<?xml version="1.0" encoding="UTF-8"?><rss version="2.0"
	xmlns:content="http://purl.org/rss/1.0/modules/content/"
	xmlns:wfw="http://wellformedweb.org/CommentAPI/"
	xmlns:dc="http://purl.org/dc/elements/1.1/"
	xmlns:atom="http://www.w3.org/2005/Atom"
	xmlns:sy="http://purl.org/rss/1.0/modules/syndication/"
	xmlns:slash="http://purl.org/rss/1.0/modules/slash/"
	>

<channel>
	<title>Lee Hulbert-Williams</title>
	<atom:link href="https://leehw.com/feed/" rel="self" type="application/rss+xml" />
	<link>https://leehw.com</link>
	<description></description>
	<lastBuildDate>Tue, 08 Apr 2025 11:33:17 +0000</lastBuildDate>
	<language>en-US</language>
	<sy:updatePeriod>
	hourly	</sy:updatePeriod>
	<sy:updateFrequency>
	1	</sy:updateFrequency>
	<generator>https://wordpress.org/?v=6.9.4</generator>
<site xmlns="com-wordpress:feed-additions:1">109596457</site>	<item>
		<title>Dopamine, Phone Addiction, and Why You Can’t Stop Scrolling</title>
		<link>https://leehw.com/dopamine-scrolling/</link>
		
		<dc:creator><![CDATA[LeeHW]]></dc:creator>
		<pubDate>Tue, 08 Apr 2025 11:20:13 +0000</pubDate>
				<category><![CDATA[All posts]]></category>
		<category><![CDATA[Self development]]></category>
		<category><![CDATA[dopamine]]></category>
		<category><![CDATA[phone addiction]]></category>
		<category><![CDATA[productivity]]></category>
		<category><![CDATA[scrolling]]></category>
		<guid isPermaLink="false">https://leehw.com/?p=2744</guid>

					<description><![CDATA[You know the feeling. You’ve just checked your phone — but five minutes later, you’re back on it. You didn’t even&#160;wantto pick it up. You’re not bored, especially. You’re not expecting a message. You just… picked it up. Again. Maybe you tell yourself it’s no big deal. But the hours add up. And part of you knows —&#160;this isn’t just a habit anymore. It’s compulsive. It’s automatic. And worst of all, it’s pulling your attention, your energy, and your goals out from under you. This is what most people call “phone addiction.” But what’s really happening is deeper — and more disturbing. It’s not just about willpower. It’s not even just about dopamine —&#160;that misunderstood molecule. It’s about how your brain has been trained, by your phone, and by the companies that run social media, to respond to a hidden system of rewards — even when it goes against what you&#160;think&#160;you want. Here’s how it works. Each time you check your phone, there’s a chance you’ll get a small, satisfying reward. Maybe it’s a notification, a like, a meme that feels interestingly true, a funny reel — or perhaps your personal kryptonite is a cat doing something ridiculous. You never know exactly what you’ll get. But sometimes… it’s just what you wanted. Now you might think you didn’t go looking for a cat video, so you didn’t really&#160;want&#160;it. But here’s where we need to define our terms. Psychologists have known since 1898 that certain consequences —&#160;certain things that happen right after we do something&#160;— have the power to increase the probability that we’ll do that thing again in the future (Thorndike, 1898). The first experiments on this were run by Edward Thorndike, who put hungry cats into puzzle boxes and timed how long it took them to escape. At first, the cats scratched and pushed randomly. But when a particular movement — like pressing a lever — led to freedom (and food), that behaviour started happening faster and more often. Thorndike called this the&#160;Law of Effect: behaviours followed by satisfying consequences become more likely. This principle became the foundation for what we now call&#160;reinforcement. It’s not about what you consciously want — it’s about what the environment delivers&#160;after&#160;your behaviour. Reinforcement learning As far back as the 1950s, researchers were showing that even subtle cues — a nod, a soft “mmm-hmm,” a smile — could shape people&#8217;s behaviour&#160;without them knowing it. In one classic set of studies, participants were asked to say words or make up sentences, seemingly at random. But when the experimenter quietly reinforced certain types of responses — say, words starting with “I” or sentences that expressed emotion — people started saying those more often. They were being reinforced, and their behaviour changed — but almost none of them could say why. If checking your phone is followed by something your brain tags as “good” — even mildly so — your likelihood of checking again increases. You don’t have to decide to want it. It’s not a conscious process. Like the participants in so many experiments, you might not even really know why you’re doing what you’re doing. Think about it: your phone is designed to be almost like a gambling machine in your pocket. Every notification, every &#8220;pull to refresh,&#8221; every quick check could reveal something exciting — or nothing at all. Sometimes you find exactly what you hoped for: a message from a friend, an interesting news story, or that perfect meme. But not always, and weirdly, it&#8217;s this very uncertainty that keeps you coming back. It’s what psychologists call a&#160;variable ratio schedule&#160;— and it literally is the same principle that keeps gamblers at slot machines. Again, decades of research on reinforcement has shown that if we want to make it so that the participant can’t easily stop the behaviour, we need the reinforcement to seem almost random. You don’t get the payoff every time. But maybe&#160;this time… That’s what makes it hard to stop. That’s what makes it feel addictive. Dopamine isn&#8217;t a pleasure chemical And here’s where dopamine comes in — though not in the way most people think. It’s often called the “pleasure chemical,” but dopamine isn’t really about pleasure. It’s about&#160;reinforcement. When something unexpected but rewarding happens — like a funny meme, a message, or an intriguing headline — dopamine tells your brain, “That was good. Remember how that happened.” It strengthens the connection between the behaviour (checking your phone) and the reward that followed. What’s more, dopamine spikes often show up&#160;before&#160;the reward — in anticipation. That’s why just picking up your phone can feel urgent, even when you’re not expecting anything in particular. Your brain has learned that&#160;something interesting might happen. And that possibility alone is enough to trigger motivation. That’s how reinforcement works: not by conscious decision, but by shaping what feels worth doing next. Why you don&#8217;t feel in control What’s my point? The human nervous system doesn’t always wait for permission from your conscious mind. It learns patterns. It tracks consequences. It adapts. And that’s exactly what social media companies know. The algorithms they use are designed specifically to detect which types of posts or interactions are reinforcing for you personally —&#160;which ones increase&#160;your&#160;screen time. So that’s why we scroll. In some sense that&#8217;s why we use social media so much. But that’s only half the story. The other half has to do with what behaviour analysts call&#160;verbal behaviour. Verbal behaviour is more than just talking aloud. When we use language — whether speaking, thinking, or writing — we&#8217;re engaging in a special kind of behaviour that can change how we interact with the world. Through language, we can create rules for ourselves (&#8220;I should spend less time on my phone&#8221;), set goals (&#8220;I want to read more books&#8221;), and even shape our identity (&#8220;I&#8217;m the kind of person who gets things done&#8221;). These verbal rules become part of how we navigate life. But here&#8217;s where it gets interesting: verbal rules don&#8217;t always match up with our directly reinforced behaviours. Think about trying to learn a new sport. You might understand the instructions perfectly (&#8220;Keep your eye on the ball&#8221;), but your body still needs to learn through direct experience. The same principles apply to most things we do. We can tell ourselves all the right things, create perfect plans, but that doesn’t mean we’ve trained ourselves to do the right thing. So when you say, “I&#160;want&#160;to stop scrolling,” and yet you keep doing it… that conflict isn’t a mystery. It’s exactly what behavioural science predicts. One part of you is operating by conscious rule — a goal, a value, a plan. The other is responding to a reinforcement schedule that’s shaping you behind the scenes. And the reinforcement schedule often wins. It’s worth saying here that this isn’t about two separate systems in the brain. Behavioural science doesn’t provide much evidence for that. What we’re dealing with is the same system responding in&#160;two different ways&#160;— sometimes to the direct consequences of what we do, and sometimes to language which we also learned through consequences, but is more distant somehow. Verbal behaviour&#160;— including self-talk, reasoning, planning, and even the story we tell ourselves about who we are —&#160;is usually more conscious. It often feels deliberate. But the effects of verbal behaviour on other things we do are often quite weak. When verbal rules point one way (“I should stay focused”), but the environment is reinforcing something else (quick dopamine from scrolling), you feel conflicted. That’s not a you problem. That’s a predictable clash between two different kinds of behavioural learning. If you experience this type of clash between what you&#160;think&#160;you want and how you&#160;actually&#160;behave, it’s not a moral failing. It’s not even unusual. But trying to use verbal behaviour — trying to talk yourself out of bad habits —&#160;is like trying to empty a bathtub with a teaspoon. It can work, but it’s going to take a lot of patience and hard work. What you really need is to understand the real game that’s being played with your attention — so you can&#160;take the rules back into your own hands. Because once you see what’s shaping you, you can start shaping your life — on purpose. So What Can You Do About It? Understanding the mechanics behind compulsive scrolling is the first step — but it’s not the whole journey. If your behaviour is being shaped by reinforcement patterns, not just conscious decisions, then change has to start at the&#160;level of experience, not just insight. That means altering the&#160;environment&#160;that’s training your behaviour. Here are a few starting points: Your phone is always available. That’s part of the problem. So add friction. Try placing it in another room when you’re working, or using app blockers that delay access rather than just restrict it. If you have to wait 30 seconds to open Instagram, the dopamine loop weakens. If you can have some periods where you go cold turkey, even better. Don’t just delete apps. Replace them with actions that&#160;feel good. A short walk. A funny podcast. A quick journal entry. Behavioural science is clear: if you want to reduce one behaviour, make another one easier&#160;and&#160;more rewarding. If you can figure out why the phone is reinforcing you might even come up with something that gives you the same function. You won’t go from five hours a day to zero. But you&#160;can&#160;reduce 5 hours to 4.5, then to 4. Track it. Reinforce small wins. Behaviour change is gradual — and what matters is the trend, not perfection. Verbal rules are weaker than reinforcement — but they’re not useless. Make your rules simple, vivid, and personal. “No phone before coffee.” “10 pages before TikTok.” Write them down. Say them aloud. Pair them with actions you want to reinforce. Every time you catch yourself scrolling,&#160;notice it. Not with guilt, but curiosity. “What just happened?” “What reward was I hoping for?” Awareness doesn’t stop the behaviour — but it’s what allows you to start reshaping it. It sounds ridiculous, but you could do worse than treating yourself like a loved pet you need to train. References]]></description>
		
