Burden or Promise

In moments of crisis, people of faith are challenged by the question about why God allowed them to be tested in this way.  Naturally, they question whether they’re being punished or if their deity is as powerful as they’ve believed.  If they are all-powerful, how did this crisis come to be?

In short, they’re forced to reconcile their belief that if they were just “good,” then they’d get good things.  For many believers, this was the tacit agreement.  They’d be rewarded for their good behavior.  When facing crisis, space must be made for the emotions, including anger, fear, and confusion.  (See On Death and Dying for the emotions that accompany loss.)

Vulnerability

Many of the things that we see as crises are based on our realization of the frailty of life and the vulnerability of the plans that we’ve made to forces outside of our control.  A loved one dies.  A relationship dissolves due to betrayal or simply drifting apart.  A friend is swallowed by addiction.  What we thought were solid plans evaporate like morning fog.  The concrete suddenly feels blurry and confusing.  Most of us have deeply-held hopes and wishes, and these crises confront us with how these may never be realized.

Absent or Enemy

An expected condition for believers is that they may feel God is absent.  That He set the great clockwork of humanity along its way but fails to show up or intervene if the gears don’t work properly or chew someone up.  This represents a challenge for the pastor, who wants to believe that God is present to guide His creations down the paths He expects for them.

Alternatively, the person may be angry.  As I explain in Conflict: Anger, anger is disappointment directed in Buddhist philosophy.  That means that someone who is angry with God is disappointed.  Often, it’s the expectation that if they do what God asks, they should have been spared these circumstances.

Helping parishioners accept their feelings and gently nudging them to alternate potential understandings takes skill.  A good place to start to see how to make these shifts might be to start with Motivational Interviewing.  The book cautions, “Heavy-handed application of religious cant will not meet the profound questions of faith with which the bereaved grapple.”  That’s more about comforting ourselves than it is helpful for the other person.

Differentiating the Event and the Experience

Crises are triggered by an event or circumstance.  Crisis is, by its nature, a place of turmoil, change, and confusion.  However, there’s a difference between the crisis itself and the experience that a person has of the crisis.  Richard Lazarus in both Emotion and Adaptation and Stress, Appraisal, and Coping explains that how we interpret or process the stressors in our life has a substantial impact on whether our body will respond with stress or apathy.  (See The Stress of Life for more.)  No pastor is likely to change the objective conditions surrounding the parishioner in crisis, but they might help them change their perspective on the crisis.

This isn’t done with trite remarks or simple assurances but rather is accomplished by acknowledging and accepting the person.

Pausing and Rewriting

When someone encounters a crisis, a pastor can help them slow down, pause, pray, and be present.  This is hard, since we’re wired to want to take action, but sometimes the best thing that we can do is just be present and try to understand what the event is trying to tell us.  In time, it may be helpful for the person to write or rewrite the story around the crisis.  (See Opening Up for more.)

Family Dynamics

The book breaks families into four types, which are really layers of functioning:

• Type I – Symbiotic attachment styles
• Type II – Mutual dependency (less symbiotic/enmeshed than Type I)
• Type III – Fight for control and lack of warmth and empathy
• Type IV – Trust the human development process, and constantly changing relationships

Types II and III have a sense of time confusion, often trying to hang on to the present moment for longer than it should last.  For more on family dynamics, see Bowen Family Systems Theory in Christian Ministry and Family Evaluation.

Only Type IV in this formulation engage with children in ways that support their continued growth.  (For more, see The Parent-Teen Connection.)

Grief

Crisis comes with loss, and the response to loss is grief.  The book says, “The long process of grief work may best be understood as a process of restructuring one’s identity taking into account the profound loss that has occurred in the absence of the centered relationship by which one has been identified.”  Another way of expressing this is that the relationship with the person or thing lost changes rather than disappears.  This is consistent with the larger research on grief.  I’d refer readers to The Grief Recovery Handbook, Companioning the Bereaved, The Grieving Brain, Handbook of Bereavement, and Meaning Reconstruction and the Experience of Loss for more detailed grief resources.

Continuity and Change

Through crisis, everyone needs healthy doses of continuity and liberal application of change.  We love our rituals.  We need to find the familiar.  However, we cannot ignore the changes that the crisis requires.  We need to find ways to weave in the continuity and the change to make the change progressive and restorative rather than feeling like a disruption of continuity.

It’s only by integration at every level that we can understand Crisis Experience in Modern Life.

The post Book Review-Crisis Experience in Modern Life first appeared on Thor Projects.

What is interesting from the start is that the timeline here roughly matches what Robert Putman first saw a sliver of and wrote about in Bowling Alone.  His updated data in The Upswing tends to point to a roughly 100-year cycle – just as is observed in this book.

