Found this interesting commentary. Since we are very much in need of feedback in tai chi, and we get it often, this article points again to the issue of communication which I personally ponder... Tom
There's No Such Thing as Constructive Criticism
By Tony Schwartz, president and CEO of The Energy Project and the author of Be Excellent at Anything.
8:00 AM Monday November 21, 2011
Here's a question guaranteed to make your stomach lurch: "Would you mind if I gave you some feedback?"
What that actually means is "Would you mind if I gave you some negative feedback, wrapped in the guise of constructive criticism, whether you want it or not?"
The problem with criticism is that it challenges our sense of value. Criticism implies judgment and we all recoil from feeling judged. As Daniel Goleman has noted, threats to our esteem in the eyes of others are so potent they can literally feel like threats to our very survival.
The conundrum is that feedback is necessary. It's the primary means by which we learn and grow. So what's the best way to deliver it in a way that it provides the greatest value — meaning the recipient truly absorbs and acts on it?
There are three key behaviors, I believe, and they're each grounded in the recognition that what we say is often less important than how we say it.
1. The first mistake we often make is giving feedback when we are feeling that our own value is at risk. That's a recipe for disaster, and it happens far more commonly than we think, or are aware.
If we're feeling threatened or diminished by another person's perceived shortcomings, providing "constructive criticism" becomes secondary to getting our value back. We're more likely to be reactive, insensitive and even hurtful.
If it's about us, it's not truly about them. Any time we provide feedback with the goal of getting someone to better meet our needs, rather than being responsive to theirs, it's unlikely to prompt the desired outcome.
A classic example is the parent who confuses his own worth with his child's performance, and reacts to the child's missteps with harshness and judgment rather than sensitivity and compassion.
2. The second mistake we make in giving feedback is failing to hold the other person's value in the process. Even the most well-intentioned criticism will, more often than not, prompt us to feel our value is at risk, and under attack.
When that happens, the primal impulse is to defend ourselves. The more the person you are criticizing feels compelled to defend her value, the less capable she becomes of absorbing what she's hearing.
I once had an employee who was highly competent and detail-driven, and rarely made mistakes. Partly this grew out of her fierce perfectionism and her outsize fear of the consequences of being wrong.
Her automatic instinct was to deny responsibility for any misstep. When I felt the need to bring one to her attention, I learned it was crucial to begin by reassuring her that I cared about her, and that I had continuing confidence in her abilities. Only then could she truly take in what I was saying.
When you're inclined to offer specific feedback, pause and ask yourself first how you'd feel if someone gave you that feedback. If you would feel uncomfortable or defensive, assume anyone else would too.
3. The third mistake we make is to assume that we're right about whatever it is we're inclined to say. Like lawyers, we take a series of facts and weave them together into a story that supports and justifies the case we're seeking to make.
The problem is that our stories aren't necessarily true. They're simply one interpretation of the facts. It makes much more sense to think about offering feedback in a spirit of humble exploration rather than declaration, dialogue rather than monologue, curiosity rather than certainty. Humility is the recognition that we don't know, even when we think we know. As Steven Covey says "Seek first to understand."
Ultimately, we'd be better off eliminating concepts like "feedback" and "constructive criticism" from our lexicons altogether. They're polarizing, and mostly destructive. We need to think of these interchanges instead as opportunities for honest inquiry and genuine learning.
"Here's the story I'm telling myself about what just happened," we might say. "Have I got that right, or am I missing something?"
That's exactly what I intend to say the next time I'm inclined to ask someone, "Would you mind if I gave you some feedback?"
Saturday, January 21, 2012
Friday, December 30, 2011
The Joy of Quiet - New York Times Opinion Article
I might add, the NECESSITY of quiet. Tom
December 29, 2011
NewYork Times
The Joy of Quiet
By PICO IYER
LAST year, I flew to Singapore to join the writer Malcolm Gladwell, the fashion designer Marc Ecko and the graphic designer Stefan Sagmeister in addressing a group of advertising people on “Marketing to the Child of Tomorrow.” Soon after I arrived, the chief executive of the agency that had invited us took me aside. What he was most interested in, he began — I braced myself for mention of some next-generation stealth campaign — was stillness.
A few months later, I read an interview with the perennially cutting-edge designer Philippe Starck. What allowed him to remain so consistently ahead of the curve? “I never read any magazines or watch TV,” he said, perhaps a little hyperbolically. “Nor do I go to cocktail parties, dinners or anything like that.” He lived outside conventional ideas, he implied, because “I live alone mostly, in the middle of nowhere.”
Around the same time, I noticed that those who part with $2,285 a night to stay in a cliff-top room at the Post Ranch Inn in Big Sur pay partly for the privilege of not having a TV in their rooms; the future of travel, I’m reliably told, lies in “black-hole resorts,” which charge high prices precisely because you can’t get online in their rooms.
Has it really come to this?
In barely one generation we’ve moved from exulting in the time-saving devices that have so expanded our lives to trying to get away from them — often in order to make more time. The more ways we have to connect, the more many of us seem desperate to unplug. Like teenagers, we appear to have gone from knowing nothing about the world to knowing too much all but overnight.
Internet rescue camps in South Korea and China try to save kids addicted to the screen.
Writer friends of mine pay good money to get the Freedom software that enables them to disable (for up to eight hours) the very Internet connections that seemed so emancipating not long ago. Even Intel (of all companies) experimented in 2007 with conferring four uninterrupted hours of quiet time every Tuesday morning on 300 engineers and managers. (The average office worker today, researchers have found, enjoys no more than three minutes at his or her desk without interruption.) During this period the workers were not allowed to use the phone or send e-mail, but simply had the chance to clear their heads and to hear themselves think. A majority of Intel’s trial group recommended that the policy be extended to others.
THE average American spends at least eight and a half hours a day in front of a screen, Nicholas Carr notes in his eye-opening book “The Shallows,” in part because the number of hours American adults spent online doubled between 2005 and 2009 (and the number of hours spent in front of a TV screen, often simultaneously, is also steadily increasing).
The average American teenager sends or receives 75 text messages a day, though one girl in Sacramento managed to handle an average of 10,000 every 24 hours for a month. Since luxury, as any economist will tell you, is a function of scarcity, the children of tomorrow, I heard myself tell the marketers in Singapore, will crave nothing more than freedom, if only for a short while, from all the blinking machines, streaming videos and scrolling headlines that leave them feeling empty and too full all at once.
The urgency of slowing down — to find the time and space to think — is nothing new, of course, and wiser souls have always reminded us that the more attention we pay to the moment, the less time and energy we have to place it in some larger context. “Distraction is the only thing that consoles us for our miseries,” the French philosopher Blaise Pascal wrote in the 17th century, “and yet it is itself the greatest of our miseries.” He also famously remarked that all of man’s problems come from his inability to sit quietly in a room alone.
When telegraphs and trains brought in the idea that convenience was more important than content — and speedier means could make up for unimproved ends — Henry David Thoreau reminded us that “the man whose horse trots a mile in a minute does not carry the most important messages.” Even half a century ago, Marshall McLuhan, who came closer than most to seeing what was coming, warned, “When things come at you very fast, naturally you lose touch with yourself.” Thomas Merton struck a chord with millions, by not just noting, “Man was made for the highest activity, which is, in fact, his rest,” but acting on it, and stepping out of the rat race and into a Cistercian cloister.
Yet few of those voices can be heard these days, precisely because “breaking news” is coming through (perpetually) on CNN and Debbie is just posting images of her summer vacation and the phone is ringing. We barely have enough time to see how little time we have (most Web pages, researchers find, are visited for 10 seconds or less). And the more that floods in on us (the Kardashians, Obamacare, “Dancing with the Stars”!), the less of ourselves we have to give to every snippet. All we notice is that the distinctions that used to guide and steady us — between Sunday and Monday, public and private, here and there — are gone.
We have more and more ways to communicate, as Thoreau noted, but less and less to say. Partly because we’re so busy communicating. And — as he might also have said — we’re rushing to meet so many deadlines that we hardly register that what we need most are lifelines.
So what to do? The central paradox of the machines that have made our lives so much brighter, quicker, longer and healthier is that they cannot teach us how to make best use of them; the information revolution came without an instruction manual. All the data in the world cannot teach us how to sift through data; images don’t show us how to process images. The only way to do justice to our onscreen lives is by summoning exactly the emotional and moral clarity that can’t be found on any screen.
MAYBE that’s why more and more people I know, even if they have no religious commitment, seem to be turning to yoga, or meditation, or tai chi; these aren’t New Age fads so much as ways to connect with what could be called the wisdom of old age. Two journalist friends of mine observe an “Internet sabbath” every week, turning off their online connections from Friday night to Monday morning, so as to try to revive those ancient customs known as family meals and conversation. Finding myself at breakfast with a group of lawyers in Oxford four months ago, I noticed that all their talk was of sailing — or riding or bridge: anything that would allow them to get out of radio contact for a few hours.
Other friends try to go on long walks every Sunday, or to “forget” their cellphones at home. A series of tests in recent years has shown, Mr. Carr points out, that after spending time in quiet rural settings, subjects “exhibit greater attentiveness, stronger memory and generally improved cognition. Their brains become both calmer and sharper.” More than that empathy, as well as deep thought, depends (as neuroscientists like Antonio Damasio have found) on neural processes that are “inherently slow.” The very ones our high-speed lives have little time for.
