Hasty Genderalizations

Gender schemas are largely non-conscious hypotheses we all have about the different characteristics of males and females. We see females as nurturing, as communal, and as doing things out of concern for other people. And we see males as capable of independent action, doing things for a reason, and getting down to the business at hand. [The male gender schema includes negations of the female gender schema and vice verse.] We have schemas about everything, every social group defined by race, age, sex, social class, and roles. So students have schemas about what it is to be a professor. And people have schemas about what it is to be a scientist. And for most professions, the schema that people have for being a professional person overlaps much more with the schema for being male than it does with the schema for being female. So we take requirements to be successful for most fields as being capable of independent action, doing things for a reason, and getting down to the business at hand.

-  Virginia Valian in an address to Chairs and Senior Administrators at the City University of New York

Our beliefs about the relative rationality of men and women are importantly problematic regardless of whether our beliefs about men and women in general are by and large correct.

Suppose that a random male raised by gender-blind robots who pass the Turing test is, on average, significantly less likely to end up more nurturing, communal, and likely to do things out of concern for other people than is a female raised under similar circumstances. And suppose both sexes vary greatly along those dimensions, such that men who are innately at least as nurturing etc. as the average woman are fairly common. When you meet a new person, your use some model of them to predict their behavior, and that model has only your prior beliefs about people with the characteristics you immediately observe, such as their appearing male or female.

If your priors are in favor of men in general being non-nurturing (and they're accurate on average), your implicit model of any specific randomly chosen man will also predict that he is non-nurturing. It will take extra evidence for you to update to expecting the man to be nurturing. So at this point, you're already going to end up with a gender imbalance in professions that require the characteristics of female gender schemata, such as teaching kindergarten, social work, and nursing.

If the vast majority of professions require the characteristics of the female gender role, then even given only the things I've mentioned so far, you're going to end up with at least a mild case of women ruling the world and men being second-class citizens.

Now suppose people are actually not so great at Bayesian updating--their beliefs have huge amounts of inertia due to confirmation bias and related phenomena. If your (implicit, unconscious) priors have grown to be strongly in favor of men being non-nurturing, non-communal, and doing things out of self-interest rather than a concern for other people, then any given man will have to exhibit the characteristics of the female gender schema much more overtly than a random woman before you believe that he is in fact nurturing etc. Due to cognitive biases we already know about, a slight gender imbalance in innate tendency to exhibit the nurturing etc. characteristics required by the vast majority of professions could easily lead to an overwhelming, horribly oppressive case of women ruling the world and men being second-class citizens. If you add to that a long history of people in power liking power and wanting to keep it and have more of it, this scenario is even bleaker.

In reality, this is exactly what the world looks like, except that the vast majority of professions require the characteristics of male gender schemata instead--most professionals benefit from being seen as agenty, having reasons for their actions, and working efficiently. There are some exceptions: Grade school teachers, social workers, and nurses benefit from being seen as nurturing, communal, and doing things out of concern for other people.

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But so far the model I've described only obviously explains things we've already observed. Does it make risky testable predictions as well?

You bet!

For one thing, it predicts the following of people working in a profession that emphasizes characteristics of the male gender schema. Suppose you hand people equal evidence of the professional competence of two candidates. Then you tell them that one is a bio of a male, and the other the bio of a female. The model I've described predicts that the man will be rated as more highly competent. Why? Because the raters will need to encounter more evidence of professional competence for the female to overcome the rater's priors against her. If this doesn't happen in real life, it's strong evidence against my model.

Furthermore, it doesn't predict that men and women would differ in their ratings of the candidates. A difference would be evidence against my model. Competing hypotheses--anything along the lines of "gender inequality happens because men dislike women more than women dislike men"--do predict that the ratings should differ according to the sex and gender of the raters.

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In 1995, the ratio of admitted/rejected male applicants for postdoctoral fellowships at a certain medical school was twice that of female applicants. Wennerås and Wold investigated. They came up with a system for determining the "impact points" of professional academics. The points were awarded according to number of journal publications, prestige of the respective journals, number of articles in which zer name is listed first among the authors, and number of citations zer article received in a one-year period. They then used this system to determine the impact on their field of applicants for postdoctoral fellowships to a certain medical school in Sweden.