		
		
		<post-id xmlns="com-wordpress:feed-additions:1">2744</post-id>	</item>
		<item>
		<title>In Defense of Metaphors: Why Figurative Language is Essential in Self-Help</title>
		<link>https://leehw.com/in-defense-of-metaphors/</link>
		
		<dc:creator><![CDATA[LeeHW]]></dc:creator>
		<pubDate>Tue, 06 Aug 2024 14:17:24 +0000</pubDate>
				<category><![CDATA[All posts]]></category>
		<category><![CDATA[Self development]]></category>
		<category><![CDATA[coaching]]></category>
		<category><![CDATA[coaching psychology]]></category>
		<category><![CDATA[self-help]]></category>
		<guid isPermaLink="false">https://leehw.com/?p=2621</guid>

					<description><![CDATA[&#8220;Metaphors have a way of holding the most truth in the least space.&#8221; Orson Scott Card Metaphors are everywhere. We talk about having a “full plate” when we’re busy, “breaking the ice” when starting conversations, “jumping through hoops” to describe bureaucratic challenges, “lighting a fire&#8221; to motivate someone, and “weathering the storm” when facing difficult times. In self-help, metaphors are particularly prevalent, shaping how we think about personal growth, relationships, and even our relationship with our own thoughts and emotions. But applied psychologists can face a difficulty when it comes to metaphorical language because our professional identity centres on being&#160;scientist&#160;practitioners. Everyday metaphors often seem like the very opposite of a scientific explanation. When a physicist describes an object falling due to gravity, they rely on equations and laws that predict the object&#8217;s behaviour with pinpoint accuracy. (See what I did there?) Physicists do not say that “gravity is the silent choreographer, scripting the dance of the cosmos, pulling every star and stone into its intricate waltz”. Well, not many physicists, anyway. The language of science is designed to minimise ambiguity and maximise clarity (i.e. it aims at precision). Furthermore, scientific theories gain traction to the extent that they are applicable to many different circumstances and contexts (which we can call scope). But here&#8217;s the thing: metaphors, despite their lack of literal accuracy, are indispensable tools in self-help and personal development. Literal language, while clear, often fails to capture the nuances of subjective human experience. The descriptions are often far too technical — not ‘human’ enough —&#160;for us to memorise and apply. Metaphors, on the other hand, often can provide a bridge between the abstract and the experiential, allowing us to grasp complex ideas in relatable terms. Is all language metaphorical We could argue that all of language is metaphorical. Words do not have intrinsic meanings but derive significance from their relationships to other words and concepts. This relational aspect often relies on metaphorical extensions. For example, the word &#8220;grasp&#8221; originally meant to physically seize something but it has been metaphorically extended to refer to the understanding we can have of a concept or idea. What’s more, our use of language is grounded metaphorically in bodily experience. When we talk about emotions, we often use physical metaphors &#8220;I&#8217;m feeling up&#8221; refers to happiness, whilst &#8220;I&#8217;m feeling down&#8221; describes sadness. Let’s take an applied example to see how important this can be in coaching and therapy. Imagine a client is trying to use something inherently rewarding such as a cookie to persuade himself to complete some work. Compare two descriptions: “The client is employing a fixed-ratio (FR-1) reinforcement schedule by using positive reinforcement, where the target behaviour of writing a 500-word section of the report (B) is followed by the delivery of a cookie (C) as a reinforcing stimulus, contingent on the antecedent condition of reaching a ‘writing’ time slot in his calendar (A).The client had previously employed self-talk through an introspective mechanism not easily amenable to objective measurement.” “It&#8217;s a bit like training an elephant. Trying to get the elephant to do something it doesn’t want to do, just by applying brute force, is very difficult. You’re struggling with a more powerful animal. But if you reward the elephant each time it makes a move in the right direction, and reward him with something he really likes, soon he&#160;wants&#160;to go in that direction and you can stop struggling.” Which one is closest to a scientific description? Which is most likely to remembered and applied by a client? Which is most metaphorical? The answers are doubtless obvious. Note that the first description is also filled with metaphors —&#160;they’re just&#160;dead&#160;metaphors we now take for granted. For instance, ‘schedule’ comes from late Latin schedula meaning a slip of paper, diminutive of scheda, in turn from the Greek skhedē meaning ‘papyrus leaf’. So the idea of ‘scheduling’ is related to the idea of listing things in order on a papyrus leaf. So yes, all of language is metaphorical. But through usage, some metaphors become so entrenched (another metaphor) or dead (and another) that we cease to treat them as metaphors. I am not a professional linguist, and this description is doubtless imperfect. But you get the idea. The Stickiness and Utility of Metaphors One of the reasons metaphors are so powerful is their stickiness. It’s often possible to come up with a fairly short metaphorical description that gets at a truth much more succinctly than any scientifically accurate description ever could. It’s something like the 80:20 rule. A highly metaphorical description loses some resolution, but it might lose even more verbosity. If you lose 20% of the detail, but in doing so the description becomes 80% shorter, you might be on to a winning formula. On balance, being succinct means being easier to remember. This ease of remembering or stickiness is incredibly useful in coaching and self-help, where the goal is often to change thought patterns or behaviours. If you can’t remember a new idea, you can’t apply it. A new idea needs to feel salient and to pop readily back into memory whenever a relevant circumstance arises. The Idea of ‘Vibing’ At risk of flogging a dead horse (yes, I know) let’s take a second or two to consider the word “vibe” — a word the Guardian&#160;describes&#160;as “the most overused word of our era”. Wiktionary gives us this definition: (informal,&#160;originally&#160;New Age&#160;jargon,&#160;often in the&#160;plural)&#160;An&#160;atmosphere&#160;or&#160;aura&#160;felt to belong to a person, place or thing.&#160;[c. 1960s]&#160;&#160;&#160;The couple canceled their night out when they got a bad&#160;vibe&#160;from the new babysitter Like its cousin Wikipedia, Wiktionary is crowd sourced — written and edited by volunteers. Note that the many people who have worked on that page seemingly couldn’t do any better than to define this word in terms of two more metaphors. This isn’t surprising. It really is very difficult to provide technical and literal descriptions — scientific descriptions — for subjective human experience. Making metaphor respectable We’re left with two separate reasons for not denigrating the use of metaphor in coaching and self-help: Despite their lack of literal accuracy, metaphors can be useful. The trick for us as professional coaches and psychologists is to align our metaphors with insights from our scientific knowledge so that if they are not a perfect description, our metaphors are at least directionally accurate.]]></description>
		
