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How To Be Spiritual In A Material World
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31 Oct 2023
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Becoming Super Conscious

 

Many many people (and animals and forests and oceans too) have become super conscious in these past few years. Is that you too? Here are what I see as the 12 sign of being super conscious now….

  1. We don’t get triggered by things in the way we used to. There’s a kind of calm understanding of what’s behind things and where they might lead if someone recognises its potential and greater purpose.
  2. We walk in awe of the natural world, going ‘look at that sky, the green of everything, the bursting wonder of flowers and the sheer joy of connecting with animals’.
  3. We KNOW things. Yup just simply know stuff we never learned or heard of before. I call this quantum intelligence and it seems to be catching on.
  4. We know who we are and at the same time it’s kind of irrelevant as we are now the source creators of ourselves. Identity has ceased to matter and fulfillment of greater purpose has taken its joyful place.
  5. We appear to be timeless in some way. Yes there are signs of aging, but at the same time there’s a radiant inner glow that supersedes any belief in getting older.
  6. We are radiant suns lighting up reality, not just in our close proximity, but in the greater field of us all.
  7. There is a strong sense of Source both within and without. We see source in everything and everyone. It seems we are now inner connected via what I like to call the Source mycelium network that connects all life now.
  8. We can commune with animals, trees, the stars, the universe. It’s more than telepathic, it’s communion at its most wonderful level.
  9. We are possibilitarians, apocaloptimists, transformers and transcenders of all that has come before. The past is maleable, we live in the presence of the present, co-creating a future too fabulous to even yet imagine.
  10. We talk with those who’ve gone on to the other side with great ease and grace, reveling in their next becoming. We are even watching a wave of loved ones being reborn right now as the next wave of super conscious beings on the planet.
  11. We are a collective force of wonder, of creation, of super connection, each with our own unique masteries and genius surging to the fore to innovate everything.
  12. We source new consciousness and quantum leap new possibilities into reality. We are future innovators, loving life, spreading Kindness with a capital K and living in a version of reality that is magical, synergistic, beautiful and naturally abundant.

 

About the Author:


Soleira Green is a visionary author, quantum coach, ALLchemist & future innovator. She has been creating leading edge breakthroughs in consciousness, quantum evolution, transformation, innovation, intelligence and more over the past 25 years, has written and self-published eleven books, and taught courses all over the world on these topics.

 

 

 

 

 

 

Original post here

 

26 Oct 2023
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Why Career Transition Is So Hard

 

 

Today people at all stages of their careers are asking themselves profound questions about the kind of work they do, how much of it they want to do, and the place it occupies in their lives. We’re asking ourselves these questions in part because fewer and fewer of us conceive of life as having the three “traditional” stages: a short early stage devoted to learning, a long middle stage dedicated to work, and a later stage devoted to enjoying one’s golden years. Instead, with growing frequency, we’re alternating between changing jobs and careers, pursuing opportunities for education, and making time for periods of rest and restoration.

This isn’t a midlife-crisis type of questioning that flares up at a certain age and gets resolved once and for all. The accelerated pace of technological change and, most recently, the advent of AI are reshaping jobs and organizations in ways that call for constant career reinvention. So we all need to learn how to get better at making the most of the frequent transitions that will constitute a long working life.

There’s a lot that’s beneficial and necessary about this shift, but no matter how often you change careers, you’re likely to experience the transition as an emotionally fraught process—one that involves confusion, loss, insecurity, and struggle. Big changes can be exhilarating, but they’re also terrifying.

For more than two decades—ever since I began conducting research on the topic for my book Working Identity—I’ve been studying career reinvention: what prompts people to do it, how they go about it, and how it affects them. In this article, drawing on work I’ve done since the book’s publication in 2004, I’ll explain why such transitions are so hard for so many of us, despite their growing frequency and prevalence, and I’ll offer some ideas for managing them more intentionally and successfully.

Why Change Is Hard

Some of what makes changing careers difficult will be unique to you and your particular circumstances. But you’ll almost surely have to confront two challenges while in transition: a lack of institutional support and an unsettling loss of professional identity.

Lack of institutional support. Until recently, many of the important moves in our working lives were institutionalized, meaning they were well scripted by the communities and professions that oversaw them. If you wanted to become a doctor, make partner at a law firm, or move up the management ranks, you had to follow a clear sequence of steps. From schooling through retirement, you knew more or less how long each step would take. Peers went through them with you, and elders showed you the way. Throughout the process, gatekeepers marked your progress with degrees, credentials, promotions, and, eventually, gold watches.

Today, with the rise of nonlinear career paths, many of the transitions we make are “under-institutionalized.” There is no immutable series of steps for the change you need to make, and no telling how long it will take or how to measure your progress. Complicating matters, the direction of travel is often from large organizations, which have well-structured recruiting and hiring processes, to smaller players, private firms, and entrepreneurial opportunities in unstructured job markets. Increasingly, too, people are shifting from full-time jobs to fluid, individualized portfolios of gigs and part-time roles. All this can offer you an endless sense of possibility, but it also makes it harder to figure out what you want to do, and where to start.

Loss of professional identity. Decades’ worth of research in social psychology shows that our sense of identity is anchored in the well-defined groups and organizations with which we are associated and by which we are recognized. Without the cover and support of a traditional employer and a stable work identity, we can quickly start to feel lost, anxious, irrelevant, and insecure. Those feelings can be strongly amplified if instead of choosing to leave your job, you’ve been let go or fired.

Emotional ups and down are a standard feature of any transition. Unfortunately, you’re likely to have to cope with them for longer than you might expect, for several reasons. If you’re an experienced executive, you probably have some very specific skills and knowledge, and that can make finding a new fit challenging, especially because many senior positions are not advertised publicly. Vetting and interviewing processes have also gotten longer—the result of a confluence of factors, including the use of multiple screening methods such as personality tests and skills assessments. More broadly, the current economic uncertainty can make it slower and harder to secure a job or financing for an entrepreneurial venture.

Search Different

When it comes to making big life decisions, we’re typically told that the first step is to figure out what it is that we really want. Once the hard work of self-reflection is done, the thinking goes, the rest is simply a matter of implementation.

The problem is, that approach doesn’t work. Year in and year out, I’ve seen the same dynamic: People know what they don’t want to do anymore, or what is no longer viable, but they don’t know what to do instead. So they delay getting started, feeling that they first need greater clarity or waiting until they’ve lost a job and are forced to make a change.

It’s easy to blame this inertia on human psychology: We fear change, lack maturity, don’t understand ourselves, have failed to reflect on our true nature. But my research has led me to a different conclusion. Usually we fail to change simply because we don’t know how to go about it. The problem lies in our methods, not our minds.

Career change is iterative. You can’t line everything up in advance. You have to figure things out over time and make adjustments as you go.

The story of Thomas (a pseudonym) is instructive. Thomas had a conventional career in finance with a Fortune 500 company until he reached the age of 48. Each year he got bigger bonuses, greater performance evaluations, and bigger responsibilities, and he was eventually promoted to finance director in his company’s health care business. But when that business was dismantled, he lost his job, and finding a new one proved difficult. He couldn’t make a lateral move, because roles at his level were few and far between; he didn’t yet have the experience to become a CEO; and he was told he was overqualified and “too well paid” for more-junior roles. Eventually he got an offer from a midsize firm that needed his expertise temporarily. It wasn’t an ideal match, but he took the position to avoid having a big gap on his CV.

After that gig ended, Thomas was back to square one. But during the search process he’d reconnected with a couple of old friends and colleagues in similar straits who had pooled office space and launched freelance advisory businesses that allowed them to generate some income while searching for the next thing. Thomas collaborated with them on two start-up ideas, but neither really took off, so he and his family made some adjustments: His wife ramped up her career, and they moved to a less costly city and invested in profit-generating rental properties.

During those difficult years, Thomas began thinking about a market gap he had noticed while working for his previous employer: the dearth of assisted-living facilities for the aging population in a region he knew well. Gradually he made connections with the players in that space, looked at models in other countries, and began helping companies orchestrate deals in the sector. Over time he became a go-to person for this kind of work. Now, with interest rates rising and the deal flow slowing, he’s seeking an operational role again, keen to use the skills he’s acquired.

What can we learn from Thomas’s story? After he was forced into a career change, he didn’t begin by trying to figure out who he “really” was and map out a plan before moving forward. Instead he hustled, following his nose and activating his networks, trying lots of different things, often simultaneously, without fully settling on one. He learned and adapted, which is what we all have to do in a world that rewards optionality and the exploration of many possible selves.

