Empirical and Practical Truths; Questions for the self

Zach--As I understand it from your last post, when the empirical and practical come into phase, the fact that these two different approaches fall into accord can point to a metaphysical truth. If I understand it correctly, it brings to mind some of the research into emotion I did. Psychologists--"not the useful kind" as one of my professors put it--researching emotion list all of the effects of having an emotion. Some write, when you are sad, you are more focused. When you are happy, you are more creative. What they have done is set up strict experiments with a theoretical structure of emotion in mind, and then observed these effects. But sometimes I'll read a paper and say to myself, "This doesn't make much sense! Why would being primed with sadness make one do so and so?"

There are many times when psychologists and lay people alike will read empirical results and extrapolate away. In an article in Wired, Brendan Koerner extrapolates from research into creativity that reading or posting Twitter messages can be beneficial not detrimental to workers. After all, research shows that external and less obvious routes to overcoming stress, such as doing yoga or taking a walk, can promote greater productivity. But we know that not all forms of distraction are equal. Working on a hobby or playing a sport are simply not equivalent to watching TV or browsing Twitter posts.

Of course there are many good scientific articles, where the psychologists have a sense for the full scope of human nature, and consider their research of an emotion in light of the full and complex workings of the human. These are articles where the empirical truths coincide with the felt truth. At any rate, reading William James sounds very interesting, and I'll have to get my hands on that book. All this talk makes me want to read Kuhn's Structure of Scientific Revolutions.

Shifting gears, I want to share a paragraph that I set aside for posting on this blug, a few days ago. It comes from Haruki Murakami's gentle and thoughtful "What I Talk About When I Talk About Running," a take-off of Raymond Carver's "What We Talk About When We Talk About Love."

Most of what I know about writing I've learned through running every day. These are practical, physical lessons. How much can I push myself? How much rest is appropriate--and how much is too much? How far can I take something and still keep it decent and consistent? When does it become narrow-minded and inflexible? How much should I be aware of the world outside, and how much should I focus on my inner world? To what extent should I be confident in my abilities, and when should I start doubting myself?

In addition to thoughts about not doing/producing/creating enough, these are questions I encounter every day. Also I think lots about the nature-nurture debate...

I'm reading Chabon's Mysteries right now. It's hysterical, and about to get gay (I can only guess). I love how Arthur LeComte has lived in so many places in Pittsburgh. I love all of the places, Highland Park, the corner of Forbes and Wightman, Elbow Room. I lived at the corner of Forbes and Wightman, I had a few dates at the Elbow Room, and while I didn't know the Bellweathers, I was a Hebrew who ran through the Highland Park neighborhood and enjoyed a coffee there.

"The Emotion of Ontologic Wonder"

Elliot -

It sounds like you had quite the amazing trip. I think train riding - like bicycle riding and unlike car riding - is conducive to these kinds of experiences. When your not stuck in a nausea inducing aluminum box eating fast food, life can really catch you by surprise. It must have been pretty amazing to ride through the rockies. I'll put taking a train ride across the country on my list of things to do right after bicycling across the country.

"The Emotion of Ontologic Wonder" is a phrase that comes from William James, the father of the Pragmatist school of philosophy. I could try to give you a quick summary of Pragmatism but I'm only on page 18 of his book. The first chapter is on the Sentiment of Rationality, which means the absence of irrationality or that pleasant feeling we get when we convince ourselves that we actually know something. The question then is how do we get to that sentiment of rationality.

In order to pass the rationality test, he argues, we need two requirements: theoretical and practical. The theoretical being the ability to place order to things (think empiricism), and the practical being the ability to know the looseness and disorder of things (think fallibility). His rationality test may seem contradictory, but that is his point. From what I gather, James is making a rational argument against rationality. Call it irony or call it chutzpah, they both should work. To him any workable philosophy must appeal as a compromise of both the theoretic and practical requirements - it must allow for scientific reason combined with an understanding of the severe limits of knowing.

Cutting to the chase....