		
		
		<post-id xmlns="com-wordpress:feed-additions:1">2621</post-id>	</item>
		<item>
		<title>The Golden Mean: Balancing the Scale of Evidence-Based Practice</title>
		<link>https://leehw.com/golden-mean-practice/</link>
					<comments>https://leehw.com/golden-mean-practice/#respond</comments>
		
		<dc:creator><![CDATA[LeeHW]]></dc:creator>
		<pubDate>Mon, 29 Apr 2024 17:35:30 +0000</pubDate>
				<category><![CDATA[All posts]]></category>
		<guid isPermaLink="false">https://leehw.com/?p=2617</guid>

					<description><![CDATA[Virtues lie between two opposing excesses. So argued Aristotle in his Nicomachean ethics, over 2300 years ago. So, courage can be understood as the mean between recklessness and cowardice. Temperance falls between self-indulgence and insensibility. Pride is found between vanity and undue humility. One of the brilliant features of this analytic framework is that it breaks us out of our habitual way of seeing virtues as simply ‘more’ of something. Courage is good, and so one should surely be as brave as possible. But no, says Aristotle. Because if we push it too far courage becomes recklessness. In a conversation with Dr Shane McLoughlin, a good friend and colleague, this idea of Aristotle’s Golden Mean came up, followed by a discussion of the concept of evidence-based practice in applied psychology. It was perhaps the proximity in time that made me realise how relevant each is to the other. We are inclined to think of evidence-based practice as a virtue —&#160;a mono-polar virtue. More evidence-based practice is good. Requiring more evidence is good. What if this is just the sort of unsophisticated thinking Aristotle was warning us against? The danger of requiring too little evidence in psychological practice is clear: it opens the door to charlatanism. Practices based on insufficient evidence can lead to ineffective or harmful interventions. For instance, treatments that have not been rigorously tested may fail to provide relief, or worse, they might cause psychological, emotional, or financial harm to clients. In coaching psychology, ineffective intervention could hold people back in their professional lives, resulting in considerable lost earnings, not to mention undermining the credibility of our profession and eroding public trust in psychological services. What is often less obvious is that demanding&#160;excessive&#160;evidence before implementing any intervention can also be very detrimental. Human beings are complicated. Actually, to be more technically precise, we’re&#160;complex. There are non-linear interactions between different features of human behaviour, with adaptation and feedback both within and between individual humans. There is substantial individual variation between people, a lot of this driven by the different life experiences we’ve lived up to this point. Even our best and most well-replicated models to predict behaviour in a given situation typically leave about half the variance unexplained. We will never have anything remotely like a dead-cert as a behaviour change technique. We have techniques that work well for many people in many circumstances. But we will never have a guarantee that a selected intervention will help this person for this issue. Most of the evidence informing psychological interventions is derived from group-based studies where we examine the average change in a group based on exposure to the intervention. What’s more, these group-design studies are set up with a specific outcome or set of outcomes in mind. If a client turns up wanting to achieve some specific goal, there simply might not be a study that (a) includes participants very much like this client in temperament, life experiences, and demographics and (b) where the outcomes measured are precisely the same as the one the client desires. In fact, I would say we almost never have this type of perfectly relevant evidence. When people want a psychological intervention —&#160;coaching perhaps to reach some professional goal or to lose weight — if those who care about evidence-based practice say ‘I can’t help you’ because we believe we have too little evidence, most clients will not just give up. Most of them seek help elsewhere. And guess who they’ll end up seeing? By definition, clients will end up seeing&#160;someone who doesn’t care about evidence-based practice. If they can’t or don’t want to find someone with less caution, then&#160;perhaps&#160;they’ll leave the itch unscratched, but even that has its cost —&#160;goals unachieved, unhealthy weight still carried, life satisfaction lower than it might have been. I would argue that Aristotle’s Golden Mean applies just as well to Evidence-based Practice: The virtue of evidence-based practice lies at the mean between charlatanism and over-caution. But if we are to offer help to our clients based on less psychological evidence than we would like, how can we claim to be doing so ethically? The formula is already woven through the fabric of our culture and indeed our practice: informed consent. Financial advisors are always necessarily working from very inadequate evidence. Economic and political events over coming months and years will affect the markets in ways they cannot predict with anything even remotely approaching certainty. And what do you hear at the end of every advert for a financial product? “Investments are subject to market conditions and can fluctuate in value, both upwards and downwards, and you may not get back the original amount invested. Past performance is not indicative of future results.” The British Psychological Society’s Practice Guidelines have some excellent advice on gaining informed consent, including that: Many psychologists already appreciate the above, I know. I’ve never seen a formal argument using Aristotle’s framework, but the broad point isn’t new. All I’m advocating is that we consider anew what we really mean by evidence-based practice, and perhaps those advocates and dissenters who have sometimes gone to war with each other in pages of our learned journals might come to a speak in a common language.]]></description>
		
					<wfw:commentRss>https://leehw.com/golden-mean-practice/feed/</wfw:commentRss>
			<slash:comments>0</slash:comments>
		
		
		<post-id xmlns="com-wordpress:feed-additions:1">2617</post-id>	</item>
		<item>
		<title>Exploring the truth behind inspirational sayings</title>
		<link>https://leehw.com/truth/</link>
					<comments>https://leehw.com/truth/#respond</comments>
		
		<dc:creator><![CDATA[LeeHW]]></dc:creator>
		<pubDate>Thu, 10 Aug 2023 08:23:09 +0000</pubDate>
				<category><![CDATA[All posts]]></category>
		<category><![CDATA[Self development]]></category>
		<category><![CDATA[coaching]]></category>
		<category><![CDATA[epistemology]]></category>
		<category><![CDATA[self-help]]></category>
		<category><![CDATA[self-improvement]]></category>
		<guid isPermaLink="false">https://leehw.com/?p=2527</guid>