A Liminal State

Embracing optionality and multiplicity in the search for a new career, as Thomas did, makes a lot of sense intellectually, but emotionally it’s a roller-coaster ride. That’s because it puts you in what anthropologists call a liminal state, where you must navigate between a past that’s clearly over and a future that’s still uncertain.

Liminality can be unpleasant, especially for those of us used to single-mindedly pursuing clear goals on a well-trodden path. But when you’re changing careers, liminality gives you the necessary time and space to question the old givens. Think of it as an identity time-out, when you can let go of your commitment to who you used to be and focus more creatively on who you might become. It takes time to discover what you want to change, identify the habits and assumptions that might be holding you back, and build sufficient skills experience and connections in a new arena. So instead of trying to land your next role as quickly as possible, you must embrace liminality. You have to be willing to get and stay lost for a while.

My research has shown that there are three important ways to make the process easier.

Diverge and delay. Finding your next role almost always takes longer than you expect. Make the most of that time. A traditional plan-and-implement program is likely only to get you more of the same. If you want your liminal period to lead to real discovery, you need to experiment with divergent possibilities while delaying commitment to any one of them. In doing so, you’ll have to think more creatively and will obtain more information about yourself and your options.

Consider the case of a lawyer I’ll call Sophie. Coming out of a two-decade corporate career, Sophie wasn’t sure what she wanted to do next, but she was keen to explore a range of possibilities, among them documentary filmmaking, nonexecutive board roles, and sustainability consulting. Over a three-year period she got herself a board-director accreditation, took filmmaking and journalism courses, worked on a start-up idea, did freelance consulting on compliance, joined a nonprofit board, did an internship in a newsroom, completed a corporate film project in her old area of ethics and integrity, and produced (and won prizes for) two short films. With deeper insight about the economic realities of the media and entertainment industries, she now feels well placed to decide between putting most of her energy into documentary filmmaking and building a more diverse portfolio of work.

Exploit and explore. Human beings are very good at either-or thinking: Either I’m leveraging my old skill set or I’m pivoting to something new. But most people making a career transition have to do both simultaneously, at least at first—ideally staying in their old jobs and careers while exploiting and exploring on the side until something new becomes viable.

One investment banker did just that when he began to tire of his career. While still working at his blue-chip firm, he started a blog lampooning the industry under the pen name Litquidity, shortened to Lit. Next, after switching to private equity, he launched the Litquidity Instagram account. As his following grew, he thought about turning his side gig into a full-time one but didn’t feel he could take the risk. Reluctantly he returned to banking. But just a few years later the Litquidity business had grown enough for him to make that transition. Today Lit is a social media sensation, with several Instagram accounts, a popular newsletter, a podcast, a deal with a recruiting firm, and roles as an angel investor and venture capital scout for Bain Capital Ventures.

Bridge and bond. We grow professionally in and through our relationships with others. But when it comes to career change, the connections we already have aren’t usually all that helpful. You need to build your relationships in two ways: by bridging, which involves creating or reactivating relationships beyond your current social circle, and bonding, which involves deepening ties and finding community within a close circle of kindred spirits.

Bridging often gets more attention because the golden rule of job-search networking has always been to mobilize your weak ties—the relationships you have with people you don’t know well or don’t see very often—to maximize your chances of learning about new opportunities. A recent study of more than 20 million LinkedIn users showed that this is indeed true: Weak ties help you get a job because they connect you to farther-flung social circles. The hitch is that most people dread the prospect of reaching out to their extended network in this way because it’s hard work that can leave you feeling exposed and vulnerable.

That’s why bonding relationships—critical for anyone trying to stay healthy, happy, and sane—are so important for people in transition. They provide the support, sustenance, and space people need to process the unsettling emotions of the transition period.

There’s no one way to forge bonding relationships. Sometimes the important ones are with people you already know (especially spouses), but sometimes they are with kindred spirits, people also in transition, or those already working in the field to which you aspire. Thomas bonded with the buddies he shared office space with. Sophie bonded with the newsroom team (who invited her to stay on a freelance basis after her internship), a community of female documentary filmmakers, and some of the other mature students in her courses. There’s convincing evidence that when independent consultants find their tribe, they are not only more productive but also better able to tolerate the anxiety of being on their own. One way or another, we all need a secure base from which to explore the unknown and turn painful feelings into sources of creativity and growth.

The Learning Plot

Being in transition is like losing the plot of your professional life. You need to diverge and delay, exploit and explore, and bridge and bond to find a new narrative thread. In doing so it’s essential to engage with others and tell them your story—again and again, as much to make sense of your experience as to enlist their help. This process, which I call “self-reflecting out loud,” will propel you forward, in no small measure because others will respond, sympathize, commiserate, ask questions, call your bluffs, and share their own experiences in ways that will help clarify your thinking.

Your story will most likely depart from the timeless myth in which a hero (you!) struggles to pivot to the next career and, by dint of hard work and determination, ultimately finds a happy ending. That kind of simple, linear plotline doesn’t reflect the realities of today’s working world, in which jobs and careers are precarious, liminality can be long, and resolution—if there is any—tends to be short-lived. So we all need to get comfortable with a new kind of narrative that revolves around what I call “the learning plot”—a story of ongoing struggle and adaptation. That’s what Thomas, Sophie, and Lit all did.

As constant reinvention becomes the norm, the stories that define us have no start or ending. Instead of closure, the prize is learning: What we learn about ourselves when we embrace, rather than resist, the loss of status and identity will give us access to more options in the long term. Proficiency in being liminal won’t reduce the great uncertainty before you. But it will increase your capacity to successfully navigate the present and future transitions that are the signature of a modern career.

 

 

 

Original article here

18 Oct 2023
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Moving Beyond Victimhood: The Great Unconscious Metapattern Of Our Time

 

“Sticks and stones may break my bones, but names shall never hurt me,” was an old adage way back in the early 1800s. For over 200 years it soothed and encouraged many a bullied student and adult. But no longer.

Today, it seems we are the walking wounded, insulted by everything. Names hurt us. Not being honored with the right pronoun hurts us. Not getting enough “Likes” on a social media post hurts us. Someone offering information we don’t agree with hurts us. Seeing historical statues of former slave owners hurts us. Our skins are thin. Suffering has become a badge of honor. And the more we publicly acclaim our suffering, the more there seems to be of it. (In other words, what we focus on materializes right in front of us.)

This is not to dismiss the reality of trauma. The world is full of it. Child abuse. Sexual abuse. Emotional abuse. Racial abuse. Gender abuse. Deliberate ritual abuse. Hunger. Starvation. War. Famine. Humanity carries the heavy epigenetic burden of all of these things—inherited ancestral patterns that take the form of thoughts, choices, and actions aligned with pain and suffering, lack, judgment and subjugation.

But humanity also carries the possibility of greatness. We also carry the inherited ancestral patterns of strength and courage, forgiveness and compassion, fairness and justice, a desire for change and evolution, love, and respect, mutual support and community. These higher emotions and strengths more than outweigh our shortcomings … but only when we choose to focus on them. We move into greater and greater possibilities and integrity only if we commit to those things, claim these traits as our own, and proudly live them.

Understanding Metapatterns

As the word implies, metapatterns are major patterns that affect many. Nationalism is a metapattern. Economics is a metapattern. Religion is a metapattern, and so is victimization. There isn’t a person, a family, a community, a government, a nation in the world that hasn’t seen suffering, abuse and inequality at one time or another. We have all been victims. There is nothing special about it. What is special is rising above it.

It is the nature of all systems — a family system, political system, religious system, a business system — that patterns within the system that are suppressed, excluded, and unacknowledged keep repeating. Abuse is a perfect example. For hundreds of years, societies suppressed acknowledgment of abuses perpetrated on people — women, indigenous peoples, people of color, pagans, Jews, Muslims, Christians, gays. As a result, the abuses kept on repeating with increasing prevalence and force. Which is exactly what we’re seeing now.

It is an incredibly healthy thing that we are now in the process of getting these deeply traumatic abuses and wounds out into the light and are discussing them. However, unless handled wisely, we run the danger of becoming the victims of past victimization by turning on perceived perpetrators and victimizing them. The old “eye for an eye and a tooth for a tooth” philosophy unconsciously lives in a lot of people’s thinking. That, too, is an inherited pattern. A pattern destined to leave us all blind and toothless unless we can turn it around and realize one very important point: The opposite of being a victim is not being a perpetrator.

