"DARVO" Habits-of-Mind

This article explains the core behaviors that true sociopaths all rely on to wreak their havoc, summing them up under the acronym DARVO: 

• Deny
• Attack
• Reverse Victim and Offender

While aggressive online trolls are not to be confused with sociopaths, I see a lot of commonality to the behaviors, especially around political topics.

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Deny = Denialism

Ignoring the facts, inventing "alternate facts" or, when absolutely desperate, claiming "false flag".

Attack = Whataboutism

Immediately pivoting to throw out scattershot claims about offenses the other side has committed. Whether those claims are factually accurate, and the offenses proportional, or logically relevant, is unimportant. All that matters is blasting them out, in order to deflect blame and change the subject.

Reverse Victim and Offender = Double Down

Doubling Down reverses the proposition from examining, explaining and justifying the problematic proposition in question, to embracing it and brazenly calling for more.

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I am not suggesting that the typical trollish online debater who embraces these tactics is a real-life sociopath, or even on a sociopath spectrum. I have personally seen plenty of examples of a person who exhibits this kind of behavior online, yet in real-life, they are totally normal, and might even be described as friendly, helpful, considerate. But the combination of online-ness and the contemporary political climate seems to bring out the "DARVO" cluster of behaviors in way too many people.

Clearly, this behavior is destructive and dangerous.  The immediate consequences are obvious: the DARVO approach makes online discourse highly abrasive, and immediately dumbs-down any attempts at serious discussion and intellectual exploration.

But long-term, I fear the online DARVOs may be doing lasting damage to their own personality, psyche and intellect, by ingraining such maladaptive habits of mind. Do years and decades of DARVO-like behaviors eventually cause a lasting change to the core personality?

Notes on Habits of Mind

Avoid single cause thinking.

Always adjust for inflation, especially when making direct comparisons (modern technology makes this easy nowadays).

Look for better ways to do everyday things. But be wary if better is coming at you via a sales pitch.

Never fail to recognize that policies or major decisions invariably have tradeoffs.

Resist algorithmic selection. E.g., don't mindlessly scroll through Netflix to find a show to watch--search for "best shows on Netflix". Better yet, maintain an ongoing list, to have a backlog at the ready. Certainly don't get your news from social media.

Don't confuse feeling like you are winning an argument with having a clear view of things. The tactics that we recruit for rhetorical purposes will steadily warp our ability to see truth and reason carefully about facts. Denialism perhaps being the most damaging in this way.

A favorite hobbyhorse: consciously resist the natural human "weakness" for a good story.

Beware charisma in leaders. It is very over-rated, all-too-often a substitute of style for substance.

I Can't Help It, I Hate the Placebo Effect

I know it is wrong, but in my heart of hearts, I detest the placebo effect. I prefer a world without this kind of statistically noisy pseudo-magic. So I take guilty pleasure in reading this article, which casts doubt on the belief, developed over the last 70 years, that the placebo effect can be an important clinical tool.

The "open placebo" stuff, especially, is hard for a devout rationalist to stomach.

The reason it is a guilty pleasure is because, also in my heart of hearts, I know that I should applaud anything that helps. If placebos and open placebos improve clinical outcomes and reduce suffering, that is a good thing.

Don't Mythologize Scott Weiland

I deplore the tendency to mythologize the suffering artist. I really liked the op-ed by the ex-wife and mother of his children of Scott Weiland, recently deceased member of Stone Temple Pilots. Best quote:

Let's choose to make this the first time we don't glorify this tragedy with talk of rock and roll and the demons that, by the way, don't have to come with it. Skip the depressing T-shirt with 1967-2015 on it.

Pet Topic: The Tenuous-at-Best Link Between Mental Illness and Creativity

The shopworn notion of the tormented, suffering, often half-mad artist continues to be commonly held. This article does a very nice job surveying the scientific research on the subject and concludes the question is not completely settled, but the preponderance of the data does not favor the hypothesis. For ordinary, run-of-the-mill creativity, the link appears to be negative. For the "super-genius" (Beethoven, van Gogh, Wagner)--maybe there is something to it.

The theme I want to build on this research is: the deleterious effects of this addled notion on the young and aspiring. Notably the young people who yearn for artistic greatness that they will never possess. Such types may be drawn to mimic the dysfunctional, self-medicating behavior of the truly disturbed. The results may be a few wasted years, or occasionally, greater tragedy resulting from utterly pointless self-destructive behavior.

Then there may even be a feedback loop onto the truly gifted. A young person who is genuinely artistic may be drawn to the notion of the tormented, suffering, self-destructive artist. Either because they simply think that is how they are supposed to be, or perhaps because they believe that is the necessary price to pay to grow in their art. Either way, it can lead to more unnecessary suffering.

I would love to see a popular movie explore this theme. It would be the single most likely way to start excising it from the mass psychology.