					<description><![CDATA[&#8220;Your attitude determines your reality.&#8221; &#8220;Fear is the only thing holding you back.&#8221; &#8220;Gratitude is the key to happiness.&#8221; Self-help is full of such pithy statements. I bet you’ve seen hundreds of them. They’re usually presented as great insights, key ideas, or even as fundamental principles of the universe. Almost all of these ideas can be shown to be false with just a little analysis. But before we dismiss them all, we need to delve into an arcane-sounding question: What do we really mean by ‘true’? This question is at the core of epistemology — a long-standing branch of philosophy. And though it may seem incredible, there are at least half a dozen respected answers to the question ‘what do we mean when we say something is true?’ Correspondence theory of truth In the modern world, we are most familiar with the correspondence theory of truth, which is most popular in mainstream science. It claims that our theories and models are true if there is a correspondence between our models and the phenomena they claim to describe. Take Newton’s second law of motion as an example: [latex] force = mass \times acceleration [/latex] The correspondence theory says that the theory is true because there really are masses in the real world, and forces too, and that the force required for a given acceleration is proportional to the mass. In other words, the parts of Newton’s theory&#160;correspond&#160;to phenomena in the real world. Newton’s second law holds true for all day-to-day phenomena like bowling balls and car crashes. But at extremely high speeds we need to take account of relativistic effects. So perhaps we turn to one of Einstein’s relativistic equations of motion instead. [latex] F = \frac{d}{dt}\left(\frac{mv}{\sqrt{1 &#8211; \frac{v^2}{c^2}}}\right) [/latex] They have a better correspondence with what happens in the real world, even when objects are moving at lightning speeds, and so we say that they are more true. Einstein’s equations take account of the speed of the object as a proportion of the speed of light. They really do have better correspondence with reality. They really are more true. But when the object in question is travelling at day-to-day speeds, the object’s speed as a proportion of the speed of light is nearly zero, and so Einstein’s equations simplify down and show that Newton’s equations are extremely close approximations. Let’s take a simpler example. Say we have a theory that “to turn on the light in any given room, you should flick the light switch”. This theory is clearly true, most of the time. But the theory is also inadequate, or even&#160;untrue in certain situations.&#160;For example, how often have you tried to flick a light switch during a power cut, or when a fuse had blown, or when a lightbulb was broken? So if we wanted a better theory we might try something like this: In most modern buildings, built to standard building codes as applied in the majority of developed countries on the planet Earth, where the lighting is provided by means of an electrical circuit, assuming that the power to the building is fully in operation, that the electrical circuit has been well maintained, that the bulb is in good working order, and the local power grid… Just like with Einstein’s theory, the more we try to make the theory&#160;truer&#160;the more we have to include a representation in our theory of all the different parts of the real world which might be relevant. Our theory needs to&#160;correspond&#160;with the structure of the real world, in all it’s complex glory. Pragmatic theory of truth In contrast, the pragmatic truth criterion is closely linked to the functionalist perspective, which asserts that the truth of a statement depends on its practical consequences and the utility it offers within a specific context. Functionalism places a strong emphasis on the role of language in guiding action and decision-making. To know whether something is true we must have first established a goal. If believing in and following a given theory leads us to the successful completion of that goal then the theory is true — according to a pragmatist. Let’s return to Newton. Imagine a forensic investigator examining the scene of a car crash, using Newton’s theories to reach her conclusions. These theories never let her down. They always permit calculation of the correct answers for all practical purposes. She never reaches the wrong conclusion. So from a pragmatic perspective, Newton’s laws are&#160;true&#160;in this context. They’re not mere approximations. They’re not poor cousin’s of Einstein’s equations. They simply&#160;are&#160;true in this context&#160;because they permit our investigator to acheive her goal of finding out how the crash happened. Adopting a pragmatic theory of truth brings another interesting side-effect. If a theory is only true to the extent that it engenders effective action towards a specified goal, then it would make sense that simpler theories which are easier to remember and apply are in some sense&#160;truer. William James, one of the grandfathers of psychology, recognised this. He knew, as any psychologist should, that the human ability to choose amongst a huge number of subtly different and complex theories, to pick exactly the right one for the current situation, and then to apply that complex theory accurately, is … limited. Simpler theories are often easier to remember and apply. They therefore might be expected more often to lead to the desired outcome. And so they are ‘truer’ all other things being equal. Those self-help theories Okay, that’s quite enough navel-gazing philososphy for one blog post. Let’s get back to one of those claims self-help gurus love so much. Earl Nightingale, one of the most influential self-help authors and speakers of the last hundred years, often repeated the claim that our attitude determines everything in our lives. “It is our attitude toward life that determines life’s attitude toward us. We get back what we put out.” — Earl Nightingale He paraphrased this insight at least half a dozen ways, but each time the claim was clear and uncompromising. Taken as a literal, scientific description of people’s lives this is clearly false. We do not necessarily get back what we put out. Millions of people suffer violence, ill health, or just plain old bad luck for reasons entirely outside their control. It would be trivially easy to show that Nightingale’s claim is untrue. But again, what do we mean by ‘true’? Such a theory plainly fails when measured against the correspondence truth criterion. It fails to take into account all manner of relevant circumstances that have a bearing on a person’s life. It’s too simple. The theory doesn&#8217;t model the various parts which correspond to the different phenomena of life. But, belief (or not) in such a statement bears a striking resemblance to what psychologists call locus of control. Locus of control refers to an individual&#8217;s beliefs regarding the degree to which they have control over the outcomes and events in their life. If we believe our successes and failures are largely down to our own actions and decisions we have internal locus of control. If we attribute our successes and failures primarily to external factors beyond our control, such as luck, fate, or external circumstances we have external locus of control. We have lots of evidence that clearly shows that people who have an internal locus of control are happier with their lives, more content with their jobs, and more successful at various different endeavours. There are hundreds of studies on it and the overall message couldn’t be clearer: believing that you are in control of what happens to you (perhaps believing that it’s down to your ‘attitude’) is a good thing — assuming you want to be happy and successful. And the strength of the relationship is pretty impressive (correlation r values in the region of .3 for several outcomes). As I said, we are all now most familiar with the correspondence theory of truth, and so of course we are inclined to say it isn’t literally true that your own attitude is the only determinant of your state in life. Many people really are victims of circumstance, having been brought up in poor conditions or having been bullied, abused, or traumatised. But assuming that your goal is to be happier in life, to succeed, and to enjoy your job, then it is pragmatically true if you desire success, happiness, job satisfaction etc. That is, holding this belief increases your chances of getting those things. And since a pithy statement like “your attitude determines your reality” is more likely to be remembered than some essay-length theory, and is therefore more likely to guide successful action, we might even say that the short glib version is more true than a nuanced version. Brief, catchy, kind-of-right-ish rules for living might be more true than we usually admit. It all depends on how you define truth.]]></description>
		
					<wfw:commentRss>https://leehw.com/truth/feed/</wfw:commentRss>
			<slash:comments>0</slash:comments>
		
		
		<post-id xmlns="com-wordpress:feed-additions:1">2527</post-id>	</item>
		<item>
		<title>Finding meaning in life</title>
		<link>https://leehw.com/finding-meaning-in-life/</link>
		