Ordinarily, the results of admissions reviews are not made public. Due to an unusual court case, the committee reviews for this particular round of medical students were, and the reviews included an overall "competence rating". From their article in Nature:

Did men and women with equal scientific productivity receive the same competence rating by the MRC reviewers? No! ... The peer reviewers gave female applicants lower scores than male applicants who displayed the same level of scientific productivity. In fact, the most productive group of female applicants, containing those with 100 total impact points or more, was the only group of women judged to be as competent as men, although only as competent as the least productive group of male applicants (the one whose members had fewer than 20 total impact points).

Wennerås and Wold controlled for the applicant's nationality, education, field, university affiliation, evaluation committee to which the applicant was assigned, postdoctoral experience abroad, letter of recommendation, and affiliation with members of the evaluation committee. Perceived gender continued to matter. Lots.

According to the multiple-regression model based on total impact, female applicants started from a basic competence level of 2.09 competence points (the intercept of the multiple regression curve) and were given an extra 0.0033 competence points by the reviewers for every impact point they had accumulated. Independent of scientific productivity, however, male applicants received an extra 0.21 points for competence. So, for a female scientist to be awarded the same competence as a male colleague, she needed to exceed his scientific productivity by 64 impact points (95 per cent confidence interval: 35-93 impact points). 

So how much work does that amount to?

This represents approximately three extra papers in Nature or Science (impact factors 25 and 22, respectively), or 20 extra papers in a journal with an impact factor of around 3, which would be an excellent specialist journal such as Atherosclerosis, Gut, Infection and Immunity, Neuroscience or Radiology. Considering that the mean total impact of this cohort of applicants was 40 points, a female applicant had to be 2.5 times more productive than the average male applicant to receive the same competence score as he ((40+64)/40=2.6). [Emphasis mine.]

Let me repeat that. A female applicant had to be 2.5 times more productive than the average male applicant to receive the same competence score.

Sandstrom and Hallsten replicated this study in 2008.

There were not enough women on the review committees (5 out of 55 in 1995) to determine whether women equally favored male candidates. There are plenty of other studies, however, demonstrating that there's no significant difference between men and women in how they rate other men and women. Both genders and sexes seem to be equally subject to gender bias. Example: A study by Norton, Vandello, and Darley on how we rationalize favoring men.

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I'm not ready to advise on what we should do about this. But here is the main update I'd like you to make: The women you meet are probably more agenty, rational, and efficient than you think they are, especially if you don't know them well. The men around you are probably more nurturing, communal, and compassionate. Your beliefs about them affect your interactions whether you're aware of it or not.

What Is Hypnosis?

There are at least two things this question might mean. The easy version has an answer along these lines: Hypnosis is a tendency to comply with suggestions more than whatever your base rate is. Additionally, it's characterized by cataleptic and amnesic effects, as well as selective attention and reduced sensitivity to pain. Let's call this set of behaviors "hypnosis syndrome".

The other interpretation of "what is hypnosis" is "why does hypnosis syndrome happen?". I don't know the answer to that one. But here are what thoughts I do have in the direction of an answer.

I don't think there's any one thing going on with hypnosis. There is no button in your brain the hypnotist pushes to cause Sudden Asleepening. I certainly don't mean to say that there's no such thing as hypnosis. But looking for an individual mechanism causing all of its features is like studying biology by searching for the source of elan vital.

Ordinary Trance

Here are some ordinary kinds of experiences from everyday life that I think hypnotists have probably figured out how to replicate at will and take advantage of.
 
1. Suggestion: If you're cognitively taxed and experiencing a lot of dissonance, it can be an incredible relief when someone else takes over.

You just had a very long day full of important business decisions. You're having dinner at a restaurant, and you can't decide what to order off the very long menu. "Just have the turkey," says your spouse, and that's what you have. They make your decision for you, and you're happy to comply without thinking deliberatively about it any further.

