This is so, so good Mike. I hadn’t heard the word ‘sonder’ before, love the meaning of it. I’m going to read this a second time, there’s so much here to think about. By the way, the nuns used to make use cover our hardcover books in brown paper because they got passed down to another class the following year. But never books that were softcover cardboard — that’s just wrong! 😉
Thank you, Jolene! Yes, brown paper on exercise books is a bit daft - and I hope my memory isn't playing tricks on me (see my answer to Antonia's comment). If I discover I'm wrong, I will provide a correction to the post! (Eeeeek). And - this season ends around the end of next week. It's been a long one!
As a recent recipient myself of your own generous spirit, Mike, I know you definitely practise what you preach! One thing I've learned recently is that the algorithmic 'filter bubble' can at least work in one's favour: on Twitter, for example, I made myself stop doomscrolling and reading negative stuff, and focus on the positive, and following people who are clearly - well, you know, nice, wholesome, charming, all that sort of fluffy stuff, as well as writing about things that I find uplifting. The feed definitely now brings me more and more such things. This has its drawbacks, no doubt, but at least it's a positive feedback loop.
This is so true! I've noticed the same thing happening. Not quite enough for my liking, but that's probably becase I haven't been posting enough on Twitter recently - which is a nice pressure to put stuff on there that somewhat reflects what I want to read...
There's an amazing hole in this, the exact shape of Robert Axelrod's Evolution of Co-operation. A round-robin tournament of prisoner's dilemma games, that showed always cooperate (Givers) and always defect (Takers) give the worst scores. The best strategy was the responsive tit-for-tat that repeated the last action of the other party. It started by assuming cooperation, punished a defection immediately and then forgave it. To encourage cooperation: favour repeated interactions, publicise/share interaction history (being a bad apple in a small community has a higher cost than in a city).
If the proportion in your population of people using the tit-for-tat strategy is large enough, the system is evolutionary stable, ie it is resistant to any other strategy coming in, and it cannot be out-performed by any other strategy. Being nice works (if you know why).
This post has reminded me that Richard Dawkins did a Horizon programme on this back in 1986, Nice Guys Finish First, which I have never seen. That's my next 48 minutes sorted!
Oh wow. That's two things I need to dive all the way into before I start writing about this again. I haven't seen that Horizon ep yet so I'll sit down with it tomorrow - great find. (And the other is both a paper AND a book? I...really need to go on a cruise, to get all this reading done.)
Thank you, Mike!
Side note: I found myself wishing that British TV still had a science show with all the nerdy-but-everyman rigour of Horizon. But then I went to look, and...it's still running. The last episode was on June 2nd. So, just goes to show that nostalgia can just be ignorance playing tricks on you. :)
Watchng the Horizon episode and dipping back into reading around the subject, I remember how excited I was to find this stuff. As a child of the Enlightenment, I always wanted to believe that we could make the world work as it should if only we could find the correct levers/ understanding.
One important wrinkle to what I wrote above is that the important thing is not the proportion of 'nice' strategies across the population as a whole, but in your interactions. It's possible to get a sustainable nucleus of cooperative, nice, behaviour even in a majority 'nasty' population if the interactions can be selected/ weighted to give a sufficient number of nice-nice ones. This was part of the toolbox of strategies for reducing the control of the Mafia in Sicily - networks of non-Mafia people/ services etc that could flourish in parallel.
I'm working my way through one of those nerdy, informative, challenging series -- the "Seven Wonders of the World" from the BBC in 1995 ("BBC documentary series in which outstanding scientists choose and discuss their personal seven wonders of the world."). I've tracked down 12 (now 13) of the 14 episodes on either YouTube or Vimeo.
Can you remember when, as a child, you were filled with wonder at the world?
Some people retain this wonder into adulthood. A new BBC programme has found them - all eminent scientists - and deftly captured on film their amazement about the world. By asking each of them to choose their "seven wonders of the world", the series has a device with which the viewer is scooped up and deposited inside the scientists' minds, looking out at the world through their fascinated eyes.