Vinyl Love: Agency Bias and Audio Elitism

There has been a fun debate going amongst the Accidental Tech Podcast crowd regarding the merits and science of vinyl LPs audio quality versus CDs. I won't rehash that here, but the summary seems to be:

• Science strongly supports digital as a vastly more accurate means of capturing and transmitting recorded sound. (In fact, after reading the Marc Edwards analysis, I found myself marveling that vinyl does (did) work as well as it did.)

• Probably the most common underlying reason people profess to find vinyl superior is the "tea ceremony" aspect. I.e., all the loving handling and ritual involved in accessing and preparing a vinyl LP for listening is an inseparable aspect of the overall experience. In many cases, the vinyl lover may not be fully aware of their reasons for finding vinyl superior, in which case it also takes on some strong overtones of placebo effect: they expect vinyl to sound superior; and since the vinyl experience involves close, purposeful listening, it is easy for the listener to convince themselves that the sound is better.

• Another possibility raised, is that the distortions created by analog mastering and vinyl reproduction are a feature, not a bug.

I agree with the above, primarily the first one, but I suggest two other reasons may explain some cases of vinyl preference.

• First, there is a variant of "agency bias". Agency bias is the belief that things don't "just happen"--there is always an active agent. E.g., it wasn't luck that caused me to miss my connection and avoid a fatal plane crash--there was some active force (fate, God) that was the agent of my good fortune.
  
  The mental phenomenon I have in mind is the idea that there has to be a payoff for effort. It's the same reason many people insist on overpaying for high octane gasoline, when it has no benefit for their vehicle. Or want to buy $40, gold-tipped cables that don't deliver a digital signal any differently than generic $3 cables. Vinyl takes effort to get a good result. CDs don't. This just seems wrong, if you are prone to "effort bias". Anything that easy can't be very good.

• The other factor is audio elitism. With vinyl, you could easily tell who cared about their audio and who didn't. Just randomly examine one record from someone's collection, or watch them prep an LP for listening. Doing it right requires careful storage of the albums, loving removal from the sleeve, taking care to only hold the sides, and then the Discwasher ritual of cleaning the record. Every. Single. Time. Anyone who didn't care about their music would be marked by beat-up records, and punished with crackly sound. With the advent of CD, any slob can have the same excellent sounds as the audiophile.

"Playback" does not prove that multi-taskers can absorb external information

With few exceptions, I don't believe that humans are generally effective at multi-tasking. It is totally a myth that the upcoming generations will be great multi-taskers[1]. Here is another myth to be aware of: I call it the "playback fallacy".

I will say something to my kids, notice they are absorbed with the screen, and ask them to pay attention. They will claim that they are paying attention, and will offer as evidence the ability to "play back", verbatim, what I have just said.

The problem is that they played back from "cache". Very analogous to the small amount of cache memory on a CPU. Information can be quickly stored and accessed there, but it is very volatile. It only becomes data when it is actively processed and stored to a less volatile location. So, if I hadn't said anything, the cache would have either been over-written by the next small stream of information, or decayed quickly within a few minutes, and the info would never have been absorbed.
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[1] Multi-tasking means actively processing more than one activity, concurrently. It should not be confused with "context-switching", which means being able to juggle and switch between multiple activities. I think humans have fewer absolute biological limitations on the ability to context-switch, though it is still problematic. One, it imposes the overhead necessary to manage the contexts. Two, there is risk of contexts over-writing each other's memory. It seems possible, though not proven, that today's youth will be better context-switchers.

Branding is Default

I think branding is all about leveraging default behavior. Consumers would be well-advised to train themselves to have a reflexive "anti-" reaction to branding. Instead of passively internalizing a brand as the default, reflexively assume that any product involving a heavy branding investment is probably over-priced, and seek the low-cost alternative.   

In decision-making, examples of the default preference abound: Workers are far more likely to save in retirement plans if enrollment is the automatic option. And the percentage of pregnant women tested for H.I.V. in some African nations where AIDS is widespread has surged since the test became a regular prenatal procedure and women had to opt out if they didn’t want it.

A study published in 2003 showed that while large majorities of Americans approved of organ donations, only about a quarter consented to donate their own. By contrast, nearly all Austrians, French and Portuguese consent to donate theirs. The default explains the difference. In the United States, people must choose to become an organ donor. In much of Europe, people must choose not to donate.

Defaults, according to economists and psychologists, frame how a person is presented with a choice. But they say there are other forces that make the default path hard to resist. One is natural human inertia, or laziness, that favors making the quick, easy choice instead of exerting the mental energy to make a different one. Another, they say, is that most people perceive a default as an authoritative recommendation.

Tablet Use Cases

I suspect #1 is watching movies. #2 may be games. My use case, reading, is probably farther down the list.

As to tablet popularity, I wonder if some of it is attributed to the resolution and beauty of the screen. I find reading on my 4" smartphone not enough words per page, but the phone's resolution is very, very nice. Now, when I use my regular monitor, I find it washed-out and grainy. The crappy screen of our family netbook is even worse.

One more thing to think about...the more a computer activity uses brain-hand interaction, the more we may be drawn to it. I don't have the links at hand, but I have read research in the past about how deeply the human hand-brain connection runs. Such articles have included some degree of finding computer interaction problematic, since it undermines that connection (I don't think mere typing "counts" as hand-brain). So maybe part of the "subliminal" appeal of tablets is stimulating that deep, ancient neural connection.

