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I was schooled in Adobe Lightroom, have been mystified by Daniel Dennett's Competence without Comprehension, and played with Prepared Learning. Prepared Learning (and Martin Seligman)  I was not planning in putting this rocktacular photo up but once I found it, how could I not? This is Dr. Martin Seligman in full 1970s kit. Anyway, we approached Martin Seligman again in one of my classes to look at positive psychology’s gifts. I’m pretty familiar with positive psychology through all the popular psychology books I’ve read over the past decade or so but it is a different world completely exploring the original works in actual journal articles. Reading Seligman’s articles is a different beast from reading his book Flourish. I love his book. His articles are bananas. I was looking up what he is known for and he did some pivotal work before he stumbled upon positive psychology. Apparently, he helped put together Prepared Learning. This is a wild concept where we are primed to make associations with fear or optimism or taste than other things. The best example is that we can learn to be afraid of snakes as children after only one negative stimuli or event but it might take a lot longer to be conditioned to be afraid of a Power Ranger doll. The idea is that natural environmental threats can flip the switch in our brain faster for a reproductive or general survival reason. The Power Ranger is new and novel and we don’t know how to respond. We have to tap into a cognition (which Kahneman says is very difficult and requires a lot of mental energy and focus to do – so we usually avoid doing so) to categorize the Power Ranger as dangerous, safe, or neutral. This makes a lot of sense intuitively – we evolved to be able to be cautious of snakes and spiders. I don’t know if it scales up but you can think of the cognitive dissonance apparent in why we allow guns, vehicles, and sugar with little to no regulation but have waged a massive genocide against wolves and sharks when the rate of injury and death from both is so unequal.
Competence without Comprehension Daniel Dennett came out with a new book called From Bacteria to Bach and Back and it is an ass-kicker. My favorite of his so far. Dennett is called one of the four horsemen. Along with Christopher Hitchens, Richard Dawkins, and Sam Harris, Dennett uses his profound intelligence to explore and explain the mysteries of life. Sidenote: I just learned that there is a fifth member who was supposed to be at the same conference where all of these guys were speaking at and where the label was coined; her name is Ayaan Hirsi Ali and she is a Somali born Dutch-American. I digress: as a philosopher, Dennett’s talent is logical jiu jitsu. As a philosopher of science and neuroscience especially, he digs deep into the big questions of evolution, free will, determinism, consciousness, morality, and language with a technical expertise that is barely understandable by my feeble brain but fascinating nonetheless. I’m trying to make sense of his logic and am not fully there yet but one of his terms is Competence without Comprehension and I love it. It is a powerful shortcut to explain complex concepts. In looking this up, there is not an easy shorthand for it (which makes me think of a rad project) but I did find an awesome blog by a Dutch psychologist. Coert Visser started the blog called Progress-Focused Approach and I love his beliefs: http://www.progressfocused.com/p/some-things-i-believe-and-expect.html Regarding Competence without Comprehension, Visser pulls together the following statements on his site (http://www.progressfocused.com/search?q=+comprehension):
The other powerful example Dennett uses to discuss consciousness emerging from a system: he mentions CERN and how the thousands of scientists need not and indeed cannot explain the entirety of the project they work on yet each of them is creating new knowledge by their skillful and necessary contribution to the whole. Each scientist has extensive competence but only vague comprehension and yet the outcome is elegance. There is strength in this tool to explain systems theories, evolution through natural selection, and the feedback loops involved. Adobe Lightroom I’ve been using Lightroom to edit and collect my photos for two years now. It was recommended by Dave Pirazzi of Colorado Lagoon fame and I took his advice unquestioningly. It was brilliant advice. I am self-taught and youtube-taught. And while I knew I wasn’t using it to the full power and I didn’t understand what a lot of the toggle bars did, I was competent enough to create decent photos. Then I met a photographer Jeff Sarvis who asked me: “But did you know there is a right way to use it, an order in which you’re supposed to use Lightroom?” No, Mr. Sarvis, I did not. He was amazing enough to invite me over to his house for an afternoon and walk me through it. 3 hours and several pages of notes later I was exhausted. I had to eat 2 chocolate chip cookies and have a cup of mate to get my brain functioning again. He taught me so much about it and answered all the questions I didn’t even know I had. For the sake of simplicity I am going to note down the simple steps for a normal photo (not an HDR, a specific touch up, or graphic design project):
Genius. I started a whole new Catalog so I could start fresh with this new information. I am so excited.
