Came across this helpful article today that reflects on some of the topics covered in the skills series. http://www.washingtonpost.com/national/exhaustion-is-not-a-status-symbol/2012/10/02/19d27aa8-0cba-11e2-bb5e-492c0d30bff6_story.html
In this interview with researcher Brené Brown, she looks at some of the outcome from her research on leadership and busyness, and has some great insight into some of the processes behind our obsession with work.
Let me quote briefly from the article, Brown writes:
‘Crazy-busy’ is a great armor, it’s a great way for numbing. What a lot of us do is that we stay so busy, and so out in front of our life, that the truth of how we’re feeling and what we really need can’t catch up with us.
and pertinent to the last blog post in our series:
One of the things that I found was the importance of rest and play, and the willingness to let go of exhaustion as a status symbol and productivity as self-worth. A lot of people told me that when they put their work away and when they try to be still and be with family, sometimes they feel like they’re coming out of their skins. They’re thinking of everything they’re not doing, and they’re not used to that pace.
Do go read the article, here is the link again: http://www.washingtonpost.com/national/exhaustion-is-not-a-status-symbol/2012/10/02/19d27aa8-0cba-11e2-bb5e-492c0d30bff6_story.html
I came across this little article recently from the NY Times, on the prevalence of the broader general public turning to education based entertainment for their downtime. Rather than merely switching off and not engaging their faculties. http://www.nytimes.com/2015/03/20/education/turning-to-education-for-fun.html
Let me quote from the article:
What does it mean when people who can afford to spend their time however they please hunker down in front of their flat screens to watch theoretical physicists or experts on other subjects lecture for hours?
Entertainment values have come to dominate many aspects of life, but another trend has been playing out, too. Call it the academization of leisure. It can be found in the live-streaming TED Talks lectures, the Great Courses, learning vacations, podcasts, science centers, brain-training games and retirement communities like Lasell Village in Newton, Mass., whose residents must complete “a minimum of 450 hours of learning and fitness activity each calendar year,”…
I find this really fascinating, certainly the increase in ‘edutainment’ or more positively framed, the rise of a broadly educated populace, is appealing. In many ways having a broader education and knowledge base helps people think from their own frameworks, and analyse perspectives better. It should also help the general public engage in better and justifiable public discourse, rather than unsubstantiated positions.
However, on the flip-side it also leads to a rise in the outward exemplification of the Dunning-Kruger effect, where a little knowledge actually hinders engagement with longer term learning and education at a broader level.
Nevertheless, I am still optimistic about this trend, and will be interested to see how it plays out. Thoughts? How do you see it working in your context?
Today we have come to the final post in this seven weeks series on study skills and methods, and just as God rested on the seventh day in Genesis, so too this post will cover rest… and a couple of other things. While in many ways this post at the end may seem somewhat superfluous and unnecessary, I think there is something useful and cathartic about deliberately considering rest. In my mind there are a few ways to rest, but most of us fall into the method of collapsing at the end of a busy day or a busy week and just attempting to be comatose. Although this is restful in some ways, actually deliberately resting can be far more rejuvenating when all is said and done.
When talking about rest and relaxation I commonly use the analogy of a sponge. Now a sponge will work for quite a long while absorbing water and then being squeezed out while drying things off, or cleaning up messes. However, leave a sponge around for too long without giving it a good soak and it will dry out completely. Once that happens it will take a lot longer for the sponge to re-absorb liquid again and go back to doing its job as a sponge. Ultimately we as humans are a bit like sponges, we can function for a very long time absorbing, and being squeezed out. But if we get exhausted and dry out too much, then it takes a much longer period of rest to rejuvenate us.
So in this post I want to cover two aspects of resting: Exercise and Rest.
Exercise
Hold on, exercise doesn’t sound a lot like resting, it sounds like work just rephrased differently. Well yes, that is one way of looking at exercise, but in many ways it complements our modern lifestyle by contributing to our rest in different ways.
In our modern lives the majority of us will fall into a sedentary lifestyle, where sitting for long hours at a desk or table, interspersed only with short walks to the coffee machine or lunch spot. While this has a whole host of biomechanical woes attached to it, one of the eventual issues is that we end up with sore achey bodies from forcing them to engage in postures and a lifestyle that they are not accustomed to. This is further exacerbated by beign engaged in an academic field, as a lot of the time our work comes home with us. In this vein it is important that we engage in regular exercise, even if it is only heading out for a 30minute walk a day. Perhaps it might be useful to get a pedometer and count your steps, or get involved in a Corporate Cup if your institution has one. But getting out for some exercise every day is important, especially for our hyper-sedentary lifestyles.
But there is a double benefit of exercise. When we exercise our bodies produce a whole bunch of hormones and chemicals, one of these come under the category of endorphins. Now endorphins are what gives you that nice happy glow after going for a run or playing sport. That even when half your body is aching and you are hot and sore you still feel like it was worthwhile. However, that is only a small part of what endorphins do in our bodies. There are studies that strongly suggest that endorphins, and therefore exercise, is useful in managing stress, and even thinking clearly. So the next time you are stuck on a problem down in the basement of your lab (like where I used to work), then head out for a run. Your body and mind will thank you for it.