Theories of Employee Evaluation, Motivation and Recognition

You should at least skim this, it is really good:
http://www.joelonsoftware.com/articles/fog0000000070.html

There are (at least) 2 distinct theories of employee evaluation. One is the hard-core GE / Jack Welch--rank people, tell them where they stand in the rank. That will fire up people's competitive spirits, and cause them to work harder to move up.

Another school of thought says that the Jack Welch theory is counter-productive, for several reasons. One, it motivates internal competition, which often takes destructive forms. So if your enterprise requires a high-degree of collaboration (and what modern corporation doesn't?), then you may get some very bad side-effects from over-emphasizing internal competition. Second, it idealizes human behavior. That idealization may work for the ultra-competitive types that find themselves in the Olympian Jack Welch-like position of establishing company norms. But for the rest of us, it may be that we do our best when positively encouraged, and we are all allowed to feel like we are doing good work and are a little bit above average. Obviously you can't allow gross distortions, it is a subtle thing. Does the 11th player on the basketball team constantly get reminded that they are at the bottom of the list, or do they receive some encouragement for working hard, and staying prepared, even when game after game they never see action?

That example is not perfectly analogous to the workplace, but it's something to think about. Joel on Software also has written insightfully along these lines.

WSJ Superstar Effect

It's always interesting to connect different things you read. This article talks about the "superstar effect" that actually diminishes competition--the presence of a standout star so demoralizes the competitors that they try less hard (Tiger Woods is their favorite example). Then this article talks about "The Humble Boss" versus the hyper-competitive CEO model.

So maybe companies that overdo the GE-style rack-and-stack employee rating do so because it fits the personality style of the CEOs. They are the type of people who are driven to complete, and probably are very accustomed to winning. I'm sure that feels good. On the other hand, it's not humble. It it also contrary to the tenets of much religion, notably Christianity, which cautions against falling prey to "scarcity thinking".

I am all for high standards and high performance. I just think that it can be a mistake to always frame it in terms of direct competition. In competition, a win is a win--you don't have to great work, you have to make sure that your work is viewed as better than anybody else's. That can lead to some severely dysfunctional behavior.

Cut the Up-Selling, Waitress!

I hate being marketed to. My patience is often tried in restaurants. I am more or less reconciled to waiters and waitresses making a pass at "up-selling" the high-profit items of appetizers, drinks and desserts. But sometimes they cross the line. It's one thing for them to chirpily ask if they can bring me an appetizer, it's easy enough to say "no" to that. The next level is to make the request more specific, and more suggestive, like "how about if I bring you an order of our brand new sizzling spicy fruitcake?" The tactic there is to simplfiy the request, to remove the "cognitive load" so that all you the patron need to say is "yes". I always say "no".

At a recent group dinner, with 5 couples, the level of sell really crossed the line. The waitress, clearly experienced, tried to take advantage of the ambiguity present in the group setting. In a social group, there is generally no clear leader, and everybody is trying to be polite. She took advantage of that dynamic to try to insert herself as the decision-maker: "Would you all like some appetizers?" When no immediate answer was forthcoming--because nobody wanted appetizers, but nobody was going to speak for the entire group--she followed up with "How about I bring you a couple of our sampler platters?". Happily, this group was having none of it.

Would more general education and awareness help?

My bubbles post ...another example would be psychological behavior. If people were aware of agency bias and confirmation bias, would they be just a little less prone to conspiracy thinking?

Part of this ties into my wish that some person of figure of authority would urge the American people to reconsider how they spending their time. Instead of consuming quite so much vapid reality TV and sports, Continuous education. I know, this is about as likely to happen as getting people to exercise.

Olympian Attitudes

This article about the spirit of the Winter Olympics athletes was good. It pulls together a few thoughts.

1. During the self-esteem boom, I remember hearing a few voices in the wilderness pointing out that self-esteem comes not from being told one is successful or talented, but from being successful or talented, and having it recognized. So the key part is the AND. It is important to help kids find things they can be good at, and then to recognize their success. Especially for kids who aren't academically or athletically talented, they may need help finding something. But it does have to be something real.

2. Happiness--I think wisdom tells us that the paradox is those who seek a happy life are not so likely to achieve it, while those who seek a purposeful or moral life will more likely gain happiness as a byproduct.

3. Olympians' attitudes--it really shows in the sportsmanship .So many of them showed such extraordinary sportsmanship and good attitude, even when falling short of the ideal goal.

Digital Dopamine

As John Ratey, the Harvard professor of psychiatry who specializes in the science of attention, told The Times's Matt Richtel for his chilling series, "Driven to Distraction," using digital devices gives you "a dopamine squirt."

Observing my children and texting--and probably, to be truthful, my own habits with email--I suspected there was a significant element of stimulation to the short-term reward system going on with receiving texts, email, etc. I think probably we should have a sabbath day from electronic communication.