James thinks that any argument that ends in absolute certainty will soon reach for a metaphysical truth. No law of gravity can explain why there is gravity, after all. The question of "Why?" will always follow a scientific conclusion. According to James, science brings us to this point of order only for us to then reach for a metaphysical non-entity to try and explain the unknowable phenomenon. This is where "The emotion of ontologic wonder" comes into play - this is that feeling we get when we are unsatisfied by empiricism and find either comfort or fear in the disorder and chaos.

Okay, I'll stop here. I'm finding this to be a very interesting read and one that may relate to your train riding experience. When you finally got to the point where you had nothing else left to write, and when you stopped and talked to the amish men, and when you took in the landscape of the rockies, my guess is that you probably had little interest in empiricism and logic. But I bet you had a serious sense of ontologic wonder.

I'll keep you updated as I continue reading. The next chapter is about pragmatism in decision making and I'm pretty psyched.

Zach

Re: A Social Business

Zach,

Did you see the SOTU? What profound awesomeness. If I've ever heard a call to forget the day-to-day, forget the news cycle, and leave conventional wisdom to its own devices, that was a vivid reminder.

On to social business! So it looks like Grameen Bank (which sounds a lot like Gringots Bank, eh?) had enough capital to convince Danone to enter this otherwise unconventional market. And, as you say, the goal is for Danone to make off profitably from this venture.

I'm a bit less familiar with the conventional social business model (I'll have to read Yunus' book or something), but there are a lot of ways to leverage social networks for good.

Social networks--actually really any network--clearly provide the ability to organize. If you're thinking Saul Alinsky, then think of the site Groupon, which negotiates a lower price for goods if the site can bring in a certain threshold of people (e.g., if Groupon gets 100 people, then dinner costs you $10 instead of $20). The flipside of Groupon is organized blackmail. I can't find a good article on the matter, but it looks like the United Students Against Sweatshops used Facebook groups to boycott Russell Athletic, and eventually changed Russell's factory policies.

Other examples: Joe Green's Causes application on Facebook gets users to join various causes and donate money. The American Red Cross leveraged cell phone networks and made it easy to donate money--all people have to do is text "HAITI" to 90999, and $10 is added to their cell phone bill.

A few words on crowd-sourcing: A tree just fell outside of the coffee shop I'm at, and a slew of people went outside and began taking pictures with their cell phones. It brings to mind the thousands gathered in Oakland after the Steelers won the Super Bowls. Thousands of people were, well, taking pictures. This is another big feature of connectivity. The most valuable iPhone applications involve crowd-sourcing. Trapster allows people to mark speed traps. Trapster, and applications like it, are ever growing systems, allowing people to bestow benefits to others.

Still, there's a lot of dubious benefit to the organizing going on on Facebook. The benefits of Trapster are apparent, but it's a very first-world utility.

So. I can think of a few types of programs which would result in social good, but this is a very open-ended discussion. Here's one. When a person went missing last month, the family's first step was to launch their campaign on Facebook and MySpace. A consulting firm could be launched to run social media campaigns. That's not a self-sustaining business, but it's something.

Does that spur any ideas?

Elliot

Making it back home

Zach,

The ride across country was amazing. Tuesday night I met a gent who came to Pittsburgh from Chicago to meet a girl who he met through an online video game, where he was a clan leader. Wednesday was a few hours in Chicago, where I toured the Art Institute, and then met the wonderful Ayelet from my high school days. On the Zephyr from Chicago, I met a truck driver who spoke about the wonders of his iPhone, the new economy, and paradigm shifts.

I read about the American Red Cross raising funds for Haiti through text-messaging, an unfathomable $500,000 per hour. I spoke with a couple who studies the Feldenkrais method who quoted yogi Richard Freeman who said, "if something is popular, then I want to know what's wrong with it?" I met a girl from England who travels foreign countries to disprove stereotypes that they are dangerous.

I spoke with a few of the eight Amish, taking a trip from Nebraska to Tijuana for medical treatment. I spoke with a Silicon Valley programmer about the lifestyle of working at a Valley company. I spoke with a Cal Tech physics undergrad and Stanford PhD about the hilarious Richard Feynman and his advisor, Linus Pauling. I played my mandolin with a guitarist from the Netherlands. We had a long conversation about politics, media, Islam in Europe, and the EU.