Resting
Now onto resting, and I bet you are thinking ‘Ahhh… time to collapse on the couch.’ Well yes, but only partially. One of the traps that I think we have in the modern world, and that is exacerbated in academia, is our constant connection to our work. While many people can go home and even if they may still be thinking about work, and checking their emails, they may not have the ability to do their work at home. For us though in an academic field we can always be connected to our work, and that is often why we do it. We are prone to waking up in the middle of the night with the answer to a question, or pondering the problems in our research for days on end. Lets face it, it is enjoyable. But it isn’t really rest. I think often we need to deliberately put our work aside from the foreground of our mind, and actively rest and focus on other things. We need to break that continual connection we have. Those resounding dings of emails arriving and scurrying off to check what needs to be done. I want to suggest two ways that we can help ourselves deliberately rest.
Regularity not Immediacy.
The first way we can rest better actually starts at work, or in our place of study. Many of us have fallen into the pattern of responding to things immediately as they come up. When an email arrives we feel almost compelled to check it and see what it is. Our email check frequency has gone from 1hr to 15mins and now to Push, so that we can know about something as soon as it arrives. But this pattern continues throughout our lives, and not just at work. When the phone buzzes in our pocket or bag, we instantly check what it was. One way that we can mitigate this trend is to simply check our emails less.
One push for this is the #2pmProject, where they advocate for only checking your email once a day at 2pm once you are back from lunch. Deal with it all then and close the email client. Now this likely wont work for everyone, and certainly doesnt work for me. But personally I have switched to only checking my email on the top of the hour. That way I still work through my emails regularly, but they don’t pop up every instant. The NY Times has a good article on this trend here: http://www.nytimes.com/2014/08/29/opinion/end-the-tyranny-of-24-7-email.html?_r=0 and I encourage you to read it. The freedom from having to respond to things immediately ultimately helps us rest better.
Sabbath Rest
The second way we can rest better is to simply set time aside to rest. The concept of a day of rest is nothing new, in fact the Israelites enshrined it in the commandments way back in Sinai. But really how often do we practice it. Even if we do have a lazy day in the park, how often are we checking our emails or social media to see whether there is something better to do or something that we are missing out on? One way that I think we can rest better is to engage in a Sabbath rest of sorts. A few years ago some people got together, and inspired by their Jewish heritage and faith, they formed The Sabbath Manifesto (http://www.sabbathmanifesto.org/). They have distilled their resting ideals down into 10 principles, and encourage liberal freedom within those. I think that this is a good response to our hectic lifestyles. The active setting aside of our busy lives and resting.
But the question is what does that look like for us? Personally I try to spend Sundays after church with friends and just hanging out socially. Thinking a bit less about my work, but also trying to steer clear of social media altogether. Taking life for what is is and resting. For others I know it involves turning the phone off for an entire day, or putting it in a box at home, as a physical disconnect. This type of deliberate resting is actually more energising than the slumping on the couch, and helps you recharge a lot better. The Art of Manliness blog has a series of suggestions on it here: http://www.artofmanliness.com/2014/05/20/tech-sabbath/ Whatever you do I encourage you to be deliberate about it. Deliberate resting is far more edifying and recharging than haphazard slumping on the couch (deliberate slumping is good though).
Well that’s the end of this series. It is time for this author to do a bit of resting. Tell me how you rest below.
‘ignorance more frequently begets confidence than does knowledge’ – Darwin
Why is it that a little bit of knowledge appears to super-inflate peoples estimation of their abilities? Whereas a significant amount of knowledge in a field makes one painfully aware of their own limitations. Take for example a novice car driver, or pilot. Once most individuals get over the initial fear and trepidation of driving or flying, they are at a significantly higher risk of accident, and also over-estimate their own competence at the task.[ref]Pavel, Samuel, Michael Robertson, and Bryan Harrison. “The Dunning-Kruger Effect and SIUC University’s Aviation Students.” Journal of Aviation Technology and Engineering 2, no. 1 (2012). http://docs.lib.purdue.edu/jate/vol2/iss1/6.[/ref] However, those experienced drivers and pilots conversely underestimate their competence at the task. Now this phenomenon has been observed regularly throughout history, as noted by Darwin, Bertrand Russell and many others. But it was with David Dunning and Justin Kruger’s 1999 JPS article that it was formally described — and subsequently entitled the Dunning-Kruger Effect.[ref]Kruger, Justin, and David Dunning. “Unskilled and Unaware of It: How Difficulties in Recognizing One’s Own Incompetence Lead to Inflated Self-Assessments.” Journal of Personality and Social Psychology 77, no. 6 (1999): 1121–34.[/ref]
So what is the Dunning-Kruger effect? Well it is the tendency of those with little to no knowledge of a specific domain tending to inflate their self-assessments of their mastery of that domain. Simply put, people who know a little of a field think they know much more than they actually do. In fact in the study the participants test scores placed them lowly on the 12th percentile, but on average their self-assessment was around the 62nd percentile. That is a rather significant over-estimation of capability in an area. Conversely those who performed well in the text under-estimated their self-assessment. As Albert Einstein sagely observed: ‘The more I learn, the more I realize how much I don’t know’ and the inverse is true for novices.
