Just a reminder: This article is an ad for a web crawler/content marketing service. The purpose of the article is to be viral. Data is selected and presented to that end. See especially "The Tragic Data Behind Selfie Fatalities" which charts data from a particularly poor Wikipedia list and what appears to be a google search.
Can someone please flag these shills. The article is about how evidence-based behavioral therapies like cbt can reduce crime, and should be applied as an alternative to prison for kids. For those that don't know anything about cbt, in this context it's basically about reducing cognitive distortions that convince people to commit crimes.
CBT aka mindfulness these is just good tool to have overall.
I have had my share of bad experiences at my job from automaticity and adaptive, impulsive response. Here is what I learnt from being mindful:
1. When faced with making a choice, you remember more vividly how the bad choice hurt you last time.
2. Put it another way, that promise I made to myself after that big mistake is harder to break. Pertinently, the reasons that justified the promise and the benefit of keeping it are also more lucent.
3. I tend to separate/check my emotional responses connected to a thought connected to bad memories.
I could preach shorter sermons, but once I start I am too lazy to stop...
I was going to challenge you on saying that CBT is the same thing as mindfulness.
Then I thought about it, and I think this is pretty insightful. CBT says there's a split second after the stimulus where you get to choose how you will think about the stimulus.
That's an awful lot like mindfulness, at least from a big picture standpoint.
This is a cognitive blind spot for human beings - I am not sure if there is a name for it.
Some examples:
"The steelers were winning the whole game - they only lost because of that fluke fumble in the end zone when time ran out..."
"I was prepared and on-track for that job interview - if only the A train hadn't had a malfunction that morning and made me late..."
"If I hadn't taken that wrong step at the end of the trail, I wouldn't have torn my ACL ..."
These are bad conclusions.
Both teams played by the same rules and then time ran out and the other team won and it doesn't matter how they won. Future predictions should be based on the win.
You were late to the job interview because you're a person that screws times up. That's much more useful information than anything you could have contributed at the interview.
I tore my ACL because my ACL was weak and was waiting to tear. If it hadn't been that step, it would have been a different one at a slightly different time.
This insistence (I am, myself, guilty) to look for exceptionalism in results rather than accept the obvious data that are being shown to us is something we need to become aware of - and avoid.
I don't think these examples are necessarily bad conclusions. A team could have won a dozen games before this one, so in that case you'd bet on the team with a better record regardless of a fluke.
And depending on where you live, it may not be possible to reach an interview if you're delayed. I mean, transport networks have accidents, strikes, signal failures, delays and god knows what else, and the alternative route may be signficantly slower. In that case, it doesn't matter how good your timing is. You could have left an hour in case of problems and still end up late. At some point, you have to assume these things will work out 90% of the time and be willing to accept the loss the other 10%.
And the final example is pretty vague about what the step actually was. If the wrong step led to a five feet drop off a rock, then yes, the wrong step may well have been why they broke their ACL...
Yes, don't blame the world for all your mistakes and problems. But at the same time, accept that you're not responsible for every single thing that happens to you as well. No one can always be prepared for every possible situation, and that's just fine.
>I was prepared and on-track for that job interview - if only the A train hadn't had a malfunction that morning and made me late
then
> You were late to the job interview because you're a person that screws times up. That's much more useful information than anything you could have contributed at the interview.
Then try hiring people - lots of people. You will very very quickly learn to immediately disqualify the people that either can't get there on time or can't submit the resume with the required information or can't provide the references by the required date, etc.
I used to be very interested and sympathetic to details and narratives and stories and "this is why I didn't send it in PDF format" or "this is why I called 5 minutes late". Now I see them as the most information-dense data that a prospective hire could possibly provide to me.
Isn't it also important to be able to recognize outliers? If your house burned down a week after you bought it, that doesn't mean you shouldn't rebuild it because it's just going to burn down again.
Lighting strikes and faulty appliances shouldn't cause a house to burn down. It's completely unreasonable to bet your safety on every device (made by whoever) inside your house working as intended.
Neighboring huge fires and gas leakage are the one thing outside of your control. Everything else should be a non-issue.
You're suggesting every consumer physically disassemble and inspect every device they purchase (after acquiring sufficient training to do so in a meaningful way)?
I'm not at all sure what you expect someone to do about a lightning strike...