<endquote>
The scientists are Danny Hillis, Thomas Eisner, Arthur C Clarke, Miriam Rothschild, Richard Dawkins, Steven Pinker, Alison Jolly, Julie Theriot, Stephen Jay Gould, James Lovelock, Steve Jones, John Maynard Smith, Aubrey Manning and Monica Grady.
"Sonder" and "empathic curiosity," two words I hadn't heard before. Funnily enough, regarding sonder, my husband and I often referred to the idea -- not of our own creation -- that everyone is the star of their own story and everyone else is just playing supporting roles.
And setting boundaries while giving and transactional only relationships and all the rest, all such fascinating important stuff that takes a lifetime to learn. Although I doubt the awful Mr. South ever learned much about any of that stuff.
Absolutely! And I wonder how the internet has tapped into and amplified that healthy sense that the world revolves around each of us, perhaps amplifying to a toxic degree. It must be healthy up to a point - but when we don't just consider ourselves protagonists but also somehow enormously *superior*, that's when it all goes awry. Narcissism outsells self-confidence, I guess, especially when it comes to things around money...
As you say, it's a lot of work - arguably a life's work? - to learn the wisdom to apply to self-confidence so you can consider the needs of others properly and know when it's the right thing to put them in front of yourself. And yet celebrity culture can be all "this 22 year old person has got it all worked out" while anyone over the age of 60 (or 50, or 40) is quietly regarded as "past it" and unworthy of listening to, especially if they don't meet certain standards of growing old glamourously (especially applied to women). That's....not a good thing.
Maybe there are different types of empathy too: the unrestrained type when you're young and ready to break all the injustices of world over your knee and make something better, and the quieter, better-at-listening one that comes along in our later years, where we understand so much more about other people, but maybe could be nudged out of our weary cynicism by the fierce empathy of youth...
You can probably tell I'm still juggling all this stuff in my head. Sorry. :)
Lovely post, Mike (I read it instead of listening but I'll probably do that too). These days so much collaboration between team members is necessary that interpersonal skills and a more sensitive, compassionate approach to dealing with everyone just makes the most sense.
I hope that your former teacher finally saw the error of his ways.
I'm so glad it's becoming clear, via all the necessary research, that collaborating in that way is starting to feel like plain good sense for so many workplaces. And it'd be great if it was the norm *between* workplaces too. Something where it was clear that genuinely helping the "competition" had some very real bottom-line benefits in the long run, if those facts became clear? But if it's true, that mindset shift is a big ask and I guess requires a lot more work to confirm the value of.
Damn. This might be my favorite issue among many of my favorites of yours! Knocked it out of the park, as we say. Strong compassion in every phrase. Stellar. 💫
I have actually never heard the word "sonder" before but love it! My version of that thought is aspen trees -- coming to terms with being part of the vast underground community rather than having every contribution you make visible to all.
(In every school I attended, which was many because we moved a lot, we had to wrap our hardcover textbooks in grocery bag paper. This was because most of the schools were poor and had to reuse the books for many years. It did allow us space to decorate our books because it was just blank, tough brown paper all around, which I imagine Mr South would not have approved of. But you've brought back many memories of bad teachers of various stripes ... along with the great ones.)
Thank you! :) That is the highest of kind words on your part.
And also - now I'm worried that my memory is playing huge tricks on me, and we were actually wrapping textbooks in brown paper, which - lets Mr South off the hook somewhat! Ruh roh. (But I don't remember us using textbooks? Or if we did, we covered them in brown paper *as well*, hence why that first lesson took an hour, I guess...).
I'm hoping some of my colleagues from school will weigh in and confirm or correct me on the details here. (Yo! DAVE! Can you remember all this?)
UPDATE: my mate Dave also remembers that it was indeed our freshly-acquired exercise books, not our textbooks. But! We weren't allowed to use sticky-tape or glue. That's why it took an hour: we were shown in excruciating detail how to make the cover just by using folding.