		<dc:creator><![CDATA[LeeHW]]></dc:creator>
		<pubDate>Mon, 06 Apr 2020 12:37:00 +0000</pubDate>
				<category><![CDATA[All posts]]></category>
		<category><![CDATA[Self development]]></category>
		<category><![CDATA[happiness]]></category>
		<category><![CDATA[meaning]]></category>
		<category><![CDATA[purpose]]></category>
		<guid isPermaLink="false">https://www.leehw.com/?p=2135</guid>

					<description><![CDATA[What do humans need to be happy in life? The argument has sparked numerous debates for centuries. Some have argued that we can be happy so long as our basic needs for food and shelter and social connection are taken care of. Others have argued that we can be happy even in the face of indescribable suffering so long as we know how to control and guide our own minds. Over the last 70 years, more and more psychotherapists have come to the conclusion that human beings cannot be happy without a sense of meaning in life. I think this goes too far. Meaning is only&#160;one&#160;of the paths to happiness. But how does one discover or create a sense of meaning? Many thought experiments and other exercises have been developed, each as ridiculous-sounding as the last. So let&#8217;s jump in! [First, a gentle warning: No matter how safe, simple, and effective they may be, exercises which get you to reflect on your life and your psychological well-being bring with them the risk of exacerbating existing problems. If you have any worries about your mental health, speak to a professional before engaging in these sorts of exercises.] What would you suffer for? If I were to offer you a bowl of ice cream for free, there is a fair chance you would take it. If I were to tell you that you can have this same bowl of ice cream only after climbing Everest, I&#8217;m going to bet your interest in the bowl of ice cream would evaporate. Nothing is free. Everything has to be paid for. For every profit in one thing, payment in some other thing. For every life, a death. — Ted Hughes The cruel truth of life is that we nearly always have to pay a price for anything we really want. This isn&#8217;t because we live in a capitalist society. It is the state of nature. If you don&#8217;t believe me, sign up for a wilderness survival weekend. Want enough of those delicious red berries to make a meal? Then you&#8217;re going to be on your hands and knees picking them for an hour and a half. Sometimes the payment comes in the form of opportunity cost. We have only so much time, and so many resources. Choose to spend on one thing, and you won&#8217;t be able to spend them on another. Pat was driving, and as we passed the turnoff for a shopping center she invited us to picture a four-burner stove. “Gas or electric?” Hugh asked, and she said that it didn’t matter. This was not a real stove but a symbolic one, used to prove a point at a management seminar she’d once attended. “One burner represents your family, one is your friends, the third is your health, and the fourth is your work.” The gist, she said, was that in order to be successful you have to cut off one of your burners. And in order to be really successful you have to cut off two. Pat has her own business, a good one that’s allowing her to retire at fifty-five. She owns three houses, and two cars, but, even without the stuff, she seems like a genuinely happy person. And that alone constitutes success. I asked which two burners she had cut off, and she said that the first to go had been family. After that, she switched off her health. “How about you?” I thought for a moment, and said that I’d cut off my friends. “It’s nothing to be proud of, but after meeting Hugh I quit making an effort.” “And what else?” she asked. “Health, I guess.” Hugh’s answer was work. — David Sedaris Is life really as grim as all that? Well perhaps not, but there is certainly a grain of truth in it. That&#8217;s why in working out what is personally meaningful for you, it&#8217;s helpful to reflect on what you would be willing to suffer for. (And don&#8217;t forget that you might be like Hugh in this story, and that&#8217;s a perfectly valid choice.) Pick one or two of the questions below, and spend a while really thinking about them. Is there anything so important to you that you would be willing to live in poverty for it? Is there anything you would want to do or be in life even if it caused you physical pain? What would you still want to do or be in life even if you would likely lose friends over it? You can easily come up with more questions of this type for yourself. Just think of something that you would consider really quite unpleasant, and then try to see if there&#8217;s anything so important and meaningful to you that you would be willing to make you want to put up with that suffering. You have to leave the house Imagine you woke up tomorrow and your life had changed in a strange and miraculous way. There on the doormat is a letter from a lawyer explaining that some distant relative you didn&#8217;t even know you had has died and left you a vast sum of money. It&#8217;s enough money that you will never need to work again, but there is a catch. Your unknown benefactor was eccentric, and has decided that for you to qualify for the money, you have to leave your house from nine to five every day. He&#8217;s clearly had legal advice too, because there is some small print. The lawyer clarifies. You can go anywhere, and do anything, but you&#8217;re not allowed to spend the daytime in any house or room you own or rent. What would you do with your days? Where would you go? How would you fill your time each day if you didn&#8217;t&#160;have todo anything? Why? If you&#8217;re mind immediately says something like &#8216;watch TV&#8217; or &#8216;sip margaritas on a Caribbean beach&#8217; take a moment to ask yourself honestly whether you wouldn&#8217;t get bored after a few weeks or months. How would you want to be remembered? Most of us hate to think about our own mortality. But as the saying goes, there are only two things certain in this life, death and taxes. The ancient Greek historian Herodotus gave his readers an account of a meeting of two great historical figures — a meeting which could never have happened in real life — to illustrate the importance of considering one&#8217;s mortality. The story tells of Croesus, the last king of Lydia and wealthy beyond all comparison. Most western languages have adopted his name to give a common saying: &#8220;as rich as Croesus&#8221;. At the height of his power, he was visited by Solon, one of the Seven Sages of Greece, recognised as wise by all, and one of the statesmen who brought democracy to Athens. Croesus asks Solon a number of questions, clearly fishing for compliments about how well he has got his life together. Imagine the scene. A lavish palace, exquisite food, more money than one could ever spend. And Croesus wants to know, in essence, whether Solon thinks he is the happiest man in the world. Solon doesn&#8217;t oblige. Instead, he gives a list of people whose lives might have seemed mediocre at the time, but who clearly did live a good life if you look back on the whole of it. He concludes that &#8220;you should count no man happy until he dies.” Many other cultures recognize the importance of thinking about death to help us get perspective on life. Many Buddhists adopt the practice of meditating on death (Maranasati)&#160;to increase their sense of &#8216;spiritual urgency&#8217; (Samvega). To simplify in a way my Buddhist friends would probably hate: meditating on death can motivate you to sort your life out. If you have the stomach for it and you don&#8217;t think it will cause you too much mental angst, why not try a modern exercise based on these ancient ideas? Imagine that it&#8217;s years from now, and you are somehow looking down on your own funeral. You might find it helps to close your eyes and really see yourself. You can see friends and loved ones all looking sad, and listening to somebody stood at the front giving a eulogy. What would you like them to say about you? About your life? Don&#8217;t focus on what you think they&#160;will&#160;say, because this will just make the pessimistic part of your mind take over. (&#8220;He was always such a pain in the &#8230;&#8221;) Try to focus on what you&#160;wish&#160;they would say about who you were. The point is not to evaluate your life to date. The point is to try to figure out what you would feel is meaningful, looking forwards. Do you need to find meaning? None of these exercises is a silver bullet. None of them has the power to transform our lives in five minutes. But if you found any of these exercises useful, why not try them again a few weeks from now, and see if your mind still gives you the same answers? Or perhaps look for other similar exercises to try out. If these exercises leave you cold, don&#8217;t panic! There are a number of ways of seeking happiness in life. Finding meaning in life is one of those ways. But people differ in their &#8216;need for meaning&#8217; (Abeyta &#38; Routledge, 2018). If meaning related exercises like the ones on this page don&#8217;t do it for you, it may just be that you are in the group of people whose happiness doesn&#8217;t depend on having a meaningful life. What else might be a path to happiness? Trying to live in line with your authentic self, learning to savour pleasant experiences, making more and better social connections&#8230; the paths to happiness are many and varied. References Abeyta, A. A., &#38; Routledge, C. (2018). The need for meaning and religiosity: An individual differences approach to assessing existential needs and the relation with religious commitment, beliefs, and experiences. Personality and Individual Differences, 123, 6-13.&#160;https://doi.org/10.1016/j.paid.2017.10.038]]></description>
		
