Nurture your inner psychopath?

Talk about lateral thinking.

In a Scientific American piece, John Horgan points out the unexpected connection made by Oxford University psychology professor Kevin Dutton in his book, The Wisdom of Psychopaths: What Saints, Spies and Serial Killers Can Teach Us about Success:

Next time you face a difficult situation, Dutton said, imagine what you’d do if you had no fear. 'Psychopath up!' Another way to become more psychopathic, Dutton suggested, might be to meditate. In a study that he calls 'Monks Versus Punks,' Dutton has carried out psychological tests of Buddhist monks and compared them to psychopaths. Like psychopaths, monks are often calm and decisive in the face of stress; free of anxiety, even in the face of death; and able to read others’ expressions accurately.

The big difference, Dutton said, is that monks are motivated by compassion for others, whereas psychopaths seek only their own pleasure.

If insight comes from making the connection between widely differing things - and that is what the IdeaFestival does really, really well - then the idea of success as a single-minded sheering, of emotion-free targeting, or of finding similarities between how a monk and killer might size up success, certainly made me think.

On the whole, Dutton's connection is impressive. But perhaps - as Horgan suggests at the conclusion of his piece - linking a certain kind of ruthlessness to success, even if that ruthlessness is motivated by compassion, makes a rather more uncomfortable point. If contemporary society is already too self-absorbed, is maximizing personal freedom the right goal?

Scientific American's "'Dexter' and British Psychologist Ask: Who Wants to Be a Psychopath?" is here.

Horgan may be best known for his book, The End of Science.

Wayne

Image credit: Some rights reserved by Gustavo da Cunha Pimenta and Showtime

Questions of survival: Who am I? Why am I here?

Using the crushing experience of Vice Admiral James Stockdale and his fellow POWs, some of whom, like Stockdale, were held captive in solitary confinement for up to eight years during the Vietnam war, Big Think contributor Dr. Dennis Charney talks about his and others' research into the idea of resilience. In this video, he suggests that "an ability to combine realism with optimism" is an important key to resiliency, and that, moreover, the lessons can be applied by sufferers of depression and anxiety.

Asked to introduce himself at the 1992 vice presidential debate - he was third party candidate Ross Perot's running mate - Stockdale began in a self-deprecating way by asking, "who am I? Why am I here?"

I remember watching that debate. I had always believed those two questions were merely rhetorical.

Wayne

The Moneyball economy

"A little less talk, a little more action" - Elvis Presley

One of the more interesting fall-outs from the election is a rash of articles about smart data trumping punditry.

According to "Big Data and the Moneyball Economy" at Big Think, the data revolution may be coming to small business.

There is a Moneyball opportunity here for small businesses who may lack traditional financial resources. They just need to get smart about how to out-think their larger rivals. Despite the buzz about Big Data from high-end consulting companies like McKinsey, few small businesses have really figured out what to do with all that data out there.... 

At the recent Tech Crunch Disrupt event in San Francisco, one of the standout companies was SizeUp, which brings business intelligence and competitive analysis to the small business space.

From wearable technology - from the innumerable sensing devices in soil and pavement and oceans - from robots flying around Mercury and Saturn and roving Mars, data is being generated at an ever-increasing pace. Successful businesses have always embraced good data. That's not necessarily new. But one also gets the idea that consulting outfits and advertising firms, organizations used to selling their expertise, had better bring their statistical A-game or risk being displaced by buccaneering number crunchers working at the figurative margins. Intuition and hunch - and certainly, intuition and hunch divorced from the data - is fast losing market value.

"A sophisticated understanding of data and statistics" has certainly propelled people like Sam Wang of the Princeton Election Consortium and Nate Silver of FiveThirtyEight to national prominence. Having made a name for himself four years ago, Silver and his formidable Brier scores have found a home at the New York Times. While the former baseball sabermetrician's 50 - 0 record calling the Electoral College depended on a record setting number of polls, others play offense. Games, data-driven discovery, are increasingly being used by enterprising organizations. Designers like Jane MgGonigal are in demand for their ability to model a human element.