From this it is relatively easy to see the application to academic fields. Students and novices in a field will have a tendency to over-estimate their knowledge in a domain, while those who are SMEs underestimate in their presentations. This is highly common in complex fields where people may be able to absorb a small amount at the lay level, and then extrapolate their knowledge out to the entire domain. Notably without accounting for the pitfalls, caveats and speed bumps along the way that the experienced person will be only too aware of. But this is also likely exacerbated in areas where people are engaging in inter-disciplinary work. Being an SME in one domain does not instantly sideline the Dunning-Kruger effect from any other domain you may engage in.
Is this just self-aggrandisement or malicious hubris? Well, not quite, as Dunning observes this isn’t a conscious problem, it is a metacognitive issue. The Dunning-Kruger effect works at a level that is prior to any confirmation bias from cognitive dissonance or similar. As Dunning writes the effect ‘is “pre” cognitive dissonance. It’s not that people are denying their incompetence, they literally cannot see it in the first place, and so there’s nothing to deny or experience dissonance over’[ref]David Dunning AMA: http://www.reddit.com/r/science/comments/2m6d68[/ref] In fact logically one cannot see the effect of the bias, as to have the self-insight to recognise the ineptitude you need the expertise that you lack in that field.
So how to combat it? Well as a metacognitive bias it is hard to combat simply by knowledge of the bias itself. Of course knowing about it may make you question your self-assessments. But it wont help you catch the thinking in the act, as you can’t see the over-estimation errors anyway. Rather you need do avoid making the error in the first place, and the way that Dunning suggests you do that is via learning. Competence and learning in the fields that you are engaged in is the way to stave off this bias. However, he also observes that you can mitigate against the effect in the early stages of learning through finding those who provide you with useful assessments and getting them to act as a sounding board or cabinet.[ref]http://www.reddit.com/r/science/comments/2m6d68/science_ama_seriesim_david_dunning_a_social/cm1jnlc[/ref] I would add one more aspect to mitigating the Dunning-Kruger effect: humility. A lot of the effect is about making out that you know something when you don’t. Here humility can help by recognising that you don’t know everything in a domain, and having the ability to outwardly acknowledge this. Of course this can be hard for SMEs as they are expected to know everything in that domain. Nevertheless, those three aspects: learning, sounding-boards and humility; will help with mitigating against the bias.
Tell me how you mitigate against this effect in the comments. But let me leave you with this wonderful piece of self-recognition from Dunning & Kruger’s original journal paper:
Although we feel we have done a competent job in making a strong case for this analysis, studying it empirically, and drawing out relevant implications, our thesis leaves us with one haunting worry that we cannot vanquish. That worry is that this article may contain faulty logic, methodological errors, or poor communication. Let us assure our readers that to the extent this article is imperfect, it is not a sin we have committed knowingly.[ref]Justin Kruger and David Dunning, “Unskilled and Unaware of It: How Difficulties in Recognizing One’s Own Incompetence Lead to Inflated Self-Assessments,” Journal of Personality and Social Psychology 77, no. 6 (1999): 1121–34.[/ref]
The final stage of the research process is usually synthesis, where ideas and concepts come together in a new form. But those syntheses rarely meet their goals if they are simply stored in your head. While there are many blockers in the writing process, from cognitive blocks to research issues, the software in your toolkit for writing should never be a block at all. I know many people who use simple word processors, like Word or Pages, for this process. But they can be buggy, and there is a better way. Here are the tools in my toolkit for writing: Scrivener and Scapple.
Scrivener and Scapple fill slightly different roles in the synthesis process. While Scrivener is a full featured writing tool, Scapple is a small lightweight mind mapping tool that lets you set out your thoughts quickly and easily. They are both cross-platform (Win/Mac/Linux [unpolished]), and have a generous trial period.
Scapple is a quick mind mapping tool, and has been one that I been wanting for quite a few years now. In the early days of my research career, I coded up a quick mindmap tool based on a Computer Science FSA assignment I had to do in my final year. That tool was ugly, clunky, and was really a kludge. Scapple is the opposite of this. It is quick and easy to use, just double clicking on the panel allows you to create a node. Dragging nodes on top of each other allows for connections. In the words of Queensland Rail: ‘Super Simple Stuff.’ Like Briss that I talked about a few posts ago, Scapple has one purpose in mind, and it does it admirably.
Once your mind map is complete, you can easily export it to PDF, PNG or a host of other formats for later reference on devices that don’t have Scapple installed. In addition once you are at this stage you can also export it to an OPML file ready for import into Scrivener with your synthesis outline already complete. I find Scapple an invaluable tool for mind mapping, and one of the easiest tools I have used for this task. Plus it has to easily take the prize for the best price:performance ratio.
Onto Scrivener then. While Word and Pages, and other single document editors, may do their job for shorter pieces, they tend to be rather buggy once the file size increases. Word especially, as its method of storing the material, plus formatting, plus recent changes, plus tracked changed etc etc is prone to errors. As the document gets longer these get exponentially worse, and so for a 3000 word term paper Word is generally fine, but for a 20,000 word report, or a 90,000 word thesis, it is unacceptable.
One solution to this is to use a markup language, such as LaTeX, which I used for the majority of my Eng, Math and Psych papers. LaTeX is word processor agnostic, just using simple text files for its input, so you can edit it in anything. However, where LaTeX is excellent for rendering complex mathematical formulae, and modifying markup for export, it is not the easiest method to use. Occasionally I have had students and peers, especially in Psych, object that they aren’t computer programmers when being asked to write in TeX. The plethora of { \$ and many other codes makes it hard to learn for those who are mainly interested in text based writing.