Views of Time

Before we can see the cycle, we must first agree that time can be seen as a cycle.  Some view time as chaotic, others as linear, and some see it as a cycle.  The Mayans famously had a calendar that consisted of concentric circles, indicating their view of time as never-ending cycles.  The view of time we’re talking about isn’t personal, as it is in Phillip Zimbardo’s The Time Paradox.  It’s not about whether the past was better or worse but primarily about whether there’s a predictability to time – whether there are cycles.

Awareness of some cycles is unavoidable.  We know that there is the cycle of day and night that’s influenced by other cycles, like time of year.  We also know that humans have been trying to flatten and control the cycle of day and night by creating light since the creation and cultivation of fire.  Today, we can have light or darkness on any schedule we’d like, whether it represents a natural cycle or not.

The seasons of the year are also observable.  Everyone knows spring, summer, fall, and winter – and what to expect in each of these.  Here, too, we as humans are trying to flatten the cycle.  We largely live outside of the temperature extremes that accompany summer and winter.  We create storehouses of fuel for fire and strategies for cooling the heat of the summer.

Beyond the cycle of the year, we lose our visibility to the cycles.  We tend to see time itself as a long, never-ending line rather than a circle that we loop through as a part of the larger cycle.

The Cycle

The cycle consists of four “seasons”:

• Spring (High) – An upbeat era of strengthening institutions and weakening individualism.
• Summer (Awakening) – Spiritual awakening and upheaval when civic order is pressured by new values.
• Fall (Unraveling) – A downcast era of individuality and weakening institutions.
• Winter (Crisis) – A time of upheaval when the old civic order is replaced with a new one.

Generations

Much is made of generations throughout the book, but I kept coming back to Chuck Underwood’s definitions in America’s Generations.  Other than the tendency to call Generation X the 13^th Generation, the main threads tracked.  Apparently, “X” was designed as a derogatory term, though being of that generation, I never took it that way.

Discontinuity

The key to the crisis is discontinuity.  It can be that it’s war, as we’ve seen on several occasions – but the point isn’t the war, the point is the change.  The point is that the world is somehow irrevocably different after the crisis.

Taleb explains in The Black Swan that unexpected events are just unexpected.  They’re not impossible.  When you see your first black swan, your thinking about swans is irrevocably changed.  No longer can you be certain when someone says they saw a swan that it was white.  Suddenly, a whole new way of viewing swans appears.

Individuality

One of the interesting topics in American society has been the oscillation that we’ve been doing between community-focused to individualistic.  Robert Putnam’s classic book, Bowling Alone, maps the decline of community focus and therefore social capital.  He started looking right at the start of the decline, mapping how membership in everything from fraternal organizations to bowling clubs declined over decades.  When he and colleagues came back to the topic in The Upswing, they realized that they had been seeing a cyclic decline.  In the 1920s and the 2020s there was a high degree of individualism.  In the 1860s and the 1960s, there was a high degree of social cohesion.

These oscillations lead to variations in trust.  In fact, trust is the simplest definition of social capital – a term that Putnam popularized – as it is the trust that we have with one another.  It goes down when we’re individualistic and goes up when are more community-focused.  Francis Fukuyama in Trust explains that the degree of trust we have in one another shapes societies.  It is both impacted by the current culture and moves towards shaping the next culture.

Self-Esteem

The seeds for the rising crop of self-esteem were sown by Dr. Benjamin Spock in his classic, [The Commonsense Book of] Baby and Child Care.  He’d encourage a generation of parents that self-esteem was critical for their children.  In Finding Flow, Mihaly Csikszentmihalyi shares that Spock, later in life, wondered whether that focus on self-esteem was right.  Somehow, the self-esteem gained through hard work and persistence was replaced with participation trophies and constant affirmation.

Because self-esteem was seen as the goal rather than the result of something else, society was able to find a shortcut to try to meet the goal and to keep children happy.  However, this eventually devolved into entitlement.

Entitlement

Entitlement is simply believing that you’re owed something.  Instead of the pursuit of life, liberty, and the pursuit of happiness, we believe that our forefathers entitled us to them.  (See the Declaration of Independence.)  Instead of something to be strived for it, was expected on a silver platter.  It’s not the children’s fault.  They expected that the world would be similar to the sheltered alcove that was their rearing.  Robert Putnam in his book, Our Kids, that was written between Bowling Alone and The Upswing, explains the benefits of the “airbags” that parents provided.  These benefits included accelerating kids’ academic performance.  However, the negative is too often that we fail to let our children learn how to deal with adversity themselves.

Perhaps that’s one of the reasons it’s claimed that Europeans, after returning from a trip to America, shared to their friends how well American parents obeyed their children.  Perhaps the tables got turned – and they shouldn’t have.

Violence for Change

Gandhi is known for his non-violent approaches to protest.  However, Gandhi didn’t live in the US.  In 1970, a striking 44% of college students said that violence was justified to bring about change.  While this is a startling fact when viewed from the position of today, it represents a highly contentious time only seven months after the Kent State massacre, where the Ohio National Guard killed four and wounded nine unarmed college students for their protests.