Honestly your characterization of him is such that I don't think it matters! You can have kids wrap whatever in brown paper without becoming a dictator about it! And I am still guessing he wouldn't have let you personalize and decorate them the way we did.
I mean, it's certainly a thing in military forces. But I read a fascinating story about the Spartans (Gates of Fire, Steven Pressfield) that suggested that they had such a superior military force because it wasn't built on heirarchies of fear and obedience - it was about loyalty and cameraderie and kindship.
And if it certainly doesn't work in education or business, and it maybe isn't the most effective way of motivating soldiers either - maybe time to throw out this awful, awful rulebook properly?
Thank you, Don. Yes, I want to believe it too - which is maybe a bias to be aware of. It's a horribly thought that the worst kind of people are the ones primed for success. But maybe we're biased to see those folk just because they're super-loud and very good at enraging huge parts of social media.
The thing I find hopeful about Adam Grant's work here is that it's throwing light on quiet success: the type that doesn't make a massive self-promoting fuss, but gets the job done better than anyone. That's the real story here - and maybe it tells a much more hopeful and uplifting picture than we're used to seeing. Fingers crossed!
And maybe having good and bad is a good thing (not at the time, because having a bad teacher is awful - but *later*). One throwing the other into sharp contrast...
But also, I remember how some of my classmates didn't like my English teacher. Maybe "bad teacher" is so often tangled up with "I don't enjoy studying this subject" and it's hard to pull them apart - which is rough on teachers, I guess...
Were they textbooks? (See Antonia's comment.) I'm now a bit worried that mine were textbooks too, and I'm misremembering the whole thing...although I don't think it's the case? (But if my memory is faulty, how would I know? Argh....)
(BTW, I'm reading Ann Leckie's 'Ancillary Justice' (https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Ancillary_Justice) and I think you'll really enjoy it for the wild Arkady-Martine-style weird society-building. It's really great so far.)
I like almost every book you recommend and my TBR-for-fun pile is falling over! I really think you'd like "The Space Between Worlds." From the description:
"An outsider who can travel between worlds discovers a secret that threatens her new home and her fragile place in it, in a stunning sci-fi debut that’s both a cross-dimensional adventure and a powerful examination of identity, privilege, and belonging.
Multiverse travel is finally possible, but there’s just one catch: No one can visit a world where their counterpart is still alive. Enter Cara, whose parallel selves happen to be exceptionally good at dying—from disease, turf wars, or vendettas they couldn’t outrun. Cara’s life has been cut short on 372 worlds in total.
On this Earth, however, Cara has survived. Identified as an outlier and therefore a perfect candidate for multiverse travel, Cara is plucked from the dirt of the wastelands."
This is so, so good Mike. I hadn’t heard the word ‘sonder’ before, love the meaning of it. I’m going to read this a second time, there’s so much here to think about. By the way, the nuns used to make use cover our hardcover books in brown paper because they got passed down to another class the following year. But never books that were softcover cardboard — that’s just wrong! 😉
Can’t wait for the new season.
Thank you, Jolene! Yes, brown paper on exercise books is a bit daft - and I hope my memory isn't playing tricks on me (see my answer to Antonia's comment). If I discover I'm wrong, I will provide a correction to the post! (Eeeeek). And - this season ends around the end of next week. It's been a long one!
Can’t wait! Also: even if they were textbooks, he was still a jerk! 😂
As a recent recipient myself of your own generous spirit, Mike, I know you definitely practise what you preach! One thing I've learned recently is that the algorithmic 'filter bubble' can at least work in one's favour: on Twitter, for example, I made myself stop doomscrolling and reading negative stuff, and focus on the positive, and following people who are clearly - well, you know, nice, wholesome, charming, all that sort of fluffy stuff, as well as writing about things that I find uplifting. The feed definitely now brings me more and more such things. This has its drawbacks, no doubt, but at least it's a positive feedback loop.
