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Having a chat with my son Hunter is rarely boring. Here are some of our conversations this morning while getting ready for school:
Me: Come here, Cutestuff.
Hunter: Like I always say, there is no such thing as Cutestuff.
Me: Then you must not exist!
Hunter: Now why would I be such a thing?
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Hunter: What is for lunch today on the school menu?
Nancy: Hotdog.
Hunter: No.
Nancy: Chili.
Hunter: NO!
Nancy: Peppy pizza salad.
Hunter: What is that?
Nancy: I don't know.
Hunter: Ok, then no.
Wednesday, October 15, 2008
Conversations with my 6 year old...
Friday, October 03, 2008
Are You What You Buy?
I finished the book Buying In by Rob Walker and thoroughly enjoyed it. The last chapter ends with the question: does what you buy define who you are?
I have the belief that every person is intrinsically valuable. If this is true, then what you buy or what you have does not make you more valuable as a person. But the objects that you surround yourself with does answer another question:
Who do you wish you were?
That is why advertisers tell stories now rather than promoting the practical usefulness of their item. They are working on your insecurity. You know this. I know it. It works anyway.As one contemporary ad agency executive has put it: "Few stronger emotions exist than the need to belong and make meaning. And brands are poised to exploit that need." (257)
We need food, basic clothing, and basic shelter. Everything after that is novelty that wears off fast because of our adaptive behavior. We adapt to the object, and it isn't as exciting for as long as we thought it would be.But, I asked, what exactly does it mean to say "the wrong reasons"? If someone creates a symbol that has meaning, if it's Polo or Ecko, and I buy into it and it makes me feel more classy or urban, isn't that okay?
"Yeah," they answered in unison, and Andrew clarified: "You're spending the money to pay for the advertising that they paid for to make you believe that. That's the snake-eating-its-own-tail of it all." (260)
It's okay to buy things, to own things. But before we do, we need to really think about who we intentionally want to be.
Thursday, September 18, 2008
Did You Really Learn Anything?
Is it possible for you to go through a course or a class and not learn anything? Oh yeah, we've all probably had an experience like that.
But is it possible to go through a course, enjoy the teacher, get a good grade, and still not learn anything? Read on...
I read about the following experiment in the book What The Best College Teachers Do (22-23):In the early 1980s, two physicists at Arizona State University wanted to know whether a typical introductory physics course, with its traditional emphasis on Newton's laws of motion, changed the way students thought about motion. As you read this account, you might substitute for the line "think about motion" any other phrase that fits your subject. Do you the students in any class change the way they think?
To find out, Ibrahim Abou Halloun and David Hestenes devised and validated an examination to determine how students understand motion. They gave the test to people entering the classes of four different physics professors, all good teachers according to both colleagues and their students. On the front side, the results surprised no one. Most students entered the course with an elementary, intuitive theory about the physical world, what the physicists called "a cross between Aristotelian and 14th-century impetus ideas." In short, they did not think about motion the way Isaac Newton did, let alone like Richard Feynman. But that was before the students took introductory physics.
Did the course change student thinking? Not really. After the term was over, the two physicists gave their examination once more and discovered that the course had made comparatively small changes in the way students thought. Even many "A" students continued to think like Aristotle rather than like Newton. They had memorized formulae and leearned to plug the right numbers into them, but they did not change their basic conceptions. Instead, they had interpreted everything they heard about motion in terms of the intuitive framework they had brought with them to the course.
Halloun and Hestenes wanted to probe this disturbing result a little further. They conducted individual interviews with some of the people who continued to reject Newton's perspectives to see if they could dissuade them from their misguided assumptions. During those interviews, they asked the students questions about some elementary motion problems, questions that required them to rely on their theories about motion to predict what would happen in a simple physics experiment. The students made their projections, and then the researchers performed the experiment in front of them so they could see whether they got it right. Obviously, those who relied on inadequate theories about motion had faulty predictions. At that point, the physicists asked the students to explain the discrepancy between their ideas and the experiment.
What they heard astonished them: many of the students still refused to give up their mistaken ideas about motion. Instead, they argued that the experiment they had just witnessed did not exactly apply to the law of motion in question; it was a special case, or it didn't quite fit the mistaken theory or law that they held as true. "As a rule," Halloun and Hestenes wrote, "students held firm to mistaken beliefs even when confronted with phenomena that contradicted those beliefs." ...The students performed all kinds of mental gymnastics to avoid confronting and revising the fundamental underlying principles that guided their understanding of the physical universe. Perhaps most disturbing, some of these students had received high grades in the class.
Have you noticed how hard it is to really convince someone by arguing? People have to be receptive to new ideas for them to really change. It sometimes takes tectonic shifts to get people to change their worldview.
So, either the person needs to be at a point where they want to learn, or they have to be at a point of disillusionment with their worldview. Far more important than providing new information is showing why they should care in the first place.
Wednesday, September 17, 2008
Salience Matters
Are the things that matter to you relevant to anybody else?