It divided a populace where more than half of people believed the rioters provoked the national guard, and the 44% quoted above saw the government as overly constraining.

Build Our Youth for the Future

Franklin D. Roosevelt, on the eve of World War II, said America “cannot always build the future for our youth, but we can build our youth for the future.”  If we cannot stop the endless cycles, we should learn to live well in them.  We’ve learned how to adapt to the seasons of the year.  We store resources for winter, plant in the spring, and harvest in the fall.  We build ways to protect against floods.

In these ways, we’re shaping the future for our children – but the greatest gift we can give them is the adaptability they need to see and respond well to the changes as they come.  If we do it well, we’ll have prepared them for The Fourth Turning.

The post Book Review-The Fourth Turning: What the Cycles of History Tell Us About America’s Next Rendezvous with Destiny first appeared on Thor Projects.

The revolutions, as conceptualized in this book, are steam, electricity, computing, and intelligence.  Thus, this is a book about how intelligence changes things.  Klaus Schwab is focused on three key factors:

• Velocity – The pace of this revolution is much, much faster.
• Breadth and Depth – Due to the nature of digital transformation, it’s more impactful across the board.
• Systems Impact – Klaus sees the transformation of entire systems rather than discrete components of the system.

3D Printing

The topic of 3D printing makes a brief appearance in the book.  While 3D printing has taken off since 2016, it’s fallen well short of the predictions that it would take over the world and replace the need to stock spare parts.  It’s an amazing set of technologies, and I love what I can do with the 3D printer I have.  It’s also limited.  The filament deposit method (FDM) used by most printers necessarily creates one axis that is less resilient and therefore isn’t suitable for some parts.

However, the bigger problem is understanding that 3D printing relies on a totally different process than traditional injection molding.  For lots of reasons, each part needs to be tested in a 3D printing world, and that takes someone to do it.  Also, 3D printing is relatively slow per part.  That means that we may not see much of a boost to productivity if we did make the switch.

Trust

The thing that did change – that wasn’t obvious – was finding a way to create sufficient levels of trust in distributed ownership.  Whether it’s the model of Airbnb for renting a place to stay or Uber and Lyft as an alternative transportation to traditional taxis, we democratized the ability to take something you have (space) or something you can do (drive) and made it a service for everyone.  While it’s not obvious, the key component isn’t technology.  Technology is an enabler, but the true component is the ability to engender trust.  There’s a brand to protect.  There’s a bigger relationship than some guy with a room over their garage.

The power of trust in a society is well explained in Francis Fukuyama’s book, Trust.  It’s an invisible force that lubricates relationships and economies.

Productivity

I’ve spent most of my professional career working in the space of personal productivity applications.  Most of that time has been with SharePoint and, more broadly, the Microsoft Office suite of tools.  I’m sad to say the projected productivity improvements never really materialized.  Klaus explains that productivity overall hasn’t really improved all that much.  In fact, productivity increases that ran from 1947 to 1983 at an average annual rate of 2.8 percent slowed to 2.6 percent between 2000 to 2007.  It dropped even further to 1.3 percent from 2007 to 2014.  (While he cites this final number, there was recession in the middle of that time period that would have impacted results.)

The promise of each Industrial Revolution is that it will dramatically improve productivity – and the threat is that this increase in productivity will lead to unemployment.

Unemployment

Economist John Maynard Keynes in 1931, during the Great Depression, described unemployment resulting from “our discovery of means of economizing the use of labor outrunning the pace at which we can find new uses for labor.”  It’s a chilling comment that foreshadows the implosion of jobs due to the impacts of artificial intelligence (AI), but it wasn’t the only period of concern about the impact of technology on the labor market.

The development of manufacturing robots was a huge concern for manufacturing labor in the 1960s through the 1980s.  Unions were worried that their workers wouldn’t find jobs.  It’s true that that kind of labor shrank in the market – but the labor market adapted, and people moved to other kinds of jobs.  The cataclysm that was predicted didn’t come to pass.

Ultimately, Industrial Revolutions have always disrupted – but not destroyed – the labor markets, and this seems like it will continue.

Large Language Models (AI)

When The Fourth Industrial Revolution was written, there were no large language models (LLMs), which are what most people today simplify to AI, though it has a much broader set of approaches.  What’s important isn’t the introduction of a new technological innovation that wasn’t predicted.  What’s important to realize is that the introduction of this accelerator has only heightened the concerns about labor market disruption.  It’s made clear impacts on the technology market and has reduced enrollment at colleges for computer science degrees.

LLMs have brought generic application to technologies that used require specific setup work that most people weren’t willing to do.  In short, it required the ability to get very precise and specific about the job to be done.  From that, machine learning models could be trained to accomplish the work.

Simplifying Jobs

The work to optimize organizations meant becoming increasingly specific about the work that was expected out of each employee.  Job descriptions were tightened, and skills identification became more precise.  Procedures were written and refined.  All of this serves the development of a large system where the people become replaceable cogs in a large machine.  (See Images of Organization for different views on organizational structure.)

