Reading and Viewing – LisaZWise.com

2023 update

Yet another yearly-ish update, which will hopefully lead to more regular writing

It turns out that 2021 was NOT the year of the podcast, or any renewed writing effort on my website. The Pandemic continued to affect all sorts of things, and the Post-Pandemic Ennui has led to a somewhat slow return to a “new normal”. It turns out that both podcasting and online writing take a lot of time and energy, as I have learnt from some of my favourite (and prolific) podcasters such as Dave Tate from EliteFTS, Dan John (already featured on my site), the Stronger by Science team, Pat Flynn, and Iron Culture. For a while, I was feeling a bit down on myself for lack of productivity, until I added up the amount of weekly live content I was “producing” through my teaching, and that ended up being at least 5 hours of material on different topics for around 24 weeks of the year, without counting the many thousands of words of feedback written on assignments. There is a different level of scrutiny from the smaller audiences, but also perhaps greater expectations around content relevance from a captive audience.

I also had ambitions of writing more regularly about the things that I am reading. I am definitely reading a lot, and happily much of my reading has been for leisure – which in turn opens my mind to the way in which fiction can inform psychology in ways that experimental research does not. My main genre of reading has been detective stories, and I will aim to update my reading list to reflect the 100+ books I have read in the past 18 months (Reacher, Bosch, Lincoln Lawyer, Martin Beck, Wallander, Aaron Falk, Rebus, Rutledge). There is something distinctly satisfying in reading a series of books in order of writing and being able to see the evolution of characters, writing, and setting over timeframes that often match my own personal history. For example, some Reacher books were set in areas of New York city at the time I first lived there which gave me strong memories of place and time, whereas the Bosch series was set in LA at a time of my own experience, but in a setting totally unfamiliar to me. I also loved reading books set in Scandinavia and Scotland – very different perspectives on events occurring in my timeline. It has been very interesting to see how detective series offer the opportunity for characters to develop over a full series, but to interact with many different people in different walks of life, thereby offering opportunities for viewing the same situation through many different perspectives simultaneously and providing a forum for social commentary.

Along with reading as an active pursuit to replace mindlessly watching repeats of TV shows, I also returned to attending AFL footy live games and going camping with my relatively new off-road setup (ute and trailer). I certainly need to update the travel side of my blog – but I’ve found that I don’t want to spend time writing on electronic devices while I’m away from my university work.

The balance between writing and doing is something I am still struggling with, but I also need to keep in mind that my blogging role models write and podcast as a major aspect of their own businesses. Similarly, many of the athletes and exercisers that are my role models are much younger than me and probably genetically more gifted in their athletic skills. I use the word “role model” rather than peer because the comparison group against whom I set my aspirational goals are not really my peers at all, but are people who have done some of the things that I aspire to, thereby showing me what it might take to achieve similar things. And universally, people who do things that are amazing in an apparently effortless way, have generally put many, many years of work into developing the skills, expertise and team support that makes things look easy.

Ute and trailer at Lake Creek Campground near Cobargo, NSW

At the end of 2022, a time when I often do website updates, I instead did a body update, by having my second total hip replacement, also something I plan to write about, as my own experiences with this surgery have been relentlessly positive and have given me the opportunity to continue an active lifestyle without too much limitation. I am still actively engaged with taekwon-do, lifting weights, boxing, and camping and hope to continue with these activities for the foreseeable future. All of which suggests that I need to decide which things are priorities at which points in my life, and work on realistic timelines.

2021 – the year of the podcast?

For most years, at the start of the year (usually January), I have a big drive to get my web presence organised, and start updating my site more regularly. The flurry of activity tends to fall away completely once I get back into the rhythm of teaching – and when I put things into context for myself, for much of the year I’m actually producing a lot of content for my units, and writing over 40,000 words of feedback on various pieces of work from students at different levels in their studies. On top of that, I contribute fairly extensively to discussion forums within courses and elsewhere. All-in-all, I’m probably preparing a lot more content than I realise, and it leaves me a bit drained of creative energy for my own projects.

