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Betterment

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For group dynamics to produce really bad behaviour, you really need to work at it. You have to train your authority figures to be cruel, prevent dissent or disengagement, and intervene all the time to stop people fixing things. It’s hard.

Catastrophic leadership is actually really hard

Article

There’s this cluster of classic social psychology experiments from the 50’s through the 70’s that you’ll be presented with in documentaries and whatnot whenever groups of people are behaving crazily. You’ve probably heard of some of them. Milgram’s ‘shock’ experiments, or Zimbardo’s prison experiment, or Asch’s conformity tests, and so on. This is the first in a little series on group dynamics. Here we’ll talk about the classic experiments, and show that the kinds of catastrophic group dynamics people trot out to illustrate them are actually really difficult to achieve.

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betterment collective-architecture connection on-ethics on-leadership somatic-architecture on-culture on-friendship

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We can think of motivations in terms of three things. There is the content: what things motivate us. Then there is the process: how things motivate us. And lastly, we have those things that maintain our motivation.

Motivation pt. II: Stickytaping it all together

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I needed to do a little refresher on motivation for another audience, so I’m going to subject you to it as well. It’s a messy subject, but at a high level, there are some interesting frameworks for understanding what makes people do things. This is part two of a two part series, where I’ll outline theories that try to make the mess all work together, with mixed success.

We can think of motivations in terms of three things. There is the content: what things motivate us. Then there is the process: how things motivate us. And lastly, we have those things that maintain our motivation.

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betterment on-leadership somatic-architecture wealth-architecture

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Individually, the disconnected dichotomies of intrinsic vs extrinsic, normative vs motivating, ‘cognitive’ and ‘biological’, and the like have little utility. But when you put them together, you can get some quite juicy fidelity on why people do what they do.

Motivation pt. I: Haphazard Dichotomies

Article

I needed to do a little refresher on motivation for another audience, so I’m going to subject you to it as well. It’s a messy subject, but at a high level, there are some interesting frameworks for understanding what makes people do things. This is part one of a two part series, where I’ll outline the main thing motivation theory has produced: a series of haphazard dichotomies. And then I’ll show you how you can use them best.

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betterment on-leadership somatic-architecture wealth-architecture

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Stress is a good thing before it’s a bad thing. It motivates us to act. We are scared of the f’s, but we don’t need to be. We should fight for things worth fighting for and fly from things that aren’t. Use the f’s as guides to action, not just things to avoid.

Giving in to Fight or Flight

Article

One particularly sticky idea is the idea of ‘fight or flight’ or whatever variation of “fight, flight, freeze, fawn, and sometimes f***”. As you might be able to tell from the slow accumulation of f’s, fight or flight is suffering from the chinese whispers effect that has us drawing wildly innappropriate conclusions from academic literature and the superficial silliness of many pop-psych ideas—where will the f’s end! So, let’s dust of the f’s and make them useful again.

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betterment on-(un)happiness on-being-fruitful somatic-architecture

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Bias reduces noise—if you know roughly what to expect, then being biased by those expectations means you won’t get distracted by less relevant data points.

Bias is good

Article

If you haven’t heard of System 1 and System 2, you’ve probably heard one of its analogues. People who say ‘don’t let your amygdala hijack your frontal lobes’, or ‘get out of the sympathetic and into the parasympathetic nervous system’, or ‘something something vagus nerve’ are using pseudo-brain science to get at the same thing. But the thing everyone seems to have taken away from this book is the thing we always take away—System 1 stuff, a.k.a. bias is a bad thing. This is not what Kahneman was going for. Kahneman was trying to show us how both System 1 and System 2 have their place.

Bias reduces noise—if you know roughly what to expect, then being biased by those expectations means you won’t get distracted by less relevant data points.

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betterment gratification on-being-fruitful on-thinking-and-reasoning somatic-architecture thought-architecture wealth-architecture

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