This atomization of work for each employee echoes Henry Ford and the creation of the assembly line.  Employees were no longer craftsmen who had many skills but instead were specifically trained for their job and could be relatively easily replaced.  Despite this ease of replacement, the atomization and specification of jobs never reached the level where it was easy to automate.

However, LLMs can operate quite effectively at the level of specification we have today, and that makes several types of labor vulnerable to automation.

Prone to Automation

Of the ten categories of jobs that Klaus projected to have the greatest replacement by automation, only four contracted.  Secretaries, administrative assistants, and legal secretaries saw fewer jobs.  It’s believed this shrinkage is due to improved technological documentation and scheduling systems.  Telemarketers saw shrinkage due in part to regulatory oversight and in part to shifts in how marketing is done.

Insurance adjusters are the only category of the most prone to automation that can be clearly identified as having shrunk as a result of technological innovation.  Customers now upload photos of their cars and get rapid appraisal of the damage and the cost to repair it.

Two things are important here.  First, even in the most prone to automation categories, the overall economic growth exceeded the contraction due to automation.  Second, while the move is dramatic in economic terms, it’s still longer than most people operate.

While it’s still early to see the impact of LLMs on these roles – or a similar set of 10 roles – it’s reasonable to expect that the broader economic forces are likely to minimize the impact of automation by LLMs.

In Demand Skills, 2020

For reference, let’s start with the World Economic Forum’s core skills outlook from the World Economic Forum Future of Jobs Report 2025.

The format of the Future of Jobs Report 2020 was a bit different, but it conveys very similar information.

Finally, if we go back to the first report from 2016, part of which is reproduced in the book, we see:

If you account for some merging of individual skills into categories in the 2025 report, we see that these skills haven’t effectively changed much in the ten years of work monitoring this data.

Relational Disruption

While most of the book is focused on the economic impact of these changes, we cannot escape the fact that these are societal changes that will have sweeping effects beyond jobs and the economy.  The way that we interact with one another is becoming shaped by these technologies and transformations.  Sherry Turkle spoke about the changes in the way we relate in Alone Together.  She said that we’re both more connected and more disconnected, simultaneously.  More recently, Jonathan Haidt wrote in the Anxious Generation how technology is making us more anxious.

There’s an epidemic of Loneliness.  Robert Putnam reports on the loss of social capital in both Bowling Alone and The Upswing.  While our technology is making it possible to communicate immediately across the globe, it’s less likely that we’re communicating with anyone who cares – or who will show up when we need them.

Attention

With the Fourth Industrial Revolution being intelligence, it’s barely a surprise that the thing that becomes the most precious is our attention.  With so much information at our fingertips, how can we stay focused on anything?  How do we stay focused long enough to get anything done?  Johann Hari in Stolen Focus shares his experience with detoxifying his life from the constant interruption and checking.  It may be that the most critical resource is attention in The Fourth Industrial Revolution.

The post Book Review-The Fourth Industrial Revolution first appeared on Thor Projects.

It was a reference recommended to me for some of the work on teaching how to address cognitive distortions.  Transparently, I’m not sure that it was helpful for that purpose other than to remind me how powerful it can be to just do the work.

The Inklings

Before I expand upon the ideas set forth in the book, I need to pause and share a story of success from an informal literary group at Oxford.  It was a set of enthusiasts who enjoyed conversations about writing.  You’ve probably heard of two of the members: C. S. Lewis and J. R. R. Tolkien.  They worked together with a small group of others.  It really had no form, rules, or agendas.  They’d read each other’s materials and share their thoughts.

It’s not unlike what Elbow is recommending in Writing without Teachers.

The Muse and the Critic

Fundamental to the writing process is the construction of the writings.  Forming the narrative, keeping the flow.  It all forms through a process of inhibition.  Typically, we don’t give this process the free rein it needs to run and to find answers to unsolvable questions.

We’ve been taught that the muse and the critic are to be like two horses harnessed to the same carriage.  We’re encouraged to write, edit, and repeat the process.  Elbow didn’t know when he wrote the book, but we know now that these are radically different cognitive processes, and they don’t necessarily work well together.

Elbow’s insight is to create spaces where you write without critique either internally or from outsiders.  He proposes a space where peers read your works and you observe their reactions rather than directly receiving criticisms.

The argument against this approach is simply that you’ll “waste” a lot of writing that you come back to later to cut, curtail, or reshape.  However, the reality is that this process often unblocks people as they’re trying to work around the critic that has frozen them.  In other words, it’s like C4 to writer’s block.

Agile

Agile software development may seem far and away from writing, but it’s closer than most might think.  The critical insight that led to agile software development is the awareness that no one could predict all of the possibilities that might happen when the software was developed.  We were spending more time and energy developing the perfect specification and plan than it would take to work intelligently and allow for mistakes.