This is where Scrivener comes in, and more. At one level Scrivener is a full featured writing device, which allows you to write easily and in a format that you are used to. But at another level it has a powerful refactoring export system, similar to working with markup languages. At yet another level Scrivener works as a consolidated research tool, allowing you to put thoughts together before writing. Another level again Scrivener allows for easy chapter and section management, letting you streamline your argument in the synthesis process. Finally, for our purposes, at a system level, Scrivener separates out its sections to different files, reducing the chances of file corruption as the document gets larger.
Personally I use Scrivener for almost all of my writing, be that this blog that you can see in the screenshot above, through to my conference papers, and now this new PhD thesis I am starting work on. I generally only export to Word for sharing the documents with proofreaders who don’t have Scrivener, or for final delivery. While there are many features of Scrivener that make it much easier to use than Word or other writing tools, I will quickly go through some of my favourites.
Firstly, the nested document system allows for a structured approach to building your argument. You can create folders for chapters, and sections and then arrange your argument beneath that. This can give you a birds eye view in the Binder of where your argument is going at any time, and helps with coherence.
Secondly, each document can be given a word limit, to help to keep you to task, and make sure that you don’t blow out your word count. This simply helps with management later on.
Thirdly, there are a multitude of methods for being able to mark material as reference material. You can either put it in your cork board for reference, or you can annotate it inline. This means you can have some of your reference material right in front of you as you write.
Fourthly, you can set overall word limits for a project, and also deadlines. This lets you write to task and make sure you aren’t getting too far behind on a writing project. This also helps with keeping the writing juices flowing. If you set a 500-1000 word a day target, then you can simply write to that deadline easily.
Fifthly, it keeps the formatting out of the way. In my Scrivener templates I have a handful of formatting options, usually one for the abstract, one for headings, one for general body text and one for block quotes. The robust way that Scrivener deals with formatting means I don’t have to muck around with whatever formatting system the word processor has decided to do that day.
Sixthly, Scrivener has a great composition mode, that blacks out other distractions on the screen, letting you just focus on the text.
Seventhly, it allows for a regular backup routine, so that you won’t lose any of your data. Plus it writes synchronously to the file system and doesn’t require you to neurotically Ctrl/Cmd-S all the time.
Finally, the export system, like that of LaTeX allows you to reformat your document at export time for various targets. For example, if one journal has a specific formatting system you can easily export it to their specification. Then if you are reading the same paper at a conference you can export it for a lectern friendly format as well. All without having to modify the formatting of the original document.
Chapter Arguments
Word Count
Corkboard
Formatting
Composition Mode
Inline Annotation
Referencing
Overall Scrivener is a robust and powerful writing tool. It incorporates many aspects of LaTeX and other markup languages, without having the steep learning curve. But there are still a couple of downsides to Scrivener and Scapple. One is the cost, although at a total of US$60 for both apps it is one of the best investments you can make, and it has certainly saved me a lot more than $60 in crash and lost material generated heartache. In addition they are commonly on sale throughout the year, so if you want them keep an eye out. They both have a very generous trial policy as well, so you can give them a go for free without laying out the cash.
The second is the lack of a direct integration with Zotero or other reference managers. You can easily use the RTF shortcodes from Zotero, but I wish for something that was more tightly integrated.
Finally, and most minorly, there isn’t an iOS/Android app yet for Scrivener, although there is one coming soon. Which a lot of the time is fine, as for research I tend to write at my desk. There are workarounds for this one though, which I will likely cover in the future.
There we go, the final tool in my general research toolkit—although there are plenty of domain specific tools. I highly recommend Scrivener and Scapple, and I will likely do a couple more posts on both over the next little while as I want to explore specific areas of the tools.
Tell me below in the comments what tools you use for the synthesis task, and do give Scrivener and Scapple a go.
A previous professor of mine used to give this adage: ‘Knowledge comes through learning, but mastery comes through teaching.’
In many ways this rings true with experience being the counterpart to knowledge that aids in gaining mastery of a subject. One may know everything that there is to know about an internal combustion engine, but without the experience in bolting one together, it is unlikely that the resulting engine will hold together. In the physical and practical STEM disciplines it is common that students undertake intern years at the end of their degree to gain practical experience. While in Medicine the SODOTO methodology of See One, Do One, Teach One is widely practiced. But for the disciplines down the theoretical and discursive end of the spectrum, this sort of ‘practical experience’ is commonly quite amorphous. Indeed, if you are studying first century community and identity, then practical first hand experience of the first century is obviously impossible to get.
However, this is where the last portion of the SODOTO model comes to bear. While practical experience of many aspects cannot be achieved, the ability to teach each other, and thereby reinforce the knowledge gained through learning, on the way to mastery, is possible. In fact I would argue that in many disciplines, as a factor of limited teaching hours and scope, a significant amount of learning happens outside of the classroom, while teaching each other.[ref]By no means am I saying that contact hours are lazy, or shortchanged, but rather there is generally a much greater breadth of material than available contact hours[/ref] While no doubt much learning happens solo, alone with books and research, significant amounts also happen in community and with peers. In this regard peer interaction and teaching each other not only reinforces content, but promotes mastery of it.