In my own case, I turn to eccentric and often extreme measures to try to keep my sanity and ensure that I have time to do nothing at all (which is the only time when I can see what I should be doing the rest of the time). I’ve yet to use a cellphone and I’ve never Tweeted or entered Facebook. I try not to go online till my day’s writing is finished, and I moved from Manhattan to rural Japan in part so I could more easily survive for long stretches entirely on foot, and every trip to the movies would be an event.
None of this is a matter of principle or asceticism; it’s just pure selfishness. Nothing makes me feel better — calmer, clearer and happier — than being in one place, absorbed in a book, a conversation, a piece of music. It’s actually something deeper than mere happiness: it’s joy, which the monk David Steindl-Rast describes as “that kind of happiness that doesn’t depend on what happens.”
It’s vital, of course, to stay in touch with the world, and to know what’s going on; I took pains this past year to make separate trips to Jerusalem and Hyderabad and Oman and St. Petersburg, to rural Arkansas and Thailand and the stricken nuclear plant in Fukushima and Dubai. But it’s only by having some distance from the world that you can see it whole, and understand what you should be doing with it.
For more than 20 years, therefore, I’ve been going several times a year — often for no longer than three days — to a Benedictine hermitage, 40 minutes down the road, as it happens, from the Post Ranch Inn. I don’t attend services when I’m there, and I’ve never meditated, there or anywhere; I just take walks and read and lose myself in the stillness, recalling that it’s only by stepping briefly away from my wife and bosses and friends that I’ll have anything useful to bring to them. The last time I was in the hermitage, three months ago, I happened to pass, on the monastery road, a youngish-looking man with a 3-year-old around his shoulders.
“You’re Pico, aren’t you?” the man said, and introduced himself as Larry; we’d met, I gathered, 19 years before, when he’d been living in the cloister as an assistant to one of the monks.
“What are you doing now?” I asked.
“I work for MTV. Down in L.A.”
We smiled. No words were necessary.
“I try to bring my kids here as often as I can,” he went on, as he looked out at the great blue expanse of the Pacific on one side of us, the high, brown hills of the Central Coast on the other. “My oldest son” — he pointed at a 7-year-old running along the deserted, radiant mountain road in front of his mother — “this is his third time.”
The child of tomorrow, I realized, may actually be ahead of us, in terms of sensing not what’s new, but what’s essential.
The author, most recently, of the forthcoming book “The Man Within My Head.”
December 29, 2011
NewYork Times
The Joy of Quiet
By PICO IYER
LAST year, I flew to Singapore to join the writer Malcolm Gladwell, the fashion designer Marc Ecko and the graphic designer Stefan Sagmeister in addressing a group of advertising people on “Marketing to the Child of Tomorrow.” Soon after I arrived, the chief executive of the agency that had invited us took me aside. What he was most interested in, he began — I braced myself for mention of some next-generation stealth campaign — was stillness.
A few months later, I read an interview with the perennially cutting-edge designer Philippe Starck. What allowed him to remain so consistently ahead of the curve? “I never read any magazines or watch TV,” he said, perhaps a little hyperbolically. “Nor do I go to cocktail parties, dinners or anything like that.” He lived outside conventional ideas, he implied, because “I live alone mostly, in the middle of nowhere.”
Around the same time, I noticed that those who part with $2,285 a night to stay in a cliff-top room at the Post Ranch Inn in Big Sur pay partly for the privilege of not having a TV in their rooms; the future of travel, I’m reliably told, lies in “black-hole resorts,” which charge high prices precisely because you can’t get online in their rooms.
Has it really come to this?
In barely one generation we’ve moved from exulting in the time-saving devices that have so expanded our lives to trying to get away from them — often in order to make more time. The more ways we have to connect, the more many of us seem desperate to unplug. Like teenagers, we appear to have gone from knowing nothing about the world to knowing too much all but overnight.
Internet rescue camps in South Korea and China try to save kids addicted to the screen.
Writer friends of mine pay good money to get the Freedom software that enables them to disable (for up to eight hours) the very Internet connections that seemed so emancipating not long ago. Even Intel (of all companies) experimented in 2007 with conferring four uninterrupted hours of quiet time every Tuesday morning on 300 engineers and managers. (The average office worker today, researchers have found, enjoys no more than three minutes at his or her desk without interruption.) During this period the workers were not allowed to use the phone or send e-mail, but simply had the chance to clear their heads and to hear themselves think. A majority of Intel’s trial group recommended that the policy be extended to others.
THE average American spends at least eight and a half hours a day in front of a screen, Nicholas Carr notes in his eye-opening book “The Shallows,” in part because the number of hours American adults spent online doubled between 2005 and 2009 (and the number of hours spent in front of a TV screen, often simultaneously, is also steadily increasing).
The average American teenager sends or receives 75 text messages a day, though one girl in Sacramento managed to handle an average of 10,000 every 24 hours for a month. Since luxury, as any economist will tell you, is a function of scarcity, the children of tomorrow, I heard myself tell the marketers in Singapore, will crave nothing more than freedom, if only for a short while, from all the blinking machines, streaming videos and scrolling headlines that leave them feeling empty and too full all at once.
The urgency of slowing down — to find the time and space to think — is nothing new, of course, and wiser souls have always reminded us that the more attention we pay to the moment, the less time and energy we have to place it in some larger context. “Distraction is the only thing that consoles us for our miseries,” the French philosopher Blaise Pascal wrote in the 17th century, “and yet it is itself the greatest of our miseries.” He also famously remarked that all of man’s problems come from his inability to sit quietly in a room alone.
When telegraphs and trains brought in the idea that convenience was more important than content — and speedier means could make up for unimproved ends — Henry David Thoreau reminded us that “the man whose horse trots a mile in a minute does not carry the most important messages.” Even half a century ago, Marshall McLuhan, who came closer than most to seeing what was coming, warned, “When things come at you very fast, naturally you lose touch with yourself.” Thomas Merton struck a chord with millions, by not just noting, “Man was made for the highest activity, which is, in fact, his rest,” but acting on it, and stepping out of the rat race and into a Cistercian cloister.
Yet few of those voices can be heard these days, precisely because “breaking news” is coming through (perpetually) on CNN and Debbie is just posting images of her summer vacation and the phone is ringing. We barely have enough time to see how little time we have (most Web pages, researchers find, are visited for 10 seconds or less). And the more that floods in on us (the Kardashians, Obamacare, “Dancing with the Stars”!), the less of ourselves we have to give to every snippet. All we notice is that the distinctions that used to guide and steady us — between Sunday and Monday, public and private, here and there — are gone.
We have more and more ways to communicate, as Thoreau noted, but less and less to say. Partly because we’re so busy communicating. And — as he might also have said — we’re rushing to meet so many deadlines that we hardly register that what we need most are lifelines.
So what to do? The central paradox of the machines that have made our lives so much brighter, quicker, longer and healthier is that they cannot teach us how to make best use of them; the information revolution came without an instruction manual. All the data in the world cannot teach us how to sift through data; images don’t show us how to process images. The only way to do justice to our onscreen lives is by summoning exactly the emotional and moral clarity that can’t be found on any screen.
MAYBE that’s why more and more people I know, even if they have no religious commitment, seem to be turning to yoga, or meditation, or tai chi; these aren’t New Age fads so much as ways to connect with what could be called the wisdom of old age. Two journalist friends of mine observe an “Internet sabbath” every week, turning off their online connections from Friday night to Monday morning, so as to try to revive those ancient customs known as family meals and conversation. Finding myself at breakfast with a group of lawyers in Oxford four months ago, I noticed that all their talk was of sailing — or riding or bridge: anything that would allow them to get out of radio contact for a few hours.
Other friends try to go on long walks every Sunday, or to “forget” their cellphones at home. A series of tests in recent years has shown, Mr. Carr points out, that after spending time in quiet rural settings, subjects “exhibit greater attentiveness, stronger memory and generally improved cognition. Their brains become both calmer and sharper.” More than that empathy, as well as deep thought, depends (as neuroscientists like Antonio Damasio have found) on neural processes that are “inherently slow.” The very ones our high-speed lives have little time for.
In my own case, I turn to eccentric and often extreme measures to try to keep my sanity and ensure that I have time to do nothing at all (which is the only time when I can see what I should be doing the rest of the time). I’ve yet to use a cellphone and I’ve never Tweeted or entered Facebook. I try not to go online till my day’s writing is finished, and I moved from Manhattan to rural Japan in part so I could more easily survive for long stretches entirely on foot, and every trip to the movies would be an event.
None of this is a matter of principle or asceticism; it’s just pure selfishness. Nothing makes me feel better — calmer, clearer and happier — than being in one place, absorbed in a book, a conversation, a piece of music. It’s actually something deeper than mere happiness: it’s joy, which the monk David Steindl-Rast describes as “that kind of happiness that doesn’t depend on what happens.”
It’s vital, of course, to stay in touch with the world, and to know what’s going on; I took pains this past year to make separate trips to Jerusalem and Hyderabad and Oman and St. Petersburg, to rural Arkansas and Thailand and the stricken nuclear plant in Fukushima and Dubai. But it’s only by having some distance from the world that you can see it whole, and understand what you should be doing with it.