So this year, it’s the year of podcasts and graphical abstracts as part of my teaching, and as part of my own learning. Hopefully it will also be the year of including data visualisation within my web-site. If I can get those things going, the year will be an online success, and “Watch this space” will be a bit more interesting than watching grass grow …

And note-to-self: my category of Reading and Viewing will need to become a category of “Consuming and Reflecting” to reflect on what I’m doing when I’m reading, listening and viewing.

Reading in 2020

The year began well, with a number of cool books that I had time to write about. But as things got crazier and crazier, the time left to read and write in between preparing classes, preparing food, and living within the confines of lockdown seemed to dissipate into nothingness. It turns out that the history of my year of reading is probably best summed up in a barrage of text-messages to various people about various books … but that would be tedious to print out. The highlights are below.

David Graeber: Bullshit jobs and other books and articles featured heavily in my shared reading (lots of ideas that resonated with me).

I re-read a bunch of books on programming in various languages and setting up websites, but I didn’t really do too much of that as I ran out of headspace

Behavioral Insights and Nudge were two books that resonated with me in anti-phase – and I’m still working through these ideas for future posts. In short, they reminded me of the extent to which Psychology as a discipline has sold out to the medical model and the idea of mental health and mental illness on a single continuum. By ignoring cognitive sciences and normal human behaviour, it has allowed its core areas to be taken over by behavioural economics and machine learning, or by the “wellbeing” industry.

And I had the pleasure of re-reading the six books of the Dune trilogy – what a great series to revisit, and very prescient for the times. And of course, I hadn’t realised there’s a new movie coming out – but it should also be a treat.

And of course, I spent a huge amount of time reading and re-reading the various sport and exercise material I like, the newest of which is Enter the Kettlebell by Pavel Tsatsouline

Alan Baddeley’s Working Memories

I was planning on reading Alan Baddeley’s classic text on Working Memory, and in searching the library, I found a 2019 version, which I failed to notice is titled “Working Memories”(plural), a really clever title for an autobiography of his career in memory research! It’s been a pleasure to read this book, which covers a lot of theory, but set in both the scientific and social context of the times. It is very instructive for younger academics to understand the very different social and political environment that shapes academia in terms of its funding and the control of gateways into recognition (through academic appointments, the concept of tenure, and the role of publishing in recognised journals). It is also instructive to read of how people navigate through changing times, to hear about the social networks that are so important in understanding the evolution of ideas, and to read about how theory and application are linked. It is somewhat reassuring to know that links between theory and application take a long time to develop, involve a range of different types of researchers, and often involve quite idiosyncratic personalities and interests.

Here is a review of the book which includes this quote:

There is a story about an introduction to a company report in which the document was compared to a bikini: “what is revealed was important, but what it covered was critical” … Written at the age of 84, this book is at the same time an insightful history of cognitive psychology, and an authoritative scientific autobiography.
https://www.tandfonline.com/doi/abs/10.1080/13546805.2019.1606707?journalCode=pcnp20

The review goes on in more detail in a similar vein to my own views on the book, which I highly recommend as a starting point for anyone wanting to read about cognitive psychology.

What algorithms want

The gap between theoretical ideas and messy reality, as seen in Neal Stephenson, Adam Smith, and Star Trek.
Ed Finn

I have just started reading a really interesting discussion about algorithms, language, mathematics and the human-machine interface in Ed Finn’s “What Algorithms Want: Imagination in the Age of Computing” published by MIT Press.

Again, this is a placeholder for what I’m reading rather than my thoughts on what I’m reading. It will expand …

Clive James

Sadly, Clive James died recently, but his death lead me to explore his writings, initially through his multi-volume autobiography, and then through some of his other works (which can be found at the his website linked above). I will expand this post soon as there is so much to write and say about his work (stories of his life, the art of writing, poetry, cultural criticism etc) and how it impacts on me. For the moment, this post is just a marker of what I want to write about.

Understanding Ignorance

An exploration of what we can know about what we don’t know: why ignorance is more than simply a lack of knowledge.
Daniel R De Nicola

I’ve started reading this philosophical approach to knowledge, what we know, and more importantly, what we don’t know. The distinction between knowledge and ignorance is an important one to think about, and is a critical distinction for education and training. It is also an interesting thing to explore in an era of mass education, deliberate misinformation, and outsourcing of many aspects of memory to technology.