The opposite of being a victim is mastering your world, mastering your patterns of thoughts, feelings and actions. The opposite of being a victim is stepping into authenticity, self-expression and joyous creativity, freed from the patterns that shackle us to the past.

Moving Beyond The Victim Pattern

So, how do we go about going beyond the victim metapattern? First, we need to understand that generational symptoms — patterns of thoughts, emotions, choices, and actions — are inherited. Clinical studies have proven that emotional trauma experienced by our parents and grandparents (and even further back in our genetic line), leave physical markers on our genes, affecting gene expression. These markers make us prone to the same kinds of trauma, over and over again.

The patterns of victimization — unconscious ways of thinking, feeling, and acting that attract abuse — are literally passed down epigenetically from generation to generation. This is what is termed “emotional DNA.” The same holds true for abusers/perpetrators. How many times do we find that an abusive parent was also subjected to violence as a child? Too often. The inherited pattern of being an abuser is also passed down.

The next thing we need to do is see that abuse and victimization are not serving our personal growth, happiness, or overall social advancement. We need to understand that anger and outrage, lashing out, seeking punishment, and reparations for old sins is simply a continuation of the very dynamic we’re hurt by and angry about.

Metapatterns are in us. And they are destined to unconsciously drive us and run our lives (from one side of the issue or the other) until we see them, acknowledge them, and choose to change and elevate their shape and effect. Only then can we move beyond them.

Symptoms Of Victim/Perpetrator

How do you recognize when a pattern or metapattern is affecting you? It shows up in our language and as symptoms: discomfort, irritation, a block to some desire, boredom, a lack of progress, ill health. Sometimes it manifests as a variety of symptoms. When it comes to the metapatterns of victimization, some generational symptoms passed down epigenetically from one generation to the next are:

  • Seeing oppression everywhere
  • Hatred for the perceived oppressors
  • Seeing discrimination even when it isn’t intended or doesn’t exist
  • A sense of not being seen and respected
  • Clinging to past wounds, past actions
  • Unworthiness
  • A sense of always being put down
  • Inability to prosper

As well, there are generational symptoms of perpetration passed down epigenetically from one generation to the next. It’s interesting to note that some symptoms of past victimization and past perpetration are the same. Some of these symptoms are:

  • Guilt
  • A subconscious desire to be punished or to fail
  • Self-sabotage
  • Anger and the continued desire to inflict pain and suffering
  • A sense of unworthiness
  • Apologizing for everything, even when no harm is done
  • Inability to prosper

In a quick example to show how this works, Hua Ming (a pseudonym) came to the US on a university exchange scholarship from China. After graduation, she chose to stay in America and became a citizen in order to continue her work at a prestigious laboratory as a geneticist. In time, she recognized she felt blocked. She was frightened by her growing responsibilities at work. She was frightened by the increasing expectations of her American fiancé and her upcoming marriage — frightened to the point she was considering throwing it all away and moving back to China.

When Hua Ming decided to pursue professional guidance for her anxiety, she realized it was really more an issue of not being able to live up to Western people’s assessment of her value. She couldn’t understand how she was suddenly worthy. “I can’t do what they’re asking of me,” she thought. “My boss expects me to lead this next team project. My fiancé thinks I should go for my PhD and an even higher position. Who do they think I am?”

Looking at Ming’s family heritage, it wasn’t hard to uncover the pattern of unworthiness grounded in her ancestral pattern of gender discrimination. Her parents had been terribly disappointed to have a girlchild. Low expectations had plagued her all her life. Despite her determination to rise above those low opinions of her — a determination that had carried her far from her homeland — the unconscious inherited sense of unworthiness as a woman and lack of value was dragging her down.

Through an understanding of emotional DNA, family patterns, and metapatterns, she finally got to see that the unworthiness she was feeling wasn’t really hers, but rather inherited emotions piled on top of a negative upbringing. She was able to work through those negative emotions.

Instead of remaining a victim to the old patterns, she was able to see how far she’d come because of them and what she had to offer. She turned the negative into the positive. She saw her true strength and courage. She thanked her ancestors for the gift of unworthiness that had fired her determination to become more, and given her the opportunity to change the past patterns of victimization that were plaguing not only her but her whole native country.

Time To Shine

It’s time for humanity to choose to move on from the victim mindset. Past abuses are past. The only reason they continue to plague us in the present is because we are unconsciously repeating the old patterns that are begging to change. Our deep system-wide unrest, bitter unhappiness, and intolerance of abuse and discrimination in all forms is a joyous red flag waving saying, “Let go of the bitterness. Let go of the intolerance for the intolerant! Let go the judgment of the judges! Let go of victimizing past perpetrators. That’s all part of the old pattern. Let go!”

Focus on the adventure and possibilities. Possibilities open hearts and doors. People are craving a bigger reality that allows them to participate in and co-create a happier, more fulfilling, and exciting world. Steve Jobs summed it up best when he said, “Blessed are the crazy ones who believe they can change the world. Because, indeed, they can.”

 

 

Original article here

26 Sep 2023
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Humans Could Live up to 150 Years, New Research Suggests

The chorus of the theme song for the movie Fame, performed by actress Irene Cara, includes the line “I’m gonna live forever.” Cara was, of course, singing about the posthumous longevity that fame can confer. But a literal expression of this hubris resonates in some corners of the world—especially in the technology industry. In Silicon Valley, immortality is sometimes elevated to the status of a corporeal goal. Plenty of big names in big tech have sunk funding into ventures to solve the problem of death as if it were just an upgrade to your smartphone’s operating system.

Yet what if death simply cannot be hacked and longevity will always have a ceiling, no matter what we do? Researchers have now taken on the question of how long we can live if, by some combination of serendipity and genetics, we do not die from cancer, heart disease or getting hit by a bus. They report that when omitting things that usually kill us, our body’s capacity to restore equilibrium to its myriad structural and metabolic systems after disruptions still fades with time. And even if we make it through life with few stressors, this incremental decline sets the maximum life span for humans at somewhere between 120 and 150 years. In the end, if the obvious hazards do not take our lives, this fundamental loss of resilience will do so, the researchers conclude in findings published in May 2021 in Nature Communications.

“They are asking the question of ‘What’s the longest life that could be lived by a human complex system if everything else went really well, and it’s in a stressor-free environment?’” says Heather Whitson, director of the Duke University Center for the Study of Aging and Human Development, who was not involved in the paper. The team’s results point to an underlying “pace of aging” that sets the limits on life span, she says.

For the study, Timothy Pyrkov, a researcher at a Singapore-based company called Gero, and his colleagues looked at this “pace of aging” in three large cohorts in the U.S., the U.K. and Russia. To evaluate deviations from stable health, they assessed changes in blood cell counts and the daily number of steps taken and analyzed them by age groups.

For both blood cell and step counts, the pattern was the same: as age increased, some factor beyond disease drove a predictable and incremental decline in the body’s ability to return blood cells or gait to a stable level after a disruption. When Pyrkov and his colleagues in Moscow and Buffalo, N.Y., used this predictable pace of decline to determine when resilience would disappear entirely, leading to death, they found a range of 120 to 150 years. (In 1997 Jeanne Calment, the oldest person on record to have ever lived, died in France at the age of 122.)

The researchers also found that with age, the body’s response to insults could increasingly range far from a stable normal, requiring more time for recovery. Whitson says that this result makes sense: A healthy young person can produce a rapid physiological response to adjust to fluctuations and restore a personal norm. But in an older person, she says, “everything is just a little bit dampened, a little slower to respond, and you can get overshoots,” such as when an illness brings on big swings in blood pressure.

Measurements such as blood pressure and blood cell counts have a known healthy range, however, Whitson points out, whereas step counts are highly personal. The fact that Pyrkov and his colleagues chose a variable that is so different from blood counts and still discovered the same decline over time may suggest a real pace-of-aging factor in play across different domains.

Study co-author Peter Fedichev, who trained as a physicist and co-founded Gero, says that although most biologists would view blood cell counts and step counts as “pretty different,” the fact that both sources “paint exactly the same future” suggests that this pace-of-aging component is real.

The authors pointed to social factors that reflect the findings. “We observed a steep turn at about the age of 35 to 40 years that was quite surprising,” Pyrkov says. For example, he notes, this period is often a time when an athlete’s sports career ends, “an indication that something in physiology may really be changing at this age.”