For more than 20 years, therefore, I’ve been going several times a year — often for no longer than three days — to a Benedictine hermitage, 40 minutes down the road, as it happens, from the Post Ranch Inn. I don’t attend services when I’m there, and I’ve never meditated, there or anywhere; I just take walks and read and lose myself in the stillness, recalling that it’s only by stepping briefly away from my wife and bosses and friends that I’ll have anything useful to bring to them. The last time I was in the hermitage, three months ago, I happened to pass, on the monastery road, a youngish-looking man with a 3-year-old around his shoulders.
“You’re Pico, aren’t you?” the man said, and introduced himself as Larry; we’d met, I gathered, 19 years before, when he’d been living in the cloister as an assistant to one of the monks.
“What are you doing now?” I asked.
“I work for MTV. Down in L.A.”
We smiled. No words were necessary.
“I try to bring my kids here as often as I can,” he went on, as he looked out at the great blue expanse of the Pacific on one side of us, the high, brown hills of the Central Coast on the other. “My oldest son” — he pointed at a 7-year-old running along the deserted, radiant mountain road in front of his mother — “this is his third time.”
The child of tomorrow, I realized, may actually be ahead of us, in terms of sensing not what’s new, but what’s essential.
The author, most recently, of the forthcoming book “The Man Within My Head.”
Sunday, December 25, 2011
Tai Chi Chuan - True Relaxation
Tai Chi Chuan – True Relaxation
I was practicing push hands with a good beginner who hasn’t yet discovered how to relax his arms. You can feel him immediately and this error gives me the upper hand, at least in a slow game. You might think stiff arms would be an asset, but not so in tai chi. It locks you in and limits your choices should you be attacked. You are pre-stuck.
I tried to get him to relax his arms more and to reengineer his understanding of what push hands “stick and follow” is.
By holding his wrist and allowing his arm to just hang, we were testing to see how much he could simply let me hold up his arm. He couldn’t do it. He HAD to hold up his arm, even though I was already holding it up at the wrist. Eventually he did let go a bit more. There were a few more ideas that helped as well. But in our play, he didn’t really get it. Not to the extent that we could then focus more on to the next issue, that of function.
His question to me was: Is there an exercise to get a handle on relaxing the arms? The answer is basically NO.
The feel of relaxed arms is more or less an experiential understanding of relaxed arms. That understanding comes from the many ways that you use the body and how you conceive of relaxation in physical terms. Many elements are at play. And until you get a feel for it, well, you don’t know what you don’t know. That is why to tell someone to not use strength or to simply relax often doesn’t really help. Such advice has to tap into their knowledge base and if they don’t have it already, the knowledge base won’t help them now. (As I’ve stated before, this is like telling an angry person to not be angry, or an uptight person to stop getting worked up.)
What are some elements?
Allowing the body to melt into the ground.
Relaxing into the leg you are on before you shift to the next leg.
Elbows that are non-doing, non-held and sinking or heavy.
Letting the hands be weightless and floating.
Supporting the arms with the whole body.
Using the ground to support the whole body.
Moving everything at the same time (even if one part LOOKS like it is not moving.)
Allowing the spine to hang and the tailbone to be heavy.
Rest the arms in space; rest the elbows on a table top (that isn’t really there.)
Activate the whole chi of the body in moving the body and therefore the arms.
Keep the elbows relating to the hips/waste and dropping into the hips/waste.
No doubt there are more….
To understand relaxation, you have to keep chipping away at the stone to create a new sculpture. There is no simple one thing that you do. It is a complex of things that you do (or don’t do) that allows this relaxation to manifest. One fellow student sees the art of relaxation as a lifelong endeavor.
One general approach is to keep looking for ways relaxation moves the form. We look to increase relaxation and see how it functions. We don’t focus on the tension and try to get rid of it. Let relaxation grow and consume tension. These are two sides of the same coin, of course, but one way is that the glass is half empty; the other the glass is half full. Denial notwithstanding, which feels better to you?
Hey, you can always go back to using tension. But why bother? Ever look at someone who thrives on conflict, anger, force, hostility? Once relaxation enters your life, these folk look foolish.
Needless to say, this is a life challenge for all of us. We are sculpting ourselves into a new reality that opens many doors.
I was practicing push hands with a good beginner who hasn’t yet discovered how to relax his arms. You can feel him immediately and this error gives me the upper hand, at least in a slow game. You might think stiff arms would be an asset, but not so in tai chi. It locks you in and limits your choices should you be attacked. You are pre-stuck.
I tried to get him to relax his arms more and to reengineer his understanding of what push hands “stick and follow” is.
By holding his wrist and allowing his arm to just hang, we were testing to see how much he could simply let me hold up his arm. He couldn’t do it. He HAD to hold up his arm, even though I was already holding it up at the wrist. Eventually he did let go a bit more. There were a few more ideas that helped as well. But in our play, he didn’t really get it. Not to the extent that we could then focus more on to the next issue, that of function.
His question to me was: Is there an exercise to get a handle on relaxing the arms? The answer is basically NO.
The feel of relaxed arms is more or less an experiential understanding of relaxed arms. That understanding comes from the many ways that you use the body and how you conceive of relaxation in physical terms. Many elements are at play. And until you get a feel for it, well, you don’t know what you don’t know. That is why to tell someone to not use strength or to simply relax often doesn’t really help. Such advice has to tap into their knowledge base and if they don’t have it already, the knowledge base won’t help them now. (As I’ve stated before, this is like telling an angry person to not be angry, or an uptight person to stop getting worked up.)
What are some elements?
Allowing the body to melt into the ground.
Relaxing into the leg you are on before you shift to the next leg.
Elbows that are non-doing, non-held and sinking or heavy.
Letting the hands be weightless and floating.
Supporting the arms with the whole body.
Using the ground to support the whole body.
Moving everything at the same time (even if one part LOOKS like it is not moving.)
Allowing the spine to hang and the tailbone to be heavy.
Rest the arms in space; rest the elbows on a table top (that isn’t really there.)
Activate the whole chi of the body in moving the body and therefore the arms.
Keep the elbows relating to the hips/waste and dropping into the hips/waste.
No doubt there are more….
To understand relaxation, you have to keep chipping away at the stone to create a new sculpture. There is no simple one thing that you do. It is a complex of things that you do (or don’t do) that allows this relaxation to manifest. One fellow student sees the art of relaxation as a lifelong endeavor.
One general approach is to keep looking for ways relaxation moves the form. We look to increase relaxation and see how it functions. We don’t focus on the tension and try to get rid of it. Let relaxation grow and consume tension. These are two sides of the same coin, of course, but one way is that the glass is half empty; the other the glass is half full. Denial notwithstanding, which feels better to you?
Hey, you can always go back to using tension. But why bother? Ever look at someone who thrives on conflict, anger, force, hostility? Once relaxation enters your life, these folk look foolish.
Needless to say, this is a life challenge for all of us. We are sculpting ourselves into a new reality that opens many doors.
Monday, December 5, 2011
Tai Chi Chuan - Do THIS!
Tai Chi Chuan – Do THIS!
Learning this most rarefied of arts is subject to many many pitfalls. I just learned something my teacher (Maggie Newman) has been saying for YEARS. And yet it just registered. As if I had heard it for the very first time. You see, my understanding of the words was incorrect. I interpreted them one way and she meant them a different way. And somehow when she demonstrated, I thought my misinterpretation was still valid, as if I was doing what she was demonstrating and doing what she was saying. Though she was very clear (I now see) it hadn’t been clear to me. The computer sort of deleted reality and created a default program.
Recently another aspect of tai chi just mentally and physically registered – a similar realization. I’ve heard the words for years, but suddenly I have a new interpretation (and execution) of those words. Like YEARS of not getting it. I have to wonder why I bother to stick with this since the error rate in tai chi is very very high.
I guess because when I do get it, there is a thrill that can’t be beat. It is the thrill of the small articulate detail that gains in meaning if only because it took so long to make the shift and understand those words and feel a deeper level of relaxation or integrated execution. And I have to wonder, what else do I not see? What else do I not get?
Embedded here is a lesson in life that frankly I don’t care to learn. By this I mean I wish that what is being demonstrated in tai chi – and my experience in tai chi – was not also true in life. Alas, I think it is!
What is generally true is that by keeping at something, it will/can change and get better. What I really want in life – how I wish life operated – is to arrive at some place and not have to be so attentive and persistent in my effort. My vision of “effortlessness” is more like going on automatic pilot where everything falls into place without any thought, focus, attention or effort. (We are trying to be effortless in tai chi.) I want to say, “It can’t be THIS hard to get from here to there can it?”
Well, it depends on how deep you want to go. Yes, it can be THIS hard if you want to continue to go into something deeply.
How often do I hear of a musician or classical singer claim that they are always in the process of learning, of becoming? I secretly react to this statement with a snicker and subtly think that they say this out of false modesty. As if they don’t REALLY mean what they are saying; it is a crowd pleaser statement. A humble diva is a good thing to be. Often they are already successful when they say this, so I wonder if they need to improve at all. Haven’t they arrived?
Well, yes, they have. They have arrived at the place that inspires them to want more. And in the case of the singer (and the tai chi practitioner) wanting more has to come from a place of love for the art itself and some internal relevance. If it comes out of ego or self aggrandizement, the art will eat you up.
