Latest Parries
April 2012
From Nokia N95 to iPhone 4S
Annoyances and upsets with the iPhone 4S have been more than offset by its screen, the silkiness of its surfaces, the camera, and the third-party market for both software and hardware.
February 2012
2001: A Space Odyssey: Dry, Juicy, Linear, Luminous
After they finished watching the Bond movies, I figured the next series John Gruber and Dan Benjamin would discuss on The Talk Show would be Stanley Kubrick’s oeuvre. But Gruber refused — too personal for podcasting, he said. Disappointed, I rewatched 2001.
January 2012
A Scheme of a Number of Friends
Instead of acknowledging the wisdom of leading from behind, the Right jumped on the Obama administration’s handling of Libya as yet another example of at best incompetence. They lost me there.
October 2011
The Mouse and the Cantilever
Steve Jobs we lost at the age of 56; when Frank Lloyd Wright reached that age it was still only 1923, the time of merely his second comeback with Tokyo’s Imperial Hotel.
March 2010
Friendship is for Weenies
It’s amazing, given the adulation he enjoyed elsewhere, that the Israeli public knew from the start not to trust this US President.
Before the Setup
Nobody from usesthis.com has asked me what my setup us, nor is likely to anytime soon. So I’m just going to mouth off here about it. But first, some background.
February 2010
Walter Russell Mead steps gingerly into the Wieseltier/Sullivan imbroglio
On the Leon Wieseltier/Andrew Sullivan spat, Walter Russell Mead seems to want to have his strudel and eat it too.
October 2009
My Hope: Obama’s Change
Defeat in the Olympics bid may focus the mind in the Oval Office where it should be: Afghanistan.
July 2009
At Modi’in Mall
There’s nothing else around here except empty desolate pretty hills. The Israel Trail passes by a bit to the west. It’s a hot July Wednesday morning. Things are reasonably busy. The shops are mostly franchises, almost all homegrown — Super-Pharm, Aroma, Tzomet Sfarim, Cup O’ Joe’s, LaMetayel, Mega, Fox, Castro, H&O.
Israel, the Bad So Far
I’m surprised at the general appearance of Tel Aviv folks. Yes, it’s hot, but people appear dressed as if they’re in, I don’t know, Be’er Sheva. And the people in Be’er Sheva, last time I was there, looked to me like they’re dressed for Gaza.
E ven before reducing the number of items on navigation menus I suspected that too much choice is debilitating. I personally have had some tough times deciding things and even once the decisions have been made have felt regrets about what I chose. I’ve read in a number of self-help books that a key characteristic of successful people is their quickness to decide and their lack of lingering over decisions once made, whether correct or not. The issue has plagued and intrigued me sufficiently to even inspire me to interview people with a tape recorder and ask them how they made decisions.
But asking people point blank about their own machinations is no way to gain access to interesting truth and insights about decision-making. This is social science and demands clever experiments. So watch this great hour-long lecture by Professor Barry Schwartz of Swathmore College entitled ‘The Paradox of Choice – Why More Is Less’ which has been viewed an amazing 74,000 times to date (there’s also a book).
Just like a picture can be worth a thousand words, so can an experiment. After participating, one group of subjects is offered the choice of $2 or a pen of the type sold in the campus store for $2.50. About 75% of the subjects choose the pen. Another group is offered $2 or the pen, or two cheaper pens. The percentage of people who choose either pen gift drops to 45%. Isn’t that amazing? And yet, doesn’t it make sense? What happens, Schwartz theorizes, is that each comparison between the two-cheap-pens option and the one-better-pen option reduces their perceived value. Alternatively, we get paralyzed in our evaluations and simply want to stop having to think about the comparison so we take the money and run from ourselves.
What’s Schwartz’s solution for this? Values. If, before venturing out into the marketplace you articulate what you actually need and want, if you create your own values, then you will benefit from the new abundance of choice. Otherwise you will suffer from it. He calls this meeting of predetermined criteria “satisficing”, as opposed to “maximising”, which is comparing all the what’s available until you find the very best. Satisficing is about your personal values, while maximising is about what’s out there.