If not, before you assume that they are just not smart enough to have it figured out, you might want to first ask if it has entered their radar. Maybe it has been buzzing around your territory enough that you had a chance to think through it, to see it as something that belongs rather than just a minor blip or an extraterrestial passing through.
The book Buying In (58) has this quote:Even today, salience matters: You are in no position to desire an iPod if you have no idea what it is. The more you see something, the more familiar it becomes - not as a result of the thing changing, but as a result of your brain changing through repeated exposure.
I find this true when I am teaching. Sometimes there are ideas that I've been aware of for a while that I wonder if I should even bother talking about. I do, and watch people get an aha moment or struggle with it. I have to remind myself that I might have come across it a while ago because of my specialty, and that it hasn't hit their radar yet.
And the same happens to me. I'll find something and think, "Wow!" and the person next to me is like, "Where have you been?"
I get to watch this happen with my kids, watching as stuff hits their radars and they take notice: "Did you know that 100 times 100 is 10,000?" "Did you know that an earthworm has 8 hearts?"
Salience matters. If it is important to you, find the simplest way to communicate it to those that you believe might care. Throw it out there so that it hits their radar screens.
Wednesday, August 27, 2008
Just Because You Can?
Just because you can sell something doesn't mean you should.
But I suppose that as long as there are a couple of people that will pay for it, there will generally be a couple of people selling it.
Recently I was in the market for a car. For most of us, that means we need to think about what it is that we are really buying. I know ultimately we are buying a means of transportation, but it certainly must be about more than that. Which, I think, is really strange considering how much money we are actually putting into it.
You ever wonder why SUVs were so popular, that is until gas became more expensive than having kids? Roughing it, for many SUV owners, is going to a Holiday Inn. Camping? Out of the question - there are icky things like bugs out there, and you might get dirty. Actually using the 4-wheel drive? Well, they do drive in the snow maybe 10 out of the 365 days of the year. Maybe.
Buying In (p 49) says you bought in:One reason SUVs became so popular is that they felt so safe: all that metal surrounding you as you towered over the punier cars all around. But of course, the data show rather convincingly that SUVs are far less safe than smaller cars. (And in fact, the feeling of safety may contribute to this, by lulling drivers into carelessness.) Before you blame this on big companies victimizing helpless, passive consumers from the old days before the recent revolution that gave us the power to hold them accountable, it's worth noting that journalist Keith Bradsher tells a somewhat different story in his definitive book on the SUV phenomenon, "High And Mighty." The SUV evolved largely in response to research into what consumers wanted and to what succeeded in the market. Carmakers conducted massive and detailed surveys, involving tens of thousands of consumers and research efforts "backed up by many interviews with consumers in focus groups," on a scale that dwarfed such efforts by politicians or media outlets. Consumers wanted four-wheel drive even though hardly any used it; they wanted to sit high in the vehicle because it felt safe, even though it wasn't. Auto executives seem to have been perplexed by and the engineers almost comtemptuous of what consumers wanted - but of courrse, they sold it to them anyway and in fact crafted advertising that played directly to consumers' dissonant desires.
My favorite car that I have owned was a Jeep Wrangler with a soft top. I loved that car. For the ten years that I owned it, it went on beaches, dirt roads, no roads, through the rain, and almost all of that with the top off (including the rain). It was a sad day when we traded it in. On that day, I realized that I was now truly domesticated: we traded it in for a minivan. A few years later I tried to regain my manhood by buying a motorcycle. I supposed it worked; that is what I called the stitches I received from laying it over once.
But my tastes are changing somewhat. Although I craved getting the 4-door version of the Wrangler, gas prices are making me aware of how much money I'm leaving on the roads, and my brain has turned a shade greener over the years. We went just about as functional as I can imagine: a Honda Fit. It's cheap, it has great gas mileage, and it will last long enough until an electric version of the Wrangler is available...
Friday, August 22, 2008
How Women Work
This link purports to explain women. Never fear, it is not 900 pages long. Not that it is the final answer, but it does give a little scientific data on the feminine half of the population. And really, guys, don't expect scientific data to help explain what's going on in their heads. But at least its a conversation starter: "How has your amygdala being working these days?"
Thursday, August 21, 2008
What Are You Looking For?
What is it that you really want in life? My friend Richard Beck thinks that you can look at pretty popular books and get a pretty good read on the populace. I think he makes a pretty good point as he reviews the book Your Best Life Now.
Dr. Beck is an experimental psychologist who teaches at the university from which I received my Master's degree. Besides being pretty stinkin' smart, he's also just fun to be around.
We have minds that hike along negative and neurotic trails when it gets a few quiet moments. But would our minds do that if we didn't have billions of dollars of marketing all around us constantly telling us that we should be dissatisfied with life? Probably, because you would still have neighbors, friends, and even family around you.
So what should you be satisfied with? And when should you work against the status quo? Making a list might make it easier to get up in the morning, ready for a content life that is still challenging.
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