Lighting rods do help, but I think you're dramatically underestimating the power and unpredictability of lightning.
As far as "minimal damages" go, as long as we're not building our houses (and everything in them) out of material that cannot catch fire, house fires due to faulty appliances will be a fact of life.
Actually, what you're proposing is a cognitive blind spot that is indicative of depression. I forget what the name of it is, but taking every minor setback or chance occurrence to be indicative of a fundamental, unchangeable character flaw is a symptom of depression.
I believe this is the psychology field of attribution theory, in particular fundamental attribution errors[1].
From the article, the parent's "alternate conclusions" seem to be regarded as cognitive biases, while the "bad conclusions" are more objective and psychologically healthy.
So congrats, rsync, if you're "guilty yourself", you're in good psychological shape, according to wikipedia :)
If you tell yourself that random acts of the universe are your fault, thats depression.
If you tell yourself that random acts of the universe are someone elses fault, thats paranoia (assuming sane observation that its truly a random act of the universe)
If you tell someone else that a random act of the universe is their fault, thats just primate dominance rituals, it doesn't mean anything and can be ignored. See it as a management technique all the time. Its easier to detect when the judgment is being made well inside the error bars of a metric, but its just as valid outside of course.
I don't think your examples work. If the probability of one team winning over another is 90%, that fluke fumble is an exception/outlier and should be treated as such.
Same goes for the train example imo.
The ACL injury thing is more difficult because you are implying an underlying pre condition of a weak ACL, so i guess your example works there.
> The better team is the team that finds a way to win - even if it is weird and flukey and doesn't fit a nice narrative.
Except all of sports data science disagrees with you. Long term trends say that a team who keeps possession of the ball the majority of the time is the team that is more likely to win. An individual game might suggest otherwise - a team that has the ball 90% of the time can lose to a goal in other 10%. But over 100 games, the trend becomes pretty clear.
> The better team is the team that finds a way to win - even if it is weird and flukey and doesn't fit a nice narrative.
No, that is the narrative. The better team doesn't always win, that's life, but people who want it to be true will say things like "the Cavaliers just wanted it more and found a way to win". Sometimes shit happens and the better team loses, and you need to recognize it as an outlier.
Successful people definitely "find a way" more than average, but if you're unable to recognize that sometimes there really is nothing to be done, that's an issue. Your attitude kind of reminds me of the Ron Swanson quote "everything I do is the attitude of an award winner, for I have won an award." The fact that you lost doesn't mean that everything you did was the behavior of a loser. Chance exists, there are no guarantees in life.
> The better job candidate finds a way to get to the interview on time - regardless of unexpected difficulties.
I know someone who was late to an interview because a terrorist attack led to a city-wide transit shutdown. They could have made it, but they would have had to leave ~24 hours early based on zero information. Is it really useful to equate that with someone who was late because they forgot to get gas the day before?
More broadly, this entire list comes down to throwing out useful data and calling it a better prediction. The entire concept of a "good excuse" is to recognize "wow, that's way outside normal parameters, not planning for that is reasonable". I agree that people often appeal to flukes and bad luck when it's unreasonable, but this list just reinforces the face that chance really is a part of life.
"I know someone who was late to an interview because a terrorist attack led to a city-wide transit shutdown."
On the one hand, I must object to the obvious reductio ad absurdum. Even I would be interested in, and sympathetic to, that narrative.
On the other hand, imagine the information contained in the event of the prospective employee that actually made it into the interview that day. There's a lot of information there that should not be ignored.
If football team A wins a because an act of god wiped out team B, I don't believe A were the better team even for that game. You've got a chip on your shoulder about people making excuses, when obviously excuses can be valid.
> Both teams played by the same rules and then time ran out and the other team won and it doesn't matter how they won. Future predictions should be based on the win.
> You were late to the job interview because you're a person that screws times up. That's much more useful information than anything you could have contributed at the interview.
I simply don't agree with either conclusion.
If you want to assess the likelihood of a team winning future games based on them winning a particular past game, it absolutely matters how they won that particular past game. If they won through superior skill, strategy and athleticism, one would reach different conclusions than if they won because the opposing team all had food poisoning the night before and only got a few hours sleep, or the opposing team captain broke her leg in the first minute.
