Tackling the empathy deficit, the first post in what looks to be an interesting new blog on empathy. Here’s the intro video:

I think empathy is something we should all be constantly working on improving. It’s the ability to imagine what it’s like to be someone else, to feel the same emotions and think the same thoughts. Not only is it a great tool for expanding our understanding of the world (at which we are definitely not the center) but it’s also a rich and interesting exercise that can break us out of ruts and trained patterns of reaction.

Curious to see how this blog develops.

Via The School of Life.

The narrative is the container for all the different stories we tell each other. Some of the stories are public, that the whole world knows, others are public to our social circles, others are considered private even though many people may know the story (it just isn’t supposed to be spread to others), and some are just in our heads.

We are very sensitive to the narrative in all of its contexts. If someone tells us something that happened, based on the way that it is told, it becomes part of one or all of our stories. The way we treat people is based partially on our understanding of the stories we share in common in the narrative.  Sometimes, a new twist in the narrative can change how we view all of the other stories in the narrative as well.

Our own personal narrative, which is part public and part private, determines a lot about how we interact with others. It is more difficult to interact with people who have conflicting stories in their narrative, without some required distance.

Each relationship has a shared narrative, the story of the two people. Friends, neighbors, co-workers, we all have the shared narrative, and we all obey according to how the narrative makes us out to be (which can be slightly different for each shared narrative in each relationship).

When something significant happens, there are cues to sync up the shared narrative about what happened.  If there are disagreements, sometimes each person will consult others on the side to gain support for their version of the story, and gain confidence that even though the other person doesn’t fully agree, that consensus says that this is what actually happened.  And by sharing the story with others, your shared narrative with them also shifts, and the part of the story that happened in one relationship now has a bigger audience and therefore more weight.

Things can get ugly around here, if people become too attached to the narrative. People might talk bad about others behind their back in order to make them look better. Or people might try to force other people to agree to their version of the story by telling it over and over again until it becomes, by default, the “official” version of the story.  Sometimes, the truth becomes obscured because one person or another didn’t fight enough for that story to enter the narrative. At that point, it doesn’t matter what happened, the narrative moves on, history is written, and the sub-narrative is shelved until someone tries to bring it back.

The narrative is fascinating to me. It’s a way of viewing personality, stories, gossip, fear, passion, success, and failure that rings true with me these days. It’s a shared story that has its own rules, rules outside of the rules of fairness or truth, and are more in line with the rules of entertainment, social hierarchy, and fun.  And it’s not all-powerful.  I think truth is still a more powerful entity, it’s just not always in the foreground.  History, in a way, could be interpreted as an eternal battle between truth and the narrative.

“If you have the facts on your side, pound the facts. If you have the law on your side, pound the law. If you have neither on your side, pound the table.”
—Legal Adage

I like that, it rings true as advice on how to win (even if you’re wrong).  Of course, it’s bad advice, and, the rest of John Gruber’s post, Pound the Quality, mostly about the iPhone’s advantage over the competition, hits on the true advise we should take.

The iPhone has turned that around, and it’s driving Microsoft executives batty. The situation is so at odds with Microsoft’s view of the computing universe that Steve Ballmer came up with this cockamamie explanation: “The Internet was designed for the PC. The Internet is not designed for the iPhone. That’s why they’ve got 75,000 applications — they’re all trying to make the Internet look decent on the iPhone.” Pound the table, indeed.

The simplest reduction of the age-old Mac-vs.-Windows debate is quality-vs.-quantity. But I don’t blame Apple for bragging about the sheer number of iPhone apps available, because it’s something that can be measured. It’s a powerful marketing point because it is an undeniable fact: there are nearly 100,000 apps, and more every week. You can’t quantify the advantage Mac software has over Windows.

It’s almost impossible to pound the quality, cause it’s not quantifiable.  It’s not irrefutable.  It’s an aesthetic.  That doesn’t stop it from being the most important thing, though.

An old Grandfather said to his grandson, who came to him with anger at a friend who had done him an injustice, “Let me tell you a story.”

“I too, at times, have felt a great hate for those that have taken so much, with no sorrow for what they do.

But hate wears you down, and does not hurt your enemy. It is like taking poison and wishing your enemy would die. I have struggled with these feelings many times.” He continued, “It is as if there are two wolves inside me. One is good and does no harm. He lives in harmony with all around him, and does not take offense when no offense was intended. He will only fight when it is right to do so, and in the right way.