		
		
		<post-id xmlns="com-wordpress:feed-additions:1">2135</post-id>	</item>
		<item>
		<title>Arguing with the universe</title>
		<link>https://leehw.com/arguing-with-the-universe/</link>
		
		<dc:creator><![CDATA[LeeHW]]></dc:creator>
		<pubDate>Fri, 06 Apr 2018 13:28:39 +0000</pubDate>
				<category><![CDATA[All posts]]></category>
		<category><![CDATA[Self development]]></category>
		<category><![CDATA[pragmatism]]></category>
		<category><![CDATA[science]]></category>
		<category><![CDATA[truth]]></category>
		<guid isPermaLink="false">http://www.leehw.com/?p=1668</guid>

					<description><![CDATA[Social media provide a strange playground for a psychologist. You get to watch people interacting, like a fly on the wall, much less intrusively than in real life. Each platform has its idiosyncrasies. Facebook ‘friendships’ mostly follow real-life ones, whilst Twitter and Reddit are dominated by relationships that exist only in cyberspace. Over the last couple of years, people have become more and more worried that these media may be causing or exacerbating a social divide. For example, in the political sphere, the centre-right and centre-left voices are being drowned out by the far-left and far-right. Numerous scholars and commentators have blamed social media. There might be some truth to the claim, though surely there are other factors too. there is one common ethical oversight prevalent at many tech and modern companies today which has caused massive damage to our society: using popularity as a proxy for accuracy. — Jason Thalken (@JasonThalken) April 3, 2018 The problem with social media is that they amplify a tendency already born into the human species to substitute popularity for truth. Human beings love to be right. And on social media, the number of clicks, likes, and retweets seem to be a readily quantifiable metric of rightness. In the cold light of day, common sense tells us this is wrong. In the words widely attributed to Waldemar Lysiak: If the majority is always right, let’s eat shit. Millions of flies can’t be wrong. Well, yes, but social media are not the cold light of day, and many leading twitterers seem to have a common sense deficit. Ultimately it may come back to this: Most people, most of the time, treat discussions and arguments like a sort of sporting competition. If your team beats mine in a well-refereed game of rugby, then in some real sense your team is the better team (at least for now). The truth being asserted here (which is the better team) is pretty much the only determinant of the metric (who won). We could argue about my team having injuries, but then isn’t the ability to play safely and avoid injury part of the concept of ‘better’? In most arguments and discussions however, the outcome of the argument is not only determined, not even primarily determined, by the Truth. Just think of a legal case going before a judge. You might have been a direct eye witness to a brutal assault, yet the defendant is rich and can afford the country’s best lawyer. Thus, he escapes punishment by winning the argument in court. Now, he’s not guilty in the eyes of the law. That’s the legal ‘truth’, but is it the Truth? There are two things going on here, the underlying Truth, and the rhetoric. (The latter term can be taken as including theories, models, statements, and arguments which make claims about the Truth.) The greater the distance between the rhetoric and the Truth, the harder the speaker or rhetorician is going to have to work. To borrow an example from Prof Michael Drout of Wheaton College, you’re going to have to work a lot harder to convince people that gravel makes a tasty snack than you would to convince them of the same claim with respect to a Snickers bar. In his Speech Act Theory, J.L. Austin calls this word-to-world fit. The sentence, “gravel is tasty” simply doesn’t describe the world well. (Given that ‘world’ is sometimes used to refer to the people of the world, and given that many knowledge claims are about phenomena beyond our globe, I prefer word-to-universe fit.) Austin and Drout are interested in such issues at the purely rhetorical level. They study the art of persuasion through language, and having a reasonable degree of word-to-universe fit is needed if one is to persuade. But in a sense, rhetoric is the study of how far one can stretch that word-to-universe fit before people stop believing you. Often, when discussing or arguing over some issue, we too get trapped at the rhetorical level; we have the experience of arguing with another human being (or maybe several of them) and we imagine that if only they would concede defeat, we would be proven right. This idea is factually and demonstrably false. How many times have you given up and let someone win an argument even though you were still sure they were wrong? Perhaps you’ve had the opposite experience, of arguing successfully for a position you didn’t really believe in. Certainly, you’ve heard of many cases where persuasive arguments put an innocent person behind bars. Winning an argument says almost nothing about the word-to-universe fit of your theory or idea. This insight is precisely what invented science. The Enlightenment thinkers, like Bacon, realised that instead of arguing with each other and allowing a win to make us falsely confident in our own knowledge, we should instead argue with the universe. This was the birth of empiricism, and over the last few hundred years it has taken us from scratching an existence in a famine-and-disease-infested world, to living like kings. (I mean this literally. The average westerner today has a better standard of living than Louis XIV.) The realisation that our conception of Truth should be defined in dialogue with the universe, not simply by whoever has the most power or money, dragged us out of the dark ages. Science is powerful. Cars, trucks, tractors, nuclear bombs and the internet have re-shaped the world, both physically and socially. The reason science is powerful is because it works. It provides descriptions of the universe with unusually tight word-to-universe fit. &#8220;Once released, things fall toward the ground,&#8221; allows you to predict the behaviour of an arrow or a falling apple to reasonable degree. You know it won&#8217;t go up. &#8220;There exists a gravitational force between any two bodies in space, directly proportional to the product of their masses and inversely proportional to the square of the distance between them,&#8221; has considerably better word-to-universe fit. It allows you to make aeroplanes and send people to the moon. We cannot afford to loosen our grip on enlightenment values. We cannot afford to let the scientific conception of truth die just because mud-slinging on the internet is entertaining. We cannot afford to retreat into the playground logic of “I won the argument, so I’m right!” We must seek the Truth, not the warm fuzzy feeling we get when a hundred people re-tweet our acerbic put-down. Each of us must take responsibility.&#160;Stop trying to win arguments. Start trying to find the truth. Even if you don’t like it. Even if you wish things were otherwise. Even if it hurts. It doesn’t matter if you win, you might still be wrong.]]></description>
		
		
		
		<post-id xmlns="com-wordpress:feed-additions:1">1668</post-id>	</item>
		<item>
		<title>Enough information already</title>
		<link>https://leehw.com/enough-information-already/</link>
		
		<dc:creator><![CDATA[LeeHW]]></dc:creator>
		<pubDate>Thu, 03 Aug 2017 13:24:15 +0000</pubDate>
				<category><![CDATA[Self development]]></category>
		<category><![CDATA[fantasy]]></category>
		<category><![CDATA[mental images]]></category>
		<guid isPermaLink="false">http://www.leehw.com/?p=1050</guid>

