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August 1, 2008

rePost: Gratitude

The takeaway is that if you are not going to be mindful of what you are doing 24/7 why don’t you make helping people a default reaction. Remember maybe helping one people directly may mean really helping 2-3 people.
from here:

Consider the following experiment conducted by Monica Bartlett and myself. We brought people into the lab and set up 2 situations: One in which they confronted a problem which would require them to complete an onerous task and one where they didn’t face any problem. In the first case, a confederate, at some cost to herself in terms of time and effort, helped the participant solve the problem, which led to measurable feelings of gratitude. In the second, the confederate was just another person in the session.
After leaving the lab, all participants just happened to encounter someone asking for help on a different onerous task. This person was either the known confederate (labeled benefactor in the figure) or someone who was a complete stranger.
Looking at the first two bars, you can see that grateful participants helped the known confederate much more than neutral participants.
Ok, I know what you’re thinking. This doesn’t prove anything! They may just be following a reciprocity norm. Fair enough. But look at the second set of bars. If it were really reciprocity, then no increased helping should occur when a stranger requests help, as participants don’t owe this stranger anything. Yet, those who were feeling grateful still helped more. Simply put, gratitude functioned to push people to acquiesce to requests for help — even onerous ones from unknown others.

Importantly, another study showed that if we reminded the participants before they left that they were helped by the confederate, they didn’t help the stranger any more than control participants. By binding the emotional state so saliently to one person, it couldn’t be misattributed as a cue to help another, thereby indicating that the increased helping isn’t just adherence to a “pay-it-forward” norm. Yet participants still were paying-it-forward.

July 17, 2008

Live Life!

Thanks to pk here:

To be truly challenging, a voyage, like a life, must rest on a firm foundation of financial unrest. Otherwise you are doomed to a routine traverse, the kind known to yachtsmen, who play with their boats at sea–“cruising”, it is called. Voyaging belongs to seamen, and to the wanderers of the world who cannot, or will not, fit in. If you are contemplating a voyage and you have the means, abandon the venture until your fortunes change. Only then will you know what the sea is all about.
Little has been said or written about the ways a man may blast himself free. Why? I don’t know, unless the answer lies in our diseased values. A man seldom hesitates to describe his work; he gladly divulges the privacies of alleged sexual conquests. But ask him how much he has in the bank and he recoils into a shocked and stubborn silence.
“I’ve always wanted to sail to the South Seas, but I can’t afford it.” What these men can’t afford is not to go. They are enmeshed in the cancerous discipline of “security”. And in the worship of security we fling our lives beneath the wheels of routine—and before we know it our lives are gone.
What does a man need—really need? A few pounds of food each day, heat and shelter, six feet to lie down in—and some form of working activity that will yield a sense of accomplishment. That’s all—in the material sense. And we know it. But we are brainwashed by our economic system until we end up beneath a pyramid of time payments, mortgages, preposterous gadgetry, playthings that divert our attention from the sheer idiocy of the charade.
The years thunder by. The dreams of youth grow dim where they lie caked in dust on the shelves of patience. Before we know it, the tomb is sealed.
Where, then, lies the answer? In choice. Which shall it be: bankruptcy of purse or bankruptcy of life?

It pains me when I see friends whose youthful dreams fade into the oblivion of getting caught up in reality!

July 15, 2008

One Word Mood Changer Of The Day

A Thank You To Kottke here:

Mamihlapinatapai, a most succinct word.
It describes a look shared by two people with each wishing that the other will initiate something that both desire but which neither one wants to start. This could perhaps be translated more succinctly as “eye-contact implying ‘after you…'”. A more literal approximation is “ending up mutually at a loss as to what to do about each other”.Heartbreaking. I wish we had an English word for that feeling. (via cyn-c)

Hmm damn you could substitute: how I wish this would happen to me!