It doesn't feel at all like they forced you to order the turkey. Still, they suggested you order the turkey, and you ordered it. That's complying with suggestion. You're more likely to comply with that particular suggestion when your feeling of indecision is slightly unpleasant or draining, so it's safe to say that you're in a state of heightened suggestibility when faced with a cognitively taxing dinner menu.

2. Selective attention: You never experience every element of your surroundings with equal attention. Sometimes, your attention becomes so selective that you're completely unaware of large portions of your perceptible environment.

You're in a state of flow. You're working on something you're passionate about, but it's very challenging, so you're highly focused. (Maybe you're composing music, proving a mathematical theorem, or practicing three-pointers.) Someone is standing right beside you trying to get your attention, even saying your name. Yet, when they finally touch your shoulder, you jump a bit from how surprised you are to discover them.

It's not that the sound of their voice didn't enter your ears, or that the light reflecting off of them didn't enter your eyes. Your attention was just too narrowly directed to respond to stimuli irrelevant to the object of your intense focus.

3. Catalepsy: Sometimes, you just feel too damn lazy to move.

It's your day off and you're lying in bed. The sun's pouring gently through the drapes, and you feel so warm and snugly that you don't want to move a muscle. But you know it's time to get up, so you imagine yourself moving, raising your head to find out what time it is. You tell yourself, "I'm going to move now". You even repeat silently to yourself, "Lift your head. Lift your head." But your body just won't move.

You aren't paralyzed. All your nerves are firing just fine. On some level, you feel that you could move, if you just wanted to hard enough. But you can't seem to make yourself want it enough. You can't muster up enough willpower to really try to try. For all the power your will seems to have over your legs, they might as well be made of lead.

4. Amnesia: It's normal to forget little things all the time. But occasionally a really drastic memory failure happens, and it feels as though you've jumped through time.

You're on the highway at night, and you're a little sleepy. The drive is monotonous; everything rushing by is the same, and the grey road just stretches on and on. It's about an hour till your next turn. But then, all of a sudden, there's your exit! And you think, "What? How did I just lose a whole hour?"

You obviously experienced each moment of that hour as it was happening--you know you didn't fall asleep, because if you had you would have crashed. But you just don't seem to have access to those memories for some reason. It's like you went on autopilot.

5. Reduced sensitivity to pain: This one's especially familiar to athletes.

You're in the final stretch of a marathon. You're sprinting now, giving it everything you've got, when suddenly you hit an uneven bit of ground and your ankle rolls. You know it's happened, but you keep going. There's a very mild, dull kind of nagging pain coming from your ankle, but it's easy to ignore, and you think nothing of it. After you cross the finish line, you collapse onto the grass beside the track. As you slowly catch your breath, you notice that your ankle is hurting more. Quite a lot, in fact. As you begin tearing up from the pain, you realize that you've probably sprained it severely.

There's no way you could tolerate putting weight on it at this point. Yet just a few minutes ago, you were sprinting as though nothing were wrong.

One More Ingredient

When experiences like this happen in the course of daily life, we don't usually recognize anything strange or spooky about them. If, however, we experience them when someone called a "hypnotist" is dangling a pendulum in front of us, we pay attention to them, and they no longer fuse so seamlessly with the rest of experience. Framing is everything.

Hypnosis seems to be some combination of suggestion, selective attention, catalepsy, amnesia, and reduced sensitivity to pain. These pieces of "hypnosis syndrome" happen to us frequently in all sorts of contexts. So perhaps there's one final, key ingredient to this apparently bizarre practice we call "hypnosis": the belief (or suspicion) that one is hypnotized.

Book Recommendation: How To Win Friends and Influence People

I'm finally reading How To Win Friends and Influence People by Dale Carnegie, which has been on my list for a year now. So far, I'm completely loving it, and I understand why it has remained so popular for most of a century.

Here is how the book works. I'll use Chapter 3 as an example.

Each chapter begins with a straightforward claim about successful socialization.

The only way on earth to influence other people is to talk about what they want and show them how to get it.

It then goes through many concrete examples, some taken from famous bits of history, others from students in the author's classes or from his own experiences.