The desire to unlock the secrets of immortality has likely been around as long as humans’ awareness of death. But a long life span is not the same as a long health span, says S. Jay Olshansky, a professor of epidemiology and biostatistics at the University of Illinois at Chicago, who was not involved in the work. “The focus shouldn’t be on living longer but on living healthier longer,” he says.

“Death is not the only thing that matters,” Whitson says. “Other things, like quality of life, start mattering more and more as people experience the loss of them.” The death modeled in this study, she says, “is the ultimate lingering death. And the question is: Can we extend life without also extending the proportion of time that people go through a frail state?”

The researchers’ “final conclusion is interesting to see,” Olshansky says. He characterizes it as “Hey, guess what? Treating diseases in the long run is not going to have the effect that you might want it to have. These fundamental biological processes of aging are going to continue.”

The idea of slowing down the aging process has drawn attention, not just from Silicon Valley types who dream about uploading their memories to computers but also from a cadre of researchers who view such interventions as a means to “compress morbidity”—to diminish illness and infirmity at the end of life to extend health span. The question of whether this will have any impact on the fundamental upper limits identified in the Nature Communications paper remains highly speculative. But some studies are being launched—testing the diabetes drug metformin, for example—with the goal of attenuating hallmark indicators of aging.

In this same vein, Fedichev and his team are not discouraged by their estimates of maximum human life span. His view is that their research marks the beginning of a longer journey. “Measuring something is the first step before producing an intervention,” Fedichev says. As he puts it, the next steps, now that the team has measured this independent pace of aging, will be to find ways to “intercept the loss of resilience.”

 

 

 

Original article here

 

22 Sep 2023
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Selfishness Is Learned

Many people cheat on taxes — no mystery there. But many people don’t, even if they wouldn’t be caught — now, that’s weird. Or is it? Psychologists are deeply perplexed by human moral behavior, because it often doesn’t seem to make any logical sense. You might think that we should just be grateful for it. But if we could understand these seemingly irrational acts, perhaps we could encourage more of them.

It’s not as though people haven’t been trying to fathom our moral instincts; it is one of the oldest concerns of philosophy and theology. But what distinguishes the project today is the sheer variety of academic disciplines it brings together: not just moral philosophy and psychology, but also biology, economics, mathematics, and computer science. They do not merely contemplate the rationale for moral beliefs, but study how morality operates in the real world, or fails to. David Rand of Yale University epitomizes the breadth of this science, ranging from abstract equations to large-scale societal interventions. “I’m a weird person,” he says, “who has a foot in each world, of model-making and of actual experiments and psychological theory building.”

In 2012 he and two similarly broad-minded Harvard professors, Martin Nowak and Joshua Greene, tackled a question that exercised the likes of Thomas Hobbes and Jean-Jacques Rousseau: Which is our default mode, selfishness or selflessness? Do we all have craven instincts we must restrain by force of will? Or are we basically good, even if we slip up sometimes?

They collected data from 10 experiments, most of them using a standard economics scenario called a public-goods game. Groups of four people, either American college students or American adults participating online, were given some money. They were allowed to place some of it into a pool, which was then multiplied and distributed evenly. A participant could maximize his or her income by contributing nothing and just sharing in the gains, but people usually gave something. Despite the temptation to be selfish, most people showed selflessness.

 

The fuzziness of psychological ideas makes them hard to test. If an experimental result doesn’t fit your theory of human behavior, you can fiddle with the definitions.

 

This finding was old news, but Rand and his colleagues wanted to know how much deliberation went into such acts of generosity. So in two of the experiments, subjects were prodded to think intuitively or deliberately; in two others, half of the subjects were forced to make their decision under time pressure and half were not; and in the rest, subjects could go at their own pace and some naturally made their decisions faster than others. If your morning commute is any evidence, people in a hurry would be extra selfish. But the opposite was true: Those who responded quickly gave more. Conversely, when people took their time to deliberate or were encouraged to contemplate their choice, they gave less.

The researchers worked under the assumption that snap judgments reveal our intuitive impulses. Our intuition, apparently, is to cooperate with others. Selfish behavior comes from thinking too much, not too little. Rand recently verified this finding in a meta-analysis of 51 similar studies from different research groups. “Most people think we are intuitively selfish,” Rand says — based on a survey he conducted—but “our lab experiments show that making people rely more on intuition increases cooperation.”

The cooperative impulse isn’t confined to an artificial experimental setting. In another paper, Rand and Ziv Epstein of Pomona College studied interviews with 51 recipients of the Carnegie Hero Medal, who had demonstrated extreme altruism by risking their lives to save others. Study participants read the interviews and rated the medalists on how much their thinking seemed intuitive versus deliberative. And intuition dominated. “I’m thankful I was able to act and not think about it,” a college student who rescued a 69-year-old woman from a car during a flash flood explained.

So Rand made a strong case that people are intuitive cooperators, but he considered these findings just the start. It’s one thing to put forward an idea and some evidence for it — lots of past researchers have done that. It’s quite another to describe and explain that idea in a rigorous, mathematical fashion. Ironically, Rand figured he could make better sense of humans by stepping away from studying real ones.

The overwhelming majority of psychological theories are verbal: explanations of the ways people act using everyday language, with maybe a few terms of art thrown in. But words can be imprecise. It may be true that “cooperation is intuitive,” but when is it intuitive? And what exactly does “intuitive” mean? The fuzziness of psychological ideas makes them hard to test. If an experimental result doesn’t fit your theory of human behavior, you can fiddle with the definitions and claim you were right all along.

Rand has sought to create quantitative models. “Science is about developing theories,” he says, “not about developing a list of observations. And the reason formal models are so important is that if your goal is theory-building, then it’s essential that you have theories that are really clearly articulated and are falsifiable.”

To do that, he has developed computer simulations of society — The Sims, basically. These models represent collections of individual people described by computer “agents,” algorithms that capture a specific package of traits, such as a tendency to cooperate or not. You can do controlled experiments on these computerized citizens that would be impossible or unethical to do with real people. You can endow them with new personalities to see how they’d fare. You can observe social processes in action, on time scales ranging from seconds to generations, instead of just taking a snapshot of a person or group. You can watch the spread of certain behaviors throughout a population and how they influence other behaviors. Over time, the patterns that emerge can tell you things about large-scale social interaction that a lab experiment with a few real people never could.

 

 

One of the first such models, in the early 1970s, studied housing segregation. It represented a city as a 16-by-13 grid of squares, populated by two types of people: stars and circles. Each star would move to the nearest location in which at least half its neighbors were also stars — it had a slight bias to be among similar others. Circles did the same. Even these mild biases led quickly to stark segregation, with all-star and all-circle regions of the board — a much more extreme partitioning than any one agent sought. The researcher, the economist Thomas Schelling, used his model to help explain racial segregation in American cities. A neighborhood can splinter into homogeneous patches even when individual residents are hardly prejudiced at all. (Of course, in reality, segregation also reflects outright racism and explicit policies of exclusion.) Schelling’s work became a case study of how a group’s collective behavior can diverge from the desires of any one agent.

Such models have also been used to explore cooperation. In an influential paper in 1981, the political scientist Robert Axelrod programmed agents to play a simple game called the Prisoner’s Dilemma. Two players have to decide whether to cooperate with or betray the other, and they receive points based on their choices. The scoring system is set up to mimic an essential dilemma of social life. Together the players perform best if they both cooperate, yet each can maximize his or her own individual outcome, at the expense of the other, by acting selfishly. The game takes its name from a scenario in which the police interrogate two thieves, offering each a reward for ratting out his or her accomplice. The thieves aren’t able to communicate to reach a joint decision; they have to make their decisions independently. Acting rationally, each should rat out the other. But when they both act “rationally,” they actually end up with the most combined jail time.

 

It’s possible we’re born with a tendency to cooperate, but frequent cooperation (with beneficial results) is required to sustain our benevolence.

 

The game gets more interesting — and more analogous to real life — when you play multiple rounds with the same partner. Here, repeated cooperation is best not just for both partners as a unit but also for each individually. You can still occasionally double-cross your partner for extra points, however, as long as it doesn’t trigger later betrayal.

What is the best strategy, then? To find out, Axelrod solicited Prisoner’s Dilemma strategies from mathematicians, biologists, economists, political scientists, computer scientists, and physicists from around the world. Axelrod programmed his computerized agents with these strategies and made them play a round-robin tournament. Some strategies were quite sophisticated, but the winner was a simple one called tit-for-tat.

