Matthew Henty

This has to be one of the best quotes of the post-crunch period:

“GE’s problems could not have been foreseen, he insists. “We had McKinsey do a study in July 2007 and we asked them to say how long the global liquidity bubble will last and they came back and said forever, so it wasn’t like we didn’t ask the tough questions.”"

In a Guardian puff-piece on General Electric here: http://m.guardian.co.uk/?id=102202&story=http://www.guardian.co.uk/business/2010/jan/14/general-electric-jeff-immelt-multinational

I was at the RSA this evening for and event (#rsasmile on twitter) with Barbara Ehrenreich talking about her book “Smile or Die – How Positive Thinking Fooled America and the World” (Amazon link). Guardian review (because I am that type of guy…) here and an extract here.

Her thesis is pretty much what you would imagine from the title of the book, that overly positive thinking does nothing but distract and fool you – be a realist instead. See your real situation. Sounds a bit like rationality to me, as preached by all those over at Less Wrong. So I am all for it – I don’t think that George W. Bush or Sarah Palin can really be doing any good with a completely blinkered approach to life. Just because you believe something doesn’t make it true. And just because something has happened, doesn’t mean it was for the best, or meant to be. Nonsense and piffle.

The point from the audience that struck me was a comment from someone who heads up the UK office of a US organisation. She said that the only reason that she can get away with her approach to work is because of the three-thousand miles of ocean between here and there. She claimed that she would not be employable at the US head office, would be seen as, “not a team player”, and believed that this had major implications for US / UK relations. And for the rest of the world.

I hope she is wrong, but those statements really struck a chord. And this is where it really starts to matter, and where we see leaders appealing to personal conviction to justify actions that have real world impacts. Conviction means almost nothing in the end – not when it runs straight into reality and causes death and destruction. But personal conviction seems to feature more and more in our political discourse, our international relations. That is scary.

As an aside, one thing that confused me is what the definition of positive psychology is. The wikipedia article looks a bit wishy washy from the first sentence, but I interpreted a lecture from Sonja Lyubomirsky I saw online (and posted about here) differently. I thought they were documenting correlations between behaviours and self-reported happiness, which is interesting and harmless, and can help think about what contentment, or happiness is. There must be something else built on top of this to attract the hostility I think Barbara Ehrenreich has for the field. More research needed… perhaps tomorrow.

Authors@Google: Sonja Lyubomirsky

Research shows that happy people:

• Nurture and enjoy their social relationships
• Are comfortable expressing gratitude
• Are often the first to help others
• Practice optimism about the future
• Savor pleasures and live in the present moment
• Make physical activity a habit
• Are often spiritual or religious
• Are deeply committed to lifelong goals

Kind of obvious – “hokey” even – but supposedly backed up by experimental research.

Happiness takes work.

Measuring happiness, subjective, ask questions:
- Are you a happy person?
- Life satisfaction – how do you feel about your life right now (terrible to delighted)

Experiments:

Counting one’s blessings
- A gratitude journal, weekly vs  three times a week vs control
- Increase in self-reported gratitude, but only in the once a week group.
- Increase in reported happiness – only in the once a week group.
(Why? – three times a week is too often, not fresh, a chore. Effort, hard to do every few days so makes you feel worse. Too hard to think of.)
- Works on average, but not for everyone. Diagnostic tool in book to help identify what is likely to work for you.

Committing acts of kindness
- Chinese proverb – if you want happiness for an hour, take a nap; for a day, go fishing; for a month, get married; for a year, inherit a fortune; for a lifetime, help somebody else.
- three or nine acts of kindness a week. High variety, low variety and control.
- Only high variety worked, otherwise boring?

Effort is important.

Eliezer Yudkowsky at Less Wrong has an interesting post called, “Atheism = Untheism + Antitheism” which puts the endless debates about belief, atheism and “new atheism” in a little bit of context. He ends up defending Dawkins and Hitchins too, which perhaps makes me sympathetic to his argument.

His argument is that “Atheism” is really made up of two distinct components, which one might call “untheism” and “antitheism”.

Where,

A pure “untheist” would be someone who grew up in a society where the concept of God had simply never been invented – where writing was invented before agriculture, say, and the first plants and animals were domesticated by early scientists.  In this world, superstition never got past the hunter-gatherer stage – a world seemingly haunted by mostly amoral spirits – before coming into conflict with Science and getting slapped down.

…..

So if you come up to the Untheists and say:

“The universe was created by God -”

“By what?”

“By a, ah, um, God is the Creator – the Mind that chose to make the universe -”

“So the universe was created by an intelligent agent.  Well, that’s the standard Simulation Hypothesis, but do you have actual evidence confirming this?  You sounded very certain -”

“No, not like the Matrix!  God isn’t in another universe simulating this one, God just… is.  He’s indescribable.  He’s the First Cause, the Creator of everything -”

“Okay, that sounds like you just postulated an ontologically basic mental entity.  And you offered a mysterious answer to a mysterious question.  Besides, where are you getting all this stuff?  Could you maybe start by telling us about your evidence – the new observation you’re trying to interpret?”

“I don’t need any evidence!  I have faith!”

“You have what?“

And at this very moment the Untheists have become, for the first time, Atheists.  And what they just acquired, between the two points, was Antitheism – explicit arguments against explicit theism.  You can be an Untheist without ever having heard of God, but you can’t be an Antitheist.

…..

There’s nothing inherently fulfilling about arguing against Goddism – in a society of Untheists, no one would ever give the issue a second thought…….  Yet in the long run, the goal is an Untheistic society, not an Atheistic one – one in which the question “What’s left, when God is gone?” is greeted by a puzzled look and “What exactly is missing?”

And as for the claim that religion is compatible with Reason – well, is there a single religious claim that a well-developed, sophisticated Untheist culture would not reject?  When they have no reason to suspend judgment, and no anti-epistemology of separate magisteria, and no established religions in their society to avoid upsetting?

Exactly correct.

And lets not get into an argument about how good it is that we have belief, how much better it makes us feel. It isn’t real, so please can we just move on?