Which brings one back to the art of life. New word, same deal. To get more, you have to give more (to you, to them, to it.) And if it isn’t out of love (for you, for them, for it,) life will be very very painful.
It sounds cliché to put it into terms like this. “Love” is a fuzzy word, loaded with cultural nonsense. For me, love in this instance is a desire to fully absorb and be one with the art, to submerge the self and become the art. To let the art become you. And in doing so, you join with others who have the same desire.
“Desire” has a bad rap in some circles. But I’d like to suggest that this desire is 70-30: 70% desire to give to that art and 30% desire for enjoyment of giving to that art and any treasures that may result. Love is the lubricant; it’s not an object that you own. It only keeps the joints well oiled and allows a smoother ride….
Learning this most rarefied of arts is subject to many many pitfalls. I just learned something my teacher (Maggie Newman) has been saying for YEARS. And yet it just registered. As if I had heard it for the very first time. You see, my understanding of the words was incorrect. I interpreted them one way and she meant them a different way. And somehow when she demonstrated, I thought my misinterpretation was still valid, as if I was doing what she was demonstrating and doing what she was saying. Though she was very clear (I now see) it hadn’t been clear to me. The computer sort of deleted reality and created a default program.
Recently another aspect of tai chi just mentally and physically registered – a similar realization. I’ve heard the words for years, but suddenly I have a new interpretation (and execution) of those words. Like YEARS of not getting it. I have to wonder why I bother to stick with this since the error rate in tai chi is very very high.
I guess because when I do get it, there is a thrill that can’t be beat. It is the thrill of the small articulate detail that gains in meaning if only because it took so long to make the shift and understand those words and feel a deeper level of relaxation or integrated execution. And I have to wonder, what else do I not see? What else do I not get?
Embedded here is a lesson in life that frankly I don’t care to learn. By this I mean I wish that what is being demonstrated in tai chi – and my experience in tai chi – was not also true in life. Alas, I think it is!
What is generally true is that by keeping at something, it will/can change and get better. What I really want in life – how I wish life operated – is to arrive at some place and not have to be so attentive and persistent in my effort. My vision of “effortlessness” is more like going on automatic pilot where everything falls into place without any thought, focus, attention or effort. (We are trying to be effortless in tai chi.) I want to say, “It can’t be THIS hard to get from here to there can it?”
Well, it depends on how deep you want to go. Yes, it can be THIS hard if you want to continue to go into something deeply.
How often do I hear of a musician or classical singer claim that they are always in the process of learning, of becoming? I secretly react to this statement with a snicker and subtly think that they say this out of false modesty. As if they don’t REALLY mean what they are saying; it is a crowd pleaser statement. A humble diva is a good thing to be. Often they are already successful when they say this, so I wonder if they need to improve at all. Haven’t they arrived?
Well, yes, they have. They have arrived at the place that inspires them to want more. And in the case of the singer (and the tai chi practitioner) wanting more has to come from a place of love for the art itself and some internal relevance. If it comes out of ego or self aggrandizement, the art will eat you up.
Which brings one back to the art of life. New word, same deal. To get more, you have to give more (to you, to them, to it.) And if it isn’t out of love (for you, for them, for it,) life will be very very painful.
It sounds cliché to put it into terms like this. “Love” is a fuzzy word, loaded with cultural nonsense. For me, love in this instance is a desire to fully absorb and be one with the art, to submerge the self and become the art. To let the art become you. And in doing so, you join with others who have the same desire.
“Desire” has a bad rap in some circles. But I’d like to suggest that this desire is 70-30: 70% desire to give to that art and 30% desire for enjoyment of giving to that art and any treasures that may result. Love is the lubricant; it’s not an object that you own. It only keeps the joints well oiled and allows a smoother ride….
Saturday, October 22, 2011
Confidence Buster - New York Times article
“Overconfidence arises because people are often blind to their own blindness.”
This looooong article on the habit and comfort of confidence is well worth your time. Why do I include it here in tai chi blog? Consider how confidence gets in the way of true practice and real progress. Consider how your own take on “failure” really has little to do with ANYTHING, let alone your progress in tai chi.
Tai chi is much more aligned with “don’t know” and the reality of right now.
I see long term students confidently do the same thing year after year after year and never question the very thing they are confident in. And believe me, many of us take the wrong turn and keep chiseling away at that stone.
A real student of tai chi keeps asking real questions.
Tom
October 19, 2011
New York Times
Don’t Blink! The Hazards of Confidence
By DANIEL KAHNEMAN
Many decades ago I spent what seemed like a great deal of time under a scorching sun, watching groups of sweaty soldiers as they solved a problem. I was doing my national service in the Israeli Army at the time. I had completed an undergraduate degree in psychology, and after a year as an infantry officer, I was assigned to the army’s Psychology Branch, where one of my occasional duties was to help evaluate candidates for officer training. We used methods that were developed by the British Army in World War II.
One test, called the leaderless group challenge, was conducted on an obstacle field. Eight candidates, strangers to one another, with all insignia of rank removed and only numbered tags to identify them, were instructed to lift a long log from the ground and haul it to a wall about six feet high. There, they were told that the entire group had to get to the other side of the wall without the log touching either the ground or the wall, and without anyone touching the wall. If any of these things happened, they were to acknowledge it and start again.
A common solution was for several men to reach the other side by crawling along the log as the other men held it up at an angle, like a giant fishing rod. Then one man would climb onto another’s shoulder and tip the log to the far side. The last two men would then have to jump up at the log, now suspended from the other side by those who had made it over, shinny their way along its length and then leap down safely once they crossed the wall. Failure was common at this point, which required starting over.
As a colleague and I monitored the exercise, we made note of who took charge, who tried to lead but was rebuffed, how much each soldier contributed to the group effort. We saw who seemed to be stubborn, submissive, arrogant, patient, hot-tempered, persistent or a quitter. We sometimes saw competitive spite when someone whose idea had been rejected by the group no longer worked very hard. And we saw reactions to crisis: who berated a comrade whose mistake caused the whole group to fail, who stepped forward to lead when the exhausted team had to start over.
Under the stress of the event, we felt, each man’s true nature revealed itself in sharp relief.
After watching the candidates go through several such tests, we had to summarize our impressions of the soldiers’ leadership abilities with a grade and determine who would be eligible for officer training. We spent some time discussing each case and reviewing our impressions. The task was not difficult, because we had already seen each of these soldiers’ leadership skills. Some of the men looked like strong leaders, others seemed like wimps or arrogant fools, others mediocre but not hopeless. Quite a few appeared to be so weak that we ruled them out as officer candidates. When our multiple observations of each candidate converged on a coherent picture, we were completely confident in our evaluations and believed that what we saw pointed directly to the future. The soldier who took over when the group was in trouble and led the team over the wall was a leader at that moment. The obvious best guess about how he would do in training, or in combat, was that he would be as effective as he had been at the wall. Any other prediction seemed inconsistent with what we saw.
Because our impressions of how well each soldier performed were generally coherent and clear, our formal predictions were just as definite. We rarely experienced doubt or conflicting impressions. We were quite willing to declare: “This one will never make it,” “That fellow is rather mediocre, but should do O.K.” or “He will be a star.” We felt no need to question our forecasts, moderate them or equivocate. If challenged, however, we were fully prepared to admit, “But of course anything could happen.”
We were willing to make that admission because, as it turned out, despite our certainty about the potential of individual candidates, our forecasts were largely useless. The evidence was overwhelming. Every few months we had a feedback session in which we could compare our evaluations of future cadets with the judgments of their commanders at the officer-training school. The story was always the same: our ability to predict performance at the school was negligible. Our forecasts were better than blind guesses, but not by much.
We were downcast for a while after receiving the discouraging news. But this was the army. Useful or not, there was a routine to be followed, and there were orders to be obeyed. Another batch of candidates would arrive the next day. We took them to the obstacle field, we faced them with the wall, they lifted the log and within a few minutes we saw their true natures revealed, as clearly as ever. The dismal truth about the quality of our predictions had no effect whatsoever on how we evaluated new candidates and very little effect on the confidence we had in our judgments and predictions.
I thought that what was happening to us was remarkable. The statistical evidence of our failure should have shaken our confidence in our judgments of particular candidates, but it did not. It should also have caused us to moderate our predictions, but it did not. We knew as a general fact that our predictions were little better than random guesses, but we continued to feel and act as if each particular prediction was valid. I was reminded of visual illusions, which remain compelling even when you know that what you see is false. I was so struck by the analogy that I coined a term for our experience: the illusion of validity.
I had discovered my first cognitive fallacy.
Decades later, I can see many of the central themes of my thinking about judgment in that old experience. One of these themes is that people who face a difficult question often answer an easier one instead, without realizing it. We were required to predict a soldier’s performance in officer training and in combat, but we did so by evaluating his behavior over one hour in an artificial situation. This was a perfect instance of a general rule that I call WYSIATI, “What you see is all there is.” We had made up a story from the little we knew but had no way to allow for what we did not know about the individual’s future, which was almost everything that would actually matter. When you know as little as we did, you should not make extreme predictions like “He will be a star.” The stars we saw on the obstacle field were most likely accidental flickers, in which a coincidence of random events — like who was near the wall — largely determined who became a leader. Other events — some of them also random — would determine later success in training and combat.