I agree that people are not good at assessing the degree to which particular events are due to intrinsic factors vs. random or external factors, and that people are biased to believe events that they believe are undesirable are caused more by random factors and events they believe are desirable are caused more by intrinsic factors. But that doesn't mean that it's impossible to make such determinations with some degree of accuracy and impartiality.
If "the A train had a malfunction" has a reasonable likelihood of occurring (e.g. it breaks down once a month), then perhaps it's reasonable to conclude that someone who is late to an important event because the A train broke down didn't plan their time in an optimal way. But if "the A train had a malfunction" means "the A train broke down while I was riding it to an important interview, and there was no way for me to disembark, and I was trapped for eight hours", that doesn't mean the person who got trapped is bad at planning their time. It means that person was unlucky, and a chaotic, unpredictable event had a negative impact on them.
Turning up eight hours early to every single important event to avoid the tiny chance of a random eight-hour delay spoiling things is, over the course of a lifetime, a worse strategy than turning up one hour early to important events and accepting the slim chance that you might occasionally miss an important event.
> This insistence (I am, myself, guilty) to look for exceptionalism in results rather than accept the obvious data that are being shown to us is something we need to become aware of - and avoid.
But equally, the natural human tendency to believe "everything happens for a reason", and to downplay the (huge) role of randomness on the outcome of all human affairs, is also something to be aware of and avoid.
I think for the team game the problem is we overvalue the last minutes in the game compared to any other time period in the game. Both teams could have made an equal number of bad plays/flukes during the game but we end up irrationally focused on the last play.
What you're talking about is the "low-factor explanation" bias, which we could also call the "all things equal" bias. When we tell stories about our lives, we're really talking about causal explanations, for the simple reason that "shit happens" isn't an interesting story for most people. The theory of causality I believe most people believe is Judea Pearl's interventionist theory, which is, we say A causes B if intervening on A changes (or prevents) B.
So in your football example one imagines, if the Steelers HADN'T fumbled that what have you, then they would've won. And, on the one hand, sure, that's probably true. But if nearly anything else had gone differently in the game, any other outcome could've happened. That's too abstruse; what am I really supposed to do with that? Life would quickly descend back to "shit happens" if you pulled that thread too hard; we'd never be able to say anything about anything, because everything would be too wrapped up in esoterica.
So while this is a pretty serious blind spot, it's something that we do because it helps us make sense of the world, and the honest-to-god failure cases don't routinely stare people in the face (as you can see by the responses you've gotten). The more important problem with this view is the "complex systems" sciences, where "all things equal" could charitably be called a shit show. But since we're so accustomed to this style of thinking working out okay, it's somehow not obvious to (e.g.) economists, or even philosophers, that there's a problem here. Thus, for example, you get "all things equal" theories of political economy, and we all suffer for them without having a good sense for why.
> Both teams played by the same rules
> and then time ran out and the other
> team won and it doesn't matter how they won.
It's more than that even. Both teams played by the same rules and one of them played better through the game. It is not the end of the game (or the result of the late train)that decided the results.
If the losing team had scored more points, if their defense had been a little better, if you had planned for traffic/delays... these are the deciding factors. The conclusion is the conclusion - but we tend to discount all the factors that made the conclusion happen.
> 1. Recognize when their automatic responses might get them into trouble,
> 2. Slow down in those situations and behave less automatically,
> 3. Objectively assess situations and think about what response is called-for.
Some martial arts training teaches that. The more defensive martial arts, such as aikido, focus on that. Training in a defensive martial art might help impulsive kids. It teaches them that lashing out blindly is a quick way to lose, and that there are much more effective responses to an attack.
This is a lot like the SAFE technique for crisis management. I was taught it in the context of wilderness survival (particularly when you get lost), and apparently it comes from kayaking.
1. Stop
2. Assess the situation
3. Formulate a plan
4. Execute
Repeat steps 2-4 as you progress. (I guess you could make it SAFER, and make R for Repeat).
I've found it very useful for general crisis management, especially for physical crises. Just forcing yourself through the steps makes you think of better options, rather than running off and making the problem worse.
I don't think it's such a good pattern for long term problems though, the idea is that you're reacting to your immediate situation and dealing accordingly, so it's effective for events that need immediate attention, such as car crashes, first aid situations, or getting lost in the wilderness.