But the other wolf, ah! He is full of anger. The littlest thing will set him into a fit of temper. He fights everyone, all the time, for no reason. He cannot think because his anger and hate are so great. It is helpless anger, for his anger will change nothing.

Sometimes, it is hard to live with these two wolves inside me, for both of them try to dominate my spirit.”

The boy looked intently into his Grandfather’s eyes and asked, “Which one wins, Grandfather?”

He replied, “The one I feed.”

This jibes with my simplified understanding of Marvin Minsky’s book, “The Society of Mind” that I read many years ago but still think about all the time.  About we each have basically a “society” of contained forces within us.  Separate people, almost.

Today I’ve been in a foul mood. Someone mentioned this story on the internet a few days ago and it came at a time when I could almost physically feel myself feeding the angry mean wolf.  I happened to also be eating junk food at the time, which made the allegory more literal than it was perhaps meant to be taken.  But, at the same time, it feels true that certain foods also feed different wolves, right?

When I’m angry I want foods that are heavy, that’ll drag my mood down a little bit, beat it up.  But in the end that just makes me feel worse.

A healthy meal, while it doesn’t have an immediate impact on my mental state, will in the long run probably feed the healthy wolf more.  So, for lunch, I had a salad and some lentil soup.

Anyway, it’s an old allegory, but it sort of helped me out today.

A couple days ago, version 2.1 of Locavore was approved in the iTunes Store.  The biggest new change is the way recipes work.  I’ve removed integration with Epicurious and replaced it with the wonderful work of Foodista. Recipes are an untapped (in my opinion) aspect of the local food movement.  Now, not only are the recipes listed within the app, but I’m able to find recipes sorted by those that have the most in-season ingredients.  It’s awesome!

I will tell a little story about how this happened, because to me it illustrates some reasons why I think big companies are unable to see good ideas, much less act on them.  And why, eventually, they shoot themselves in the foot.

When Locavore first launched, I linked to an Epicurious search results page from the food detail page.  Somehow, Epicurious caught wind of this and notified Apple that I hadn’t gotten their permission to do this.  That’s the first weird thing… big companies have enough sway to require permission to load their web page within an app.

Apple threatened to yank the app unless I got their permission.  I wrote to five different email addresses at Epicurious and none of them ever replied.  Eventually, I get a phone call from someone at Epicurious.  They offer to buy Locavore, I give them a crazy price that they decline, and then they say they will give me permission to link to their search results page from within the app.  It takes them a month plus to draw up the papers, at which point I’ve already updated the app to close Locavore and open Safari with Epicurious’s search results page because Apple needed this to be resolved more quickly.  Finally, they say the papers are drawn up, ask for my address, I give it to them 1 minute later, and to this day I have not seen these papers.

Enter Foodista

Foodista.com is a great small new company in Seattle that is indexing all of the recipes on the web.  They are ambitious, extremely friendly (I visited the team here in Seattle a few months ago), and really excited about not only recipes, but all of the amazing new ways food, recipes, local food, and the love of it all can come together in this amazing new futuristic world called the present.  They love food, they love the Internet, they blog and participate with their readers, they put on food conferences, they team with local chefs and bartenders for special events, and they constantly find new ways to work together with others.  I love them.

After talking with them for half an hour, they agreed to open up their recipe api to me, link to me from their food detail pages, and allow me to include their recipes in Locavore.  We brainstormed a dozen ideas on ways we could work together, and were also quick to do custom work that same day to make sure we could start working together immediately.

The result

Locavore is all about knowing what’s in season.  But how do you know what to do with what’s in season?  Now, with Foodista’s help, you can get a custom list of recipes from all over the Internet, sorted by those that have the most in-season ingredients.  That doesn’t exist anywhere right now.  My guess is that in 5 years, it will be everywhere.  And that’s a good thing.  The difference between big, slow, companies and small fast ones like us are that WE WANT the future to get here.  We want information to spread as quickly as possible and we want everyone to benefit from technology.

Also included in the new version of Locavore 2.1

• Farmers’ markets are now listed on a map so you can see exactly where you are in the local food ecosystem of your neighborhood.
• New data for the UK.
• New art!

Enjoy!