You may be surprised by our failure: it is natural to expect the same leadership ability to manifest itself in various situations. But the exaggerated expectation of consistency is a common error. We are prone to think that the world is more regular and predictable than it really is, because our memory automatically and continuously maintains a story about what is going on, and because the rules of memory tend to make that story as coherent as possible and to suppress alternatives. Fast thinking is not prone to doubt.
The confidence we experience as we make a judgment is not a reasoned evaluation of the probability that it is right. Confidence is a feeling, one determined mostly by the coherence of the story and by the ease with which it comes to mind, even when the evidence for the story is sparse and unreliable. The bias toward coherence favors overconfidence. An individual who expresses high confidence probably has a good story, which may or may not be true.
I coined the term “illusion of validity” because the confidence we had in judgments about individual soldiers was not affected by a statistical fact we knew to be true — that our predictions were unrelated to the truth. This is not an isolated observation. When a compelling impression of a particular event clashes with general knowledge, the impression commonly prevails. And this goes for you, too. The confidence you will experience in your future judgments will not be diminished by what you just read, even if you believe every word.
I first visited a Wall Street firm in 1984. I was there with my longtime collaborator Amos Tversky, who died in 1996, and our friend Richard Thaler, now a guru of behavioral economics. Our host, a senior investment manager, had invited us to discuss the role of judgment biases in investing. I knew so little about finance at the time that I had no idea what to ask him, but I remember one exchange. “When you sell a stock,” I asked him, “who buys it?” He answered with a wave in the vague direction of the window, indicating that he expected the buyer to be someone else very much like him. That was odd: because most buyers and sellers know that they have the same information as one another, what made one person buy and the other sell? Buyers think the price is too low and likely to rise; sellers think the price is high and likely to drop. The puzzle is why buyers and sellers alike think that the current price is wrong.
Most people in the investment business have read Burton Malkiel’s wonderful book “A Random Walk Down Wall Street.” Malkiel’s central idea is that a stock’s price incorporates all the available knowledge about the value of the company and the best predictions about the future of the stock. If some people believe that the price of a stock will be higher tomorrow, they will buy more of it today. This, in turn, will cause its price to rise. If all assets in a market are correctly priced, no one can expect either to gain or to lose by trading.
We now know, however, that the theory is not quite right. Many individual investors lose consistently by trading, an achievement that a dart-throwing chimp could not match. The first demonstration of this startling conclusion was put forward by Terry Odean, a former student of mine who is now a finance professor at the University of California, Berkeley.
Odean analyzed the trading records of 10,000 brokerage accounts of individual investors over a seven-year period, allowing him to identify all instances in which an investor sold one stock and soon afterward bought another stock. By these actions the investor revealed that he (most of the investors were men) had a definite idea about the future of two stocks: he expected the stock that he bought to do better than the one he sold.
To determine whether those appraisals were well founded, Odean compared the returns of the two stocks over the following year. The results were unequivocally bad. On average, the shares investors sold did better than those they bought, by a very substantial margin: 3.3 percentage points per year, in addition to the significant costs of executing the trades. Some individuals did much better, others did much worse, but the large majority of individual investors would have done better by taking a nap rather than by acting on their ideas. In a paper titled “Trading Is Hazardous to Your Wealth,” Odean and his colleague Brad Barber showed that, on average, the most active traders had the poorest results, while those who traded the least earned the highest returns. In another paper, “Boys Will Be Boys,” they reported that men act on their useless ideas significantly more often than women do, and that as a result women achieve better investment results than men.
Of course, there is always someone on the other side of a transaction; in general, it’s a financial institution or professional investor, ready to take advantage of the mistakes that individual traders make. Further research by Barber and Odean has shed light on these mistakes. Individual investors like to lock in their gains; they sell “winners,” stocks whose prices have gone up, and they hang on to their losers. Unfortunately for them, in the short run going forward recent winners tend to do better than recent losers, so individuals sell the wrong stocks. They also buy the wrong stocks. Individual investors predictably flock to stocks in companies that are in the news. Professional investors are more selective in responding to news. These findings provide some justification for the label of “smart money” that finance professionals apply to themselves.
Although professionals are able to extract a considerable amount of wealth from amateurs, few stock pickers, if any, have the skill needed to beat the market consistently, year after year. The diagnostic for the existence of any skill is the consistency of individual differences in achievement. The logic is simple: if individual differences in any one year are due entirely to luck, the ranking of investors and funds will vary erratically and the year-to-year correlation will be zero. Where there is skill, however, the rankings will be more stable. The persistence of individual differences is the measure by which we confirm the existence of skill among golfers, orthodontists or speedy toll collectors on the turnpike.
Mutual funds are run by highly experienced and hard-working professionals who buy and sell stocks to achieve the best possible results for their clients. Nevertheless, the evidence from more than 50 years of research is conclusive: for a large majority of fund managers, the selection of stocks is more like rolling dice than like playing poker. At least two out of every three mutual funds underperform the overall market in any given year.
More important, the year-to-year correlation among the outcomes of mutual funds is very small, barely different from zero. The funds that were successful in any given year were mostly lucky; they had a good roll of the dice. There is general agreement among researchers that this is true for nearly all stock pickers, whether they know it or not — and most do not. The subjective experience of traders is that they are making sensible, educated guesses in a situation of great uncertainty. In highly efficient markets, however, educated guesses are not more accurate than blind guesses.
Some years after my introduction to the world of finance, I had an unusual opportunity to examine the illusion of skill up close. I was invited to speak to a group of investment advisers in a firm that provided financial advice and other services to very wealthy clients. I asked for some data to prepare my presentation and was granted a small treasure: a spreadsheet summarizing the investment outcomes of some 25 anonymous wealth advisers, for eight consecutive years. The advisers’ scores for each year were the main determinant of their year-end bonuses. It was a simple matter to rank the advisers by their performance and to answer a question: Did the same advisers consistently achieve better returns for their clients year after year? Did some advisers consistently display more skill than others?
To find the answer, I computed the correlations between the rankings of advisers in different years, comparing Year 1 with Year 2, Year 1 with Year 3 and so on up through Year 7 with Year 8. That yielded 28 correlations, one for each pair of years. While I was prepared to find little year-to-year consistency, I was still surprised to find that the average of the 28 correlations was .01. In other words, zero. The stability that would indicate differences in skill was not to be found. The results resembled what you would expect from a dice-rolling contest, not a game of skill.
No one in the firm seemed to be aware of the nature of the game that its stock pickers were playing. The advisers themselves felt they were competent professionals performing a task that was difficult but not impossible, and their superiors agreed. On the evening before the seminar, Richard Thaler and I had dinner with some of the top executives of the firm, the people who decide on the size of bonuses. We asked them to guess the year-to-year correlation in the rankings of individual advisers. They thought they knew what was coming and smiled as they said, “not very high” or “performance certainly fluctuates.” It quickly became clear, however, that no one expected the average correlation to be zero.
What we told the directors of the firm was that, at least when it came to building portfolios, the firm was rewarding luck as if it were skill. This should have been shocking news to them, but it was not. There was no sign that they disbelieved us. How could they? After all, we had analyzed their own results, and they were certainly sophisticated enough to appreciate their implications, which we politely refrained from spelling out. We all went on calmly with our dinner, and I am quite sure that both our findings and their implications were quickly swept under the rug and that life in the firm went on just as before. The illusion of skill is not only an individual aberration; it is deeply ingrained in the culture of the industry. Facts that challenge such basic assumptions — and thereby threaten people’s livelihood and self-esteem — are simply not absorbed. The mind does not digest them. This is particularly true of statistical studies of performance, which provide general facts that people will ignore if they conflict with their personal experience.
The next morning, we reported the findings to the advisers, and their response was equally bland. Their personal experience of exercising careful professional judgment on complex problems was far more compelling to them than an obscure statistical result. When we were done, one executive I dined with the previous evening drove me to the airport. He told me, with a trace of defensiveness, “I have done very well for the firm, and no one can take that away from me.” I smiled and said nothing. But I thought, privately: Well, I took it away from you this morning. If your success was due mostly to chance, how much credit are you entitled to take for it?
We often interact with professionals who exercise their judgment with evident confidence, sometimes priding themselves on the power of their intuition. In a world rife with illusions of validity and skill, can we trust them? How do we distinguish the justified confidence of experts from the sincere overconfidence of professionals who do not know they are out of their depth? We can believe an expert who admits uncertainty but cannot take expressions of high confidence at face value. As I first learned on the obstacle field, people come up with coherent stories and confident predictions even when they know little or nothing. Overconfidence arises because people are often blind to their own blindness.
True intuitive expertise is learned from prolonged experience with good feedback on mistakes. You are probably an expert in guessing your spouse’s mood from one word on the telephone; chess players find a strong move in a single glance at a complex position; and true legends of instant diagnoses are common among physicians. To know whether you can trust a particular intuitive judgment, there are two questions you should ask: Is the environment in which the judgment is made sufficiently regular to enable predictions from the available evidence? The answer is yes for diagnosticians, no for stock pickers. Do the professionals have an adequate opportunity to learn the cues and the regularities? The answer here depends on the professionals’ experience and on the quality and speed with which they discover their mistakes.