> Recognize when their automatic responses might get them into trouble
How? Ok, if I set my mind to it I'm probably ok for 5 minutes or so until pure instinct sets in again....how to keep self-monitoring one's mood indefinitely?
Quite frankly, whatever values they want. Telling someone to be conscientious about their actions isn't indoctrination. If they take the time, step back from the situation, and make a decision different than the one you would've made, that's still a win.
Right, so let's look at it from the perspective of a group of ISIS members, and analyze first what a "desirable outcome" is.
According to their own magazine, the objective of ISIS is to "[make it so] the Blessed flag [of their religion]...covers all eastern and western extents of the Earth, filling the world with the truth and justice of Islam and putting an end to the falsehood and tyranny of jahiliyyah [state of ignorance], even if American and its coalition despise such. " So basically, the "desirable outcome" is a Muslim (of the Wahabi brand ISIS prefers) world.
Now we know what the "desirable outcome" of a large chunk of people is, let's take a look at what "values" can "produce" this desirable outcome.
Judging from the actions of ISIS, these include
* Public beheading
* Rape and enslaving of non-Wahabi women
* Destruction of historical monuments
* Detonating explosives among gathered civilians
So, are these the values you are arguing to teach children? Obviously not, but do you see my point?
It's not so complicated. The article is about jail and impulse control, so the desired "outcome" is to stay out of jail and the "value", if you'd even call it that, is to temper momentary impulses to foster longer term thinking. Except in extreme cases, just spending time with someone and caring about that person gets you most of the way there, regardless of the specific values you're trying to impart.
If you want to regress forever you can quickly reach the bedrock question of, "Why do anything?" And if you want to drill hard enough, yes, there is no absolute answer to that. We get it.
But, back in reality, most of us have a general handle on outcomes that are good and bad for humans, and what people want day to day and for society. Safety is better than danger. Health is better than disease. Joy is better than pain. Choice is better than slavery. And so on.
If you want to have a hyper-abstract philosophical debate on bedrock values or is/ought, you should start a discussion that is targeting that question.
Those "bedrock values" you call "bedrock" are not as such at all.
What about those that get joy from pain? What about brothel owners that highly value the slavery that gets them their women? What about terrorists cells that desire chaos above safety?
>Unless you state what you think are desireable outcomes, your statement means nothing
Only if we start as some kind of visitors from Mars who don't know the earthly ways.
Else, the "desirable outcomes" are pretty much agreed upon, at least for most people: keep mentally and physically healthy, study, get a good job, support your family, be good to others, don't be a criminal (as in TFA), etc.
Some families I know argue profit above all things, comfort above all things. Morbidly obese families, for example, do not feel that physical health is an important value.
>Get a good job
I know families that value finding welfare loopholes to facilitate a non-working lifestyle.
>Support your family
I know people that very much do not value supporting their family
>Be good to others
ISIS members do not value being good to non-Muslims. (they do not agree with your values)
>Don't be a criminal
Members of gangs generally completely disagree with this.
Somehow the person you're replying to is being downvoted for suggesting, essentially, that "people believe different things are important." Are we going to seriously argue against that?
You mean, most people in power/authority, who have a vested interest in keeping the status quo.
> study
Why is study in and of itself a desireable outcome? That's an activity in service of a goal, not the goal itself. Unless you think that accumulation of knowledge without application is a good/worthy goal.
> support your family
Do you mean blood family or whoever you married? I fail to see why I should support somebody I married unless I choose to, as they're a person with the ability to support themselves.
I don't think that these impulsive people do a single wrong thing that lands their in jail.
Rather, they are a constant nuisance to everybody around them, and eventually it gets them in trouble. What they get locked up for is probably not their first transgression.
They might not be criminals but they actively decrease quality of life for everybody involved. The kind of behavior people tend to leave with high school, and they should have left ever sooner.
I wonder if therapy will help them avoiding behaving like a bad apple, not just avoid getting caught with their eventual out-of-bounds act.
I don't think you fully understand what growing up in a terrible neighborhood entails. They aren't so much "a constant nuisance to everybody around them" as they are acting like many who are around them.
When you grow up in the hood and your father is gone (dead, in jail, never in the picture) and your mother is on crack and all of your friends and siblings are in gangs and/or on drugs and/or selling drugs, changing your destiny is a difficult proposition.