Teaching Each Other
The most obvious aspect of a social learning, or educating each other, is the nature of teaching. Now, while some of this teaching will undoubtedly be from material that is not covered in classes, there is even benefit from teaching the material that has been covered in various classes. This act of learning amongst peers, whether it be over a coffee or group studying before tests, helps to reinforce the material that has already been taught and learnt. However, in addition to simply reinforcing the existing material it also helps the overall learning process in two other ways.
Firstly, the process of discussing and reinforcing the material already learnt rarely happens by simply repeating the lecture or textbook verbatim. The differing emphases of people in a group will naturally emphasise different aspects of the material. These different emphases will then require reframing the material in their own thought system, and finally in their own words. This reframing and rephrasing helps with embedding the material learnt, and aids in mastery of the material.
Secondly, as material is discussed and rephrased from different viewpoints, it inevitably will need to be explained from those differing viewpoints. This act of explanation ensures that you have firmly grasped the material, and understand the concepts involved. Plus the pushback and challenge from peers will help with being able to explain complex concepts to others, especially those who haven’t had the opportunity to learn the prior material.
Finally, peer learning helps with challenging and extending your knowledge-base. Inevitably in a peer group there will be a range of backgrounds, abilities, and conceptual approaches. Those who have a better grasp on the material can help extend the learning in new ways, and those who may feel like they are playing catch up can hear the material in a different format that may resonate better. In traditional learning it can be tempting to dismiss those in the class who ask all the hard questions and appear to know it all. But with peer learning you can be alongside to challenge and learn from them, just as they will from you.
Encouraging Each Other
However, study is not all about knowledge and learning, even though structures may be set up that way. A significant amount of time in educational settings is enabled by meeting peers and having social interactions outside of a learning mode. As John Donne meditated ‘No man is an island.’[ref]John Donne, Meditation XVII[/ref] Rather as he continued on: ‘Each is a piece of the continent, A part of the main.’ So too the social interactions that we have in our learning environments are invaluable. The contacts and friends you make over coffee, lunch or beers; at your university or college, or at conferences, are often some of the best peer interactions you can have (thanks SBLAAR).
The other SBL-AAR
Overall academia and research can be arduous, with long periods spent reflecting and studying material alone, with only your thoughts, and sometimes family, for company. So take the opportunities to build a solid peer network, at whatever stage of academia you are at. Those peer friendships, even if they don’t stay within the academy, or even in your field, are often a great boon and encouragement.
Community and collegiality is important, even in an introspective individualistic academic space. So make the most of it. Build peer networks, and solidify relationships. Make the time to do social events and meet with your peers. Take opportunities at conferences to talk with people you don’t know, and about things other than your research topics.
I suppose it is tempting, if the only tool you have is a hammer, to treat everything as if it were a nail. – Abraham Maslow[ref]Maslow, Abraham H. Toward a Psychology of Being. 1962.[/ref]
In his observations of human psychology Abraham Maslow, of the famous/infamous Maslow’s Hierarchy of needs, noted the strange bias for people to use familiar methods to complete tasks, even if they are not ideally suited for it. Abraham Kaplan more candidly expressed it as: ‘Give a small boy a hammer, and he will find that everything he encounters needs pounding.’[ref]Abraham Kaplan (1964). The Conduct of Inquiry: Methodology for Behavioral Science. San Francisco: Chandler., 28.[/ref] Although my favourite visual expression comes from the older colloquial usage of the ‘Birmingham hammer.’ Nevertheless, whichever expression is chosen, the intent is clear: people tend to use the same tools to accomplish the job, even if they may be the wrong ones.
This trend is one that can be seen repeatedly throughout our society, from people and companies stubbornly sticking with outmoded methods of communication, through to DIYers using large blunt objects to persuade stuck objects to move. Maslow’s hammer appears to be all around us, and doesn’t necessarily seem to be going away. But, while the physical, technical and social implementations of Maslow’s hammer are all around us, I want to think about how it gets used from the perspective of our world views.
First though a brief primer on world views. Simply put a world view is in many ways the lens through which you look at and interpret the world. Mine is thoroughly shaped by my upbringing in Australia, my parental influences, my education in the sciences (Math, Psych, Chem, Biol etc), my faith, and also the minutiae of the influences from the city I live in, the politics of the era, and many more. So when we interpret information, we are inevitably interpreting it through the lens of our world view.
So what does this have to do with Maslow’s hammer? Well a bunch of our world view for intellectual pursuits comes from our training and education. Hence in this post I am calling it Maslow’s hammer, although there are some indications that it could be called other things. Maslow’s hammer resonates with me, likely through my Psych training influenced world view. This is where Maslow’s hammer highlights some of the strange decision making that we do in assessing arguments and evidence. It is probably best displayed by the slavish application of scientific method by some groups to almost every other discipline. As perhaps can be seen in some of Richard Dawkins’ twitter feed: https://twitter.com/richarddawkins/status/334656775196393473 Dawkins regularly attempts to apply his hammer (scientific reductionism) to the world around him, and upon finding a bolt (philosophy) attempts to hammer it into the hole with the same ferocity as the nails he finds.
Of course Dawkins’ rigorous application of his worldview in the vein of Maslow’s hammer is on the extreme end of worldview application. However, I would propose that we all engage in this type of bias in various degrees. We each bring our experience and training to bear on the subject at hand, which is perfectly reasonable. But where the bias kicks into overdrive is where we apply our worldview to the exclusion of all other approaches.