Anesthesiologists have a better chance to develop intuitions than radiologists do. Many of the professionals we encounter easily pass both tests, and their off-the-cuff judgments deserve to be taken seriously. In general, however, you should not take assertive and confident people at their own evaluation unless you have independent reason to believe that they know what they are talking about. Unfortunately, this advice is difficult to follow: overconfident professionals sincerely believe they have expertise, act as experts and look like experts. You will have to struggle to remind yourself that they may be in the grip of an illusion.
Daniel Kahneman is emeritus professor of psychology and of public affairs at Princeton University and a winner of the 2002 Noble Prize in Economics. This article is adapted from his book “Thinking, Fast and Slow,” out this month from Farrar, Straus & Giroux.
Editor: Dean Robinson
This looooong article on the habit and comfort of confidence is well worth your time. Why do I include it here in tai chi blog? Consider how confidence gets in the way of true practice and real progress. Consider how your own take on “failure” really has little to do with ANYTHING, let alone your progress in tai chi.
Tai chi is much more aligned with “don’t know” and the reality of right now.
I see long term students confidently do the same thing year after year after year and never question the very thing they are confident in. And believe me, many of us take the wrong turn and keep chiseling away at that stone.
A real student of tai chi keeps asking real questions.
Tom
October 19, 2011
New York Times
Don’t Blink! The Hazards of Confidence
By DANIEL KAHNEMAN
Many decades ago I spent what seemed like a great deal of time under a scorching sun, watching groups of sweaty soldiers as they solved a problem. I was doing my national service in the Israeli Army at the time. I had completed an undergraduate degree in psychology, and after a year as an infantry officer, I was assigned to the army’s Psychology Branch, where one of my occasional duties was to help evaluate candidates for officer training. We used methods that were developed by the British Army in World War II.
One test, called the leaderless group challenge, was conducted on an obstacle field. Eight candidates, strangers to one another, with all insignia of rank removed and only numbered tags to identify them, were instructed to lift a long log from the ground and haul it to a wall about six feet high. There, they were told that the entire group had to get to the other side of the wall without the log touching either the ground or the wall, and without anyone touching the wall. If any of these things happened, they were to acknowledge it and start again.
A common solution was for several men to reach the other side by crawling along the log as the other men held it up at an angle, like a giant fishing rod. Then one man would climb onto another’s shoulder and tip the log to the far side. The last two men would then have to jump up at the log, now suspended from the other side by those who had made it over, shinny their way along its length and then leap down safely once they crossed the wall. Failure was common at this point, which required starting over.
As a colleague and I monitored the exercise, we made note of who took charge, who tried to lead but was rebuffed, how much each soldier contributed to the group effort. We saw who seemed to be stubborn, submissive, arrogant, patient, hot-tempered, persistent or a quitter. We sometimes saw competitive spite when someone whose idea had been rejected by the group no longer worked very hard. And we saw reactions to crisis: who berated a comrade whose mistake caused the whole group to fail, who stepped forward to lead when the exhausted team had to start over.
Under the stress of the event, we felt, each man’s true nature revealed itself in sharp relief.
After watching the candidates go through several such tests, we had to summarize our impressions of the soldiers’ leadership abilities with a grade and determine who would be eligible for officer training. We spent some time discussing each case and reviewing our impressions. The task was not difficult, because we had already seen each of these soldiers’ leadership skills. Some of the men looked like strong leaders, others seemed like wimps or arrogant fools, others mediocre but not hopeless. Quite a few appeared to be so weak that we ruled them out as officer candidates. When our multiple observations of each candidate converged on a coherent picture, we were completely confident in our evaluations and believed that what we saw pointed directly to the future. The soldier who took over when the group was in trouble and led the team over the wall was a leader at that moment. The obvious best guess about how he would do in training, or in combat, was that he would be as effective as he had been at the wall. Any other prediction seemed inconsistent with what we saw.
Because our impressions of how well each soldier performed were generally coherent and clear, our formal predictions were just as definite. We rarely experienced doubt or conflicting impressions. We were quite willing to declare: “This one will never make it,” “That fellow is rather mediocre, but should do O.K.” or “He will be a star.” We felt no need to question our forecasts, moderate them or equivocate. If challenged, however, we were fully prepared to admit, “But of course anything could happen.”
We were willing to make that admission because, as it turned out, despite our certainty about the potential of individual candidates, our forecasts were largely useless. The evidence was overwhelming. Every few months we had a feedback session in which we could compare our evaluations of future cadets with the judgments of their commanders at the officer-training school. The story was always the same: our ability to predict performance at the school was negligible. Our forecasts were better than blind guesses, but not by much.
We were downcast for a while after receiving the discouraging news. But this was the army. Useful or not, there was a routine to be followed, and there were orders to be obeyed. Another batch of candidates would arrive the next day. We took them to the obstacle field, we faced them with the wall, they lifted the log and within a few minutes we saw their true natures revealed, as clearly as ever. The dismal truth about the quality of our predictions had no effect whatsoever on how we evaluated new candidates and very little effect on the confidence we had in our judgments and predictions.
I thought that what was happening to us was remarkable. The statistical evidence of our failure should have shaken our confidence in our judgments of particular candidates, but it did not. It should also have caused us to moderate our predictions, but it did not. We knew as a general fact that our predictions were little better than random guesses, but we continued to feel and act as if each particular prediction was valid. I was reminded of visual illusions, which remain compelling even when you know that what you see is false. I was so struck by the analogy that I coined a term for our experience: the illusion of validity.
I had discovered my first cognitive fallacy.
Decades later, I can see many of the central themes of my thinking about judgment in that old experience. One of these themes is that people who face a difficult question often answer an easier one instead, without realizing it. We were required to predict a soldier’s performance in officer training and in combat, but we did so by evaluating his behavior over one hour in an artificial situation. This was a perfect instance of a general rule that I call WYSIATI, “What you see is all there is.” We had made up a story from the little we knew but had no way to allow for what we did not know about the individual’s future, which was almost everything that would actually matter. When you know as little as we did, you should not make extreme predictions like “He will be a star.” The stars we saw on the obstacle field were most likely accidental flickers, in which a coincidence of random events — like who was near the wall — largely determined who became a leader. Other events — some of them also random — would determine later success in training and combat.
You may be surprised by our failure: it is natural to expect the same leadership ability to manifest itself in various situations. But the exaggerated expectation of consistency is a common error. We are prone to think that the world is more regular and predictable than it really is, because our memory automatically and continuously maintains a story about what is going on, and because the rules of memory tend to make that story as coherent as possible and to suppress alternatives. Fast thinking is not prone to doubt.
The confidence we experience as we make a judgment is not a reasoned evaluation of the probability that it is right. Confidence is a feeling, one determined mostly by the coherence of the story and by the ease with which it comes to mind, even when the evidence for the story is sparse and unreliable. The bias toward coherence favors overconfidence. An individual who expresses high confidence probably has a good story, which may or may not be true.
I coined the term “illusion of validity” because the confidence we had in judgments about individual soldiers was not affected by a statistical fact we knew to be true — that our predictions were unrelated to the truth. This is not an isolated observation. When a compelling impression of a particular event clashes with general knowledge, the impression commonly prevails. And this goes for you, too. The confidence you will experience in your future judgments will not be diminished by what you just read, even if you believe every word.
I first visited a Wall Street firm in 1984. I was there with my longtime collaborator Amos Tversky, who died in 1996, and our friend Richard Thaler, now a guru of behavioral economics. Our host, a senior investment manager, had invited us to discuss the role of judgment biases in investing. I knew so little about finance at the time that I had no idea what to ask him, but I remember one exchange. “When you sell a stock,” I asked him, “who buys it?” He answered with a wave in the vague direction of the window, indicating that he expected the buyer to be someone else very much like him. That was odd: because most buyers and sellers know that they have the same information as one another, what made one person buy and the other sell? Buyers think the price is too low and likely to rise; sellers think the price is high and likely to drop. The puzzle is why buyers and sellers alike think that the current price is wrong.
Most people in the investment business have read Burton Malkiel’s wonderful book “A Random Walk Down Wall Street.” Malkiel’s central idea is that a stock’s price incorporates all the available knowledge about the value of the company and the best predictions about the future of the stock. If some people believe that the price of a stock will be higher tomorrow, they will buy more of it today. This, in turn, will cause its price to rise. If all assets in a market are correctly priced, no one can expect either to gain or to lose by trading.
We now know, however, that the theory is not quite right. Many individual investors lose consistently by trading, an achievement that a dart-throwing chimp could not match. The first demonstration of this startling conclusion was put forward by Terry Odean, a former student of mine who is now a finance professor at the University of California, Berkeley.
Odean analyzed the trading records of 10,000 brokerage accounts of individual investors over a seven-year period, allowing him to identify all instances in which an investor sold one stock and soon afterward bought another stock. By these actions the investor revealed that he (most of the investors were men) had a definite idea about the future of two stocks: he expected the stock that he bought to do better than the one he sold.
To determine whether those appraisals were well founded, Odean compared the returns of the two stocks over the following year. The results were unequivocally bad. On average, the shares investors sold did better than those they bought, by a very substantial margin: 3.3 percentage points per year, in addition to the significant costs of executing the trades. Some individuals did much better, others did much worse, but the large majority of individual investors would have done better by taking a nap rather than by acting on their ideas. In a paper titled “Trading Is Hazardous to Your Wealth,” Odean and his colleague Brad Barber showed that, on average, the most active traders had the poorest results, while those who traded the least earned the highest returns. In another paper, “Boys Will Be Boys,” they reported that men act on their useless ideas significantly more often than women do, and that as a result women achieve better investment results than men.
