Progress-focused

I learned about Sean Carroll, theoretical physicist at Caltech, through various interesting YouTube videos on topics such as the non-existence of an afterlife , theism versus naturalism , the arrow of time , the relation between the laws of nature and the meaning of life . Elaborating on that latter theme, Sean Carroll has written an extremely ambitious new book called The Big Picture, On the Origins of Life, Meaning, and The Universe itself in which he, as the title suggests, presents a view on everything trying to integrate what scientists have discovered about cosmology and particle science with a view on meaning of life and morality.

Scott Barry Kaufman wrote an article in which he asserted that deliberate practice may be important in achievement domains such as chess and playing a musical instrument but that it does not work as well for almost any creative domain. His argument is: deliberate practice works well for activities which rely on consistently replicable behaviors that must be repeated over and over again but this is not what creative performance relies on. In a response to Kaufman's article, The deliberate creative , Cal Newport refutes Kaufman's assertion convincingly.

K. Anders Ericsson is a Swedish psychologist who is a professor at Florida State University. In the beginning of his career he worked with among other Nobel laureate Herbert Simon. He is recognized as the most prominent researcher in the area of expertise development. Together with his colleagues, he has done research into how experts in different areas have managed to reach the top of their fields. Uptil now he has mostly scientific publications. But now he and Robert Pool have published a popular book about expertise development: Secrets from the New Science of Expertise . Here is an interview with Ericsson about this new book. 

Irrational beliefs can be harmful to ourselves and others. Therefore, being prepared to update our beliefs (making them more realistic/rational) can be wise. However, this is usually not easy because there can be multiple obstacles to do it. But if if we see the usefulness of letting go of irrational beliefs a few practical tips can help us make progress. Helping other people to get rid of irrational beliefs is another matter. We usually recognize other people's irrationality easier that our own irrationality (if we'd clearly see that our beliefs were irrational we would not hold on them in the first place). Seeing other people's irrationality can make us want to confront them about their irrationality. However, such confrontations seldom work.

One of the ways we can counter irrational beliefs is by informing ourselves about some well documented cognitive biases, heuristics and effects which all to some extent skew are perception of reality, usually without us being aware of it. I'll keep my explanations brief because it is quite easy to learn more about each of these biases, heuristics and effects by googling them.

I define irrational beliefs as beliefs which are incoherent or logically inconsistent and which are in conflict with what we know about reality (in conflict with available evidence, that is). Nobody is free from irrational beliefs. Our way of interpreting reality is not and never will be perfect. We are afflicted with systematic biases in how we perceive reality. Furthermore, through our upbringing and culture, we all inevitably have, without us being aware of it, adapted beliefs which are outdated. That we have irrational beliefs does not mean we must acquiesce in that fact. Critically reflecting on your own beliefs is a good thing. It enables you to develop your view on the world and to make it more realistic. For several reasons that can be hard. In this post I described four factors which impede the process of changing our of beliefs: (1) the confirmation bias, (2) self-fulfilling prophecies, (3) labeling oneself based on one's beliefs, and (4) social pressure. Then, in ...

In 1859 Charles Darwin published his book The Origin of species in which he described a mechanism for the process of evolution of species for the first time. At its core the idea of evolution boils down to: the unity of life (all life is connected), the diversity of life, and the match between organisms and their environment can be explained by descent with modification through natural selection ( Vermeij, 2015 ).

The Dunning-Kruger effect is the phenomenon that people who are incompetent in a certain area often are not aware -and cannot be aware- of just how incompetent they are. A explanation of this counter intuitive effect is the following: when you know little about a subject you do not know how much knowledge you are lacking due to which you are likely to overestimate yourself.

Writing down the title of this post feels awkward and even a bit scary. Who am I to disagree with Steven Weinberg ? He is a paragon of rationality and intellectual accomplishment. He's won a Nobel prize in physics, he coined the phrase 'standard model' and he recently wrote a wonderful book on the history of science ( read more ). So he has lots of authority on matters of science whereas I have little if any. Yet, in determining truth, authority alone is not a valid argument. So I will point out where I think he is wrong.

Guest post by Jamie Hale  The effort required to form strong memory is often intense for students. Students often spend hours trying to master new information. Of course, methods to enhance memory are important for everyone, not just students. For example, when a friend recommends a new shoe store we want to remember the name of of it, or when going to the grocery it is important to remember the items we need to pick up. What are some strategies that can be used to strengthen memory?

In this post from 2012 , I wrote that people may create fear in order to control other people. I explained that creating fear is an effective way of gaining people's attention, creating hyper-vigilance, suppressing their rationality, and legitimizing violence in order to fight the (supposed) threats and to enforce loyalty. People doing this set in motion a vicious cycle. In other words, a process of escalation seems inevitable. In order to keep their followers' fears sustained, and their rationality suppressed, they have to keep feeding them new information about the (supposed) threat. By creating more fear, they get more attention, suppress more people's rationality, legitimize greater violence, and acquire greater control. These are the methods dictators use.

"I-am-thinking" can be more harmful than we may realize. How we think and talk about ourselves, and others, can have a great influence on our and others' emotions, behavior, results, and development. Research by Mueller & Dweck (1998), for example, has shown that different types of praise can have different types of effects. Praising traits and abilities can evoke a fixed mindset while praising effort can evoke a growth mindset.

Last year I wrote that the existence of ego depletion is doubtful ( here ) and that I think the concept is based on a too simple way of thinking about psychology ( here - sorry it is in Dutch). Now it appears that the curtain definitely falls for the concept of ego depletion.