This is so true! I've noticed the same thing happening. Not quite enough for my liking, but that's probably becase I haven't been posting enough on Twitter recently - which is a nice pressure to put stuff on there that somewhat reflects what I want to read...
Andrew, you might like this site: https://www.positive.news/ They tweet at @PositiveNewsUK
Already a subscriber 😀
There's an amazing hole in this, the exact shape of Robert Axelrod's Evolution of Co-operation. A round-robin tournament of prisoner's dilemma games, that showed always cooperate (Givers) and always defect (Takers) give the worst scores. The best strategy was the responsive tit-for-tat that repeated the last action of the other party. It started by assuming cooperation, punished a defection immediately and then forgave it. To encourage cooperation: favour repeated interactions, publicise/share interaction history (being a bad apple in a small community has a higher cost than in a city).
If the proportion in your population of people using the tit-for-tat strategy is large enough, the system is evolutionary stable, ie it is resistant to any other strategy coming in, and it cannot be out-performed by any other strategy. Being nice works (if you know why).
This post has reminded me that Richard Dawkins did a Horizon programme on this back in 1986, Nice Guys Finish First, which I have never seen. That's my next 48 minutes sorted!
https://naturedocumentaries.org/1500/nice-guys-finish-first-richard-dawkins-1987/
Oh wow. That's two things I need to dive all the way into before I start writing about this again. I haven't seen that Horizon ep yet so I'll sit down with it tomorrow - great find. (And the other is both a paper AND a book? I...really need to go on a cruise, to get all this reading done.)
Thank you, Mike!
Side note: I found myself wishing that British TV still had a science show with all the nerdy-but-everyman rigour of Horizon. But then I went to look, and...it's still running. The last episode was on June 2nd. So, just goes to show that nostalgia can just be ignorance playing tricks on you. :)
Watchng the Horizon episode and dipping back into reading around the subject, I remember how excited I was to find this stuff. As a child of the Enlightenment, I always wanted to believe that we could make the world work as it should if only we could find the correct levers/ understanding.
One important wrinkle to what I wrote above is that the important thing is not the proportion of 'nice' strategies across the population as a whole, but in your interactions. It's possible to get a sustainable nucleus of cooperative, nice, behaviour even in a majority 'nasty' population if the interactions can be selected/ weighted to give a sufficient number of nice-nice ones. This was part of the toolbox of strategies for reducing the control of the Mafia in Sicily - networks of non-Mafia people/ services etc that could flourish in parallel.
I'm working my way through one of those nerdy, informative, challenging series -- the "Seven Wonders of the World" from the BBC in 1995 ("BBC documentary series in which outstanding scientists choose and discuss their personal seven wonders of the world."). I've tracked down 12 (now 13) of the 14 episodes on either YouTube or Vimeo.
There's nothing in Wikipedia and only a very partial record on the BBC site, but there is a very good preview piece in the Times Higher Education (10 March 1995) here: https://www.timeshighereducation.com/news/amazed-by-muscular-fleas/97029.article
<startquote>
Can you remember when, as a child, you were filled with wonder at the world?
Some people retain this wonder into adulthood. A new BBC programme has found them - all eminent scientists - and deftly captured on film their amazement about the world. By asking each of them to choose their "seven wonders of the world", the series has a device with which the viewer is scooped up and deposited inside the scientists' minds, looking out at the world through their fascinated eyes.
<endquote>
The scientists are Danny Hillis, Thomas Eisner, Arthur C Clarke, Miriam Rothschild, Richard Dawkins, Steven Pinker, Alison Jolly, Julie Theriot, Stephen Jay Gould, James Lovelock, Steve Jones, John Maynard Smith, Aubrey Manning and Monica Grady.
"Sonder" and "empathic curiosity," two words I hadn't heard before. Funnily enough, regarding sonder, my husband and I often referred to the idea -- not of our own creation -- that everyone is the star of their own story and everyone else is just playing supporting roles.