Of course, there is always someone on the other side of a transaction; in general, it’s a financial institution or professional investor, ready to take advantage of the mistakes that individual traders make. Further research by Barber and Odean has shed light on these mistakes. Individual investors like to lock in their gains; they sell “winners,” stocks whose prices have gone up, and they hang on to their losers. Unfortunately for them, in the short run going forward recent winners tend to do better than recent losers, so individuals sell the wrong stocks. They also buy the wrong stocks. Individual investors predictably flock to stocks in companies that are in the news. Professional investors are more selective in responding to news. These findings provide some justification for the label of “smart money” that finance professionals apply to themselves.
Although professionals are able to extract a considerable amount of wealth from amateurs, few stock pickers, if any, have the skill needed to beat the market consistently, year after year. The diagnostic for the existence of any skill is the consistency of individual differences in achievement. The logic is simple: if individual differences in any one year are due entirely to luck, the ranking of investors and funds will vary erratically and the year-to-year correlation will be zero. Where there is skill, however, the rankings will be more stable. The persistence of individual differences is the measure by which we confirm the existence of skill among golfers, orthodontists or speedy toll collectors on the turnpike.
Mutual funds are run by highly experienced and hard-working professionals who buy and sell stocks to achieve the best possible results for their clients. Nevertheless, the evidence from more than 50 years of research is conclusive: for a large majority of fund managers, the selection of stocks is more like rolling dice than like playing poker. At least two out of every three mutual funds underperform the overall market in any given year.
More important, the year-to-year correlation among the outcomes of mutual funds is very small, barely different from zero. The funds that were successful in any given year were mostly lucky; they had a good roll of the dice. There is general agreement among researchers that this is true for nearly all stock pickers, whether they know it or not — and most do not. The subjective experience of traders is that they are making sensible, educated guesses in a situation of great uncertainty. In highly efficient markets, however, educated guesses are not more accurate than blind guesses.
Some years after my introduction to the world of finance, I had an unusual opportunity to examine the illusion of skill up close. I was invited to speak to a group of investment advisers in a firm that provided financial advice and other services to very wealthy clients. I asked for some data to prepare my presentation and was granted a small treasure: a spreadsheet summarizing the investment outcomes of some 25 anonymous wealth advisers, for eight consecutive years. The advisers’ scores for each year were the main determinant of their year-end bonuses. It was a simple matter to rank the advisers by their performance and to answer a question: Did the same advisers consistently achieve better returns for their clients year after year? Did some advisers consistently display more skill than others?
To find the answer, I computed the correlations between the rankings of advisers in different years, comparing Year 1 with Year 2, Year 1 with Year 3 and so on up through Year 7 with Year 8. That yielded 28 correlations, one for each pair of years. While I was prepared to find little year-to-year consistency, I was still surprised to find that the average of the 28 correlations was .01. In other words, zero. The stability that would indicate differences in skill was not to be found. The results resembled what you would expect from a dice-rolling contest, not a game of skill.
No one in the firm seemed to be aware of the nature of the game that its stock pickers were playing. The advisers themselves felt they were competent professionals performing a task that was difficult but not impossible, and their superiors agreed. On the evening before the seminar, Richard Thaler and I had dinner with some of the top executives of the firm, the people who decide on the size of bonuses. We asked them to guess the year-to-year correlation in the rankings of individual advisers. They thought they knew what was coming and smiled as they said, “not very high” or “performance certainly fluctuates.” It quickly became clear, however, that no one expected the average correlation to be zero.
What we told the directors of the firm was that, at least when it came to building portfolios, the firm was rewarding luck as if it were skill. This should have been shocking news to them, but it was not. There was no sign that they disbelieved us. How could they? After all, we had analyzed their own results, and they were certainly sophisticated enough to appreciate their implications, which we politely refrained from spelling out. We all went on calmly with our dinner, and I am quite sure that both our findings and their implications were quickly swept under the rug and that life in the firm went on just as before. The illusion of skill is not only an individual aberration; it is deeply ingrained in the culture of the industry. Facts that challenge such basic assumptions — and thereby threaten people’s livelihood and self-esteem — are simply not absorbed. The mind does not digest them. This is particularly true of statistical studies of performance, which provide general facts that people will ignore if they conflict with their personal experience.
The next morning, we reported the findings to the advisers, and their response was equally bland. Their personal experience of exercising careful professional judgment on complex problems was far more compelling to them than an obscure statistical result. When we were done, one executive I dined with the previous evening drove me to the airport. He told me, with a trace of defensiveness, “I have done very well for the firm, and no one can take that away from me.” I smiled and said nothing. But I thought, privately: Well, I took it away from you this morning. If your success was due mostly to chance, how much credit are you entitled to take for it?
We often interact with professionals who exercise their judgment with evident confidence, sometimes priding themselves on the power of their intuition. In a world rife with illusions of validity and skill, can we trust them? How do we distinguish the justified confidence of experts from the sincere overconfidence of professionals who do not know they are out of their depth? We can believe an expert who admits uncertainty but cannot take expressions of high confidence at face value. As I first learned on the obstacle field, people come up with coherent stories and confident predictions even when they know little or nothing. Overconfidence arises because people are often blind to their own blindness.
True intuitive expertise is learned from prolonged experience with good feedback on mistakes. You are probably an expert in guessing your spouse’s mood from one word on the telephone; chess players find a strong move in a single glance at a complex position; and true legends of instant diagnoses are common among physicians. To know whether you can trust a particular intuitive judgment, there are two questions you should ask: Is the environment in which the judgment is made sufficiently regular to enable predictions from the available evidence? The answer is yes for diagnosticians, no for stock pickers. Do the professionals have an adequate opportunity to learn the cues and the regularities? The answer here depends on the professionals’ experience and on the quality and speed with which they discover their mistakes.
Anesthesiologists have a better chance to develop intuitions than radiologists do. Many of the professionals we encounter easily pass both tests, and their off-the-cuff judgments deserve to be taken seriously. In general, however, you should not take assertive and confident people at their own evaluation unless you have independent reason to believe that they know what they are talking about. Unfortunately, this advice is difficult to follow: overconfident professionals sincerely believe they have expertise, act as experts and look like experts. You will have to struggle to remind yourself that they may be in the grip of an illusion.
Daniel Kahneman is emeritus professor of psychology and of public affairs at Princeton University and a winner of the 2002 Noble Prize in Economics. This article is adapted from his book “Thinking, Fast and Slow,” out this month from Farrar, Straus & Giroux.
Editor: Dean Robinson
Monday, October 17, 2011
Tai Chi Chuan - Happiness Failure Change
Tai Chi Chuan – Happiness Failure Change
I was recently introduced to a delightful phrase, famous I’m told, from one of my wisest (and wisdom seeking) friends.
From the web(1):
§
The Secret of Happiness:
Nasrudin is known as much for his wisdom as his foolishness, and many are those who have sought out his teaching. One devotee tracked him down for many years before finding him in the marketplace sitting atop a pile of banana peels--no one knows why.
"Oh great sage, Nasrudin," said the eager student. "I must ask you a very important question, the answer to which we all seek: What is the secret to attaining happiness?"
Nasrudin thought for a time, then responded. "The secret of happiness is good judgment."
"Ah," said the student. "But how do we attain good judgment?"
"From experience," answered Nasrudin.
"Yes," said the student. "But how do we attain experience?"
"Bad judgment."
The earliest credible source I can find is the great Sufi sage/fool Mulla Nasrudin, born circa 1208.
§
Why do I bring this up in the context of a tai chi blog?
I think advanced tai chi leads to good judgment. Learning tai chi brings the student face to face with failure much of the time. And failure can be linked to bad judgment, though while learning tai chi poor judgment is more or less linked to ignorance and poor habits, both of which lead to bad judgment. We do what we do. But when we get pushed around in tai chi push hands, many changes are required. In making these changes, and learning these hard won lessons, it can affect how you approach the rest of your life.
I’ve talked about change in other blogs on my site before but it is always worth another look. If failing and frustration stimulate a desire to change, HOW do we change in the first place?
To my thinking, two elements are required. The first is to look closely at what is going on. Awareness. Examine where your actions lead. Or ask, as Dr. Phil does, “How’s it working for you?”
A colleague at work told me that he was frustrated with another worker and he had told her she was “rude.” He asked me if telling her that she was “rude” was wrong. He wasn’t really looking for advice on his interaction; he was looking for reassurance that he was right. He truly felt it was a legitimate statement.
I agreed with him that his impression and his statement were accurate, but that is not the point. To label a co-worker “rude” doesn’t move a business conversation towards resolving the work being discussed. He basically changed the focus and redirected the conversation towards their (lack of) interpersonal skills. Work is now off the table, and how she treats him is what they will be discussing. Even worse, he has veered off facts and put forth his judgment. In tai chi terms, this is a push using force. (And tai chi-ers don’t use force!)
I suggested that it wasn’t a good move and that it was better to bypass the rudeness and stick to the facts that will move work forward. Ignore the attitude – it is mostly fluff anyway.
