives’ rates synchronized throughout the event, which lasted 30 minutes, with 28 fire-walkers each making five-second walks. So relatives or friends’ heart rates matched a fire-walker’s rate before, during and after his walk. Even people related to other fire-walkers showed similar patterns.
This cohesion and solidarity happened in spectators who were simply watching, not sharing with performers the movements, vocalizations, or rhythms usually presumed to accompany social bonding through emotional resonance.

via derek bownds