That’s how I went about finding apartments in Tel Aviv — I guess the sheer effort that would have been involved in maximizing made me not bother, and I was much better for it. My first place on Witkin St I found through an agency, and it was the very first place the guy took me to. The next place, on Uriel Okosta St in the Florentin neighborhood, I found by seeing a young woman post a sign on a noticeboard; it too was the first place I saw that met my criteria, more or less. The place in Even Sapir outside Jerusalem I found by subscribing to a list of available apartments and viewing all the places in moshavs (agricultural communities) outside of town; it was the fourth place I saw while driving around throughout one single day. I came to love each of these places, as imperfect as each was in its way. This seems like a textbook example of Schwartz’s “satisficing”.
Even though Uriel Okosta was quite unsuitable in that it lacked anything outdoors, I never lamented the move much, which is another point of Schwartz’s: the more you agonize over a decision the more you’ll lament your final choice, even if it was ultimately a good one, because you’ve seen all the benefits of all the other options. Ignorance is bliss. Or at any rate, knowledge about the attractions of rejected choices is often disquieting to inchoate souls.
But more than that, with all this choice, the individual starts blaming himself for imperfections. Back when there were only two types of jeans, Schwartz argues, if they didn’t fit properly then it wasn’t his fault, it was the jeansmaker’s. But today, with 200 types, if they don’t fit it’s his fault for not having chosen the right pair. He argues that this self-blame is what accounts for the increase of depression in rich modern societies.
Why the title “Do better, feel worse”? Because the people who maximize rather than satisfice do in fact do better — chances they’ll find a nicer apartment, better paying job — but they’ll feel more harried, regretful and depressed about what they got.
I think his approach dovetails with David Allen’s Getting Things Done, which, as Allen often says, is about feeling okay about what you’re not doing. Central to GTD is that the mind isn’t great about doing all the things necessary for achieving peace of mind (“mind like water”, as he puts it) at the correct time. His classic example is that we tend to remember we need new batteries when we switch on the portable radio, not when we pass the hardware store. Allen believes there are five discrete activities required for mind like water — collecting, processing, organizing, reviewing and doing — and that each of these requires its own mood and energy level, and that problems occur when we try to do all of them at once. I think this is another way of stating the problem Schwartz brings up about buying a new car. Usually the process of deciding which features we want in a car is done by looking around at the market, rather than generating our own list of features before we even look at the market. We’ve combined two very different steps into one, and so having skipped the first step, we’re then paralyzed when trying to choose a car without having generated our own criteria for choice.
The message, it seems to me, is that we need to carve out plenty of time to ourselves, without input, in order to generate personal output. To be sure, we enjoy input, but we have so much of it that it’s crushing us, most vividly and obviously illustrated by the paralysis we undergo when faced with the multiplicity of choices. How do we know which we want if we don’t know what we want? Okay, so we need to carve out personal output time. But how do we know what we need to output? That comes down to a personal system. I believe GTD provides a fabulous skeleton for such a system, so neat and lean that it feels organic.
Schwartz notes that today we equate choices with freedom and freedom with happiness, therefore we assume choices equal happiness, and that is false. I’m persuaded of the falsehood of that syllogism, especially as I suspected it anyway. But what of the second part, the link between freedom and happiness? Well, what is freedom? It’s not the choosing that makes us happy, but the things that we choose — and stick with. For me, writing this blog every day (well, I’m not doing it every day, but I’m trying, I’m trying) is a self-imposed constraint. Rousseau wrote that Britons don’t deserve their freedom because whenever they get it they immediately give it away (ie, elections). But that seems nonsensical. The very exercise of freedom takes freedom away, as you’ve now committed to doing something which means you cannot do anything else during that time. Freedom is comprised of both the pivotal moments of choice between the fulfilment of obligations and the moments spent fulfilling them.
Previously
Now the Sailors are Safe, Pursue the Matter
Nextly
Without My Own Blog