And setting boundaries while giving and transactional only relationships and all the rest, all such fascinating important stuff that takes a lifetime to learn. Although I doubt the awful Mr. South ever learned much about any of that stuff.
Absolutely! And I wonder how the internet has tapped into and amplified that healthy sense that the world revolves around each of us, perhaps amplifying to a toxic degree. It must be healthy up to a point - but when we don't just consider ourselves protagonists but also somehow enormously *superior*, that's when it all goes awry. Narcissism outsells self-confidence, I guess, especially when it comes to things around money...
As you say, it's a lot of work - arguably a life's work? - to learn the wisdom to apply to self-confidence so you can consider the needs of others properly and know when it's the right thing to put them in front of yourself. And yet celebrity culture can be all "this 22 year old person has got it all worked out" while anyone over the age of 60 (or 50, or 40) is quietly regarded as "past it" and unworthy of listening to, especially if they don't meet certain standards of growing old glamourously (especially applied to women). That's....not a good thing.
Maybe there are different types of empathy too: the unrestrained type when you're young and ready to break all the injustices of world over your knee and make something better, and the quieter, better-at-listening one that comes along in our later years, where we understand so much more about other people, but maybe could be nudged out of our weary cynicism by the fierce empathy of youth...
You can probably tell I'm still juggling all this stuff in my head. Sorry. :)
Lovely post, Mike (I read it instead of listening but I'll probably do that too). These days so much collaboration between team members is necessary that interpersonal skills and a more sensitive, compassionate approach to dealing with everyone just makes the most sense.
I hope that your former teacher finally saw the error of his ways.
Thank you, Mark.
I'm so glad it's becoming clear, via all the necessary research, that collaborating in that way is starting to feel like plain good sense for so many workplaces. And it'd be great if it was the norm *between* workplaces too. Something where it was clear that genuinely helping the "competition" had some very real bottom-line benefits in the long run, if those facts became clear? But if it's true, that mindset shift is a big ask and I guess requires a lot more work to confirm the value of.
Damn. This might be my favorite issue among many of my favorites of yours! Knocked it out of the park, as we say. Strong compassion in every phrase. Stellar. 💫
I have actually never heard the word "sonder" before but love it! My version of that thought is aspen trees -- coming to terms with being part of the vast underground community rather than having every contribution you make visible to all.
(In every school I attended, which was many because we moved a lot, we had to wrap our hardcover textbooks in grocery bag paper. This was because most of the schools were poor and had to reuse the books for many years. It did allow us space to decorate our books because it was just blank, tough brown paper all around, which I imagine Mr South would not have approved of. But you've brought back many memories of bad teachers of various stripes ... along with the great ones.)
Thank you! :) That is the highest of kind words on your part.
And also - now I'm worried that my memory is playing huge tricks on me, and we were actually wrapping textbooks in brown paper, which - lets Mr South off the hook somewhat! Ruh roh. (But I don't remember us using textbooks? Or if we did, we covered them in brown paper *as well*, hence why that first lesson took an hour, I guess...).
I'm hoping some of my colleagues from school will weigh in and confirm or correct me on the details here. (Yo! DAVE! Can you remember all this?)
UPDATE: my mate Dave also remembers that it was indeed our freshly-acquired exercise books, not our textbooks. But! We weren't allowed to use sticky-tape or glue. That's why it took an hour: we were shown in excruciating detail how to make the cover just by using folding.
#phew #vindicated #sadism
🙃
Honestly your characterization of him is such that I don't think it matters! You can have kids wrap whatever in brown paper without becoming a dictator about it! And I am still guessing he wouldn't have let you personalize and decorate them the way we did.
Oh, absolutely. Any joyful doodling on your covers would have been a crime punishable by death, I am certain.
Ah rhe tyrannical teacher. Why do they think that invoking unnatural amounts of fear leads to a good learning experience?!
I don't get it either.
I mean, it's certainly a thing in military forces. But I read a fascinating story about the Spartans (Gates of Fire, Steven Pressfield) that suggested that they had such a superior military force because it wasn't built on heirarchies of fear and obedience - it was about loyalty and cameraderie and kindship.