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In this balmy and thunderstormy late-August week Graduate School offered up new concepts, new terms, and new confusions. Considering my program is interdisciplinary these concepts are as schizophrenic as I am at the moment. First: Marcia's Identity Theory First is Marcia’s Identity Theory. Almost as an aside in one of my courses, the professor drew an XY graph on the board and described a theory posited in the 1960’s describing how people identify themselves in accordance to the thing they are learning/playing with/engaging with. It describes a spiral of starting out excited about something but not knowing much about it. This excitement part is defined as “commitment” and the lack of knowledge is defined as “foreclosure” in relation to “exploration” (how little do you know compared to how much you know). As you go through the spiral you end up learning more but depending on how you respond to the various levels of challenge your commitment might fluctuate. This fluctuation occurs when the information you are learning challenges what you think you know about your topic, how hard it is to understand, or how little it corresponds to the thing about your topic that you are interested in. If you continue with the study and aren’t prohibitively challenged to the point of quitting then you will spiral through the stages toward more exploration (learning), back into higher commitment (once you are reinvigorated by what you’re learning and new connections you make), and to a new baseline level of foreclosure and commitment from which to work from. If you do ‘quit’ permanently, or more likely temporarily, you end up in the quadrant of moratorium. I would imagine that getting out of the moratorium requires a special level of grit and creativity (as discussed by Paul Tough in How Children Succeed). Immediately, my first association of this theory is with Csikszentmihaly’s concept of Flow and Seligman’s Flourish. Luckily for me, the professor also made this connection and explained it terrifically. In these concepts you find the sweet-spot of action between stress and interest to work in a state of Flow where you are accomplishing at a high level while also minimizing distracting noise (like children and bills…). Their argument is that the more time you can spend in flow the more contentment you will find with life due to your higher feeling of meaning, purpose, and hope in life. I would imagine this is because you feel like you have a greater sense of control over an aspect of your life that you value. Second: Ecosystem ServicesEcosystem Services is the second concept that I stumbled across. This is huge to me because, if going off of Marcia’s concept above, this is the next iteration of exploration and opening up my foreclosure level with my study (and the reason I went back to grad school). After reading Neel’s text about managing longleaf pines and William Ginn’s book Investing In Nature I have come to realize that this idea has many names: Tending the Wild (from the book of that name), Ecosystem Based Management, Additionality, Working Landscapes, and Socio Ecological Systems Theory. Basically, all these terms invoke the idea of actively managing natural resources for their exploitation but with a conscientiousness that values the system, the ecology, the habitat, and the parts beyond just the marketable resource - both for their inherent sake and also as a literal investment into future (conscientious) exploitation. The idea boils down to an economic strategy as Neel states in his text: “…treat your forest like an annuity, harvesting a portion of your annual interest rather than all of it. You certainly do not want to spend all your capital. In fact, under the Stoddard Neel approach, we aim to put more money in the bank every year with timber growth than we take out for timber harvest.… Rather than maintaining a constant timber volume, we like to see our investments grow over time.” (169) The reason I like the term Ecosystem Services is that it focuses on the result. However, I think one of the drawbacks of this interdisciplinary field is that it is hard to conceptualize and place into an easy box. This term or the other ones don’t do well toward that goal either. Maybe it’s too nuanced, maybe it is too much a capitalist fringe but it has proven successful as Ginn elaborates in his text and how Mark Tercek describes in his Nature’s Fortune. I will continue to focus on this niche of ecosystem services- or whatever I end up calling it- for the sake of developing reproducible models, adaptable methods, and serviceable techniques that can be applied to multiple habitats and their species facing overexploitation. Three: Box Plots Lastly, in my statistics course I finally learned what those boxes with the lines coming out of them are. They are called boxplots and they help to interpret data to understand where the most typical data is (the median), the range of data and sample variance (where most of the data is), and the outliers. Outliers are just that: they lie outside of the normal data. They can also screw up all kinds of things because they are by definition anomalous. Outliers usually have special circumstances and beyond a Malcolm Gladwell interpretation, they mess it up for the middle parts. Understanding what’s in the box (where most of your data is) helps with understanding patterns, comparisons, and trends.