The slow-motion death of conservative politics

Waleed Aly makes some important points here – we end up so far down the slippery slope in what we don’t bother challenging in our leaders that it becomes hard to identify when it all went so horribly wrong. Each incremental step seems small until you look at how far we have collectively fallen in our acceptance of injustice, intolerance, corruption and greed. The problems in Australian academia reflect the problems in Australian society – so much is corrupted and wrong, but it is difficult to know how to make appropriate change from within.

It’s true in a sense that Trump has stolen the Republican party. But it’s also true it was there for the taking. There are many reasons Trump is succeeding – anger and disillusionment among a humiliated electorate is one of them. But there’s also the fact that the Republicans have been training their voters to indulge every reactionary prejudice for years. Trump simply does this better, louder, and with less varnish than his rivals. Can we be surprised when he vanquishes them? Can the Republican establishment really cry foul when he outdoes them?And is it so different here? Well, in a way, yes. A moderate is presently in the top job and the reactionary forces aren’t yet taking endorsements from former Ku Klux Klan wizards (they’ll have to settle for Reclaim Australia for now). But there’s an important commonality too: that the contradictions that were once holding conservative parties together, and delivering them political success, have now fallen apart. The most important of these is the contradiction between liberal economics and the politics of “values”.It’s hard to be the staunch defenders of family, culture and tradition while you’re also staunch advocates of things like high-skilled immigration and workplace “flexibility” of the kind WorkChoices offered. It’s hard to believe the market should be free to exploit and commodify whatever consumers will tolerate – sex, culture, children – and yet pretend we are bound together by inviolable, sacred values.

Source: The slow-motion death of conservative politics

The “jazz” of teaching

via Stephen Theiler: New York Times opinion piece on Online education

I particularly like this idea:

Every memorable class is a bit like a jazz composition. There is the basic melody that you work with. It is defined by the syllabus. But there is also a considerable measure of improvisation against that disciplining background.

Science as a “job” versus a hobby (with an aside on negentropy)

I’ve been reading Mihaly Czikszentmihalyi’s work on creativity and flow (I can do this now that Wikipedia has helpfully allowed me to pronounce his name so I can actually talk about his work! (“cheek-sent-me-high-ee” [note by me: presumably this is the American pronunciation, which is probably the best I can aspire to but nothing like the orginal]. Originally Mihály Csíkszentmihályi, Hungarian pronunciation: [ˈmihaːj ˈtʃiːksɛntmihaːji]).

He has many interesting things to say, and his concepts of positive psychology / optimum experience resonate strongly with how I view the world. As with Vygotsky’s work, the way his ideas are represented in educational and psychology literature (actually, more likely I’ve read text books or review articles) does not do them justice. In particular, his description of attentional processes and their relationship with flow deserves much closer examination on my part as it is at the heart of expert skilled performance. But probably most pertinent to my current area of study are his comments on formal study (extrinsically driven “inquiry”) versus informal study (intrinsically motivated “hobby”) and their influence in organising “psychic energy” (flow). (And as an aside re psychic energy: I love the idea of negentropy or “the specific entropy deficit of the ordered sub-system relative to its surrounding chaos” which can be used “as a measure of distance to normality” – in fact, it is probably an extremely important concept to get my head around. I suspect that Csikszentmihalyi’s notion of psychic energy, far from being New Age mumbo-jumbo, provides an opportunity to understand the “Chi energy” of martial arts in terms of cognitive science … this aside should probably be a new post …)

So back to the comment on formal study (“real scientists”) versus informal study (“amateur scientists”) from Csikzsentmihalyi, M. (1009) “Flow: The psychology of optimal experience”, New York: HarperPerennial, p137-138). It is pertinent to my current way of thinking particularly as a comment on the push for output / performance metrics to determine whether or not academics are “active researchers” and quality assurance of academia by ensuring all academics have Ph.D.s. to prove their research credentials …