Tit-for-tat resembles human reciprocity. It starts with cooperation and, after that, does whatever the other player did on the previous round. An agent using the strategy extends an olive branch at first. If its opponent reciprocates, it keeps cooperating. But if its opponent double-crosses it, the tit-for-tat agent rescinds its peace offering until its opponent makes amends.

 

 

By combining the short-term temptation to be selfish with the long-term benefits of collaboration, the Prisoner’s Dilemma is an ideal model for human cooperation, and Rand has built on Axelrod’s work to understand why evolution might have favored intuitive selflessness. 

Rand and his grad student Adam Bear considered a variant of the Prisoner’s Dilemma in which matchups were either one-shot or multiple-round, chosen at random.8 The computerized agents faced a tough choice. In a one-off, they would score more points by betraying their opponent, whereas in repeated play cooperation made more sense. But the uncertainty made it unclear which strategy was best. Rand and Bear then added a twist. An agent could elect to pay some points at the start of an encounter—representing the efforts of deliberation—to suss out what kind of matchup it would face, so that it could tailor its strategy.

The agent had to decide whether the advantage of foreknowledge outweighed its cost. The price of the tip-off varied randomly, and each agent was programmed with a maximum price it would agree to pay; if the price exceeded that amount, the agent did not receive any advance information and instead chose some default behavior, following its “intuition.” In this way, the simulation allowed for different personality types. Some agents intuitively cooperated, others intuitively betrayed. Some occasionally deliberated, others didn’t.

Is deliberation helpful? That’s not immediately obvious. Intuitive thinking is fast but inflexible. Deliberative thinking can achieve better outcomes but takes time and energy. To see which strategy excelled in the long run, Rand and Bear’s model simulated a process of evolution. A large population of agents played the game with one another and either proliferated or died depending on how well they did. This process can model either genetic evolution or cultural evolution, in which the weak players don’t actually die, but merely adopt stronger strategies through imitation.

 

Most of us are genuinely good. And if we’re not, we can be encouraged to be. The math is there.

 

Typically, one strategy swept through the population and replaced the alternatives. This victorious strategy depended on the precise parameters of the game. For example, Rand and Bear varied the probability that matchups would be single- or multiple-round. When most were multi-round, the winning agents defaulted to cooperating but deliberated if the price was right and switched to betrayal if they found they were in a one-shot game. But when most were one-shots, the agents that prevailed were no longer willing to pay to deliberate at all. They simply double-crossed their opponents. In other words, the model produced either wary cooperation or uncompromising betrayal.

This outcome was notable for what was missing. Agents that always cooperated usually died off completely. Likewise, almost no set of game parameters favored agents that defaulted to the double-cross but were sometimes willing to deliberate. Bear and Rand stared at this asymmetry for several weeks, baffled.

Finally, they had a breakthrough. They realized that when your default is to betray, the benefits of deliberating — seeing a chance to cooperate — are uncertain, depending on what your partner does. With each partner questioning the other, and each partner factoring in the partner’s questioning of oneself, the suspicion compounds until there’s zero perceived benefit to deliberating. If your default is to cooperate, however, the benefits of deliberating — occasionally acting selfishly — accrue no matter what your partner does, and therefore deliberation makes more sense.

So, it seems there is a firm evolutionary logic to the human instinct to cooperate but adjust if necessary — to trust but verify. We ordinarily cooperate with other people, because cooperation brings us benefits, and our rational minds let us decipher when we might occasionally gain by acting selfishly instead.

The model also ties up a loose end from Rand’s earlier studies of public-goods games. In that research, time pressure caused some people to cooperate more, but never caused anyone to cooperate less. This asymmetry now makes sense. The only people who would have shown that behavior were those who were willing to deliberate, but defaulted to betrayal; the time pressure would bring out their Machiavellian inclinations. Evidently such people are rare. If someone is deep-down selfish, rational deliberation will only make them more so. And the evolutionary model shows why. Defectors who have qualms are quickly winnowed out by genetic or cultural evolution.

When it comes to getting people to cooperate more, Rand’s work brings good news. Our intuitions are not fixed at birth. We develop social heuristics, or rules of thumb for interpersonal behavior, based on the interactions we have. Change those interactions and you change behavior.

Rand, Nowak, and Greene tested that idea in their 2012 paper. They asked some subjects whether they’d ever played such economics games before. Those with previous experience didn’t become more generous when asked to think intuitively; they’d apparently become accustomed to the anonymous nature of such games and learned a new intuition. Unfortunately, it was a cynical one: They could get away with mooching off others. Similarly, subjects who reported that they couldn’t trust most of the people in their lives also didn’t become more generous when acting on intuition. It’s possible we’re born with a tendency to cooperate, but frequent cooperation (with beneficial results) is required to sustain our benevolence.

Happily, even the Grinch can expand his heart by three sizes, as Rand demonstrates in a recent study. First, he had test subjects play the Prisoner’s Dilemma for about 20 minutes with a variety of opponents. For half of the subjects, the average game lasted eight rounds, meaning cooperation was the best strategy; for half, the average game lasted a single round, which discouraged cooperation. Afterward, everyone played a public-goods game. Those stewed in cooperation gave significantly more money in the second phase of the experiment than did those without it. In less than half an hour, their intuitions had shifted.

How do you encourage cooperation in places where cooperation isn’t the norm? Corporate America comes to mind. “In a lot of situations people are basically rewarded for backstabbing and ladder-climbing,” Rand says. Rand and Bear’s modeling paper, in which intuitive defectors don’t trust each other enough even to consider whether cooperation would pay off, points to an answer. Rand suggests that, at least at first, incentives could come from above, so that the benefits of cooperating don’t depend solely on whether one’s partner cooperates. Companies might offer bonuses and recognition for helpful behavior. Once cooperation becomes a social heuristic, people will begin to cooperate when it benefits them, but also even when it doesn’t. Selflessness will be the new norm.

When selflessness is the norm, encouraging people to make decisions quickly can bring out their better angels. Extensions of this research reveal that we see quick or unthinking acts of generosity as particularly revealing of kindness, and that people may even use this signal strategically. In recent work, Rand and his collaborators have shown that people are faster to make decisions to cooperate when they know someone is watching, as if aware that others will judge them by their alacrity. Among other puzzles, Rand is currently trying to untangle this apparent paradox—the strategic use of intuition.

Rand’s work offers a correction to those misanthropes who peer into the hearts of men and women and see shadows. Most of us are genuinely good. And if we’re not, we can be encouraged to be. The math is there.

If you think seeing life as a set of economics games and cooperation as self-interest in disguise sounds dismal, it is actually not so distanced from what you might call virtue. “When I’m nice to other people, I’m not doing it because of some kind of calculation. I’m doing it because it feels good,” Rand says. “And the reason it feels good, I argue, is that it is actually payoff maximizing in the long run.”

Rand then adds a crucial clarification. “It feels good to be nice — unless the other person is a jerk,” he says. “And then it feels good to be mean.”

Tit for tat indeed.

 

 

 

Original article here

18 Sep 2023
Comments: 0

Voice Is the Next Big Platform, Unless You Have an Accent

 My mother waited two months for her Amazon Echo to arrive. Then, she waited again — leaving it in the box until I came to help her install it. Her forehead crinkled as I download the Alexa app on her phone. Any device that requires vocal instructions makes my mother skeptical. She has bad memories of Siri. “She could not understand me,” my mom told me.

My mother was born in the Philippines, my father in India. Both of them speak English as a third language. In the nearly 50 years they’ve lived in the United States, they’ve spoken English daily — fluently, but with distinct accents and sometimes different phrasings than a native speaker. In their experience, that means Siri, Alexa, or basically any device that uses speech technology will struggle to recognize their commands.

My parents’ experience is hardly exclusive or unknown. (It’s even been chronicled in comedy, with this infamous trapped-in-a-voice-activated elevator sketch.) My sister-in-law told me she gave up on using Siri after it failed to recognize the “ethnic names” of her friends and family. I can vouch for the frustration: The other day, my command of “Text Zahir” morphed into “Text Zara here.”

Right now, it’s not much of a problem — but it’s slated to become more serious, given that we are in the middle of a voice revolution. Voice-based wearables, audio, and video entertainment systems are already here. Due in part to distracted drivers, voice control systems will soon be the norm in vehicles. Google Home and Amazon’s Alexa are radicalizing the idea of a “smart home” across millions of households in the US. That’s why it took so long for my mother’s Echo to arrive — the Echo was among Amazon’s bestsellers this holiday season, with a 900 percent increase from 2016 sales. It was backordered for weeks.

