Recent Books - 22 July 23

One of the reasons I made this site was to give myself more incentive to pay attention and take useful notes when reading books. Here, I'll give my takeaways from what I've read in the last week or two.

Flow: The Psychology of Optimal Experience  - Mihaly Csikszentmihalyi

"Attention is our most important tool in the task of improving the quality of experience."

I've heard this book referenced in many, many podcasts, but I hadn't read it until now. For the first roughly half of the book, I wasn't sure it was going to be worth it, but then something clicked. While the podcasts had focused on the state of flow, I found myself more interested in the conditions that made it possible.

Perhaps, ironically, I finally reached a state of flow while reading it. I'd read the first ~100 pages over the course of a couple weeks, then put it on the shelf for a few months. Then, I picked it back up and read the remaining 140 pages in two or three days.

The two biggest takeaways are, or at least really should be, self-evident. Yet most people, myself included, seem not to pay much attention to the truth of them.

First, there is the concept of psychic entropy. If you're not clear on what you want to achieve, your mind will be cluttered and will have a lack of focus. Even more true now than when the book came out in 1990, our world is filled with distractions available at all times of day. Many of these distractions are fun and easy, but not particularly rewarding. On the other hand, basically everything worthwhile takes effort to gain and maintain, and these activities can be much more rewarding.

This leads to the second concept: an autotelic personality. Coming from the Greek word τέλος/telos, it refers to the purpose of an activity, its ultimate aim. Someone with an autotelic personality make the task itself the purpose of the task. This is easy when it's something we specifically do for fun, such as art of sports, but even in such areas, we often forget that and focus on what success can bring us instead. Keeping the activity as the goal allows us to really get into it, and this is where flow can happen.

Overall, though I struggled somewhat with the first half, I'd definitely recommend reading this, particularly if you're the type of person who tends to overthink every activity you participate in.

Maybe You Should Talk To Someone - Lori Gottlieb

This is a memoir by therapist Lori Gottlieb, talking about her experiences both as a therapist and as a patient in therapy following her breakup from the man she expected to marry. I don't remember who I got the recommendation from, but thanks to whoever you are. I enjoyed this a lot more than I expected.

I've never thought much about therapy before this book. I'd like to do it, as I'd like to get an outside look at myself, but I don't have any reason that would justify the cost. This book gave me insight into it, at least from one person's point of view. Honestly, it's a great advertisement for therapy in general.

The part I found most interesting was when she talked about the purpose of therapy. Therapy, she says, is about getting to know yourself, and part of that is unknowing yourself; letting go of stories you've told yourself about yourself. "Live your life, not the story you've been telling yourself about your life."

I'm a generally positive person. For instance, I think AI is going to kill us all unless we get extremely lucky (hey, it's worked so far for nukes!), yet I'm also enjoying the progress it's making and the cool capabilities it's bringing along the way. But I do have limiting stories about myself. I'm bad at cardio, at art, and at understanding normal people. Are those stories true? Maybe. Do they have to remain true? Probably not.

The Intelligence Trap - David Robinson

The biggest thing I took from this book is the importance of curiosity, and the huge negative effect that anxiety can have on it. When you couple this with perfectionism, it's a recipe for avoiding learning anything meaningful. If I set myself the requirement of learning everything exceptionally well, immediately, of course I'm going to fail. And if I know I'm going to fail, why even try? Instead, approaching a topic with curiosity, wanting to know more but not making unreasonable demands of myself, lends itself to both better learning and more fun while doing it.

The second big takeaway is that smarter people are less likely to question their own assumptions, and that intelligence ≠ rationality. This makes sense, as smarter people are probably used to being right more often, but it's a dangerous trap to fall into, one I've seen happen from both first and third-person perspectives.

He also mentioned the role of desirable difficulties, of purposely making a problem harder in some ways in order to make your mind really work at it before giving up. This is very common in studying, and relates to the feeling of familiarity. It's easy to re-read a section, and offers the comforting sense that you get the material, but it doesn't really make you work. As with most writers who cover this topic, Robinson finds that spaced recall is probably the most effective way to learn many things.