At one time I rented the grand ballroom of a certain New York hotel for twenty nights in each season in order to hold a series of lectures.

At the beginning of one season, I was suddenly informed that I should have to pay almost three times as much rent as formerly. This news reached me after the tickets had been printed and distributed and all announcements had been made. 

Naturally, I didn't want to pay the increase, but what was the use of talking to the hotel about what I wanted? They were interested only in what they wanted. So a couple of days later I went to see the manager.

'I was a bit shocked when I got your letter,' I said, 'but I don't blame you at all. If I had been in your position, I should probably have written a similar letter myself. Your duty as the manager of the hotel is to make all the profit possible. If you don't do that, you will be fired and you ought to be fired. Now, let's take a piece of paper and write down the advantages and the disadvantages that will accrue to you, if you insist on this increase in rent.'

Then I took a letterhead and ran a line through the center and headed one column 'Advantages' and the other column 'Disadvantages.' 

I wrote down under the head 'Advantages' these words: 'Ballroom free.' Then I went on to say: 'You will have the advantage of having the ballroom free to rent for dances and conventions. That is a big advantage, for affairs like that will pay you much more than you can get for a series of lectures. If I tie your ballroom up for twenty nights during the course of the season, it is sure to mean a loss of some very profitable business to you.

Now, let's consider the disadvantages. First, instead of increasing your income from me, you are going to decrease it. In fact, you are going to wipe it out because I cannot pay the rent you are asking. I shall be forced to hold these lectures at some other place.

There's another disadvantage to you also. These lectures attract crowds of educated and cultured people to your hotel. That is good advertising for you, isn't it? In fact, if you spent five thousand dollars advertising in the newspapers, you couldn't bring as many people to look at your hotel as I can bring by these lectures. That is worth a lot to a hotel, isn't it?' 

As I talked, I wrote these two 'disadvantages' under the proper heading, and handed the sheet of paper to the manager, saying: 'I wish you would carefully consider both the advantages and disadvantages that were going to accrue to you and then give me your final decision.'

I received a letter the next day, informing me that my rent would be increased only 50 percent instead of 300 percent.

Mind you, I got this reduction without saying a word about what I wanted. I talked all the time about what the other person wanted and how he could get it.

Suppose I had done the human, natural thing; suppose I had stormed into this office and said, 'What do you mean by raising my rent three hundred percent when you know the tickets have been printed and the announcements made? Three hundred percent! Ridiculous! Absurd! I won't pay it!'

What would have happened then? An argument would have begun to steam and boil and sputter--and you know how arguments end. Even if I had convinced him that he was wrong, his pride would have made it difficult for him to back down and give in.

Interspersed are actionable instructions summarizing the methods illuminated by the examples.

Tomorrow you may want to persuade somebody to do something. Before you speak, pause and ask yourself: 'How can I make this person want to do it?'

Each chapter concludes with a concise statement of the principle discussed.

Arouse in the other person an eager want.

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I do have one worry about this book.

Up through my first year of college, I was mostly horrible with people, and I was proud of it. I didn't like people, I didn't want them to like me, and suggestions that being nice would make things easier offended me. I was cold and arrogant. I did seem to have a surprising amount of a certain kind of social success anyway, for I was always leading groups of various sorts, and people always insisted that my leadership was irreplaceable when I spoke of leaving. But my domain of social success was severely limited, and I was crippled by that.

I began to change when I finally concluded that my extreme arrogance would prevent me from befriending a worthy peer in the unlikely event that I might encounter one in college. I certainly didn't decide to become "good with people", but the resolution to become less arrogant, and my subsequent success (yes, believe it or not, I'm vastly less arrogant than once I was), began a success spiral that led me into a growth mindset where dramatic change seemed possible.

Toward the beginning of my second year of college, I decided to get very good at socialization. It was a time in my life when I was terribly excited to dive into Impossible Projects, and this was one. And I'm still in the midst of this one, but I've come a long way. I still have a few gaping holes in my social education. But I've taken the project seriously, and I really have learned a lot.

Recently, I began working on an essay summarizing what I've learned. The principles I've so far outlined are very nearly identical to those set forth in Carnegie's book.

