The Power of Setting Goals

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Can you imagine Sir Edmund Hillary, the first man to climb Mount Everest, explaining how he was able to accomplish that feat? Suppose he explained he was just out walking around on a day when he happened to find himself at the top of the tallest mountain in the world. Or the Chairman of the Board of General Motors explaining that he got his position because he just kept showing up for work and they just kept promoting him until one day he was Chairman of the Board. Ridiculous – of course – but no more ridiculous than your thinking you can accomplish anything significant without specific goals. 

Zig Ziglar, See You at the Top

Shrink the Change

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A sense of progress is critical, because the Elephant in us is easily demoralized. It’s easily spooked, easily derailed, and for that reason, it needs reassurance, even for the very first step of the journey.

If you’re leading a change effort… rather than focusing solely on what’s new and different about the change to come, make an effort to remind people what’s already been conquered.  

A business cliché commands us to “raise the bar.” But that’s exactly the wrong instinct if you want to motivate a reluctant Elephant. You need to lower the bar. Picture taking a high-jump bar and lowering it so far that it can be stepped over. 

If you want a reluctant to get moving, you need to shirk the change.

Chip & Dan Heath, Switch

Judging From Behind the Curtain

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The world of classical music—particularly in its European home—was until very recently the preserve of white men. Women, it was believed, simply could not play like men. They didn’t have the strength, the attitude, or the resilience for certain kinds of pieces. Their lips were different. Their lungs were less powerful. Their hands were smaller. That did not seem like a prejudice. It seemed like a fact, because when conductors and music directors and maestros held auditions, the men always seemed to sound better than the women. No one paid much attention to how auditions were held, because it was an article of faith that one of the things that made a music expert a music expert was that he could listen to music played under any circumstances and gauge, instantly and objectively, the quality of the performance.

But over the past few decades, the classical music world has undergone a revolution. 

Many musicians thought that conductors were abusing their power and playing favorites. They wanted the audition process to be formalized. That meant an official audition committee was established instead of a conductor making the decision all by himself. In some places, rules were put in place forbidding the judges from speaking among themselves during auditions, so that one person’s opinion would not cloud the view of another. Musicians were identified not by name but by number. Screens were erected between the committee and the auditioner.. and as these new rules were put in place around the country, an extraordinary thing happened: orchestras began to hire women. 

In the past thirty years, since screens became commonplace, the number of women in the top U.S. orchestras has increased fivefold. 

“Some people look like they sound better than they actually sound, because they look confident and have good posture,’ one musician, a veteran of many auditions, says. “Other people look awful when they play but sound great. Other people have that belabored look when they play, but you can’t hear it in the sound. There is always this dissonance between what you see and hear. 

Too often we are resigned to what happens in the blink of an eye. It doesn’t seem like we have much control over whatever bubbles to the surface from our unconscious. But we do, and if we can control the environment in which rapid cognition takes place, then we can control rapid cognition. 

Malcolm Gladwell, Blink

The Best Teachers

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The best teachers … sometimes discard or place less emphasis on traditional goals in favor of the capacity to comprehend, to use evidence to draw conclusions, to raise important questions, and to understand one’s thinking. In most disciplines, that means they emphasize comprehension, reasoning, and brilliant insights over memory, order punctuality, or the spick-and-span. Spelling, the size of margins or fonts, and the style of footnotes and bibliographies are trivial in comparison to the power to think on paper; conceptual understanding of chemistry is more important than remembering individual details; the capacity to think about one’s thinking — to ponder metacognitively – and to correct it in progress is far more worthy than remembering any name, date, or number. 

The ability to understand the principles and concepts in thinking critically through a problem outranks any capacity to reach the correct answer on any particular question. These teachers want their students to learn to use a wide range of information, ideas, and concepts logically and consistently to draw meaningful conclusions. They help their students achieve those levels by providing meaningful directions and exemplary feedback that quietly yet forcefully couple lofty ideals with firm confidence in what students can do – without making any judgments of their worth as human beings. Most significant, they help students shift their focus from making the grade to thinking about personal goals of development. 

Ken Bain, What the Best College Teachers Do

Disillusioned?