Overall, researchers estimate 24.5 million voice-driven devices will be delivered to Americans’ daily routines this year — evidence that underscores ComScore’s prediction that by 2020, half of all our searches will be performed by voice.

But as technology shifts to respond to our vocal chords, what happens to the huge swath of people who can’t be understood?

To train a machine to recognize speech, you need a lot of audio samples. First, researchers have to collect thousands of voices, speaking on a range of topics. They then manually transcribe the audio clips. This combination of data — audio clips and written transcriptions — allows machines to make associations between sound and words. The phrases that occur most frequently become a pattern for an algorithm to learn how a human speaks.

But an AI can only recognize what it’s been trained to hear. Its flexibility depends on the diversity of the accents to which it’s been introduced. Governments, academics, and smaller startups rely on collections of audio and transcriptions, called speech corpora, to bypass doing labor-intensive transcriptions themselves. The University of Pennsylvania’s Linguistic Data Consortium (LDC) is a powerhouse of these data sets, making them available under licensed agreements for companies and researchers. One of its most famous corpora is Switchboard.

Texas Instruments launched Switchboard in the early 1990s to build up a repository of voice data, which was then distributed by the LDC for machine learning programs. It’s a collection of roughly 2,400 telephone conversations, amassed from 543 people from around the US — a total of about 250 hours. Researchers lured the callers by offering them long-distance calling cards. A participant would dial in and be connected with another study participant. The two strangers would then chat spontaneously about a given topic — say, childcare or sports.

For years linguists have assumed that because the LDC is located in Philadelphia, the conversations skewed towards a Northeastern accent. But when Marsal Gavaldà, the director of machine intelligence at the messaging app Yik Yak, crunched the numbers in Switchboard’s demographic history, he found that the accent pool skewed more midwestern. South and North Midland accents comprised more than 40 percent of the voice data.

Other corpora exist, but Switchboard remains a benchmark for the models used in voice recognition systems. Case in point: Both IBM and Microsoft use Switchboard to test the word error rates for their voice-based systems. “From this set of just over 500 speakers, pretty much all engines have been trained,” says Gavaldà.

But building voice technology on a 26-year-old corpus inevitably lays a foundation for misunderstanding. English is professional currency in the linguistic marketplace, but numerous speakers learn it as a second, third, or fourth language. Gavaldà likens the process to drug trials. “It may have been tried in a hundred patients, [but] for a narrow demographic,” he tells me. “You try to extrapolate that to the general population, the dosage may be incorrect.”

Larger companies, of course, have to think globally to stay competitive — especially because most sales of smartphones happen outside the US Technology companies like Apple, Google, and Amazon have private, in-house methods of collecting this data for the languages and accents they’d like to accommodate. And the more consumers use their products the more their feedback will improve the products, through programs like Voice Traininglanguage on the Alexa app.

But even if larger tech companies are making headway in collecting more specific data, they’re motivated by the market to not share it with anyone — which is why it takes so long for the technology to trickle down. This secrecy also applied to my reporting of this piece. Amazon never replied to my request for comment, a spokesperson for Google directed me to a blog post outlining its deep learning techniques, and an Apple PR representative noted that Siri is now customized for 36 countries and supports 21 languages, language variants, and accents.

Outside the US, companies are aware of the importance of catering to accents. The Chinese search engine company Baidu, for one, says its deep learning approach to speech recognition achieves accuracy in English and Mandarin better than humans, and it’s developing a “deep speech” algorithm that will recognize a range of dialects and accents. “China has a fairly deep awareness of what’s happening in the English-speaking world, but the opposite is not true,” Baidu chief scientist Andrew Ng told The Atlantic.

Yet smaller companies and individuals who can’t invest in collecting data on their own are beholden to cheaper, more readily available databases that may not be as diverse as their target demographics. “[The data’s] not really becoming more diverse, at least from my perspective,” Arlo Faria, a speech researcher at the conference transcription startup Remeeting, tells me. Remeeting, for example, has used a corpus called Fisher that includes a group of non-native English speakers — but Fisher’s accents are largely left up to chance, depending on who happened to participate in the data collection. There are some Spanish and Indian accents, for instance, but very few British accents, Faria recalls.

That’s why, very often, voice recognition technology reacts to accents differently than humans, says Anne Wootton, co-founder and CEO of the Oakland-based audio search platform Pop Up Archive, “Oftentimes the software does a better job with like, Indian accents than deep Southern, like Shenandoah Valley accents,” she says. “I think that’s a reflection of what the training data includes or does not include.”

Rachael Tatman, a PhD candidate at the University of Washington’s Department of Linguistics who focuses on sociolinguistics, noted that the underrepresented groups in these data sets tend to be groups that are marginalized in general. A typical database of American voices, for example, would lack poor, uneducated, rural, non-white, non-native English voices. “The more of those categories you fall into, the worse speech recognition is for you,” she says.

Still, Jeffrey Kofman, the CEO and co-founder of Trint, another automated speech-to-text software based in the UK, is confident accent recognition is something speech science will be able to eventually solve. We video chatted on the Trint platform itself, where Australian English is now available alongside British and North American English as transcription accents. Trint also offers speech-to-text in a dozen European languages, and plans to add South Asian English sometime this year, he said.

Collecting data is expensive and cumbersome, which is why certain key demographics take priority. For Kofman, that’s South Asian accents, “because there are so many people from India, Pakistan, and those countries here in England, in the US and Canada, who speak very clearly but with a distinct accent,” he says. Next, he suspects, he’ll prioritize South African accents.

Obviously, it’s not just technology that discriminates against people with accents. It’s also other people. Mass media and globalization are having a huge effect on how people sound. Speech experts have documented the decline of certain regional American accents since as early as 1960, for example, in favor of a more homogenous accent fit for populations from mixed geographic areas. This effect is exacerbated when humans deal with digital assistants or operators; they tend to use a voice devoid of colloquialisms and natural cadence.

Or, in other words, a voice devoid of an identity and accent.

As voice recognition technology becomes better, using a robotic accent to communicate with a device stands to be challenged — if people feel less of a need to talk to their devices as if they are machines, they can start talking to them as naturally as they would a friend. And while some accent reduction coaches find their clients use voice assistants to practice neutralizing their thick foreign or regional accents, Lisa Wentz, a public speaking coach in San Francisco who works in accent reduction, says that she doesn’t recommend it.

That’s because, she tells me, most of her clients are aiming for other people to understand them. They don’t want to have to repeat themselves or feel like their accents prevent others from hearing them. Using devices that aren’t ready for different voices, then, only stands to make this feeling echo.

My mother and I set up her Alexa app together. She wasn’t very excited about it. I could already imagine her distrust and fear of a car purported to drive by the command of her voice. My mother would never ride in it; the risk of crashing would be too real. Still, she tried out a couple of questions on the Echo.

“Alexa, play ‘Que sera sera,’” my mother said.

“I can’t find the song ‘Kiss your ass era.’”

My mom laughed, less out of frustration and more out of amusement. She tried again, this time speaking slower, as if she were talking to a child. “Alexa, play ‘Que sera sera.’” She sang out the syllables of sera in a slight melody, so that the device could clearly hear “se-rah.”

Alexa understood, and found what my mom was looking for. “Here’s a sample of ‘Que sera sera,’ by Doris Day,” she said, pronouncing the sera a bit harsher — “se-raw.”

The 1964 hit started to play, and my mother smiled at the pleasure of recognition.

 

 

Original article here

14 Sep 2023
Comments: 0

Why You Should Cultivate a Fluid Sense of Self

If you want to learn something about change there is no better place to look than evolution. Nothing represents a continuous and unrelenting cycle of order, disorder, and reorder on a grander scale. For long periods of time, Earth is relatively stable. Sweeping changes—warming, cooling, or an asteroid falling from space, for example—occur. These inflection points are followed by periods of disruption and chaos. Eventually, Earth, and everything on it, regains stability, but that stability is somewhere new.

During this cycle, some species get selected out. Others survive and thrive. Species in the latter group tend to have high degrees of what evolutionary biologists call “complexity.” Complexity is comprised of two elements: differentiation and integration. Differentiation is the degree to which a species is composed of parts that are distinct in structure or function from one another. Integration is the degree to which those distinct parts communicate and enhance each other’s goals to create a cohesive whole.