Therefore, while reading this book, I respond to most of what he says with a feeling of, "Yes!!! This is so obviously right. Why didn't anyone ever explain this to me back when I needed it?"

There was a period of a few years between when I began the project and when I gained sufficient proficiency to generate these principles on my own when this book might have given me a giant boost. I might have shot ahead by as much as three years if it were perfectly timed. But before that period, it would have been useless to me. It would have been an imposition, one more person telling me the Right Way To Live as though I had any inclination to mar my personal aesthetic with their ugly morality. I wouldn't even have had the capacity to understand what "Give honest, sincere appreciation" meant.

So my worry is this. I don't know to what extent people might be able to use this book to actually grow rather than to merely feel either validated or offended.

I do suspect, however, that there exist many people in precisely the right stage of social development to benefit enormously. If you think you might be receptive to the sort of advice given above, I wholeheartedly recommend that you read How To Win Friends and Influence People, and in fact I suggest that you move it as near the top of your reading list as you can possibly stand.

These principles are powerful. When understood and practiced, they change everything, including your efficiency in accomplishing the things you'll waste a lot of time on before reading this book if you put it off. And I do think there's a good chance that reading the book will lead you to practice the principles, and thereby to understand them.

The Kindle version is $2.99, and it's a quick read. You'll know by the third chapter if it's for you.

Cuff Links and Nail Polish: How Gender Roles Hurt Everyone

Ever since I first realized that people consider me to be a woman--that as a further fact beyond having visibly female sex characteristics, they think I belong in the female gender role--I've been struggling with how to respond to that information.

It's clear that I shouldn't try to hate mall shopping just because my culture has put much more pressure on me to enjoy that than it has on my brothers. For whatever reason, I do enjoy it, and if I stopped I'd have one fewer thing in life from which to derive pleasure. Which would be sad. But it's also clear that I shouldn't feel guilty for being assertive as a result of similar pressures, if I can avoid it.

So I'm trying to become more conscious of when my motivations spring from implicit beliefs along the lines of, "This will preserve my social points, because women are supposed to make themselves sexually appealing to straight men, and this makes me sexier." (Note: Men can gain social points for looking extra sexy, though men's social points aren't usually conceptualized that way. But women lose social points when they don't make a special effort to look sexy. Because pleasing men is what we're really here for, right?)

Sometimes it's pretty clear-cut. For instance, it's usually easy for me to tell when I'm not doing something merely because I would be perceived as less feminine/more masculine, and I'd lose social points for it. It feels like longing. I notice myself going, "I love men's dress shoes so much; I wish I could get some really dashing men's dress shoes and coordinate my outfit around them." For a while in college, when I felt that way my response was, "Fuck this shit, that's exactly what I'm going to do!" But now I'm in a new environment where I don't feel quite so high status. When I went shoe shopping the other day, I found myself gazing longingly at the men's shoes while spending my allotted shoe money, with resignation, on women's shoes. (Much sadder to me than the shoes: Men's cologne. Oh my god I love it so much.)

There are also clear-cut cases where I wholeheartedly adore doing the traditionally feminine thing, and would definitely still want to do it if I were male. I love having painted nails--though having someone else paint them is better--and if a male version of me wouldn't go in for a mani-pedi, it would be for the same reason that female me is reluctant to be visibly masculine. Transgressing gender roles comes with a price, regardless of your sex.

The areas that give me trouble are the ones where I sort of want to do something that falls in the female gender role, but also sort of don't want to do it. 

For example, I sort of want to wear a tight dress that shows off my breasts and hips, and I sort of want to wear heels that show off my calves. For a while I thought this was because I want to appear well groomed, since that makes me feel like I command attention and respect (thus increasing my confidence), and this is simply the way to do it when you're in a female body. (I do, by the way, like my female body, and I usually don't like the idea of becoming physically male.) But a female body in a suit and tie neither appears nor feels any less well groomed. Indeed, I'd feel a lot better groomed that way, since in men's clothes I can dress to the nines without worrying that it's "too slutty". I would feel elegant, in charge, and handsome.