And if it certainly doesn't work in education or business, and it maybe isn't the most effective way of motivating soldiers either - maybe time to throw out this awful, awful rulebook properly?
This.
Is.
Great!
I love your narrations!
Thank you so much. :) More to come! I love doing stuff this way, so I'll keep experimenting with audio stuff.
You are very welcome! And I am glad that there will be more to come. Audio is fun!
Great read
Thank you, Angelo!
This is fantastic, Mike. Lots of insights to glean from here.
Cheers for reading, Israel. I can really recommend Adam Grant's book! Much more interesting than anything I've cobbled together here...
This was so beautiful. It's nice to have some hope that nice guys don't always finish last. Thank you!
Thank you, Don. Yes, I want to believe it too - which is maybe a bias to be aware of. It's a horribly thought that the worst kind of people are the ones primed for success. But maybe we're biased to see those folk just because they're super-loud and very good at enraging huge parts of social media.
The thing I find hopeful about Adam Grant's work here is that it's throwing light on quiet success: the type that doesn't make a massive self-promoting fuss, but gets the job done better than anyone. That's the real story here - and maybe it tells a much more hopeful and uplifting picture than we're used to seeing. Fingers crossed!
“Great teachers, overflowing with enthusiasm and kindness, are a blessing in our lives.” Amen, sir. I had bad and good as well.
And maybe having good and bad is a good thing (not at the time, because having a bad teacher is awful - but *later*). One throwing the other into sharp contrast...
But also, I remember how some of my classmates didn't like my English teacher. Maybe "bad teacher" is so often tangled up with "I don't enjoy studying this subject" and it's hard to pull them apart - which is rough on teachers, I guess...
If kindness didn’t work, civilization would end. Wonderful read Mike, thank you.
I think so too. Keeping my fingers crossed for a lot more of both. Thank you. :)
I remember spending an entire class wrapping books in brown paper just so, too. I’ve met ever been great on crisp corners.
Were they textbooks? (See Antonia's comment.) I'm now a bit worried that mine were textbooks too, and I'm misremembering the whole thing...although I don't think it's the case? (But if my memory is faulty, how would I know? Argh....)
They were textbooks. Every year we had to “wrap and protect” them.
And over the course of the term, we drew all over them.
HOORAY.
In the simulations that comprise the other universes of our other selves, maybe no schoolbooks were ever wrapped in brown paper ...
Or maybe they were, but we were encouraging to cover them with absolutely riotously creative designs.
And maybe as adults we still do that with the books we buy for ourselves, because it's so FUN.
We should definitely learn from that universe/those universes. They're onto something there.
I mean, many of my school years were miserable but I do remember enjoying that one speck of time!
This talk of universes makes me want to read "The Space Between Worlds" again. I enjoyed that book.
I have not read that one!
(BTW, I'm reading Ann Leckie's 'Ancillary Justice' (https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Ancillary_Justice) and I think you'll really enjoy it for the wild Arkady-Martine-style weird society-building. It's really great so far.)
I like almost every book you recommend and my TBR-for-fun pile is falling over! I really think you'd like "The Space Between Worlds." From the description:
"An outsider who can travel between worlds discovers a secret that threatens her new home and her fragile place in it, in a stunning sci-fi debut that’s both a cross-dimensional adventure and a powerful examination of identity, privilege, and belonging.
Multiverse travel is finally possible, but there’s just one catch: No one can visit a world where their counterpart is still alive. Enter Cara, whose parallel selves happen to be exceptionally good at dying—from disease, turf wars, or vendettas they couldn’t outrun. Cara’s life has been cut short on 372 worlds in total.
On this Earth, however, Cara has survived. Identified as an outlier and therefore a perfect candidate for multiverse travel, Cara is plucked from the dirt of the wastelands."
Thank you. :) But - I'd go hoarse!
I'd at least need some breaks....