Agile isn’t a perfect way to develop software.  It makes a lot of mistakes, and it creates a lot of rework – but those mistakes and that rework is less costly than the alternative software development lifecycle (waterfall) approach.

Elbow says, “We have to get ideas and test ideas.”  This has its own name in agile software development: a spike.  It’s a focused effort to testing and understanding something.  Decades earlier, Elbow was doing the same thing.  Let yourself play out the character or encounter idea, and see where it leads.  If it’s good, keep it, use it, integrate it.  If it’s not, discard it – but discard it knowing that you couldn’t make it work instead of wondering.

The Journey When the Artifact Isn’t the Answer

Sometimes when I’m teaching, I ask people to do things, and neither they nor I will keep the results.  One could easily ask whether we’re wasting our time.  The answer is no – but the reasoning isn’t obvious.  The reason for doing the activity is to teach.  The artifact itself is useless.  The learning that comes from creating the artifact is the important part.

Writers’ artifacts are their writing, and they’re sort of the point, aren’t they?  Maybe.  Consider the work of Richard Hackman.  He wrote in Collaborative Intelligence about the value of teams not just in what they delivered but also in their ability to increase their velocity of value creation through learning and trust.

Elbow is not concerned with how much writing that you throw away.  He’s concerned about how much writing you get from the process that is worth reading.  That comes through being able to see the path clearly and know that you couldn’t have gotten to what you’ve written without all the twists and turns you’ve taken – even if no one but you ever saw them.

The Right Struggle

Elbow explains that many people don’t write.  They’ve never figured out how to write well.  It was too painful.  It didn’t feel productive.  It didn’t seem to work.  The traditional approach to learning writing felt too rigid or mechanical.  Maybe it felt like some magic that other people had but they didn’t.  It didn’t make sense.  They’d stare at the blank page and wonder where to start.  Elbow’s answer is wherever.  Free writing is a way to just get started writing; once you’ve started, you’ll eventually be pulled into the place you intend to be.

The goal isn’t to prevent the struggle but instead to get the struggle into the range that is tolerable.  It may be, to make it tolerable, you need to try Writing without Teachers.

The post Book Review-Writing Without Teachers first appeared on Thor Projects.

Systematizing Success

At the heart of the concept is finding a way to transfer some responsibility from the subordinate to the supervisor for success.  In truth, this is the core of what leadership is about: taking some accountability for those you lead.  However, it’s rarely practiced this way.  By placing a set of guardrails around the kinds of responses (or excuses) that leaders can use about their subordinate performance, the responsibility that a supervisor has for their subordinate success is systematized.

Servant Leadership

It’s an extension of the work of Robert Greenleaf.  Servant Leadership is a concept that turned over the historical thinking that people down the line were there to support the leaders.  Greenleaf argued you’d get better performance if leaders believed they were there to make it easier for subordinates to make the changes that the organization needed.

A quick aside to servant leadership is that the Greenleaf Center for Servant Leadership was headquartered in the city next door, Westfield, Indiana, until it was moved years ago.  There are still many people who had relationships with the Center in my orbit.

Truths

The book suggests that there are 12 simple truths to helping people win at work.  They are:

1. Performing well: What makes people feel good about themselves
2. To help people perform well, an effective performance management system must be established
3. It all starts with performance planning
4. The biggest impact on performance comes from day-to-day coaching
5. Trust is key to effective coaching
6. The ultimate coaching tool: Accentuating the positive
7. Redirection helps get performance back on track
8. Deliver reprimands with caring candor (see Radical Candor)
9. Performance reviews should be about retaking the final exam
10. Developing and sharing your leadership point of view is a powerful communication tool for your people
11. Servant leadership is the only way to go
12. Celebrate successes

Action

In the end, “Talk is just hot air unless you back it up with some action.”  Maybe it’s time to start learning how to start Helping People Win at Work.

The post Book Review-Helping People Win at Work: A Business Philosophy Called “Don’t Mark My Paper, Help Me Get an A” first appeared on Thor Projects.

I recently went back to update the research and check to see whether the failure rate has changed.  I think the statement that the failure rate is 70% still reasonable – but there are factors like the size of the project, skills, and change readiness that affect the specific number for individual organizations.  Check out the details and comment if you disagree.

The post Revisiting the 70% Change Project Failure Rate first appeared on Thor Projects.

Skepticism

Being skeptical is a stance to claims, not a chance to be a curmudgeon.  It’s an opportunity to engage in the reasoning process that led to the belief and the degree to which the conclusion is supported by the evidence – or not.  In fact, a wise man proportions their beliefs to match the evidence.  The only thing that we know must be wrong is certainty – because every perception of reality and truth is subject to revision in the presence of additional information.

It is possible to learn to be a skeptic, to ask questions about the origins and processes of beliefs.  It’s possible to be taught how to question in ways that lead to better understanding.  In fact, that’s basically the process that James Spradley teaches in The Ethnographic Interview – not to be skeptical but to increase understanding.

