behavioral psychology

Engage or Enrage. It is likely that we have family members or friends that we differ with greatly when it comes to politics, healthcare, etc.  I am no different.  When the inevitable hot topic arises, do you recommend flight or fight, engage or enrage?  How do you respond when this occurs?

The concept of this app sounds promising. Do you think the internet can be a place for deep and meaningful conversations in this day and age?

It can be difficult to find what you don't expect. Today, a friend shared an IG post reminding me of my 'egg hunt' in London last year.

My wife and I were grocery shopping and couldn't find the eggs. This corner store had everything else... milk, deli meat, bread, cheese, prepared sandwiches, and much more. We walked up and down the refrigerated aisles, inspecting the shelves, thinking we had missed them. 

Finally, we asked a store attendant if they had eggs. He said, 'Sure,' and pointed toward the lower shelves. I looked where he was pointing and still didn't see the eggs! Well, the eggs were right where he pointed...cartons and cartons of them... on a shelf that wasn't refrigerated. I realized that it took some time for me to see the eggs because I wasn't expecting them to be there stocked right under the sugar. In the U.S., eggs are refrigerated so we can usually find them next to the milk and other dairy products.  

Isn’t it interesting how much our habits shape what we see, and what we miss?

In case you're interested... the IG post shared:

"In the US, eggs are washed and sanitized, stripping away a natural protective layer that keeps bacteria out. That’s why American eggs have to be chilled from farm to fridge. Across the pond, washing eggs is illegal. British and European farms vaccinate hens against Salmonella and leave that natural coating intact, which means eggs can safely sit at room temperature. Two different food safety philosophies, one goal: keeping you healthy."

Phone addiction. One thing that I've really seen on this trip is how strong my pattern is to turn to my phone when I'm not feeling well, physically or emotionally. Feeling my feelings isn't addictive! I'm also noticing the general culture here in Taiwan of people always being on their phones. At restaurants or the hotel breakfast, I've noticed couples eating together who are just on their phones the whole time. So weird to me. Comparing this to Nepal where I would see people just sitting on their front doorsteps looking out onto the road...

This is something that I've worked on a lot, but it's still difficult to really take in how collectively addicting technology is. I think I know one person who has a good relationship with it.

An AI safety introduction that I like. I’m curious what people’s thoughts, reactions and impacts from this link are.

I’m already fairly familiar with this space, and it seems like it needs some solid introductory articles - so I wanted to present this one to you all and see what you thought.

COVID Vaccines: is the cure is worse than the disease (these days)? I don’t get COVID vaccines anymore. I did the first round while we were still in lockdown.

I stand by the choice to get vaccinated then. We didn’t know what was happening, lots of people were dying, good statistics were hard to come by (good interpretations even harder), and the virus hadn’t mutated yet.

It wasn’t great for me: two shots separated by a month; 5.5 days after the first I got shingles (apparently thousands of other people also got at that exact time) and then after the 2nd I was sicker than I’ve almost ever been. It lasted about 2.5 days and then was VOOM instantly cleared up. It was weird and felt unnatural. But perhaps when I later got COVID, it would have been WAY worse, without having gotten the vaccine.

Now, I don’t believe it’s worth it. The experience of having COVID is way less. It’s less deadly. There’s not a chance of herd immunity. And I’ve got friends who have awful long COVID from the vaccine. I haven’t done all the research, and anyone who’s tried to tell me about the research has seemed stilted to one side or another that had me take their interpretations with a huge grain of salt.

Providing environments for learning. Imagine you’re attending a meditation workshop and the facilitator invites you to lean into stillness. After a few seconds, they start giving cues on how to be still, one after another, followed by reading a passage from a book about meditation, and then it ends. You didn’t really get to experience stillness, but you learned a lot about why it’s important. Now imagine being facilitated by a person who gives a short context in the beginning, shares short cues at 10-minute intervals, and ends after 30 minutes. In the first scenario, stillness was interrupted by talking about how to be still; in the second, you were provided the environment to be in stillness and possibly experienced stillness.

Similarly, we ought to teach our children by providing environments where they can have certain experiences and relate to them with integrity, trust, love, and whatever other qualities we want to foster in them.

Teaching concepts like confidence or processing emotions is very limited, or even counterintuitive if the child doesn’t have a reference from their own experiences. If your child is consistently trusted in their daily choices, they’ll believe in themselves. If you let your child express their emotions, they will know what processing emotions means—because they have experienced it.

If you want a self-confident child, trust in your child’s abilities and give plenty of opportunities for them to be trusted.

Here’s some examples of what I’ve been doing to support my daughter’s confidence, autonomy, individuality, and freedom:

• Simple daily things I do that are maybe the most important is that I wait a few seconds longer than most parents to intervene, interrupt, speak, direct, or support. During this time, I’m looking to see what minimal intervention or support I can give for her to accomplish her mission by herself.
• I trust in her development and the natural intelligence of her body. She will reach developmental milestones in her own time. I will not rush her to talk, walk, or master skills like eating with a spoon. When it’s necessary and relevant for her, she’ll make the effort to learn and do it.
• I offer several options for food and let her decide what she wants to eat and how much. I trust that she’ll eat when she needs food and that she’ll pick food that matches what she needs. The only thing I control is what food is provided for her.
  -I’m available to listen to her feelings when she needs to process her emotions. I trust that she’ll express herself when she feels safe, and I don’t force or suppress her expression.
• I mostly let her direct our play and follow her lead. I avoid suggesting what to play with and instead see where her attention goes. When I ask her if she wants to play with something, it’s mostly in the context of offering her an alternative to something unsafe, like Do you want to play with this smooth metal spoon instead of that very sharp metal knife?
  -We have a yes-space where she can follow her own directed play without interruptions for safety concerns.

Every time we show a child how something works, we take away their opportunity to discover it by themselves. This is why child-led play and learning, or unschooling, is an amazing alternative to traditional schooling. They don’t need to rediscover the wheel, but providing an environment with the necessary pieces at their developmental level to make similar discoveries is fun and empowering.

Adults are slightly different, but I think the concept of providing environments is still relevant. For adults, environments can be a thought experiment or imaginative, like the example at the beginning of this post. As dreams show us, our imagination is an environment that provides learning opportunities.

Parenting our children is more about creating a supportive environment where they can naturally develop these qualities or learn them through the experience of being in a relationship with us, rather than trying to teach them directly. This post doesn’t really end here—I invite you to first run an experiment where you create an environment for an experience to happen and share what you learn.