But if you were to highlight that this bias isn’t really a bias in its own right, you would be correct. In fact it is a different extrapolation of a cognitive bias we have already covered: the confirmation bias. However, in the original post in this series I looked at the confirmation bias as a mechanism of biased interpretation of external input, in this case the bias is applied outward. Maslow’s hammer applies confirmation bias upon our internal toolkit application and finds that we tend to apply the tools in our arsenal that we are most familiar with. Correspondingly ignoring tools that we may be less familiar with, but have better utility to that situation.
So how do we engage with and steer clear of Maslow’s hammer? I believe that one of the main methods is to be polyvalent scholars and thinkers. While in the renaissance period there were some scholars such as Leonardo DaVinci who were legitimately considered polymaths (Greek: learned in much), or subject matter experts (SMEs) in multiple disciplines, I don’t think that this is the case in the modern era. While there are some in our world who can be considered polymaths, to become an SME in multiple fields is a difficult task given the high degree of specialisation required. However, polyvalence (Gk/Lt: multiple strengths)[ref]Seriously, who combines Greek and Latin word roots[/ref] I think is possible, and being well-versed, but perhaps not SME level, in a variety of topics, aids in setting down Maslow’s hammer. Rather the broad training helps with being able to diversify the toolset used, and helps scholars and thinkers alike to bring a wider variety of tools to the task. This helps with not using the wrong tool for the job. Academically speaking this is interdisciplinary work, but realistically it is all about not using a hammer where a screwdriver is ideal.
How do you find Maslow’s hammer working in your thinking? Tell me below.
He listens well who takes notes. – Dante (Canto XV)
Note taking can often seem like something of a burden, that gets in the way of learning stuff, or getting things done. However, unless we have a robust eidetic memory, then we are going to need to take notes. Thankfully there are a plethora of note taking options that can make your life easier. Or they can actually make it harder, as we will see. Thankfully they are all easier than using scraps of paper everywhere, and then trying to fit pages into a 3 ring binder with only a 2 hole punch (thanks Tom for the salient example).
However, what apps and tools should be in your toolkit? Well this is where it gets a bit nasty, as there are so many tools that purport to do everything but make you cups of tea, and wash the dishes. But when you distill it down they may tidy up and take the trash out, but they have a few warts, plus all these bloated bits on the side, and no-one really knows what do do with all the guff that they leave around. So here are my four top tools, and why I only really use two of them.
Evernote
Evernote has become something of the big daddy of note taking systems with most people at least having heard of it, if not used it before. It has certainly earned that reputation as well, with most features of the app being easy to use, and the convenience of cloud synced notes is invaluable. Plus it has a relatively good searching system, with notes being indexed and decently easy to access. It is on the bloated side, with it trying to manage your notes, research, life, girlfriend/wife, and it would like to hold your hand on dates if it could. In that regard it essentially duplicates a bunch of other tasks, and several of them not particularly well. Nevertheless, this isn’t the critical flaw that some would like to believe. Think of it as a Swiss Army note pad. You are never going to use that funky skewering thingy, and rarely will you use all three of the bottle openers, but it does the core tasks quite well. You do have to pay for a bunch of features though. Want to use the iOS app offline: Premium, want to collaborate better: Premium, want to upload more: Premium, want to annotate your PDFs: Premium… etc. That just makes me annoyed really, but if you want to live in their ecosystem and use its advantages then it is only fair that they want you to pay for it. After all that lovely condo overlooking Central Park doesn’t come for free.
However, there is one big caveat with Evernote, and it isn’t that it has such a close naming similarity to Endnote that it makes me shudder. When you are using Evernote you are in their system, and it is a proprietary one. It is a lesson I have learnt the hard way over a couple of other platforms (*cough* Springpad and others), and it involves losing all your notes and information if the system goes down. Evernote here is a bit more friendly, with the userbase being large enough that it shouldn’t go down suddenly, and if it does look like a sinking ship it does allow you to export your notes. Still, this ecosystem deal makes me feel a little queasy.
OneNote
The next option is OneNote, from the Microsoft behemoth. OneNote does much the same as Evernote, with its own cloud syncing thingy, and given the size of the Micro$oft juggernaut it should be syncing, rather than sinking. Being linked in with the Office environment here makes it a fairly useful little tool, although you give up all of the nice archiving and indexing algorithms from Evernote. But on the flipside, you only have to pay through the nose once for the privilege of using the tool, rather than the pesky subscription model. However, the caveat here is the same as the one for Evernote. Indeed, OneNote is one of the platforms that I have lost data with before. Although in this case I have all my notes still jammed into the little .one files, dutifully backed up. I can do almost nothing with them. The version of OneNote that last opened them didn’t support easy export, and so short of copying and pasting them all it’s a bit of a lost cause. But hey, on the bright side at least I have the files (*hums* Always look on the bright side of life). This consigns OneNote to the same drawer as Evernote.