					<description><![CDATA[“If [more] information was the answer, then we’d all be billionaires with perfect abs.” — Derek Sivers Thinking about a problem can often feel the same as dealing with it. This can be a dangerous psychological effect, which threatens to undermine your attempts at self-improvement. Behavioural scientists have published dozens of studies on this over the last two decades. Let’s take a moment to see how it works. When we say we are ‘thinking’ we mean we’re dealing with the world symbolically. We might be doing it purely in our heads, we might have the support of a piece of paper or a computer screen, but the information in our heads, on the paper, or on the screen, stands in for the stuff in the real world. For instance, the word ‘apple’ is related in your brain to a physically real, roughly spherical, juicy fruit. At least, it is if you’ve had a fairly average upbringing in an English-speaking country. The word, either spoken out loud by someone else, or just in your head in the form of a thought, comes to have some of the same function as the thing it’s associated with. If you like apples, you are currently hungry, and someone says ‘there’s an apple in the fruit bowl’ you might well go in search of said fruit bowl. Why? Because apples are attractive to you, the word ‘apple’ has the power to influence you in a similar way to (though not exactly the same way as) a real apple. If we ask you to bring to mind the smell of rotten fish, what happens? Are you able to imagine it? Is it delightful? If we were to put you in a brain scanner, we would find that there is considerable similarity between what your brain does when presented with words that ask you to imagine rotten fish, and what it does in the presence of actual rotten fish. The words (we might say the thoughts or ideas), come to have a similar function to the real thing. Have you ever wanted to ask someone to stop talking about some future event you’re nervous about? “Yeah, the job interview is on Tuesday. Let’s talk about something else.” Why? Because the power of language means that the words have some of the same functions as the actual event. Being in a difficult situation makes you anxious, or unhappy, or whatever, and so talking about it can trigger some amount of that same emotion. This is not a bug. It’s a fundamental feature. It is literally how language works, and by extension, how thinking works. This feature of language, that words and mental images can stand in for real things, does have a huge drawback however. If we have a desire or goal, thinking too much about it, especially conjuring up vivid mental images of it, can have the same satiating functions as the real thing. That’s big and somewhat abstract claim, so perhaps an example will help. In the early 1990’s, Dr Gabriele Oettingen and Dr Thomas Wadden[1] conducted a study at the University of Pennsylvania with people who had signed up to a weight loss program at the medical school. They asked participants to give dispassionate ratings of how much they expected to lose weight. They just asked a simple question and got a reply on a numerical scale. Next, they asked them to really get into it, to think extensively about their new future self, to try to see their future self in their mind’s eye, and so on. Participants were asked to rate these future fantasies as positive (looking good) or negative. By the end of the weight loss programme, those who hadn’t really expected to lose weight had done about as well as anyone else. No big result. But those who were able to conjure up a rich and clear mental image of their future self as successfully slimmed-down were significantly more likely to have … failed to lose weight. Let that sink in. Thinking briefly about the future and evaluating it was not associated with worse outcomes, but thinking really deeply, conjuring up pleasing mental images, and so on, was associated with worse outcomes. At the time, this study was largely discounted as being a fluke, not least because the data were correlational. The researchers merely noted down who came up (naturally) with positive or negative mental images. Since that study, however, Dr Oettingen and her colleagues have gone on to demonstrate in a number of different experiments[2] that asking someone to think excessively, and especially to fantasise, about a desirable goal, actually makes it less likely that the person will carry out the behaviours necessary to reach that goal. It’s clear to us that the mental image has some of the same functions as the real-life outcome. In particular, it switches off motivation, as if the goal has already been achieved. Thinking through a problem is surely a good thing. Burying your head in the sand — failing to think about and imagine what you really want in life — is not a recipe for long-term satisfaction. But most people don’t know that the opposite tendency — imagining or fantasising about positive outcomes — can be an equally pernicious trap. There is danger here for self-help and philosophy junkies. The mere act of reading a book about something can trick our brains into feeling like we’ve fixed the problem. Many self-help gurus will compound this problem by asking you explicitly to imagine your perfect future. We can get a sort of ‘aha!’ feeling that tricks us. Knowing the solution isn’t the same as implementing it. At least, it isn’t the same in the real world, though your brain doesn’t always know the difference. Don’t turn into the sort of person who reads reads yet another self-help book, pats himself on the back for making an effort to improve his life, then closes the book without acting on any of the changes the book describes. (And if you are that person already, now is the time to stop!) Shout out to my buddy Vince, who reminded me about that great Sivers quote at the top, and thus gave me the impetus to write this post.&#160; [1] Oettingen, G., &#38; Wadden, T. (1991). Expectation, fantasy, and weight loss: Is the impact of positive thinking always positive? Cognitive Therapy and Research, 15(2), 167–175.[2] e.g. Kappes, H. B., &#38; Oettingen, G. (2011). Positive fantasies about idealized futures sap energy. Journal of Experimental Social Psychology, 47(4), 719–729. http://doi.org/10.1016/j.jesp.2011.02.003]]></description>
		
		
		
		<post-id xmlns="com-wordpress:feed-additions:1">1050</post-id>	</item>
		<item>
		<title>Opportunity cost</title>
		<link>https://leehw.com/opportunity-cost/</link>
		
		<dc:creator><![CDATA[LeeHW]]></dc:creator>
		<pubDate>Mon, 31 Jul 2017 08:58:28 +0000</pubDate>
				<category><![CDATA[All posts]]></category>
		<category><![CDATA[Self development]]></category>
		<category><![CDATA[daily routine]]></category>
		<category><![CDATA[opportunity cost]]></category>
		<category><![CDATA[rules for life]]></category>
		<guid isPermaLink="false">http://www.leehw.com/?p=1037</guid>

					<description><![CDATA[Our wonderful, complex, modern world provides myriad opportunities. And so, of course, it presents us with many thousands of choices to make, and just as many opportunity costs. Unlike 99% of everyone who ever lived on this planet, you can take a glowing rectangle out of your pocket, tap it a few times, and have food delivered to your home within a day or two. We should pause to notice just how astonishingly wonderful this is. But we should notice too the opportunity costs. For example, barring a zombie apocalypse, most of the people reading this post will never learn to hunt their own dinner. OK, maybe that&#8217;s not important to you, but it is an opportunity cost. We live in a culture driven by advertising, and so we are told over and over that we can have it all. This is a lie. There is always an opportunity cost. Do you prefer not to be insulted, or otherwise have your feelings hurt? Then you had better not hope for fame. Do you hope to earn lots of money? Then you better not value leisure above hard work. Do you care deeply about the environment? Then you had better get used to being cold in the winter, hot in the summer, and wet on your long walks into town. Do you love novelty, going from one thing to the next? Then you must reconcile yourself to the fact that you will never become a true expert on one thing. The glorious developments in technology over the last hundred years mean we often need to make such choices — between competing opportunities — on a much more frequent basis. Last week, Nick and I were on holiday in Spain. One day, lying on the beach, I reached into my bag and pulled out a battered old Kindle. Almost all my books are electronic these days, and about half of them are loaded on my Kindle. I had finished my previous book, and so I was confronted with a choice of a dozen books I’ve not yet read, or to re-read one from a list of about 300. As it happened, I picked a non-fiction book and as I started to read, I wanted to make notes. I don’t find the kindle very user-friendly for highlighting and annotating passages. A couple of days later, therefore, I was lying on the beach again with the same book loaded on my iPhone. The beach was quiet, the weather perfect, the sea lapping in gently susurrating waves. The perfect conditions to concentrate. And so I reached into my bag, pulled out my iPhone, and checked Twitter. This is why, ladies and gentlemen, boys and girls, we need to make rules for ourselves, now more than ever. This is why, occasionally, I take a break from social media.]]></description>
		
		
		
		<post-id xmlns="com-wordpress:feed-additions:1">1037</post-id>	</item>
		<item>
		<title>How to spend less money</title>
		<link>https://leehw.com/money/</link>
		