I got to write. I described the soaring landscape of Colorado, the gorgeous but dangerous Donner Pass. I wrote about things on my mind, about plans for the future. I got to the point at 6:30pm Mountain Time on Thursday where I felt I had expressed on paper whatever it was I had wanted to. I finished reading Murakami's amazing Kafka on the Shore. I didn't use my computer once, didn't have access to the Internet. I was free from distraction, and so my mind could be liberated.

And I'm back. Now the task is, as DFW puts it, keeping the important things, the expansive things, in front of me on a daily basis. So there's a bit of writing and reading in store.

Elliot

Choo Choo

Dear Elliot,

Did you make it home?

Zach

Social Business

Dear Elliot -

For the sake of not wanting to think about the failing Obama presidency, I think it might be interesting to talk about some exciting, new approaches to solving the world's problems.

The idea that comes to mind is from Muhammed Yunus, the Nobel Prize winner and founder of the Grameen Bank, in his book "The World Without Poverty". In his book, Yunus advocates for the creation of "Social Businessess" - essentially, businesses that provide services and/or products and compete with for-profit businesses for market share, while having the sole mission of making social change.

The social business would work towards profit, but it's owners would not receive dividends, instead all profits would go to expanding the business so as to further create positive change. The best example of this is a partnership between Grameen Bank and Danon (the french yogurt company). The two have partnered to sell cheaply packaged, inexpensive, and highly nutritious yogurt to people in poverty in Bangladesh. While the partnership has every intention of making profit off this exercise, the main mission is to help solve childhood malnutrition.

I think this is a fantastic idea. In general, I am all for incorporating business models into social change initiatives. What could be more sustainable? And when it comes to effectiveness, businesses have the reputation for being much more efficient. I'm loving the idea.

Do you have any social business models in mind? Perhaps some sort of social networking idea? I'm all about exploring this concept further.

Zach

Do you write, or are you a writer?

I want to link to a NYTimes Magazine article by James Traub that I read towards the end of the semester. Traub is, I think, such a clear writer, something that I aspire to be. Here's a favorite piece of reportage from that article:

One of [Biden's] former aides — Washington is rife with them — told me that she had learned an important life lesson from her boss: “Question people’s judgment, not their motives.”

That seems like a great piece of advice. It also says something about Traub who's able, probably in limited conversation with a person, to elicit a fundamental lesson that Biden gave to this aide of his. It's like if you asked someone, "what's the most important thing your parents have taught you," and they gave you a gem like this.

Being a good writer is something that won't wane with the economic woes of brick-and-mortar newspapers. If communication is a good skill to have, and it is, then thinking and writing is the best exercise at improving at communication.

Something that writers encounter is thoughts about who is reading their work. How will they judge me? Will they like what I'm writing about? Andrew Sullivan doesn't have comments on his blog. Seems like a big affront to the democratic standards of the blogosphere. So, I asked him, does he ever edit what he writes when he considers how readers might perceive it? He said he doesn't ever self-edit, or second guess what he's going to write based on thinking about his audience. (So, you might ask, why not allow comments?)

Consider Mark Pincus. Mark a successful Internet entrepreneur, and on top of the social networking applications market right now. He keeps a personal blog where he writes about business decisions and shares personal thoughts. He writes about his thoughts on the Congressional deal-making here, and writes about his conception of the new Internet era here. This is a terrific line (especially that latter post) to the thoughts of someone who is doing very important things that shape the lives of many in society. But look at the comments he's getting. They're not reflective. They're people who are bringing their gripes about his company's products to his personal blog. That's a chilling reception to someone who wants to share their thoughts. Which should prompt the question, is the best form of blogging to broadcast to the Internet? Will the best kind of writing come from a form where you write with consciousness of how others will perceive your post and comment on it?

No doubt that blogging is important. It's a chance to share ideas with people who might be able to build on your ideas. It allows you to transcend people in your immediate space and reach out to the .005% of the world that has substantive thoughts about the ideas you have.

But sharing with everyone is a weird concept. Weird? But why? Writers (like Jon Chait and his TRB) do it all the time. But I think successful writers in the public space have had years to hone their voice. To wit, you don't just start writing by signing up to write TRB. If you can firm your voice before the limelight, it seems like that preparation could be useful once you're getting attention.