Meaningful Patterns

We’re wired to find patterns.  It’s a part of our most primitive biology.  (See Thinking, Fast and Slow and The Righteous Mind.)  We’re so wired to find patterns that we’ll find them where there are none.  Constellations are patterns we see in the sky that resemble what we find on Earth, even though the stars’ locations aren’t controlled by the shapes of bodies on Earth.

The challenge with our ability to find patterns is in determining which patterns are meaningful – that is, those that can help us understand.  Some patterns aren’t really patterns even though they appear that way.  Sometimes, we read too much into it, like repeatedly confusing correlation with causation.  Just because two events appear to vary together doesn’t mean that one causes the other.  We painfully discovered this in the 2008 financial system meltdown, which was triggered by a simple correlation confused for a causation.  It was discovered that home ownership was correlated with economic stability.  When we manipulated the home ownership variable, we discovered that it wasn’t causal of economic stability.  In fact, the push for home ownership and greed in derivative financial instruments created a great economic problem.  (See The Halo Effect for the Community Reinvestment Act and its role in the meltdown.)

Appearance of Science

Our world today has developed an appreciation for science – some deserved and some undeserved.  We’ve made great progress through scientific concepts, and because of that, some things try to take on the airs of science to improve their credibility.  Science and Pseudoscience in Clinical Psychology drives home the point that just because it sounds scientific doesn’t make it scientific.  Calling something “creation-science” doesn’t make it scientific.

Problems in Scientific Thinking

The bad news for science is that it’s not as pure or perfect as we’d like to believe.  Every scientific “truth” is subject to revision.  The atom used to be the smallest, indivisible unit of matter until we discovered it wasn’t.  The book proposes a set of problems for science, which follow in summary:

1. Theory Influences Observations
2. The Observer Changes the Observed
3. Equipment Constructs Results
4. Anecdotes Do Not Make a Science
5. Scientific Language Does Not Make a Science
6. Bold Statements Do Not Make Claims True
7. Heresy Does Not Equal Correctness
8. Burden of Proof
9. Rumors Do Not Equal Reality
10. Unexplained Is Not Inexplicable
11. Failures Are Rationalized
12. After – the – Fact Reasoning
13. Coincidence
14. Representativeness
15. Emotive Words and False Analogies
16. Ad Ignorantiam
17. Ad Hominem and Tu Quoque
18. Hasty Generalization
19. Overreliance on Authorities
20. Either-Or
21. Circular Reasoning
22. Reductio ad Absurdum and the Slippery Slope
23. Effort Inadequacies and the Need for Certainty, Control, and Simplicity
24. Problem -Solving Inadequacies
25. Ideological Immunity, or the Planck Problem

Many of these are covered in Mastering Logical Fallacies.

Alien Abductions and Other Hallucinations

Sleep deprivation is the reason Michael Shermer gives for his belief in his alien abduction.  For others, the root cause may be recovered memories using hypnosis.  (See Remembering Trauma for more on the problems with recovered memories, particularly via hypnosis.)  For others, it’s a hallucination caused by a serious mental illness.  Irrespective of the cause, we need to consider how sometimes our memories aren’t exactly what we believe them to be – and that our perception of reality isn’t always perfect.

That isn’t to say that someone didn’t perceive ghosts or don’t remember perceiving ghosts.  It’s only to say that without separate corroboration, it’s hard to say whether it really did or didn’t happen.

The Fallacy of Objectivism

I haven’t been able to force myself to finish Atlas Shrugged yet.  I’ve read a lot of it, but it’s so hollow and predictable that I’ve not made it through.  For some, these are heretical words.  It’s Ayn Rand’s magnum opus, a pinnacle of her achievement.  For me, it’s just tired.  Rand started a movement of objectivism that reached cult-like proportions.  (See Terror, Love, and Brainwashing for more on cults.)  Objectivism proposes a single truth to moral right and wrong.  I can’t buy that.

The problem is that morals are contextual to society.  How Good People Make Tough Choices makes this clear.  So, too, does Anatomy of Love.  It explains how sex and love differ from culture to culture and vary over time.  Shermer speaks of Rand’s infidelity and that of her protégée.  The story of Henry Murry and Christiana Morgan speaks of their infidelity.  (See Love’s Story Told and Translate this Darkness.)  These stories further expose how Jung’s relationship varied from the monogamous heterosexual norm.

The Court of Public Opinion

There’s a real difference between a courtroom, where logic, at least presumably, reigns, and the court of public opinion, where the best rhetoric, no matter how illogical, can win.  Sometimes, the ideas that are the weirdest come out victorious not by the strength of their evidence but by the capacities of their advocate – their orator.

We can therefore find ourselves believing things that aren’t smart.  We stumble on a belief because of a compelling story or pithy anecdote.  We come to believe something by non-smart means – but we defend them with vigor.  The problem isn’t that people aren’t smart.  The problem is that we’re not always smart.  The problem is that we’ll use our smarts to defend a belief that we came to in a non-smart way.