Like all innovations, the data revolution may take some time to work its way from outfits that can afford to pay for the data collection and analysis to those without the deep pockets. And I certainly don't know if companies like SizeUp will succeed, or what kinds of products and services will win. But in a culture long attuned to rewarding the biggest voices and the so-certain forecast, it seems clear that talk is, indeed, cheap.

Wayne

Image: Some rights reserved by pursuethepassion

Wanted: Marketing Poet

Blog readers, from time to time I will revisit an earlier entry, reposting it because it says something particularly well, or, like today, because I'd like to add a new thought. 

Here we go.

Author James Geary describes how metaphor may lead to unexpected decision making in this TED video.

The elliptical faculty of metaphor enables ranking and comparison; it is both richly informative - and can mislead, as Geary suggests. Recent research has also shown that we are born with some innate sense of number and language - we are not blank slates onto which all subsequent knowledge is imparted afresh, but equipped from the beginning with this ability to relate things, one to another.

We mine these shortcuts all the time - finding them in poetry, pithy quotes, aphorisms and especially meaningful prose. As Geary suggests, Shakespeare's "Juliet is like the Sun" is a far more effective description than any attempt to literally describe her. At a neurological level metaphor is how we recognize and contribute to new patterns, or how we exercise our uniquely human capacity for "conceptual synesthesia."

Describing the power of language and number from his rather unusual and direct vantage, "Embracing the Wide Sky" author, synesthete and 2010 IdeaFestival presenter, Daniel Tammett, runs with that idea. I highly recommend the book.

To underscore the vast associative power of the mind, Geary demonstrates how easily people relate the sharp sound of the letter "K" to angular objects. Similarly, as Tammet pointed out in 2010 we tend to group sounds with their real world targets. The words "gleam," "glint," "glam" and "glass," for example, related to the ideas light, transparency and vision. It's not a coincidence.

It's not a coincidence because humans really don't care about the world as it is. We care about a world that makes sense. We care about a world that has meaning. Yes, yes - of course data is crucial, and it's finding its way into more disciplines, including the social sciences and once purely abstract pursuits like philosophy. But I've often wondered why more organizations didn't employ theater directors as organizational consultants, or why more poets aren't asked to assess a new or improved product. Will consumers find it meaningful? Is it concise, expressive? Retained to examine an organization's strategy, what might an interact artist have to say about a company's assessment of the competitive landscape and its constantly moving parts? Her insight might uncover relationships that might otherwise go unnoticed.

If the literal meaning of metaphor is that X = Y, why not a poet as marketing head, chief of the Department of Meaning?

Wayne

The loudest voices always have the best ideas? Sure

You've probably been there before, stuck in a room with opinion slowly gravitating toward the most insistent or loudest voice, despite your strong argument - unspoken, alas - that it's a rotten idea.

In this exceptionally brief RSA Animation, Susan Cain, the author of the best selling "Quiet: the Power of Introverts in a World the Can't stop Talking," wants you to know that it's our culture's extroversion bias at work.

There is no correlation between being the best talker and having the best ideas. I mean, like zero.

She targets that bias with this bit of gentle sarcasm from her book:

Diagnostic and Statistical Manual (DSM-IV), the psychiatrist’s bible of mental disorders, considers the fear of public speaking to be a pathology — not an annoyance, not a disadvantage, but a disease — if it interferes with the sufferer’s job performance. 'It’s not enough,' one senior manager at Eastman Kodak told the author Daniel Goleman, 'to be able to sit at your computer excited about a fantastic regression analysis if you’re squeamish about presenting those results to an executive group.' (Apparently it’s OK to be squeamish about doing a regression analysis if you’re excited about giving speeches.)

Cain, Susan (2012-01-24). Quiet (p. 31). Random House, Inc.. Kindle Edition.

We need every kind of mind.

Wayne