Pages/Word/GoogleApps
The fourth option here is Pages, or Word if you are on PC/Android/WinMo, or Google Apps if you swing that way. These aren’t really dedicated note taking systems, although they can be pressed into service in a pinch. They all come with a variety of mobile apps, and you can cloud sync your notes via Dropbox (see the last post) so you can get at your notes anywhere. However, they are quite granular and don’t really support tagging or any other organisational features. So you need to keep your directory structures clean and clear. File format wise they are both proprietary but widespread enough that they can be opened on multiple platforms and by multiple apps. Plus they can all be exported to PDF for archival. Quite nice really, but seriously bloated for a note taking app. That said, I still use Pages and Word for note taking in conferences (depending if I’m on the iPad or laptop), and then just export to PDF for archival at the end of the conference.
None of the above solutions have really whetted my appetite for a note taking app, until this one: SimpleNote. If Evernote and OneNote are your full featured, slightly bloated and bulging note taking apps, then SimpleNote is the polar opposite. SimpleNote does exactly what it says, and is a basic text based note taking app. It supports one form of organisation: tagging; and that is about it. It is solely text and MultiMarkDown compatible, which means no fancy fonts or formatting, just plain text with some basic italics, bold and other simple formatting features. Where it excels is that it does this without any fuss and mess, and is easily exportable and cross compatible. For a start, given that everything is in text, and several helper apps can reach into the cloud to extract your notes and store them in .txt format on your machine, means that you don’t have to worry about being stuck in a proprietary system. Plus with everything being indexed in text format, apps such as DEVONthink or Spotlight can quickly read them and find your data. You can tag your notes with OpenMeta tags so you can find them easily, and being cloud based you can access your notes anywhere. As they are fairly open with their interface there are other good desktop helper apps to use as well. Personally here I use ResophNotes if I’m on Windows, and a fork from Notational Velocity called nvALT on the Mac. nvALT is my go to for quick note taking and it syncs easily with SimpleNote. That way I can have all the quick notes I need on my phone, and anywhere. From paper ideas, to pithy quotes, it is all here. I quite like this primer on text notes over on the ‘A Better Mess’ blog, he covers the range of uses better than I can in this short form now: Plain Text Primer : nvALT 101.
Finally I will end this post by highlighting one use of this system. When I find particularly salient quotes from articles and books, I tend to store them in a little file on my SimpleNote, that I nickname my quote bank. Some of it is humorous anecdotes while others are serious treatises. But they are all there for ease of finding and rapid application.
Well there it is, my note taking post, and why I don’t use Evernote, or OneNote. In this case simple wins out, with SimpleNote just having the ease and sticking power. Tell me why I’m a fool not to use Evernote, or your favourite note taking app, in the comments below.
In academia and many other fields, the temptation is to become ever more specialised. Indeed, continually narrowing and paring back the breadth of expertise to be deep in a specific area is one of the requirements of many post-graduate research degrees. Despite this trend and requirement, it is not actually the best thing to be super-specialised at the expense of a broader knowledge base. In fact it is really beneficial to be a broad learner, and in a wider range of disciplines than just your area of speciality.
Professionally, having a strong detailed knowledge of your particular area is important, it is also as important to be able to draw in insights from other fields and areas to leverage on the work at hand. Being able to link concepts together and understand ideas from different perspectives is invaluable. However, even from a broader standpoint having a wider knowledge base will help with being able to explain concepts in layman’s terms, rather than using the specialised jargon of your field. Not only does this make your work more broadly accessible, but it even improves your communication within the field.
So how can this be picked up. Do we need to therefore be experts in every discipline, as some argue for true doxastic justification? No, I would argue that even just a broad understanding of other disciplines is helpful. What is more there are many ways of being able to pick up this knowledge without having to be invested as deeply as with your primary field. Personally the two primary ways I broaden my knowledge base are through conferences and hobbies.
Conferences
The somewhat more obvious option for being a broad (not bored) learner, as they tend to have a broad cross-section of interest, rather than just your highly specific area. Plus professional conferences tend to be closer to your area of focus which makes bridging the gap easier. Of course here it is tempting to just attend those papers that relate to your specific field, and it is certainly important to be getting the current information for that area. However, it is highly unlikely that these conferences will have a paper on in every time slot that addresses your speciality. So in those time slots that are blissfully free from your topic, then head along to other papers to broaden the knowledge base.
Though, if your speciality primarily has smaller conferences on highly specific topics, then it can be worth heading along to larger conferences, even if they are not super-specific. Or attending other smaller conferences on related topics. This breadth of knowledge base in related fields can be invaluable in inter-disciplinary research and insights.
Hobbies
The other area that can be invaluable for being able to communicate research are your hobbies. Hobbies tend to be far less specialised than the fields that we are engaged in for work, and so the communication for these tends to be more transferrable. For example, I do a bit with yeast, namely baking and brewing. So if I want to talk about how an idea spreads in a social setting I could talk about Berger and Luckmann’s theory of sociological construction, or I can talk about how yeast spreads through dough in a similar fashion. While the former is certainly more accurate, the latter is more communicable to non-experts. Plus, even for experts the different analogies and metaphors can spark a better understanding of complex concepts. Rather than hobbies necessarily being distractions from work, they can be leveraged as insights and analogies for communicating the work at hand.
In short, while our specialisation and expertise in specific topics is needed and required, we also need to have a broad knowledge base underpinning it. It gives us new insights into the topics at hand, and it improves our communication of our expertise. How do you keep your breadth of knowledge. Tell me below.
