Newsletter
Motivation pt. I: Haphazard Dichotomies and other things
November 29, 2024
Hello,
Here’s everything since my last little missive to you:
Motivation pt. I: Haphazard Dichotomies
Excerpt: 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.
Main idea: 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.
The Super-Rich And Their Secret Worlds: a tour of the unregulated frontier lands of global trade:
There’s been some recent reporting that art isn’t necessarily the investment it was once thought to be—not all works will appreciate like a Picasso might. But if you’re very wealthy, there are only so many places to put your money: real estate, stocks, and art is just another asset class.
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Why Do So Many People Want to Die?
There are still parts of the world today where rates of suicide are 10 times the average found elsewhere, apparently as the result of a local chain reaction … Yet, what could have set off the chain reaction to begin with? MacDonald has put forward what he calls the “wave theory” … suicide was probably at a “normal” level … until … some kind of catastrophe occurred—a cholera epidemic, a slave raid? … This caused a surge in suicides, and the wave has been propagating ever since.
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How To Give A Good Speech:
The art of good public speaking is often to say less, giving each idea time to breathe, and time to be absorbed by the audience. But the anxiety of the speaker pushes in the other direction, more facts, more notes, more words, all in the service of ensuring they don’t dry up on stage.
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The neuroscience of heartbreak. Bit silly, and as usual more of a psychology thing than a neuroscience thing, but fun. Most interesting part:
The adversity intensifies the passion according to a phenomenon called “frustration attraction”, and it’s due to the dopamine and norepinephrine rising occurring when seeking for the abandoner who broke the social tie. These two neurotransmitters are the main responsible for the chemical reactions of love, so when they increase in the attempts of winning someone back, so does your romantic passion for them.
I’d be very curious to know if it looks the same as limerance, or if it’s just another ‘look dopamine is involved in stuff’ thing. Maybe one day I’ll look it up, or one of you can tell me.
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The Myth Of The Loneliness Epidemic. Contra my article on the loneliness epidemic. They pose the question:
Alarms over the state of American friendship are nothing new. Over the last few decades, there has been a surge in writing about friendship in books and newspapers. Does this surge reflect a real crisis or simply the increasing value Americans place on friendships? Or is it just a popular cultural meme unmoored from reality?
I’m not left very swayed. They begin by pointing out how troublesome ‘friendship’ is to measure, then decide they the way they did it is better and conclude that the quality of friendship is at least the same, if not better. Then they go on to point out what might explain people feeling like they have less friends even though they don’t have a change in quality, which feels a bit equivocal—why is their measure of quality more important than people’s experience of it?
It’s basically an argument that we have higher expectations of friendship now, and when we go for the old ‘people are less hardcore than before’ argument it invariably does nothing to improve the situation for anyone.
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I hope you found something interesting.
You can find links to all my previous missives here.
Warm regards,