Why is it that we cannot correct flaws in ourselves that we know we have?  Why can’t we adjust for our own biases and prejudices by sheer force of will?  Why can’t we change priorities and desires simply by wanting to?

Clearly there is a wire missing between our conscious and subconscious minds.  Our subconscious mind can tell us what to do, but we can’t bully our subconscious around in the same way.  Mostly because it’s sub… we don’t know what is going on in there at all. We have a limit to our self-knowledge.

It’s not just psychologists who experience the limitations of self-knowledge. Just consider Harry Markowitz, a Nobel Prize winning economist who practically invented the field of investment portfolio theory. In the early 1950′s, while working at the RAND Corporation, Markowitz became intrigued by a practical financial problem: how much of his savings should he invest in the stock market? Markowitz’s breakthrough was to derive a complicated mathematical equation that could calculate the optimal mix of assets. He had come up with a rational solution to the old problem of risk versus reward.

But Markowitz was incapable of using his own equation. When he divided up his investment portfolio, he ignored the investment advice that had won him the Nobel Prize. Instead of relying on the math, he fell into the familiar trap of loss aversion – this leads people to reject investments that might lead to losses – and he split his portfolio equally between stocks and bonds. Markowitz was so worried about the possibility of losing his savings that he failed to optimize his own retirement account.

via The Limits of Self-Knowledge : The Frontal Cortex.

The best we can do is be on guard to see what our subconscious is doing, and to try to correct anything that is not aligned with our conscious values, goals, desires.  And perhaps that is simply the difference between children and adults… that guard.

Along with the guard come a few tradeoffs.  First reactions.  Unguarded vulnerability.  True, innocent, glee.  And in exchange we get a little control, a little consistency of action and behavior, manners, etiquette, kindness, and fairness.

Is that a fair trade?

Interesting, if pretty surface-level, article about how nonsense makes our brains eager to find a new pattern, and sometimes might even help learning.

An experience, in short, that violates all logic and expectation. The philosopher Soren Kierkegaard wrote that such anomalies produced a profound “sensation of the absurd,” and he wasn’t the only one who took them seriously. Freud, in an essay called “The Uncanny,” traced the sensation to a fear of death, of castration or of “something that ought to have remained hidden but has come to light.”

At best, the feeling is disorienting. At worst, it’s creepy.

Now a study suggests that, paradoxically, this same sensation may prime the brain to sense patterns it would otherwise miss — in mathematical equations, in language, in the world at large.

via Mind – How Nonsense Sharpens the Intellect – NYTimes.com.

Another way of describing it is that nonsense turns on the seeking button in our brains.  We expect sense, we get none, and we are left hungry for something to fill the void left by that expectation.

Isn’t fear’s best costume the appearance of wisdom? Is it possible to separate the two in a mixture? How often do we rationalize something with facts, anecdotes, statistics, and group agreement when really we’re covering up the fact that we’re afraid?

Of course, sometimes wisdom can lead to fear. Putting all of your money on black at a roulette table is something that should be scary, right?

But what about those times where there’s simply fear but not wisdom? Going somewhere you haven’t gone before. Doing something new. Putting something to the test. Starting a new job can be scary, but by default it’s not necessarily an un-wise thing to do. And yet it’s easy to imagine rationalizing the choice away.

What tests are there to take to help determine if your choices are being made based on wisdom, wisdom and fear, or just fear?

Magical words from Caterina:

Much more important than working hard is knowing how to find the right thing to work on. Paying attention to what is going on in the world. Seeing patterns. Seeing things as they are rather than how you want them to be. Being able to read what people want. Putting yourself in the right place where information is flowing freely and interesting new juxtapositions can be seen. But you can save yourself a lot of time by working on the right thing. Working hard, even, if that’s what you like to do.

via Caterina.net: Working hard is overrated.

I agree with this, even though my subconscious flip flops on the issue pretty regularly.  Of course, wisdom like this is easy to take advantage of, or use in the wrong way.  A lot of people who don’t work hard are also not working on the right thing… probably a bigger percent actually.

And then, what’s the right thing?  Is it that magical task that history has put you right in front of?  That you must do as the right ideas and right technologies come together in the right place?  And, what if that right thing isn’t fulfilling?

Is it better to work hard on the right thing that is not fulfilling or the wrong thing that is fulfilling?  Or, does fulfillment come from the sense that you are working on the right thing? I don’t know.