Tight dresses and heels aren't about authority and respect. They're about sex. The part of me that wants to wear them loves being sexy, loves the idea of turning on strangers when I walk down the street. The part of me that doesn't want to wear them wants attention and respect with no dependence on my utility as a sperm receptacle.

If I were young, fit, and male in a post-gender society, I'd often go out dancing in skimpy head-turning dresses that showcase my physique. But I'd go to conferences with a tie clip and cuff-links, because that's how I roll. And color coordinated nail polish, of course. If I were female? Same.

How I expressed myself, how I interacted with others, and how I made my way in the world would have everything to do with who I am and nothing to do with which behaviors society associates with which body parts. How other people interacted with me would be similarly gender-free.

I chose to talk about clothing here because it's a concrete, simple, vivid illustration. But it's also relatively trivial. Gender roles do not stop at attire, and it's the more subtle things that really hurt us.

It's the way the pizza delivery person always addresses my male companion instead of me when we answer the door together, because priors say women are submissive and men are dominant. It's the way I have to publish twice as many articles in journals twice as prestigious to be academically competitive with a man, because priors say women are simple-minded and men are intelligent. It's the way I'm interrupted far more often than my male discussion partners, and the way I'm perceived as bitchy and pushy rather than confident and authoritative when I do insist on speaking up, because priors say women are quiet and men do the talking. Men are agenty, and women are at their service.

If you want to better understand exactly how gender roles work, I highly recommend the talk below by Virginia Valian. Alternately, check out her book Why So Slow?: The Advancement of Women. In the latter, you'll find citations of and notes on all the source material she mentions in the talk.

P.S. The longer version of this is the most important lecture I've ever listened to.

Edit: Shortly after I wrote this, a New York Times article featured a clothier called Bindle and Keep, which has been making men's suits for female bodies for over a year now. I am SO excited about this, and I really hope the meme spreads rapidly through the clothing industry. Hopefully, I'll eventually get to schedule a fitting for my dream suit in the Bay Area.

Ars Memoriae

I sense that more is possible in the art of memory.

There was a time when everyone remembered. There was a time before smart phones, before computers, before widespread literacy, and before writing, when there was nothing to do with a thought besides remember it. If you failed in that task, there would be no external reminder to fall back on--no index to browse, text message to dig up, no crumpled-up post-it at the bottom of your purse--and the thought would be lost forever. That time comprises the vast majority of  human history.

It's easy to imagine that members of pre-literate societies must have lived almost entirely in the moment, with no libraries or photographs to hold onto their past thoughts for them. But that is only because the art of memory has been so thoroughly replaced by external mnemonic technologies. Few of us have ever been prompted to explore the potential of internal memory.

Before the printing press, people were taught from childhood the powerful, ancient techniques of memory. How powerful? Powerful enough to create and pass down the 15,963-line Iliad for at least a hundred years before it was finally committed to paper. People in pre-literate societies were constantly immersed in their history, oral tradition, and the products of their previous mental labors. For all the incomprehensible breadth of humanity's new external memories, it is we who are bound to the present.

If you haven't heard of linking, memory palaces, or the Major System, the most basic introduction to mnemonics will demonstrate that you needn't be limited by the tiny capacity of your working memory once you've learned to embed information directly into long-term memory. I remember the first time I learned a twenty item list in just a few minutes. The encoding took effortful concentration (though it gets much easier with practice; I can now complete the same task in about 30 seconds), but the surprise and excitement I experienced with each item effortlessly recalled shattered deep resignations about my own cognitive limits. That was my first taste of the possibility in the art of memory.

I've since learned of the subculture of mnemonists, people who compete in the memory circuit. They travel all over the world to find out who can learn the longest string of random digits, lines of poetry, and shuffled decks of cards. I've learned that the only difference between myself and mental athletes is that I've never deliberately trained my skills. I could perform such feats if I tried, as could you.