Is it really true that a person without a Ph.D., who is not working a one of the major research centers, no longer has any chance of contributing to the advancement of science? Or is this just one of those largely unconscious efforts at mystification to which all successful institutions inevitably succumb? It is difficult to answer these questions, partly because what constitutes “science” is of course defined by those very institutions that are in line to benefit from their monopoly.
There is no doubt that a layman cannot contribute, as a hobby to the kind of research that depends on multibillion-dollar supercolliders, or on nuclear magnetic resonance spectroscopy. But then, such fields to not represent the only science there is. The mental framework that makes science enjoyable is accessible to every one. It involves curiosity, careful observation, a disciplined way of recording events, and finding ways to tease out the underlying regularities in what one learns. It also requires the humility to be willing to learn from the results of past investigators, coupled with enough skepticism and openness of mind to reject beliefs that are not supported by facts.
Defined in this broad sense, there are more practicing amateur scientists that one would think. Some focus their interest on health, and try to find out everything they can about a disease that threatens them or their families. Following in Mendel’s footsteps, some learn whatever they can about breeding domestic animals, or creating new hypbrid flowers. Others diligently replicate the observations of early astrononmers with their back yard telescopes. There are closet geolgistists who roam the wilderness in search of minerals, cactus collectores who scour the desert mesas for new specimens, and probably hunderds of thousands of individuals who have pushed their mechanical skills to the point that they are vergin g on true scientific understanding.
What keeps many of these people from developing their skills further is the belief that they will never be able to become genuine “professional” scientists. and therefore that their hobby should not be taken seriously. But there is no better reason for doing science than that sense of order it brings to the mind of the seeker. If flow, rather than success and recognition, is the measure by which to judge its value, science can contribute immensely to the quality of life.

Csikszentmihalyi has many more quotable quotes and pertinent comments, and it is an interesting study in motivation to note that I only blog things when the book I’m reading and the computer (rather than note pad) are in close proximity (I also have hundreds of photos taken at each single event that I photograph, but very few occasions where I take out the camera …)

While specialisation is necessary to develop the complexity of any pattern of thought, the goals-ends relationship must always be kept clear: specialisation is for the sake of thinking better, and not an end in itself. Unfortunately many serious thinkers devote all their mental effort to becoming well-known scholars, but in the meantime they forget their initial purpose in scholarship.
There are two words whose meanings reflect our somewhat warped attitudes toward levels of commitment to physical or mental activities. These are the terms amateur and dilettante. Nowadays these labels are slightly derogatory. An amateur or dilettante is someone not quite up to par, a person not to be taken very seriously, one whose performance falls short of professional standards. But originally amateur from the latin verb amare, “to love,” referred to a person who loved what he was doing. Similarly, a dilettante , from the latin delectare, “to find delight in,” was someone who enjoyed a given activity. The earliest meanings of these words therefore drew attention to experiences rather than accomplishments; they described the subjective rewards individuals gained from doing things, instead of focusing on how well they were achieving. Nothing illustrates as clearly our changing attitudes towards the value of experience as the fate of these two words. There was a time when it was admirable to be an amateur poet or a dilettante scientist, because it meant that the quality of life could be improved by engaging in such activities. But increasingly the emphasis has been to value behaviour over subjective states; what is admired is success, achievement, the quality of performance rather than the quality of experience. Consequently it has become embarrassing to be called a dilettante, even though to be a dilettante is to achieve what counts most – the enjoyment one’s actions provide.

An addendum … and possibly why I don’t blog often. It’s the unfinished nature of blogging that concerns me – by the time I’ve “finished”, what there is to write is a full-blown paper, not a quick comment. But when I do actually blog something while I’m still developing an idea, the logical continuation of the thought keeps popping up after I’ve published the post and I add addendums like this:

The bad connotations that the terms amateur and dilettante have earned for themselves over the years are due largely to the blurring of the distinction between intrinsic and extrinsic goals. An amateur who pretends to know as much as a professional is probably wrong, and up to some mischief. The point of becoming an amateur scientist is not to compete with professionals on their own turf, but to use a symbolic discipline to extend mental skills, and to create order in consciousness. On that level, amateur scholarship can hold its own, and can be even more effective that its professional counterpart. But the moment that amateurs lose sight of this goal, and use knowledge mainly to bolster their egos or to achieve a material advantage, then they become caricatures of the scholar. Without training in the discipline of skepticism and reciprocal criticism that underlies the scientific method, laypersons who venture into the fields of knowledge with prejudiced goals can become more ruthless, more egregiously unconcerned with truth, than even the most corrupt scholar.