In a new article in Harvard Business Review Dan Cable and Freek Vermeulen, both professors of organizational behavior and strategic management, argue for the complete abolishment of contingent pay for top managers. They offer the following 5 arguments:

Since long, it has been known that how we interpret events in our lives has a strong influence on our feelings and behavior and, because of that, also on future events in our lives. An example of an event which can have a strong emotional impact is to get personally rejected. As new research by Howe & Dweck (2016) shows, the degree to which people can recover from personal rejection depends on how they think about personality.

Coert Visser, September 6, 2013 In their large-scale study, Teresa Amabile and Steven Kramer have discovered that making progress in meaningful work is a main contributor to a positive work life and to good performance (Read more about this study, here ). Here are a few practical suggestions to harness the power of meaningful progress.

Coert Visser, September 12, 2013 By focusing on progress in meaningful work, your work experience and your performance are stimulated . It is useful to make explicit what progress you have achieved, for example by keeping a progress diary . If you don’t make progress explicit it may well be that you are not aware of the progress you are actually making. This is because progress can remain largely invisible if you don’t consciously focus on it. The reason for this is that we usually focus our conscious attention mainly on what has gone wrong and on what we still have to do. Progress which you have already made is thus easily overlooked.

Coert Visser, September 9, 2013 Making progress in meaningful work is one of the most motivating factors for employees. Therefore, it is important to talk about and to describe desired and achieved progress, frequently. But did you know that negative occurrences such as setbacks and failures can have a 2 to 3 times stronger (negative) effect on motivation than positive factors? This was shown in a study by Amabile and Kramer .

Coert Visser, September 7, 2013 In 5 steps to harness the progress principle I mentioned the research finding that progress in meaningful work is extremely motivating. In other words, the more you think that your work contributes to what is valuable to you, the more motivating it will be for you to achieve progress in this work. To speak of meaningful work, means to go beyond a simple task or results focus. To do meaningful work means that, as an employee, you have the feeling that completing the task or achieving the results is linked to an underlying purpose that is valuable to you. Here is an example.

Coert Visser, Juli 1, 2012 In 2011, Teresa Amabile, a professor of Business Administration at Harvard Business School and Steven Kramer, a developmental psychologist published the book The Progress Principle: Using Small Wins to Ignite Joy, Engagement, and Creativity at Work which is one of the most compelling cases yet for focusing on progress in work. In the book they report on a large scale study into worker performance and motivation. One thing Amabile and Kramer did was to survey more than 600 managers from dozens of companies, asking them to rank the impact on employee motivation and emotions of five workplace factors: recognition for good work, incentives, interpersonal support, making progress and clear goals. The majority of these managers, chose “recognition for good work”. But a multiyear study which tracked day-to-day activities of 238 people in 26 project teams in 7 companies in 3 industries showed that these managers were not right about this. The study exami...

In progress focused work we argue for positive, goal oriented ways of communicating. As much as possible we try to avoid negative expressions such as anger or blame because these generally needlessly threaten both the issue and the relationship. Sometimes people ask whether such negative communication might be effective or even necessary in certain situations. They argue that these negative expressions might create a sense of urgency and pressure in your conversation partner to go along with your expectations. Based on this idea they may even argue that feigning anger is a good way to get people to go along with your expectations. This tactic, according to them, could be applied in conflict situations, negotiations and in conversations in which performance expectations need to be clarified.

Some time ago I wrote about economist Richard Wolff's book Democracy at work. A cure for capitalism in which he argued that capitalism is inherently threatening to democracy and that a fundamental change is needed in the direction of Worker Self-Directed Enterprises (WSDEs) which would be an alternative to capitalism ( read my explanation of this argument here ). While I found the book interesting, I wasn't convinced that capitalism should be replaced. Now, there is a book by another economist, also one who is very critical about current day capitalism and concerned for the protection of the democracy, Robert Reich . The book is called Saving Capitalism: For the Many, Not the Few and it argues not for the replacement of capitalism but for its rescue.

Neuroplasticity is the property of the brain to keep developing throughout life. Over the last decade or so more information has become available about how great this capability of the brain is. In this post I write about how important neuroplasticity's role can be in healing diseases and in this post I discuss some skeptical views on neuroplasticity. Since I started reading about neuroplasticity, about 10 years ago, I began to wonder how far the possibilities of brain training could go. One of the questions which interested me in particular was the question of to which degree age-related problems can be prevented or reversed. A topic about which I was specifically curious is presbyopia, the condition in which aging people are progressively less able to focus. This condition usually starts around age 40 and, from what I read, from age 50 nearly everybody is so affected by it that reading glasses are necessary in order to read.

Recently I have referred to the influence on modern societies of ideas and values from the Enlightenment. Here I call Enlightenment values an important basis for the progress which has happened in the Western world over the last two centuries and suggest that the rest of the world can benefit from them as much (which is actually happening more and more).

I'd like to introduce two concepts: level-thinking and progress-thinking. Below, I will explain what I mean with these two terms and argue for putting less emphasis on level-thinking and more on progress-thinking. Level-thinking is a way of thinking in which people, when they assess other people or themselves and when they set goals, emphasize the achieved level and desired level.  Progress-thinking is a way of thinking in which people, when they assess or set goals, emphasize achieved and desired progress. These two ways of thinking have a number of different characteristics and consequences which I will describe below.