I've not tried, though I have made my life much more efficient (I was once terribly forgetful and absent minded) by storing information in my very own brain for reliable recall any time I want to. If I don't want to lose my keys, I simply remember where they are. If I want to remember which bus stop I'm looking for, I needn't leaf through my notebook while standing in the cramped isle or pull up the right screen on my phone. I just remember. I never forget passwords, names, or my credit card number--not once I've decided to remember, anyway. These conveniences alone are well worth the half hour of study needed to become proficient in elementary mnemonics.

But there's just no way that this is all there is. About 2,600 years have passed since we began writing things down. And rather than putting to revolutionary use the internal memory software responsible for the Iliad by harnessing the ability to remember more important and different kinds of information, we're still mostly using it to remember our shopping lists while our hands are full? That can't be right.

Or can it? After all, there's no reason for most of us to know that a mole of carbon atoms is 6.022*10^23 atoms of carbon: In the unlikely event that you need to do stoichiometry, Wolfram Alpha will answer all of your questions. This much is certainly true. But in the context of a discussion of mnemonics, something about it feels off. "We don't need internal memory because our external memory is so much better" misframes the relationship between memory and learning.

If you take a 400 level college course, it probably has prerequisites. You must first have taken a related 300 or 200 level course. Why?

Because often, in order to learn things you first must know things. Human memory is a massive network of associations, and recognizing relationships among concepts requires each concept be located somewhere in that network. Without well-traveled pathways, the memories will get lost. They will find neither conscious awareness nor each other.

You cannot innovate, you cannot invent, and you cannot seamlessly integrate information stored only externally. Creativity is not a magical spell for creating something out of nothing. It's the ability to make new associations among old ideas and new data. To be creative, the raw materials must reside in internal memory. Wikipedia is simply not available to the subtle workings of fluid intelligence.

We should not allow technologies like writing to cause our memories to languish and atrophy. Rather, they should enrich our memories with much higher leverage information than was available to mnemonists past.

Our society has lost the art of memory because we can get away with being lazy. But how might the world be if each of us had a sprawling memory palace as lavishly furnished as that of an erudite Greek of 660 BCE? Imagine if it contained the most important information we encounter now.

This is the vision of a liberal arts education, after all; but while we spend longer than ever before--18 years at least--memorizing only to forget, we are no longer taught how to learn. If we all learned to think memorably, to keep the most important parts of past experience close at hand, how much more creative might we become? And what might we gain the ability to learn?

Further Resources

• This half-hour lecture/audiobook by Derren Brown is the best introduction to the basic mnemonic techniques I've found so far.
• For a look at how it was done in the good old days, check out Cicero's Rhetorica ad Herennium (Latin background optional). Though there's been some innovation, this is still basically an accurate description of how the professionals do it.
• There is much to learn of the remembering mind in Homerian verse. As Milman Parry established in the 1920's (at the age of 18), what was captured by Homer in heroic hexameter was not merely a story, but the inner workings of literary thought 'ere dawn of the written word.
• Joshuah Foer's Moonwalking with Einstein is a riveting tour of mnemonic subculture, as well as an introduction to the history and theory of the art of memory. The Kindle version's only ten bucks, but if you can't spare the resources, at least watch his TED talk on the same.

Press "A" To Jump

"You're becoming a very specific kind of guru," my best friend divulged after one of those long conversations that only happen on road trips. "You're like that character at the very beginning of a video game when there's a tutorial that teaches you things like, 'navigate with the arrow keys' and 'press A to jump'. Nobody will even survive for very long, let alone defeat the final boss, with just those skills. But if it weren't for knowledge like this we'd get stuck in corners and never regenerate more than a few feet from where we started."

The things I said to him that day are things I'd never before articulated outside of my own head, because they seem too obvious to me to be worth saying. I said them in this case because I was exasperated, couldn't think of any other reason he seemed to be running directly into a corner over and over again, and wasn't having much luck with asking simple questions. I was expecting him to respond with, "Duh, I know that; the actual problem is x," which would finally allow access to the actual problem.

But no, the truth is that sometimes very smart people intent on winning the game simply never learn how to use the controller. So, just in case you happen to be button mashing at the moment, here are the things I said that have helped him take much more control of his life.

You have values. Winning means fulfilling those values. Fulfilling values requires identifying and accomplishing causally relevant goals.