He could not accept my suggestion. He felt entitled to his self-expression (we always are!). Yet, to me, calling a co-worker “rude” is like adding gasoline to a fire. With this fire you can now roast marshmallows, break into a sweat, inhale smoke, watch the fireworks or heat the room, but not resolve any work related issues.
[I interact with Miss Rude as well. I always focus on her words and address what the facts are. Instead of being aggravated by her stance, I find her amusing and comical. I even admire her spunk. Big picture here – most likely she is not going to change and like all comic characters in TV sitcom, she does as they do (always the same thing show after show.) If the situation gets worse, I’ll take it to my supervisor.]
I think my tai chi buddies would agree. For my work buddy to change, he’d have to take a bigger view of the situation. He’d have to look closely at his conversation with his co-worker instead of assuming his approach is legitimate. But habits win the day if you are not willing to closely examine what you are doing and the results from your actions. Alas, all we know is habit, which we are condemned to repeat and repeat and repeat….
What is the lesson we need to learn? Choose your habits wisely, and drop them when they get in the way. The implicit challenge here is that we have a hard time making the distinction between a helpful habit and a poor habit. The nature of the habitual is that we don’t examine this.
The second element is being willing to fail. Yes, it’s not a happy prospect, but how do you find the right pathway without trying a few options that do not rely on the habitual? It takes some experimenting and a high tolerance for failure. (Ours is a funny society. We are encouraged to take risk, but we are often punished if the risk doesn’t work out!)
In our efforts to change, a good mentor or teacher is a huge advantage and may speed the process along. But even that is not a guarantee. (Because now you need two more tai chi qualities: trust and listening!)
Happiness? It’s an art. Just like living and tai chi.
(1) http://virtualbumperstickers.blogspot.com/2007/06/good-judgment-comes-from-experience.html: The Beggar King and the Secret of Happiness by Joel Ben Izzy, Algonquin Books of Chapel Hill, 2003.
I was recently introduced to a delightful phrase, famous I’m told, from one of my wisest (and wisdom seeking) friends.
From the web(1):
§
The Secret of Happiness:
Nasrudin is known as much for his wisdom as his foolishness, and many are those who have sought out his teaching. One devotee tracked him down for many years before finding him in the marketplace sitting atop a pile of banana peels--no one knows why.
"Oh great sage, Nasrudin," said the eager student. "I must ask you a very important question, the answer to which we all seek: What is the secret to attaining happiness?"
Nasrudin thought for a time, then responded. "The secret of happiness is good judgment."
"Ah," said the student. "But how do we attain good judgment?"
"From experience," answered Nasrudin.
"Yes," said the student. "But how do we attain experience?"
"Bad judgment."
The earliest credible source I can find is the great Sufi sage/fool Mulla Nasrudin, born circa 1208.
§
Why do I bring this up in the context of a tai chi blog?
I think advanced tai chi leads to good judgment. Learning tai chi brings the student face to face with failure much of the time. And failure can be linked to bad judgment, though while learning tai chi poor judgment is more or less linked to ignorance and poor habits, both of which lead to bad judgment. We do what we do. But when we get pushed around in tai chi push hands, many changes are required. In making these changes, and learning these hard won lessons, it can affect how you approach the rest of your life.
I’ve talked about change in other blogs on my site before but it is always worth another look. If failing and frustration stimulate a desire to change, HOW do we change in the first place?
To my thinking, two elements are required. The first is to look closely at what is going on. Awareness. Examine where your actions lead. Or ask, as Dr. Phil does, “How’s it working for you?”
A colleague at work told me that he was frustrated with another worker and he had told her she was “rude.” He asked me if telling her that she was “rude” was wrong. He wasn’t really looking for advice on his interaction; he was looking for reassurance that he was right. He truly felt it was a legitimate statement.
I agreed with him that his impression and his statement were accurate, but that is not the point. To label a co-worker “rude” doesn’t move a business conversation towards resolving the work being discussed. He basically changed the focus and redirected the conversation towards their (lack of) interpersonal skills. Work is now off the table, and how she treats him is what they will be discussing. Even worse, he has veered off facts and put forth his judgment. In tai chi terms, this is a push using force. (And tai chi-ers don’t use force!)
I suggested that it wasn’t a good move and that it was better to bypass the rudeness and stick to the facts that will move work forward. Ignore the attitude – it is mostly fluff anyway.
He could not accept my suggestion. He felt entitled to his self-expression (we always are!). Yet, to me, calling a co-worker “rude” is like adding gasoline to a fire. With this fire you can now roast marshmallows, break into a sweat, inhale smoke, watch the fireworks or heat the room, but not resolve any work related issues.
[I interact with Miss Rude as well. I always focus on her words and address what the facts are. Instead of being aggravated by her stance, I find her amusing and comical. I even admire her spunk. Big picture here – most likely she is not going to change and like all comic characters in TV sitcom, she does as they do (always the same thing show after show.) If the situation gets worse, I’ll take it to my supervisor.]
I think my tai chi buddies would agree. For my work buddy to change, he’d have to take a bigger view of the situation. He’d have to look closely at his conversation with his co-worker instead of assuming his approach is legitimate. But habits win the day if you are not willing to closely examine what you are doing and the results from your actions. Alas, all we know is habit, which we are condemned to repeat and repeat and repeat….
What is the lesson we need to learn? Choose your habits wisely, and drop them when they get in the way. The implicit challenge here is that we have a hard time making the distinction between a helpful habit and a poor habit. The nature of the habitual is that we don’t examine this.
The second element is being willing to fail. Yes, it’s not a happy prospect, but how do you find the right pathway without trying a few options that do not rely on the habitual? It takes some experimenting and a high tolerance for failure. (Ours is a funny society. We are encouraged to take risk, but we are often punished if the risk doesn’t work out!)
In our efforts to change, a good mentor or teacher is a huge advantage and may speed the process along. But even that is not a guarantee. (Because now you need two more tai chi qualities: trust and listening!)
Happiness? It’s an art. Just like living and tai chi.
(1) http://virtualbumperstickers.blogspot.com/2007/06/good-judgment-comes-from-experience.html: The Beggar King and the Secret of Happiness by Joel Ben Izzy, Algonquin Books of Chapel Hill, 2003.
Sunday, October 2, 2011
Tai Chi Chuan - The Push NOT! Part II
Tai Chi Chuan – The Push NOT!
Part II
An illusion happens once all three are sequenced correctly. It is not enough to be able to do each of these singularly. Tying it all together is yet another skill. All three become one continuous movement. There is a fluid change going on continuously. A push is not some static shove or thrust. It is a dynamic, organic world in motion.
There are two feelings that occur to those who are pushed. The first is that this is inevitable and inescapable. The second is that you don’t “feel” the pusher.
I actually think you do feel the pusher, but only after it is too late, once you hit the wall. You can’t “catch” the feeling of the push until you have already been pushed. This creates a sensation of “softness”. The sequence masks your ability to track it from a feeling perspective. If it goes wrong, you feel it.
To the pushee, a good push feels like this: if I get stuck or trapped, the pusher seems to drop out of site for a brief moment and my body is confused. My body thought it was getting a pressure and suddenly it is gone. My body reacts a bit by falling in space and trying to reorient itself, even if for just a micro-second. By this time the pusher has moved her body under (the drop in the hip joint) and forward. As her body does this, her arms stay connected to my body. The pressure between us is being transferred to the partner’s feet. My energy is being put into her feet. By the time I realize that her body is moving forward, I’m hitting the wall.
The sequence, if done well, confuses my expectations and my body can’t register what is really going on. My expectations are turned upside down. My body thinks it should be other than where it is. In essence, I am relating to my stuck place; the pusher is relating to my entire body and to the ground.
§
Is there anything more? Is this it? (Did you notice that in this sequence, you never actually “push”?)
Of course there is more! Lots more! But this is quite enough for the time being.
Frankly, it’s about as much as I can handle!
Part II
An illusion happens once all three are sequenced correctly. It is not enough to be able to do each of these singularly. Tying it all together is yet another skill. All three become one continuous movement. There is a fluid change going on continuously. A push is not some static shove or thrust. It is a dynamic, organic world in motion.
There are two feelings that occur to those who are pushed. The first is that this is inevitable and inescapable. The second is that you don’t “feel” the pusher.
I actually think you do feel the pusher, but only after it is too late, once you hit the wall. You can’t “catch” the feeling of the push until you have already been pushed. This creates a sensation of “softness”. The sequence masks your ability to track it from a feeling perspective. If it goes wrong, you feel it.
To the pushee, a good push feels like this: if I get stuck or trapped, the pusher seems to drop out of site for a brief moment and my body is confused. My body thought it was getting a pressure and suddenly it is gone. My body reacts a bit by falling in space and trying to reorient itself, even if for just a micro-second. By this time the pusher has moved her body under (the drop in the hip joint) and forward. As her body does this, her arms stay connected to my body. The pressure between us is being transferred to the partner’s feet. My energy is being put into her feet. By the time I realize that her body is moving forward, I’m hitting the wall.
The sequence, if done well, confuses my expectations and my body can’t register what is really going on. My expectations are turned upside down. My body thinks it should be other than where it is. In essence, I am relating to my stuck place; the pusher is relating to my entire body and to the ground.
§
Is there anything more? Is this it? (Did you notice that in this sequence, you never actually “push”?)
Of course there is more! Lots more! But this is quite enough for the time being.
Frankly, it’s about as much as I can handle!
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