How your soul is dyed, Obesity penalty, the Humanities, the limits of personal experience, and more!
RWL #354
Greetings from the Last Homely House! The berry harvest is winding down. We had rain for much of July, so I think it contributed to a real bumper-crop this year. My youngest (AKA, Daughter #3) is our prime berry picker. She has brought in several gallons of berries this year. Half of our freezer is stuffed with bags of berries. I look forward to using them through the next year.
I’ve been preparing for my next Being in the World interview. This one will be with my colleague Scott Smith, chair of the UNH Department Chair, Classics, Humanities and Italian Studies. We’ll be talking about my favorite Stoic, Seneca. But in preparation for our discussion, I came across this quote from another famous Stoic, the Roman emperor Marcus Aurelius:
“The soul becomes dyed with the color of its thoughts.”
That’s the meme-ified version. A longer, more formal version is
"Such as are thy habitual thoughts, such also will be the character of thy mind; for the soul is dyed by the thoughts. Dye it then with a continuous series of such thoughts as these: for instance, that where a man can live, there he can also live well."
(Source: http://classics.mit.edu/Antoninus/meditations.5.five.html )
This quote is worth meditating on. How much do we reflect on our own thoughts? I know I am vulnerable to the CBT error of catastrophizing (a tendency to “focus on the worst-case scenario or spend time thinking about how terribly things will go”), but you can train yourself to perceive when you are doing this and work not to. Habits of thought are just that - habits.
Another way I think about this quote is through another quote I like to quote (that’s a lot of quotes) from Austin Kleon: “You are, in fact, a mashup of what you choose to let into your life.” We are communal animals. How we think is strongly influenced by the people we associate with. And this extends to people we allow into our lives through television and books. Your media diet has the same impact on your brain as the food you eat has on your body. Watch too much trash, it has the same effect as eating junk food, but on your brain. Maybe read a little more Aurelius and watch a little less Bachelorette. We pick up habits of thought from the people we interact with as we take their thoughts into our own mind and process them. Our soul becomes dyed with the same colors as the ones of the people we associate with. (This is me giving myself advice - feel free to take it, too.)
See you Sunday with another essay. As usual, willing good for all of you!
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Read
What: Our World in Data, The limits of our personal experience and the value of statistics
https://ourworldindata.org/limits-personal-experience
Why: I consider myself a qualitative researcher - I talk to people and gather their personal experiences and try to draw lessons from them. But before academia, professionally, I was a quant guy - I led finance operations for a couple of hospitals. I value data. A person’s lived experience has a robustness and texture that is hard to be matched by data. But a person’s lived experience is limited by its very nature. Additionally, we are easily blinded by our own stories. Data can cut through our own self-deception, which is too easy to indulge. It’s one of the reasons I continue to track my own personal goals on a daily and weekly basis - I can tell myself I worked hard this week, but the numbers can tell a different story (or confirm it!).
The good people at Our World in Data are excellent at data visualization. I like browsing their bi-weekly newsletters just to see how they are presenting things. This piece is their case for using data. Check it out!
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What: WSJ, The Hidden Career Cost of Being Overweight
Why: The economist Tyler Cowen, whose work I often cite here, frequently talks about “lookism” as a prejudice that rarely gets discussed. Specifically how attractive people get more opportunities than average people, and homely people get fewer opportunities. I’d add weight as part of the larger “lookism” phenomenon. This article adds an interesting dimension to the discussion - evidence from the recent work from home evolution. Overweight people experienced less prejudice. Interesting.
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Watch
What: TEDxPortsmouth, James W. Dean Jr., Why College Students Need Shakespeare Now More Than Ever (18 min)
Why: James Dean is the president of UNH, so he’s sort of my big boss. In this video he makes the case for integrating the humanities into education. He makes what amounts to a business case for them at about 5:40:
The humanities can help us to understand and appreciate the problems we are facing. Which shouldn’t be surprising since they represent the distillation of literally thousands of years of human experience, learning, and wisdom.
If you’ve been reading this newsletter for a while, you know I wholeheartedly agree. As I said back in RWL #336:
One of the things I worry about as a professor in a business program in a health professions college in a liberal arts university is that my students have too much of a training mindset and not enough of an education mindset.
… by which I meant, I worry that they don’t embrace the humanities enough. Dean goes on to point out that many programs of study are becoming more specialized, not less. This poor preparation for a complex and changing world. A highly technical program of study is vulnerable to change. If all you do is focus on how to go through the motions of a task, without understanding the why behind the task, when the task changes, you won’t be able to adapt.
In one of his letters, Seneca says of education:
Why then do we give our sons a liberal education? Not because it can make them morally good but because it prepares the mind for the acquisition of moral values.
I was motivated having listened to this.
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Listen
What: Business Breakdowns, Toast: The Restaurant Operating System (50 min)
Why: We started using Toast in some restaurants during the Pandemic. Since then, I’ve seen it show up more and more. Sometimes we can check out at a restaurant by scanning a QR code that leads to the Toast app. This pod goes into the details of Toast’s history, how it serves restaurants, and who its competitors are. Very interesting.
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What: Conversations with Bill Kristol, Google’s Royal Hansen on AI: Where Are We? Where Are We Going? (50 min)
Why: The guest is Royal Hansen, Vice President of Engineering for Privacy, Safety, and Security at Google. He has a computer science background and gives a brief on how AI has evolved, what it is capable of today, and where it is going in a way that is clear and understandable. Definitely worth a listen. For example, I didn’t realize video chips had become essential to allowing the AI boom.