If your goals have not already been accomplished, it means that the universe is not in your preferred configuration yet. Since there are a whole lot of possible configurations of the universe, unless you have extremely general goals, the odds are pretty small that the universe will just happen to end up in your favorite one if you simply wait. That doesn't mean, "Don't get too set on specific goals, 'cause you'll probably be disappointed." It means, "Don't wait." The basic game mechanics consist of learning to manipulate causal chains to increase the odds that the universe ends up in the configurations you like, and doesn't end up in the configurations you don't like. Manipulating causal chains means trying to understand them and then reaching out and actually acting on them accordingly.

In other words, figure out what you want, figure out how to get it, and then do that.

It sounds so obvious that I'm embarrassed to say it. But people really do seem to spend most of their time not doing this. They just sort of stand around waiting and hoping that things will go their way. They waste a lot of time lamenting the cruelty of fate when bad things happen, and feeling blessed when good things happen. When Karma shits on them even through they tried really hard, they feel helpless instead of wondering whether they're trying the wrong thing.

So when you're stuck in a corner, make sure you're holding the controller and not button mashing: Figure out what you want, figure out how to get it, and then do that.

Running Without Lying (To Ourselves Or Each Other)

The truth about barefoot running is that the truth about barefoot running is hard to find. But so far, it really does seem to be better than running in cushy-motion-controlling-arch-supporty shoes. So let's be honest: Barefooters hurt their feet a lot, more research is needed, and we should be a bit confused about all of this in the mean time.

I've been running for about five years now. But I wasn't really a runner until four years ago when, like many, I read Born to Run and fell deeply in love. Immediately upon finishing the book, I started training barefoot, transitioned to minimalist running shoes (specifically Vibram KSOs), and vowed to one day run an ultramarathon. I even brainstormed ways of testing out persistence hunting for myself.

For those who've never heard of this stuff, here are the central claims that came to fuel the barefoot running movement.

1. Distance running is central to human evolutionary history. We evolved to run great distances--as in a good hundred miles or so at a time--pursuing prey relentlessly and forcing it to trot until it keels over from exhaustion. While we're certainly not built for speed, we're good enough at endurance to be deadly.
2. The cushy footwear you'll find on display at any athletics store--arranged according to arch support, motion control, and activity type--is largely responsible for the majority of running injuries. It encourages landing on the heel rather than the front of the foot; it enables weak, atrophied, useless foot muscles (the true nature of "flat feet"); and it prevents pronation of the foot, which is a biomechanical feature rather than a defect to be corrected by orthotics. As a result, shod runners collide with the ground much harder than do barefoot runners, and most of the shock goes straight through the heel and knee, rather than into the foot and calf muscles that have evolved to take it.
3. Running is good for you. Shoes and poor form are not. Everyone should run like the Tarahumara: barefoot or in minimalist footwear, in short, quick steps, with a forefoot strike instead of a heel strike, and probably not on concrete.

I originally set out in this post to write a well-reasoned discussion of the evidence for these claims. Last time I looked, no such thing existed; there was an awful lot of cheering, hype, and speculation, but almost no evaluation of actual evidence not taken directly from Born to Run. To my delight, this time I discovered that someone has already done it for me--and done it well.

The barefoot running sequence at Condensed Science has three main parts. The first discusses the evolutionary basis for barefoot running. The second is about biomechanics. Third is an analysis of injury rates in running, and it's the one wherein the author seriously impressed me by explaining what we actually do and don't know at this point rather than merely arguing for her favorite side.

In Summary

Yeah, we may well have been "born to run". Given that, runners are injured at surprisingly high rates: Somewhere around half of us are injured each year. You're more likely to end up with joint injuries if you run in conventional athletic shoes, and you're more likely to injure your feet if you run barefoot-ish (You don't say!). You're definitely less likely overall to be injured if you run barefoot, so even though Vibrams do not in fact prevent all injury, they're better by comparison. Biomechanics is complicated, and relevant studies are sparse; it is ok to be uncertain and to make the least bad guess based on whatever evidence is available.

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ETA: Just to be clear, I'm making no claims here about walking.