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Disenchantment, whether it is a minor disappointment or a major shock, is the signal that things are moving into transition. At such times, we need to consider whether the old view or belief may not have been an enchantment cast on us in the past to keep us from seeing deeper into ourselves and others than we were ready to. For the whole idea of disenchantment is that reality has many layers, none “wrong”  but each appropriate to a particular phase of intellectual and spiritual development. The disenchantment experience is the signal that they time has come to look below the surface of what has been thought to be so. It is the sign that you are ready to see and understand more now. 

Lacking that perspective on such experiences, however, we often miss the point and simply become “disillusioned.” The disenchanted person recognized the old view as sufficient in its time, but insufficient now.

On the other hand, the disillusioned person simply rejects the embodiment of the earlier view; she finds a new husband or he gets a new boss, but both leave unchanged the old enchanted view of relationships. The disenchanted person moves on, but the disillusioned person stops and goes through the play again with new actors. Such a person is on a perpetual quest for a real friend, a true mate, and a trustworthy leader. The quest only goes around in circles, and real movement and real development are arrested. 

William Bridges, Transitions

Making habits that stick for the long term

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According to Good Habit, Bad Habit author Wendy Wood, forming new long-term behavioral patterns is possible to some extent for most people, and it’s largely a function of learning to do something so automatically that you perform the task without having to consciously decide to do it, like brushing your teeth before you go to bed.  

Amanda Mull writing in The Atlantic

 

The Algorithms of Nostalgia

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Nostalgia has become a template for the serial production of more content, a new income stream for copyright holders, a new data stream for platforms, and a new way to express identity for users. And there’s so much pop culture in the past to draw from, platform capitalism will seemingly never run out. We’re told our data is collected in an attempt to predict what we want, but this isn’t quite true. In attempting to predict our tastes, streaming services work to produce them in its image. Since algorithms are trained on the past, they aren’t merely transmitting nostalgia through neutral channels; they’re cultivating nostalgic biases, seeking to predispose users to crave retro. 

Even as Silicon Valley positions itself as progressive, its algorithms are stuck in the past.

Grafton Tanner, writing in Real Life Magazine

Data Science articles from Jan 2022

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CDC announces plan to send every US household pamphlet on probabilistic thinking & Bayesian inferences

Using machine learning models & clustering network embeddings to get meaningful insights into social network ecosystems

Many PhD candidates are willing to publish findings based on fraudulent data based on some less familiar Bayesian methods

Scientists make first detection of exotic “X” particles in quark-gluon plasma

2022 Trends in Semantic Technologies: Humanizing Artificial Intelligence

NRO Selects 5 Companies for Commercial Radar Development Contracts

Tiny machine learning is bringing neural networks to microcontrollers

Why very few machine learning models actually get deployed

Remote Sensing: Deep Learning for Land Cover Classification of Satellite Imagery Using Python   

Hands-on data visualization for interactive storytelling in Python

The goal of a recommendation algorithm “isn’t to surprise or shock but to affirm. The process looks a lot like prediction, but it’s merely repetition. The result is more of the same: a present that looks like the past and a future that isn’t one.” https://bit.ly/3HW7Ior

The algorithmic feedback loop: "If you want to freeze culture, the 1st step is to reduce it to data & if you want to maintain the frozen status quo algorithms trained on people’s past behaviors & tastes would be the best tools..."

What patent trends can tell us about next gen of AI Tech

Stop talking about “statistical significance and practical significance”

Defending old ways of doing business

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I learned the danger of excessive caution long ago, when I consulted for huge Fortune 500 companies. The single biggest problem I encountered—shared by virtually every large company I analyzed—was investing too much of their time and money into defending old ways of doing business, rather than building new ones. We even had a proprietary tool for quantifying this misallocation of resources that spelled out the mistakes in precise dollars and cents.  Senior management hated hearing this, and always insisted that defending the old business units was their safest bet. After I encountered this embedded mindset again and again and saw its consequences, I reached the painful conclusion that the safest path is usually the most dangerous. If you pursue a strategy—whether in business or your personal life—that avoids all risk, you might flourish in the short run, but you flounder over the long term.

Ted Gioia writing in The Atlantic

Escaping from Group-Narcissism

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You can’t force everyone to see the value in your group, just as you can’t force everyone to see the value in you as an individual. But you can control how you see yourself, and the narrative you tell yourself about your group and the world. The only way out from the group-narcissism trap is up, by transcending your group’s feelings of entitlement and connecting with fellow humans—even when it’s easier to believe that you’re special. 

Scott Barry Kaufman writing in The Atlantic