		<dc:creator><![CDATA[LeeHW]]></dc:creator>
		<pubDate>Mon, 29 May 2017 21:02:21 +0000</pubDate>
				<category><![CDATA[All posts]]></category>
		<category><![CDATA[Self development]]></category>
		<category><![CDATA[debt]]></category>
		<category><![CDATA[finance]]></category>
		<category><![CDATA[money]]></category>
		<category><![CDATA[self-improvement]]></category>
		<guid isPermaLink="false">http://www.leehw.com/?p=1028</guid>

					<description><![CDATA[There are many ways to get better at money management, though you wouldn’t know it from reading personal development blogs. They pretty much all recommend you plan out a budget and stick to it strictly, month in, month out. You set up a spreadsheet or pay for some shockingly expensive bespoke software and audit your expenditure at the end of every month. It works just fine, but it’s like counting calories. It’s tedious, and there’s a real risk you’ll one day break the diet in an alarming binge. Another approach is to change your mindset when it comes to money. Do this and frugal habits may become automatic. I think this is the easier approach, but how do you change your mindset? How do you convince your brain not to spend money like water? Here, I think, it’s useful to consider what money really is. The usual story given by economists goes like this. Back in the day, Jones had a sheep and wanted a woollen tunic. She could make the tunic herself or she could barter with someone else who had a woollen tunic and who wanted a sheep. This introduced a rather unfortunate “double coincidence of wants”. It wasn’t enough that you found someone who had what you wanted, they also had to want what you had. To prevent this messy situation, so the story goes, people invented cash. This took various forms, but generally involved precious metals, because, as the adjective suggests, the metals are themselves valuable. Give over your sheep to a neighbour and get a chunk of silver in return. You are now free to keep hold of this silver as a “store of value” until you decide to redeem it against some commodity that you need. It’s a nice story, and one that you’ll find in pretty much all economics textbooks. There are just two problems with it. 1. It doesn’t really make sense. 2. There’s very little evidence that this is how money evolved. As Dr David Graeber points out in Debt: The First 5,000 Years, the double coincidence of wants doesn’t actually exist as a problem until you want to trade with people you don’t know. If your neighbour needs a sheep, and you have a superfluous sheep, you’re very unlikely to leave the sheep in the meadow, doing not very much, just because your neighbour has nothing you want right now. You’re most likely just to make the partial exchange, both of you knowing that one of you now owes the other a sheep, or its equivalent. Sooner or later, your neighbour is going to have something you want, and then you’ll be able to ask for a sheep-sized lot of it. It’s also easy enough to keep track of who owes whom what. You really don’t need physical bits of precious metal to keep track of who is owed what when you’re dealing with neighbours. It’s just like keeping a bar tab. The earliest money systems, then, we’re debt-based. And they seem to have worked very well. Some of them were extremely sophisticated. There’s a good deal of historical evidence that this was the real way money was invented. Let that sink in for a moment. Money wasn’t a store of value, but simply a quantity of debt. As civilisations became more complex, it became increasingly desirable to trade with people you didn’t know. Now, we are not going to let some out-of-towner walk off with our sheep simply because they’ve promised one day to repay us. We may never see them again. So we need political authorities to get involved — someone who will enforce the debt repayment. Governments of various types start to regulate money. Soon, leaders’ faces are being stamped on coins. If some Roman centurion gave you a little silver coin with Caesar’s face on it, in return for your sheep, you could be confident you could redeem it with with any of the millions of Roman citizens, even thousands of miles away from home. This invention of money-as-cash began a long process of obscuring from the ordinary person the real nature of money. We came to believe that money has inherent worth, that it is truly an independent store of value. In today’s prices, the metal that makes up a USA dollar coin is worry about 4.5 cents. The paper in a ten pound note is not worth anything like ten pounds. Despite the obfuscating effect of cash, which feels like a real thing with real value, money remains merely an accounting of debt. British bank notes actually say “I promise to pay the bearer on demand the sum of X pounds.” The note isn’t ten pounds. It’s an IOU for ten pounds worth of something. Your savings account is simply a way we all have of keeping account of how much debt society owes you. Your credit card is actually keeping score on how indebted you are to society. Indebted here can’t mean ‘how much money is owed’ because that’s circular. Money is debt. If you have a credit card debt, you owe society something of value. The latter seems more intuitive, perhaps. We’ve all meet someone who had to work a second job to pay off their credit card debt. It’s clear that the balance of the card showed how much work they need to give to society in order to set themselves on the straight and narrow. It’s less intuitive when we’re talking about money you have in the bank, or in your wallet. That figure represents how much work or valuable material goods society owes you. I’m going to say that again for emphasis: the amount of money you have is a measure of society’s debt to you. How much society is willing to give you in work and in material things. It is literally how much your compatriots are in hock to you. The money you have in your pocket, the money in your bank account, that’s not stuff. It’s not a thing. It’s accumulated promises. When you do useful things for other people, you get promises in return. Other people (whom we glibly call ‘society’) promise to do something useful for you one day in return. If you’re wealthy, you have a lot of accumulated promises. In free societies, you can also pass these promises on to other people, including your friends or family when you die. People will sometimes say that “you can’t take it with you” because, “there are no pockets in a shroud.” Well, yes. But spend a few minutes truly understanding that money is debt, and you come to realise that having money means you are currently owed things by society. The people around you have (indirectly) promised to look after you and make your life a little more comfortable. Spend that money on a new car and a 76-inch plasma TV and those promises are gone. You’re on your own. Do you really want to cash in all the promises your fellow citizens have made you, for a big TV and a flashy car?]]></description>
		
		
		
		<post-id xmlns="com-wordpress:feed-additions:1">1028</post-id>	</item>
		<item>
		<title>Using social media to live a better life</title>
		<link>https://leehw.com/bettersocial/</link>
		
		<dc:creator><![CDATA[LeeHW]]></dc:creator>
		<pubDate>Wed, 17 May 2017 10:21:16 +0000</pubDate>
				<category><![CDATA[All posts]]></category>
		<category><![CDATA[Self development]]></category>
		<category><![CDATA[meaning]]></category>
		<category><![CDATA[social media]]></category>
		<guid isPermaLink="false">http://www.leehw.com/?p=1020</guid>

					<description><![CDATA[We live in the age of the selfie, of Facebook, of Instagram, of self-generated content. This isn’t unprecedented narcisism, as some would have us believe. It’s the modern equivalent of boring your friends with four packets of photographs from you recent trip. In many ways, the modern approach is better. Tweaking an Instagram filter is fun. Re-taking a selfie until you get one without bags under your eyes might be desirable. Taking things further, learning about composition and the technology behind digital cameras, can be worthwhile. But if we’re not careful, we can end up as a sort of fifth-rate journalist. We can spend more time crafting the adjectives than in getting good nouns. We can forget that media has content not just style. We can take a perfect selfie, on a boring night in. What memory will such a photograph evoke in years to come? If we’re going to live our lives in public, through social media, then let’s use those things as a tool to help us motivate ourselves to live a better life. Let’s not put all our effort into the gloss, the filters, and the posing. Let’s put most of the effort instead, into doing things and going places and seeing stuff, so that the photos don’t need to be re-taken ten times until they’re perfect. I humbly submit that a blurry shot of yourself playing frisby in the park with friends and loved ones might evoke more meaningful memories than a perfectly powdered bathroom selfie.]]></description>
		
		
		
		<post-id xmlns="com-wordpress:feed-additions:1">1020</post-id>	</item>
	</channel>
</rss>