The reason I like this -beyond the fact that I will have to actually use it when I conduct my own research- is because it helps me travel the labyrinth that is Slow Thinking. Daniel Kahneman wrote in his book Thinking: Fast and Slow that humans have two modes of thinking: fast and slow. Fast thinking accounts for almost all our decisions and we are both really good at it and really bad (you can be both when you use it all the time). Fast thinking is based on our reactions, mostly emotionally. We’re good at it because on the whole we react well to stepping out of the way of the oncoming car or identifying when someone is pleased or angry with us. We are bad it when we choose the donuts for breakfast or make connections that just aren’t there (most racism, gender stereotypes, etc). We rely on fast thinking because that’s our default. Slow thinking however is what is required when understanding processes, probabilities, cognitive biases, and long-range outcomes. We are almost never good at Slow Thinking and it takes practice and discipline to even understand what is occurring. The big problem arises because we apply Fast Thinking to almost all things that require Slow Thinking. We end up stumbling ungracefully into poor decisions because our brains have never had to adapt to Slow Thinking models. These models seem to me to be the world of statistics. If I can work to train my brain into more Slow Thinking ways of understanding probabilities and processes I hope I will be able to recognize my own cognitive biases more accurately and more quickly. After receiving a text from a close friend a couple months ago that said, "There's a name for my delusion: I'm an optimist!", I haven't been able to get that thought out of my head. For over a year now I have been trying to understand my own perspective and my own engagement with the world. There was a vague sense that I am a negative person but I always saw that as a strength of viewing the world rationally, logically, and skeptically. In addition to seeing it as a strength, I viewed it as a strategy: I built my successful business with this mindset, so it must work. So, why would anyone choose to be delusional? Why would anyone choose to see the world through rose-colored glasses for the sake of seeing the world through rose-colored glasses? And, most importantly to me the-business-owner-and-environmental-guy, wouldn't that perspective skew and disrupt how I engage with the very real and very scary stresses facing small business owners and the environmental situation at-large? Like most answers to my questions, I turned to books. Flow by Mihaly Csikszentmihalyi, Flourish by Martin Seligman, and Mindset by Carol Dweck were what I turned to. I came to them from finding their names repeated over and over in the following books I encountered over the past four months: How to Find Fulfilling Work by Roman Krznaric, How Children Succeed by Paul Tough, and Give and Take by Adam Grant. But it turns out that this same friend has been trying to get me to think about what all of these authors call Positive Psychology for a while. What has sold me is that through these works, all of them share that successful people are proven to be more optimistic. And here optimism doesn't mean ignoring the scary realities but rather embracing them and not overly worrying about them. In fact, many of the anecdotes I found are of people who have had the exact same stresses and worries as business owners and environmentalists as myself but still chose to be optimistic. The statistics are pretty great: happy and successful relationships are those where the partners view their significant other as having 5 positive qualities to every negative quality whether that is objectively true or not, more money, etc. I like to think of these books sequentially, leading up to a whole narrative. Maslow’s Hierarchy of Needs lays the groundwork for the ability to self actualize or “flow” and flow allows us to “flourish” and choose to see the world in a “growth-mindset” way. First Book: Maslow’s Hierarchy of Needs prioritizes the important aspects of life and focuses health prior to intimacy and intimacy prior to objective engagement with reality for example. There are five stages of the Hierarchy of Needs:
 Second Book: Csikszentmihalyi’s Flow: Developing Flow is the most successful strategy to deny entropy and Flow is a ‘game’: a system of symbolic order that includes the following steps:
 Third Book: Flourish by Martin Seligman is similar to Flow and a further exploration of Self-Actualization. More than that it (and this whole discussion) is Positive Psychology. To Flourish means having high positive emotion (admiration, joy, pride and gratitude) plus being high on any three of the following:
Fourth Book: Mindset by Carol Dweck. is a book that encapsulates the ideas of the previous three books. It focuses on the positive psychology research done by the others along with many more. It basically takes the entire 200 pages of the book to explain how we can make decisions that are growth-oriented rather than fixed. The definitions are best described in the list below but the graphic does a decent job of explaining the difference as well. Parents, teachers and coaches: to create a growth mindset in students, children this involves:
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