Brief contact with a cockroach will usually render a delicious meal inedible. [But] the inverse phenome-non—rendering a pile of cockroaches on a platter edible by contact with one’s favorite food—is unheard of.[ref]Rozin, Paul, and Edward B. Royzman. ‘Negativity Bias, Negativity Dominance, and Contagion’. Personality and Social Psychology Review 5/4 (2001): 296–320.[/ref]
Why does our media constantly report on the negative aspects of our society, with only a short snippet of positive media? Why is it that people spouting polemic and invectives get so much more airtime, than those building constructive arguments? Undoubtedly some of this is due to the prevalence of polemics and the problem of evil in the world, there is also a cognitive bias lurking beneath the surface: the negativity bias. This bias describes our human predisposition to paying more attention to elements that have an overall negative nature, to those that have a positive nature to them.
The negativity bias, also known as the positive-negative asymmetry effect, has been regularly observed in a wide range of studies, and is intrinsically felt by many people. For example the loss of a pet or more significantly a relative will resonate with many individuals for a significant period. Or for a child at school being picked last on a sports team, or failing a test, will have a higher and longer lasting currency than all the times that they were picked first or excelled. Psychologically the effects of negative events stick with us longer than the positive ones.[ref]Baumeister, Roy F.; Finkenauer, Catrin; Vohs, Kathleen D. (2001). Bad is stronger than good. Review of General Psychology 5 (4): 323–370. [/ref] Furthermore, in a range of psychological studies, even when artificially controlling for frequency and occurrence the majority of people pay more attention to negative than positive events, and are even internally motivated to avoid negative projection rather than emphasise positive projection.
So is this just the old adage of the world going to hell in a hand basket? Are things just getting ever worse, and eventually the situation will be completely untenable, with the world imploding in on itself in a sea of negativity? Well, not quite, or so the research says. Although it is obvious that negative events occur, and seemingly regularly, the overall tenor of the world is that these events are in decline. As Steven Pinker found in his research on violence in The Better Angels of Our Nature we may actually be living in the most peaceful era ever.[ref]Pinker, Steven. The Better Angels of Our Nature: Why Violence Has Declined. 1st Edition edition. New York: Viking Adult, 2011.[/ref] While I’m usually quite suspicious of Whig-type historiography, it appears that the research in Pinkers book stacks up. Why then is it that we feel that the world is just getting worse? A significant portion of it is likely to do with our negativity bias.
With our inbuilt negativity bias pushing us towards paying more attention to negative events than positive, is is understandable that the variety of media tends to report on negative events. Especially those outlets that are dependent on sales or clicks to pay the bills. In turn this feeds our negativity bias, and so the cycle is perpetuated. However, it is important to note that this is not a chicken-and-the-egg origins scenario. From the plethora of studies it is quite clear that the origins for the cycle lie within our cognitive biases, and are then subsequently fed and reinforced.
The same effect occurs when people are asked to make decisions based on the evidence provided. Many will decide on a course of action, or a held belief, based on the negative arguments put forward, rather than the positive arguments. We humans tend to make decisions based on what we may lose, rather than what we can gain.[ref]Rozin, Paul, and Edward B. Royzman. ‘Negativity Bias, Negativity Dominance, and Contagion’. Personality and Social Psychology Review 5/4 (2001): 296–320.
In a possible confirmation of the FUTON bias: https://sites.sas.upenn.edu/rozin/files/negbias198pspr2001pap.pdf[/ref]
What does this have to do with academia and the public square, other than something that is cool to know about. Well, one of the primary applications is to do with how positions are argued. While proving the null hypothesis probably wont suffice for formal arguments, it certainly suffices for the public square. What is more, because of the negativity bias, these negative arguments tend to be taken on board more than the same argument phrased positively. As an example I was recently reading an article posted to that erudite news source: Facebook. Essentially the author of the article was arguing positively for the existence of a town from archaeological and historical evidence, and quite academically convincingly too might I add. However, from the comments on Facebook it was evident that the take home aspect of many readers was that the author was arguing negatively, against the proposed thesis that the archaeological evidence pointed to the non-existence of the town. Many readers completely failed to acknowledge the positive arguments, even when quizzed.
So what for us? Well in academia and public discourse there is a tendency to provide solely constructive arguments, as within the scientific method it is difficult to prove the null hypothesis (don’t get me started on Bayesian theory and NHST again). However, for reception of that discourse we need to be aware that negatively framed arguments tend to be carried with more weight. Sadly then negative arguments must be engaged with, rather than merely dismissed. Of course the difficulty is how to engage with them without merely being negative in response, and on that question I’m very sad to say it is highly contextual.
How do you deal with negative arguments, and how are you aware of the negativity bias at play in your own work? Tell me below, in the comments.
The other area that can be invaluable for being able to communicate research are your hobbies. Hobbies tend to be far less specialised than the fields that we are engaged in for work, and so the communication for these tends to be more transferrable. For example, I do a bit with yeast, namely baking and brewing. So if I want to talk about how an idea spreads in a social setting I could talk about Berger and Luckmann’s theory of sociological construction, or I can talk about how yeast spreads through dough in a similar fashion. While the former is certainly more accurate, the latter is more communicable to non-experts. Plus, even for experts the different analogies and metaphors can spark a better understanding of complex concepts. Rather than hobbies necessarily being distractions from work, they can be leveraged as insights and analogies for communicating the work at hand.