Consider Homo sapiens (you and me), by far the most abundant and widespread species of primate. we have large frames, four limbs, opposable thumbs, body temperature that is somewhat resistant to external conditions, good vision and hearing, digestive tracts that can accommodate a variety of nutrients, and the capacity for language and understanding. In other words, we are a highly differentiated species. But we also have enormous brains and advanced nervous systems that integrate all of these parts into a cohesive whole. The combination of these qualities—widespread differentiation and strong integration—makes us a decidedly complex species. Our complexity is how we got here today and why, hopefully, we’ll stick around for at least a bit longer.

Though change at the individual level, the primary concern of my new book Master of Change, is different than change on an evolutionary scale, there is still much we can learn from evolution’s foundational principles, lessons that apply to the horizons of our own lives. If we want to survive and thrive during ongoing cycles of change and disorder, then we, too, can benefit from developing our own versions of complexity.

As a matter of fact, there is a psychological construct called self-complexity. Essentially, it says that the key to a strong and enduring identity—one that is equal parts rugged and flexible, that can navigate the inevitable changes we all face—is to diversify your sense of self.

The more you define yourself by any one activity, the more fragile you become. If that activity doesn’t go well or something changes unexpectedly, you lose a sense of who you are. But with self-complexity, you have develop multiple components to your identity.

We all can wear many hats: examples include writer, spouse, artist, parent, employee, neighbor, entrepreneur, baker, and creative, to name just a few. Take an inventory of your own identities. Are there any upon which you are over-reliant for meaning and self-worth? What would it look like to diversify your sense of self? Even if you desire to go “all in” on a certain endeavor, you’ve got to ensure that you don’t leave others completely behind.

I’ve come to use the metaphor of a house for identity. If your house only has one room in it, and that rooms floods, you are going to be very disoriented. But if your house has multiple rooms, you can seek refuge in the others while you weather the storm. It’s okay to put spend a lot of time in one room—so long as you have other rooms available when the one you are currently pouring yourself into changes.

For example: there are times when I lean heavily into each of my main identities—father, husband, writer, coach, friend, athlete, and neighbor. I’ve learned that keeping all of these identities strong ensures that when things don’t go well in one area of my life I can rely on the others to pick me up, which helps me to stay grounded and navigate whatever challenge I am facing.

What you want to do is challenge yourself to integrate the various elements of your identity into a cohesive whole. This allows you to emphasize and de-emphasize certain parts of your identity at different periods of time. The result is a fluid sense of self.

Unlike other types of matter, fluid contains both mass and volume but not shape. This allows it to flow over and around obstacles, changing form while retaining substance, neither getting stuck nor fracturing when unforeseen impediments manifest on its path. Cultivating a fluid sense of self allows you to do the same. By developing and nurturing multiple parts of your identity, you can more easily navigate change.

A large body of research shows that when there is too great a fusion between one’s identity and their pursuit, then anxiety, depression, and burnout frequently result. This is especially true for athlete’s during periods of change and transition, when one’s dominant—and all to often, sole— sense of identity feels at risk. Yet while it may be heightened for athletes, it’s a pattern that holds true in all lines of work and all walks of life: if you want to be excellent and experience something fully, then you’ve got to go all in, but only to a point. If your identity becomes too enmeshed in any one concept or endeavor—be it your age, how you look in the mirror, a relationship, or your career—then you are likely to face significant distress when things change, which, for better or worse, they always do.

None of the above is permission to be laissez-faire or go through the motions. Caring deeply about the people, activities, and projects you love is key to a rich and meaningful existence. The problem is not caring deeply; it is when your identity becomes too rigidly attached to any single object or endeavor.

 

 

 

Original article here

 

 

06 Sep 2023
Comments: 0

So…How Do Adults Make New Friends?

In approximately one month and 10 days, I’ll be on my way to making one of the larger decisions of my adult life (so far, anyway); I’m moving to Austin, Texas, approximately 2,000 miles and one hell of a road trip away from my family and almost my entire friend group back in New York. While I have many questions about my move—chief among them, “How much should a mattress cost?” and “Will everyone hate me for being a Brooklyn transplant?”—nothing has loomed larger in my mind than the question of friendship, or, more specifically, how a full-grown adult goes about making new friends with no partner or kids to act as built-in buffers.

Of course, a big move is hardly the only circumstance in which an otherwise reasonably socialized adult might find herself craving new friendships. The COVID-19 pandemic shrunk our social circles considerably, with many of us spending the last year-plus in the company of family and only our absolute closest BFFs. As the world slowly reopens, it stands to reason that we might want to seek out new connections—and feel somewhat unsure about where to start (especially as COVID-19 rates continue to climb in many cities).

Anxiety about friend-making isn’t so uncommon, according to clinical psychologist and friendship researcher Dr. Miriam Kirmayer, although some of these nerves may be linked to misconceptions about how meaningful friendships actually come about. “There does seem to be, for many people, this belief that friendships should just happen—whether we’re in a new city or a new phase of life—and that our people, so to speak, will magically show up. As beautiful as that is, that isn’t the reality for most people,” explains Kirmayer. “My best advice is to be very intentional with how we approach making friends; seek out opportunities, experiences and activities where we are likely to meet new people with whom we share something in common. My second piece of advice is to try and choose wisely, or, in other words, choose opportunities where we will have more frequent interactions, because we know that friendships often require that frequency of interaction in order to develop.”

Conventional wisdom has it that you should pick popular yet slightly off-the-beaten path activities, like a running group or a knitting club, to meet new people. But what about those of us for whom a good Friday night hinges on the strength of a gummy edible and the availability of a new episode of The Bold Type on Hulu? I’m not trying to paint myself as a total couch potato, but…let’s just say my social style is definitely on the “chill” side, not so much the “go hiking and meet new people on top of a mountain at 7:00 a.m.” side. My quest for new friendships almost feels like dating, something I’m meh at yet very enthusiastic about, except that I don’t have a great frame of reference for what “success” would look like. Does friendship success equal a hangout invite? A standing Saturday-night bar crawl? Godparent-ing each other’s children? How will I know when I’ve cracked it, socially speaking?

For some people, social success—however they define it—can spring from a source as prosaic as social media. Mijal Tenenbaum, 27, moved to Los Angeles with only a few loose acquaintances at her disposal. She DM-ed one of them on Twitter and invited them out to brunch, and while that plan never came to be, Tenenbaum’s new friend did invite her to Disneyland, of all places. Today, the two are best friends, and Tenenbaum’s advice to people in similar situations (whether they’re in a new city or just feeling socially stagnant) would be: “If you get good vibes from an acquaintance or Twitter mutual, reach out and give them a chance! Even if you’re a little insecure and you don’t know them well, just go for it.”

For Hannah Smith, 27, friendship began at home—quite literally—when she moved to San Francisco in 2019 without knowing anyone. Smith sublet three different rooms through Craigslist before she finally signed a month-to-month lease in the perfect place (which she also found through Craigslist), eventually turning a roommate from her final apartment into one of her best friends. “Low-commitment living situations can be a great way to get to know people in a new place,” says Smith, although she adds that this strategy might be somewhat complicated by the ongoing effects of COVID-19.

One popular method for friend-making endorsed by Kirmayer is volunteering, which is exactly how Courtney Gustafson, 31, ended up meeting her two best friends. “During the pandemic, I happened upon a colony of feral cats, started caring for them, made them an Instagram, and then two different people reached out to offer help with the cats,” says Gustafson. “The three of us turned out to be around the same age and have a lot in common, and now we are a cat rescue/best friend team of 3!”

Ultimately, there’s no perfect way to predict the success of a new friendship. After all, you could join a volunteer effort or a cooking club and meet absolutely nobody you bond with, or you could meet your all-time, Elena Ferrante–novel–level soulmate at a random party you almost skipped. Still, as more people get vaccinated and life ever-so-creepingly returns to “normal,” it’s worth thinking about whether the friendships in your life are giving you what you need and want. If they’re not, maybe you should DM that cool-seeming Twitter person, sublet with a friendly acquaintance, or bond over a mutual love of feral cats—because after all, without true and lasting friendships, who would have the courage tell us when we were being annoying on the internet?

 

 

Original article here

 

 

 

19 Aug 2023
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What Socrates Can Teach Us About AI

If Socrates was the wisest person in Ancient Greece, then large language models must be the most foolish systems in the modern world.

In his Apology, Plato tells the story of how Socrates’s friend Chaerephon goes to visit the oracle at Delphi. Chaerephon asks the oracle whether there is anyone wiser than Socrates. The priestess responds that there isn’t: Socrates is the wisest of them all.

At first, Socrates seems puzzled. How could he be the wisest, when there were so many other people who were well known for their knowledge and wisdom, and yet Socrates claims that he lacks both?