Finally, he encourages his readers not to discount feelings as a source of information. I'm a huge fan of formal logic, but we're evolved animals, and not all of our systems run through the prefrontal cortex. Don't be a Straw Vulcan, basically.

Think Again - Adam Grant

I haven't read anything else by Grant, but I have watched his TED Talk. Two of them actually, the second one appropriately enough being about Flow.

In his view, useful confidence is based on a belief that we can learn to accomplish a goal, that we have the tools we need to adapt and achieve. Unhelpful confidence/arrogance is assuming we already know the best method to do so, and thus don't need to seek out more and possibly better viewpoints. We should be asking what evidence could change our minds, not trying to defend our entrenched position.

He stresses the importance of updating our beliefs, of letting go of things we previously thought were true. This can be because we found out we were wrong, or because the situation has changed. The latter will become increasingly relevant as AI advances and many situations (e.g. relevant job skills) change more and more rapidly.

Finally, he talks about preacher, prosecutor, or politician roles. The preacher is concerned with converting people to his own views, the prosecutor with proving himself right at all costs, and the politician with being liked. This is similar to the concept of scout vs soldier mindset by Julia Galef.

Overall, a decent book, but nothing groundbreaking. I'd recommend The Scout Mindset by Galef more highly.

The Diving Bell and the Butterfly - Jean-Dominique Bauby

The writing of this book is a fascinating story. After suffering a massive stroke in his forties, Bauby was left with locked-in syndrome. He was only able to blink his left eyelid, yet with a customized alphabet that prioritized the most common letters first and a very patient assistant, he wrote the entire book letter by letter by blinking at the right times.

If you're like me, that's the majority of the worth of the book right there. Other than that, it was a mildly interesting story, but I didn't get much out of it.

Useful Delusions: The Power and Paradox of the Self-Deceiving Brain - Shankar Vedantam & Bill Mesler

I like Vedantam, and I've read his first book The Hidden Brain, and I believe I've listened to all 462 episodes of his podcast of the same name, with the exception of rebroadcast episodes. That said, I've got mixed opinions on this book.

While he specifically says "self-deception can sometimes play a functional role in our lives. This does not mean that we should embrace all forms of self-deception.", the rest of the book implies we should be more open to dishonesty. Indeed, he soon follows this with "But if the stories have resonance and power, does it really matter if they are true? Why put the emphasis on the truth or falsity of the stories, rather than on what the stories do for us?"

While in theory I see his point, I can't get behind it. One of the more common defenses of religion is that even if it's not literally true, it helps people feel better, so it's useful enough to believe anyway. That works, to an extent. But so does believing I have a giant, extremely valuable diamond buried in my backyard. Is it true? Who cares, so long as it makes me feel better?

I don't think rationality works that way. If you choose to loosen your standards anytime a falsehood is useful, you can't count on the benefits of trying to be truly rational. P.C. Hodgell said "That which can be destroyed by the truth should be." I can see exceptions to this, sure. There may be some truth that, if known, would cause the entire human race to be miserable, with no positive effect to offset it. In that case, sure, let's embrace a useful delusion. But I'm not going to make that possible exception the cornerstone of my thinking, and I'm not going to purposely deceive myself in order to gain some purported benefit.

My biggest issue with this book is that it implies that useful delusions cannot be replaced by useful truths. For instance, he talks about the story that forms the basis of the United States. The story that we're a nation of freedom and justice, a shining beacon on a hill for the rest of the world. Yes, it has benefits. It certainly sounds nice, if nothing else. But facing up to the truth, facing the fact that slavery was a cornerstone of our nation's birth and that racism and bigotry have lasting consequences to this day, has larger benefits. Denying this in order to cling to our comforting story as a nation is not helpful.

Like I said at the start, mixed feelings. His analysis of the facts is spot on. I find no fault there. But his implied approval of embracing delusions in order to gain their benefits strikes me as misguided.