Ultimately, this is one of the key things that explains Why People Believe Weird Things.

The post Book Review-Why People Believe Weird Things: Pseudoscience, Superstition, and Other Confusions of Our Time first appeared on Thor Projects.

Motor Vehicle Accidents

Motor vehicle accidents (MVAs) happen every day.  There are over 6 million in the US, leading to 2.4 million injuries.  It’s estimated that the average person will be involved in 3-4 in their lifetime.  The prevalence of posttraumatic stress disorder is somewhere around 9% of those injured – with rates climbing if we filter to only those accidents with injuries or defined as serious.  In those cases, the rate is somewhere between 20-45%.  Some of the issues may be exacerbated by the 69% of people who report pain more than a month after the accident.

In short, MVAs are a serious concern for the population and a serious driver of posttraumatic stress.  Scaer reports that much of his work is with this population and that the conclusions he draws appear to apply more broadly.

Cognitive Appraisal

One of the key factors that seems to play a part in whether people will develop PTSD or not is in their appraisal.  This isn’t unexpected.  Hans Selye’s work in The Stress of Life and Robert Sapolsky’s work in Why Zebras Don’t Get Ulcers explain the biological and neurological impacts of stress.  Richard Lazarus in Emotion and Adaptation and Stress, Appraisal, and Coping explains that how we appraise a situation substantially impacts whether we’ll respond to it with the physiological impacts of stress.

Lazarus’ work is consistent with what we know about cognitive behavioral therapy (CBT) as well.  (See Brief Cognitive-Behavioral Therapy for Suicide Prevention and Cognitive Therapy for Suicidal Patients.)  Specifically, it regards how our cognitive processes can have an impact on our emotions and mood.  This is good news.  It means that we can consciously decide that we’re going to shape our emotions and moods into directions that are less disruptive.  That isn’t to say that we can just command our emotions to sit down and be quiet, but rather we can do a dance with our emotions that shapes how we feel about what is happening and has happened to us.

Corruption of Time Perception

One of the most common experiences when something has the potential to be traumatic is a corruption of the perception of time.  It seems like time begins to slow down.  As we learned from the work on the psychological state of flow, our sense of time requires coordination from many parts of the brain.  (See Flow, Finding Flow, and The Rise of Superman.)  Flow disrupts this in a way that we lose track of time, whereas trauma seems to create a sense of time dilation for the moment and sometimes where flashbacks seem to intrude on the current moment.

One of the techniques frequently used in the treatment of trauma is teaching people how to ground themselves to the current moment.  That is to anchor them in the time and space they’re in rather than the memory of the trauma they’ve had in the past.

Sexual Trauma

The prevalence of sexual trauma is startling.  Contemporary estimates range from 12-64% of women experience sexual trauma.  Freud’s claim of the prevalence of sexual trauma and then recanting those claims is still a controversy.  (See The Assault on Truth.)  It’s important to recognize that this trauma is harmful, because it disrupts both control and the ability to protect oneself, often leading to a persistent fear or hypervigilance.

Sometimes, the sexual trauma doesn’t cross the line into rape but is instead a place where someone feels pressured into sex but doesn’t say no – and sometimes it does, but it’s not reported.  The problem is that there is no black and white definition for sexual trauma any more than there’s a definitive test for any other kind of trauma.  We’ve, appropriately, established some hard limits, but there are still experiences that may be quite traumatic that aren’t over those limits.

Trauma Blocking

One of the challenges with trauma is that it blocks us from the life that we want.  It could be silently avoiding an intersection, because we witnessed or were a part of an MVA there, or avoiding social situations, because they remind us too much of a trauma that was experienced immediately afterwards.  Trauma can move us in subtle ways that prevent us from enjoying our life.

Recovered Memories

There are some challenges with the material, including, “When patients say that they really cannot recall much detail from their childhood, it is a red flag for child abuse.”  Perhaps the best walk through of this is Richard McNally’s Remembering Trauma.  The short is that there may be something there – but there may not be.  It may just be that the context and questions aren’t sufficient to trigger recall.

Some of the more difficult claims to accept in The Body Keeps the Score are around the “memory” of trauma stored in the body.  Frankly, I’m not convinced.  I believe there’s an impact – but I’m not sure there’s a score to be kept.  Without this claim, it’s hard to believe that The Body Bears the Burden.

The post Book Review-The Body Bears the Burden: Trauma, Dissociation, and Disease first appeared on Thor Projects.

Storage Locks

The whole journey started because I hated the storage locks we had.  The key felt flimsy, and it didn’t seem to fit into the locks well.  I was looking at replacements and soon realized that nearly every storage lock on every RV used the same key – a key you could pick up at nearly any camping store.