He makes it his mission to solve the mystery. He goes around interrogating a series of politicians, poets, and artisans (as philosophers do). And what does he find? Socrates’ investigation reveals that those who claim to have knowledge either do not really know what they think they know, or else know far less than they proclaim to know.

Socrates is the wisest, then, because he is aware of the limits of his own knowledge. He doesn’t think he knows more than he does, and he doesn’t claim to know more than he does.

How does that compare with large language models like ChatGPT4?

In contrast to Socrates, large language models don’t know what they don’t know. These systems are not built to be truth-tracking. They are not based on empirical evidence or logic. They make statistical guesses that are very often wrong.

Large language models don’t inform users that they are making statistical guesses. They present incorrect guesses with the same confidence as they present facts. Whatever you ask, they will come up with a convincing response, and it’s never “I don’t know,” even though it should be. If you ask ChatGPT about current events, it will remind you that it only has access to information up to September 2021 and it can’t browse the internet. For almost any other kind of question, it will venture a response that will often mix facts with confabulations.

The philosopher Harry Frankfurt famously argued that bullshit is speech that is typically persuasive but is detached from a concern with the truth. Large language models are the ultimate bullshitters because they are designed to be plausible (and therefore convincing) with no regard for the truth. Bullshit doesn’t need to be false. Sometimes bullshitters describe things as they are, but if they are not aiming for the truth, what they say is still bullshit.

And bullshit is dangerous, warned Frankfurt. Bullshit is a greater threat to the truth than lies. The person who lies thinks she knows what the truth is, and is therefore concerned with the truth. She can be challenged and held accountable; her agenda can be inferred. The truth-teller and the liar play on opposite sides of the same game, as Frankfurt puts it. The bullshitter pays no attention to the game. Truth doesn’t even get confronted; it gets ignored; it becomes irrelevant.

Bullshit is more dangerous the more persuasive it is, and large language models are persuasive by design on two counts. First, they have analysed enormous amounts of text, which allows them to make a statistical guess as to what is a likely appropriate response to the prompt given. In other words, it mimics the patterns that it has picked up in the texts it has gone through. Second, these systems are refined through a process of reinforcement learning from human feedback (RLHF). The reward model has been trained directly from human feedback. Humans taught it what kinds of responses they prefer. Through numerous iterations, the system learns how to satisfy human beings’ preferences, thereby becoming more and more persuasive.

As the proliferation of fake news has taught us, human beings don’t always prefer truth. Falsity is often much more attractive than bland truths. We like good, exciting stories much more than we like truth. Large language models are analogous to a nightmare student, professor, or journalist; those who, instead of acknowledging the limits of their knowledge, try to wing it by bullshitting you.

Plato’s Apology suggests that we should build AI to be more like Socrates and less like bullshitters. We shouldn’t expect tech companies to design ethically out of their own good will. Silicon Valley is well known for its bullshitting abilities, and companies can even feel compelled to bullshit to stay competitive in that environment. That companies working in a corporate bullshitting environment create bullshitting products should hardly be surprising. One of the things that the past two decades have taught us is that tech needs as much regulation as any other industry, and no industry can regulate itself. We regulate food, drugs, telecommunications, finance, transport; why wouldn’t tech be next?

Plato leaves us with a final warning. One of the lessons of his work is to beware the flaws of democracy. Athenian democracy killed Socrates. It condemned its most committed citizen, its most valuable teacher, while it allowed sophists—the bullshitters of that time—to thrive. Our democracies seem likewise vulnerable to bullshitters. In the recent past, we have made them prime ministers and presidents. And now we are fueling the power of large language models, considering using them in all walks of life—even in contexts like journalism, politics, and medicine, in which truth is vital to the health of our institutions. Is that wise?

 

 

Original article here

15 Aug 2023
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3 Simple Habits That Can Protect Your Brain from Cognitive Decline

You might think that the impact of aging on the brain is something you can’t do much about. After all, isn’t it an inevitability?

To an extent, as we may not be able to rewind the clock and change our levels of higher education or intelligence (both factors that delay the onset of symptoms of aging). But adopting specific lifestyle behaviors–whether you’re in your thirties or late forties–can have a tangible effect on how well you age. Even in your fifties and beyond, activities like learning a new language or musical instrument, taking part in aerobic exercise, and developing meaningful social relationships can do wonders for your brain. There’s no question that when we compromise on looking after ourselves, our aging minds pick up the tab.

THE AGING PROCESS AND COGNITIVE DECLINE

Over time, there is a build-up of toxins such as tau proteins and beta-amyloid plaques in the brain that correlate to the aging process and associated cognitive decline. Although this is a natural part of growing older, many factors can exacerbate it. Stress, neurotoxins such as alcohol and lack of (quality and quantity) sleep can speed up the process.

Neuroplasticity–the function that allows the brain to change and develop in our lifetime–has three mechanisms: synaptic connection, myelination, and neurogenesis. The key to resilient aging is improving neurogenesis, the birth of new neurons. Neurogenesis happens far more in babies and children than adults. A 2018 study by researchers at Columbia University shows that in adults, this type of neuroplastic activity occurs in the hippocampus, the part of the brain that lays down memories. This makes sense as we respond to and store new experiences every day, and cement them during sleep. The more we can experience new things, activities, people, places, and emotions, the more likely we are to encourage neurogenesis.

With all this in mind, we can come up with a three-point plan to encourage “resilient aging” by activating neurogenesis in the brain:

  • GET YOUR HEART RATE UP

Aerobic exercise such as running or brisk walking has a potentially massive impact on neurogenesis. A 2016 rat study found that endurance exercise was most effective in increasing neurogenesis. It wins out over HIIT sessions and resistance training, although doing a variety of exercise also has its benefits.

Aim to do aerobic exercise for 150 minutes per week, and choose the gym, the park, or natural landscape over busy roads to avoid compromising brain-derived neurotrophic factor production (BDNF), a growth factor that encourages neurogenesis that aerobic exercise can boost. However, exercising in polluted areas decreases production.

If exercising alone isn’t your thing, consider taking up a team sport or one with a social element like table tennis. Exposure to social interaction can also increase the neurogenesis, and in many instances, doing so lets you practice your hand-eye coordination, which research has suggested leads to structural changes in the brain that may relate to a range of cognitive benefit. This combination of coordination and socializing has been shown to increase brain thickness in the parts of the cortex related to social/emotional welfare, which is crucial as we age.

  • CHANGE YOUR EATING PATTERNS

Evidence shows that calorie restriction, intermittent fasting, and time-restricted eating encourage neurogenesis in humans. In rodent studies, intermittent fasting has been found to improve cognitive function and brain structure, and reduce symptoms of metabolic disorders such as diabetes. Reducing refined sugar will help reduce oxidative damage to brain cells, too, and we know that increased oxidative damage has been linked with a higher risk of developing Alzheimer’s disease. Twenty-four hour water-only fasts have also been proven to increase longevity and encourage neurogenesis.

Try any of the following, after checking with your doctor:

  • 24-hour water-only fast once a month
  •  Reducing your calorie intake by 50%-60% on two non-consecutive days of the week for two to three months or on an ongoing basis
  • Reducing calories by 20% every day for two weeks. You can do this three to four times a year
  • Eating only between 8 a.m. to 8 p.m., or 12 p.m. to 8 p.m. as a general rule

 

  • PRIORITIZE SLEEP

Sleep helps promote the brain’s neural “cleaning” glymphatic system, which flushes out the build-up of age-related toxins in the brain (the tau proteins and beta amyloid plaques mentioned above). When people are sleep-deprived, we see evidence of memory deficits, and if you miss a whole night of sleep, research proves that it impacts IQ. Aim for seven to nine hours, and nap if it suits you. Our need to sleep decreases as we age.

Of course, there are individual exceptions, but having consistent sleep times and making sure you’re getting sufficient quality and length of sleep supports brain resilience over time. So how do you know if you’re getting enough? If you naturally wake up at the same time on weekends that you have to during the week, you probably are. If you need to lie-in or take long naps, you’re probably not. Try practicing mindfulness or yoga nidra before bed at night, a guided breath-based meditation that has been shown in studies to improve sleep quality. There are plenty of recordings online if you want to experience it.

Pick any of the above that work for you and build it up until it becomes a habit, then move onto the next one and so on. You might find that by the end of the year, you’ll feel even healthier, more energized, and motivated than you do now, even as you turn another year older.

 

 

Original article here