July 12, 2008

Raising The Tide

ht to Bill Scher
ty Brad Delong here:
This is conservatism. The dismissal of economic burdens from others making less money than you. The belief that an ideal economy can thrive with a small boat of winners and a giant sinking ship of losers. The insistence that your economic dissatisfaction is illegitimate, and can only be explained by a brainwashing from the media or politicians.
I’ve written my belief that the circumstances of one’s life affects the things one achieves and although I believe that people can break free from the constraints of their environment(this I am trying to prove personally) I will always be thankful for whatever break that comes my way. Always realizing that what often we call hardwork may just be a different sort of luck. This is why the quote resonates with me deeply.
We should not think of ourselves to highly. Always remember the cognitive biases.

July 10, 2008

Why "Wise" Self Made Introspective People Give

from here an article on discussing Nassim Taleb’s book “The Black Swan”:
There are various things you can do. The first is to realize that if you succeed, it’s probably not exclusively due to your brilliant mind. More than anything else it is luck. You still need a brilliant mind of course to help guide you at every step, just don’t pretend that it alone will get you where you want to be.
most self made people realize that there was someone just as smart and just as driven as them that wasn’t as successful as they are. They see people far more intelligent and far more “better” in less enticing situations. They realize that given how much they know about how precarious their success actually was, a little missed connection here and a little bad timing there and the whole thing collapse like a corrupt politician’s bridge. Because of this Randomness the “Wise” Self Made Introspective person cannot but be the philanthropists who helps less fortunate people at least achieve a decent kind of life.
I hope, I pray, I will become, Someday, Someday!

July 9, 2008

Reminder To Start Helping

from here:
The economic growth in a country like South Korea, which has made much more educational progress than the United States, clearly demonstrates this. “If you look across countries,” says Lawrence Katz, a labor economist at Harvard, “education is the strongest predictor for how quickly the pie grows.”

Hope I can find the time to contribute in the community with increasing literacy and helping people find a track towards getting educated in my country. I don’t know. I promised myself I’d get more involve a around January next year. Posting this as a reminder.

July 9, 2008

Choice and Breaking Free

from here:
In other words, our choices depend upon what’s available, not what’s rational. This is true of even highly intelligent people.
And of course, your neighbourhood, your school influences what seems available to you. This is why peer effects matter. If you’re surrounded by people who carry knives, you’re more likely to carry one yourself, simply because the option of doing so is more salient. Similarly, if your friends are all studying for Oxbridge, you might be more likely to do so.
My personal history corroborates this. I got into Oxford – from which the rest was straightforward – not because I was smarter or harder-working than others, but because a teacher told me I could do it. Had he not made the choice available, the thought of going to Oxford would never have occurred to me – ability or not.
Circumstances, then, determine choice.
After office me and a couple of my officemates decided to hang out at a nearby Starbucks, I think we stayed for about 2 hours. I was telling them that I used to be insecure with my educational background and it hampered me for awhile and a considerably long time. It was only when I was able to study the lives of people whom I admired that I came to the conclusion that:
I control my destiny to a large extent.
That , People cannot say what I can and cannot DO.
My Desire And The HardWork That I muster and put in any endeavor Is my own reward.
This is clarion call to people living within the confines of what our environment has put upon us.
We control our lives. Lives we must learn to live on our terms!

July 9, 2008

Oil

from here:
Americans fell in love with vehicles like the Ford pickup trucks in the 1990s, back when gas didn’t cost much more than $1 a gallon. That seemed normal at the time, because gas prices had remained in a narrow range — roughly 90 cents to $1.25 a gallon — going back to the early 1980s.
But this stability was actually a sign of something deeply unusual. The cost of most everything else was rising, as was the size of people’s nominal paychecks. So in practical terms, gas was becoming cheaper. By 1999, it had effectively fallen to its lowest point on record, about 30 percent lower than few people in my country realize this.
The over all sentiment is that we should go back to the regulated oil days. The fact is we have a weak government that can’t seem to reign in the profiteering.