I quickly decided on some Admiral Combination Cam Locks.  I wanted something simple that would allow me to open or close the hatches without worrying about having the key.  I will say that I had to adjust almost every lock, but that had nothing to do with the locks themselves and everything to do with the trailers’ need to bend, shorten, or contort the locking mechanism to work in all the storage areas.  I just needed a cut off wheel, a hammer, and a vice to make all the adjustments that were necessary.

Storage areas are important to keep locked, but they’re not the same as getting access to the trailer itself.

Door Lock

As I was finishing up my research on the storage locks, I became disturbed.  I read that most RVs have the same master key arrangement for their main handle as well.  Only the deadbolt is uniquely keyed.  I reflected on my time at the dealerships and realized that the salesperson unlocked every RV with one key.  It dawned on me that the key was a master key, and if I had an RV key, I could open any other camper’s handle.

Of course, the deadbolt is keyed – but who locks that when they leave their RV?  I know I didn’t.  I just locked the handle and moved on.

The solution was a RVLock V4.  It has keys, a keypad, and key fobs; after I got it, they released an add-on that allows you to lock or unlock via Bluetooth on your phone.  The code is what we use almost every time we want to unlock the trailer, though we carry the key (and a key fob) as alternatives.  To lock, we can simply hold down on the lock button for two seconds.  We’re literally down to needing zero keys to get into the camper.

Installation was easy minus a bit of interference with the screen door, which hadn’t been installed properly when the RV was built.  That being said, we made a few adjustments, and the screen door works better than it did before – and the entry door lock no longer interferes.

Results

We love the changes.  No more fumbling with keys while we’re trying to get hooked or unhooked.  No more worrying about taking keys when we head out or losing them at the beach.  More than that, we don’t have to worry about our stuff being stolen while we’re out.  Whether that was a real concern or not, we appreciate the peace of mind.

The post The Travel Trailer Project: RV Locks first appeared on Thor Projects.

Let me explain what a weight distribution hitch does, how it works, and what I needed to do to make the experience better.

What the Hitch Does

The function of it is to transfer the load of the trailer from the rear axle to the front axle.  It does that by keeping the truck and the trailer aligned rather than having the hitch sag under the weight of the trailer.  Two bars hold the sides of the Y on the hitch.  By holding them down, relative to the end of the Y where the hitch sits on the ball, it maintains the alignment – and transfers the weight to the front wheels.

To make the connection, most weight distribution hitches use chains to connect the bars and the trailer.  This is where things can go well – or not so well.

Hookup Brackets

The chains are connected to hookup brackets.  These brackets work like chain binders: they require a lot of force to get set, but once they’re set, they don’t require any force to stay.  They’re used to reduce the slack – or apply tension.  Once set, a pin is inserted to keep things in place.

The key to a hookup bracket – and to chain binders – is the length of throw.  That is, how far the chain is moved when bound.  The larger the movement, the more slack is taken out.

In my case, the old hookup brackets had a relatively small throw and were also hard to latch the chain on before binding it.  It meant things had to be just right for things to work.  The replacements have a longer throw – and they hold the chain better as you’re preparing to bind it.

Handling

As I continued to tow the trailer, I realized something just wasn’t right.  As it turns out, the “not right” was probably because the weight distribution hitch that we got with the package wasn’t right.  It was rated for 600 lbs of tongue weight.  The trailer is ~9,000 pounds dry, and the standard is that tongue weight is 10-15% of the overall weight.  In short, we really need a hitch rated for 900 lbs to 1,350 lbs of tongue weight.

The solution was a ProPride 3P hitch.  Not only does it come with a 1,400 lbs weight limit option, it substantially reduces sway.  There’s a long story about how it works, but let me just say that it works.  I used to be able to feel that back end of the truck and the camper getting swung around in the wind – and that all went away.

Our first trip after installing the system was through 60 mph crosswinds, and it was smooth as glass.  I was watching dust devils in the fields next to us, and the truck and trailer remained straight as an arrow.

Undercarriage

As an aside, that same trip, the undercarriage liner ripped off the trailer.  What I didn’t know when we bought the trailer is that the underbelly was basically one large sheet of corrugated plastic riveted to the bottom of the frame.  The rivets were basically placed at random.  In my case, they were far enough apart that the wind caught the liner and ripped it off – at least partially.  I took the rest off and threw it away, so it wasn’t dragging the entire way home.

My replacement includes screws, aluminum bars, H-channel, and sheets of corrugated plastic that are inserted into the H-channel and then secured on the sides with the aluminum bars.  The benefit of this approach is that we can take off and replace any section to be able to work on the internals, which wasn’t possible with the out of the factory solution.  Now, I have a permanent solution – and one that is maintainable.

In Summary

In short, the ProPride 3P system, though pricy, makes a real difference for handling while towing.  As an added benefit, hooking up is much easier.  Using over-center cams and rotation for the tensioners, it’s safer and easier – exactly what you want.

The post The Travel Trailer Project: Weight Distribution Hitch first appeared on Thor Projects.