The New Yorker carries two features this week with some great anecdotes illustrating how current psychology views the role of effort and free will. I’ve thrown in a link to my new favorite science publication, Seed Magazine, which combines top notch science feature-writing with an impressive breadth of cultural awareness. They also have an impeccable design department headed by Ben Fry, who wrote the textbooks to a visualization class I took.
Malcolm Gladwell describes a computer-engineer-turned-little-league-basketball-coach who takes his daughter’s team to victory in the junior nationals simply by using a continuous full-court press. It’s a deadly effective strategy, but also “socially horrifying.” The article explores other examples where simply “putting in a lot of effort” is met with resistance by our culture at large.
Jonah Lehrer writes about a psychology study that found that children who are able to suppress their craving for candy for a future reward end up being more successful later on in life. While this isn’t terribly surprising, the underlying psychological explanation–metacognition, or the awareness of your own thought processes–is intriguing. Is highly developed metacognition a genetic trait, or can it be cultivated? You can probably guess which answer is most appealing to the readers of the New Yorker.
Seed Magazine features the “eusocial” insects–ants, bees, and wasps–to illuminate an age-old puzzle in evolutionary theory: how does altruism evolve? Why is it that most hive members become sterile workers, slaving away while unable to pass their genes on to the next generation? One idea is that workers are still helping out their own genes since they are related to the queen (who does have offspring). However, some species have “selfless” social roles even when hive members aren’t closely related.
End the ban on illegal drugs, writes this week’s Economist. Flatly put, “the war on drugs has been a disaster, creating failed states in the developing world even as addiction has flourished in the rich world. By any sensible measure, this 100-year struggle has been illiberal, murderous and pointless.”
This isn’t your typical liberal stoner diatribe, however — the Economist admits up front that drug use is likely to increase under a legal system. But governments should still legalize, because doing so decreases auxiliary crime and puts the emphasis on treating drug addiction as an issue of public health problem rather law enforcement. Legalization is also unequivocably better for developing countries, many of whom are falling apart at the seams because of drug-related organized crime.
What about morality? Aren’t more kids going to have their lives ruined by addiction? Not any more than they already are:
[Eliminating drugs] is the kind of promise politicians love to make. It assuages the sense of moral panic that has been the handmaiden of prohibition for a century. It is intended to reassure the parents of teenagers across the world. Yet it is a hugely irresponsible promise, because it cannot be fulfilled.
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Under Mao Tse-tung, the country used a basic but effective network of so-called “barefoot doctors”. But since the introduction of sweeping economic reforms in the past two decades, everything has changed. The reforms have brought new wealth but the collapse of many local clinics and free services mean that poorer families simply can’t afford health care and serious illness can bankrupt them.
["Heathcare in China" via BBC World Service]
Heard this short radio documentary on BBC World yesterday when I was driving. I ended up stopping the car and sat in the parking lot of a store so I could finish listening. The funny thing about growing up along with your home country is you don’t notice your country’s peculiarities until much later. For me, the idea of walking in off the street and getting hospital care seemed entirely natural, until I went back to China a few years ago and found it really strange to go to the doctor as easily as I could buy candy. But then again, how else would China provide adequate health-care to 1.3 billion people?
This is actually part two of two in a series about health-care systems around the world. Part one is about health-care in the US and the UK.
Tim Wu, via Slate, on why China has been getting so much embarrassing press during the Olympics, even though they’re trying so hard to be good hosts:
China’s idea of what makes for a better Olympics for foreign consumption—tightened security and cleaning up marginal elements—is exactly what makes Western reporters crazy…you want to clean things up, but the West wants to see the dirt, not the rug it was swept under. It’s the dishonesty, as much as the substance of what’s wrong in China, that seems to get under the skin of Western reporters.
Beijing itself is an expression of the problem…It suffers from the current obsession with fazhan (“development”), which in urban-planning terms replicates the “giant soulless block” development style of Robert Moses and the American 1950s. Authenticity, which Western culture valorizes, isn’t something that Chinese people or planners go for right now. There’s a tendency to either modernize or tear down old structures, instead of trying to preserve their decay in the way Westerners like. It’s all just a little too nouveau riche to get much respect.
[Are the Media Being too Mean to China? via Slate]
As the author of the article later puts it, there’s “a sense that no matter what China does, it won’t really be accepted as an equal on the world stage, that it will always be left cleaning the toilet at the OECD country club.” Maybe that’s why there is such a wide audience for the sentiments expressed in this video:
[2008 China Stand Up! via The New Yorker]
Came across some innovative new thoughts about street design when I was on The Bostonist this morning. The article talks about redesigning Boston’s streets to be more amenable to pedestrians, by applying some rather subtle psychological tricks, which is encapsulated in the “Shared Space” philosophy of street design:
The curb is a big enemy in the Shared Space philosophy, because the curb is a separator, dictating what belongs to the pedestrian and what belongs to the vehicle. There are other enemies as well: signs, lines on the road, even traffic lights. Pioneered by Dutch traffic engineer Hans Monderman, who died earlier this year at age 62, Shared Space gets the street naked, removes all physical and psychological barriers, and forces cars and pedestrians to share. The concept makes the street safe by making it dangerous to proceed without paying attention. We have some elements of Shared Space here; in Downtown Crossing, Winter and Summer streets have no curb and, in the mornings, commercial vehicles mix with pedestrians.
[via Boston Globe]
On an unrelated note, this type of unconventional, wholistic thinking reminds me of a passage in Michael Pollan’s The Omnivore’s Dilemma, which I’ve just now managed to jump on the bandwagon and read. The book has chapter after chapter of enlightening–and sometimes shocking–stories about food, farming, industry, etc, but one of the most remarkable sections was about a agricultural (and political) radical named Joel Salatin and his “beyond organic” approach to farming. After the jump: Why I almost want to be a farmer now, and another TED talk
