Tom Munnecke’s Eclectica

From Jon Haidt’s paper on positive emotion, “Elevation and the positive psychology of morality”

“If disgust is the emotional reaction that we feel when we see people move down… then is there a corresponding emotion we feel when we see people move up? … I have called this emotion elevation”

“To begin, my students and I did a simple recall study, asking college students to recall and write about times when they had been in one of four positive emotion-arousing situations. The prompt for elevation was to “think of a specific time when you saw a manifestation of humanity’s ‘higher’ or ‘better’ nature.” Control conditions included instructions to “think of a specific time when you were making good progress towards a goal,” which is the appraisal condition described by Lazarus (1991) as the elicitor of happiness. In a second study we induced elevation in the lab by showing participants 10 minute video clips, one of which was about the life of Mother Teresa. (Control conditions included an emotionally neutral but interesting documentary, and a comedy sequence from the television show “America’s Funniest Home Videos”). In both studies we found that participants in the elevation conditions reported different patterns of physical feelings and motivations, when compared to participants in the happiness and other control conditions. Elevated participants were more likely to report physical feelings in their chests, especially warm, pleasant, or “tingling” feelings, and they were more likely to report wanting to help others, to become better people themselves, and to affiliate with others. In both studies happiness energized people to engage in private or self-interested pursuits, while elevation seemed to open people up and turn their attention outwards, towards other people. Elevation therefore fits well with Fredrickson’s (1998) “broaden and build” model of the positive emotions, in which positive emotions are said to motivate people to cultivate skills and relationships that will help them in the long run.”

The question is, how do we figure out a way of connecting the notion of elevation to the dynamics of the network effect?

According to a recent report by Epsilon, “Americans today are donating less money and to fewer NPOs (non-profit organizations) than at any time in the past quarter century. Americans’ waning interest and participation in NPOs is directly linked to an overarching and worrisome decline in confidence in American institutions. Today’s donor class views most social institutions as untrustworthy and with a healthy dose of skepticism.”

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to quote Freeman Dyson:
“To help the poor from “the top down” is least likely to succeed. But science and technology are concentrated at the top, making top down the method of choice for those in power. The challenge, he said, is to find ways to help people by providing science and technology from “the bottom up.” ?Three successful “bottom up” approaches described by Dyson share an important trait: As they succeeded, they spread quickly. Dyson calls this “autocatalysis” — a chemistry term meaning that as a chemical reaction proceeds, it automatically accelerates. When, for example, British farmers in the 1950s began using drying sheds to keep their harvests dry, the technology spread rapidly. “As soon as the sheds were shown to be effective, every farmer had to have one,”
Autocatalysis is a “key virtue to look for in any technology that claims to improve human welfare on a large scale,” he added.”

I’ve started a web page to describe my prototype for micro philanthropy activity at www.munnecke.com/prototype

I listened to the conference call sponsored by Plexus Institute which should have both an audio and transcript version of the presentation. Ary Goldberger of Harvard Medical School spoke of his discoveries of fractal patterns in physiological signals. A strong, healthy body shows great complexity and diversity of signals, heart rate variability, for example. A weak, sick body shows flatter, more regular signals. He analyzes these signals from a fractal perspective, looking for self-similarity, and says that there are new areas for testable hypotheses about how the body signals.

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One of Senge’s patterns is the general problem addiction loop . Quick fixes seem to solve a problem, but often feed back to create other problems. Fundamental solutions which take longer to understand and implement are ignored in the flurry of quick fixes, creating a vicious circle. The flurry of quick fixes then feeds some kind of assessment system which makes it appear that we are being productive, with all that activity going on. This is like trying to get out of a hole by digging it deeper, and measuring your productivity by how many shovelfuls you scoop each day.

The flip side of this is to create a virtuous circle, addressing the fundamental issue to create a solution-generating feedback loop. This dissolves problems rather than solves them, which appears to be infinitely unproductive to those who use problem-solving metrics. For example, I once helped design a system which allowed very flexible table-driven techniques to generate applications. A hospital pharmacy formulary, for example, could be managed by simply defining the data elements, their interactions, and security procedures. Some folks wanted to estimate the complexity of the system, and asked how many lines of code would be required. I answered, “none.” We had a very long discussion in which they could not stop thinking and asking about “lines of code” to make the system work.

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Storytelling seems to be a growing method of communication. It seems that the most generative of my ideas have been those that people can communicate through others via stories… I recall Douglas Hofstadter’s epic “Goedel, Escher, Bach” by his stories of Tortoise and Achilles, not the prose between them.

Steven Denning has some interesting ideas on storytelling in his book, The Springboard: How Storytelling Ignites Action in Knowledge-Era Organizations. From his web site:

And storytelling’s bad press was not new. It had been disreputable for several millennia, ever since Plato identified poets and storytellers as dangerous fellows who put unreliable knowledge into the heads of children and hence would be subject to strict censorship in The Republic.”
“The antagonism towards storytelling may have reached a peak in the twentieth century with the determined effort to reduce all knowledge to analytic propositions, and ultimately physics or mathematics. In the process, we discovered the limits of analytic thinking. We learnt of Godel’s proof of the incompleteness of arithmetic, and began to absorb the implications of the indeterminacy of quantum physics and complexity theory, but many years of schooling had instilled in us a continuing itch for reductionist simplicity. This itch reflects what Freeman Dyson calls the Napoleonic approach, and leads to hierarchy, procedures, rules and a distinctive form of myopia. It doesn’t help us much in coping with a rapidly changing world, where innovation is the key to success.”

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