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Lawrence Hrubes

What Google Learned From Its Quest to Build the Perfect Team - The New York Times - 1 views

www.nytimes.com/...to-build-the-perfect-team.html

human sciences psychology communication

shared by Lawrence Hrubes on 29 Feb 16 - No Cached
  • Five years ago, Google — one of the most public proselytizers of how studying workers can transform productivity — became focused on building the perfect team. In the last decade, the tech giant has spent untold millions of dollars measuring nearly every aspect of its employees’ lives. Google’s People Operations department has scrutinized everything from how frequently particular people eat together (the most productive employees tend to build larger networks by rotating dining companions) to which traits the best managers share (unsurprisingly, good communication and avoiding micromanaging is critical; more shocking, this was news to many Google managers).The company’s top executives long believed that building the best teams meant combining the best people. They embraced other bits of conventional wisdom as well, like ‘‘It’s better to put introverts together,’’ said Abeer Dubey, a manager in Google’s People Analytics division, or ‘‘Teams are more effective when everyone is friends away from work.’’ But, Dubey went on, ‘‘it turned out no one had really studied which of those were true.’’In 2012, the company embarked on an initiative — code-named Project Aristotle — to study hundreds of Google’s teams and figure out why some stumbled while others soared.
  • As they struggled to figure out what made a team successful, Rozovsky and her colleagues kept coming across research by psychologists and sociologists that focused on what are known as ‘‘group norms.’’
  • As the researchers studied the groups, however, they noticed two behaviors that all the good teams generally shared. First, on the good teams, members spoke in roughly the same proportion, a phenomenon the researchers referred to as ‘‘equality in distribution of conversational turn-taking.’’ On some teams, everyone spoke during each task; on others, leadership shifted among teammates from assignment to assignment. But in each case, by the end of the day, everyone had spoken roughly the same amount. ‘‘As long as everyone got a chance to talk, the team did well,’’ Woolley said. ‘‘But if only one person or a small group spoke all the time, the collective intelligence declined.’’Second, the good teams all had high ‘‘average social sensitivity’’ — a fancy way of saying they were skilled at intuiting how others felt based on their tone of voice, their expressions and other nonverbal cues. One of the easiest ways to gauge social sensitivity is to show someone photos of people’s eyes and ask him or her to describe what the people are thinking or feeling — an exam known as the Reading the Mind in the Eyes test. People on the more successful teams in Woolley’s experiment scored above average on the Reading the Mind in the Eyes test. They seemed to know when someone was feeling upset or left out. People on the ineffective teams, in contrast, scored below average. They seemed, as a group, to have less sensitivity toward their colleagues.
Lawrence Hrubes

Dan Pink: The puzzle of motivation | Video on TED.com - 0 views

www.ted.com/...dan_pink_on_motivation.html

TOK emotion SocialScience science motivation

shared by Lawrence Hrubes on 18 Nov 13 - Cached
  • Lawrence Hrubes on 18 Nov 13
     
    "Career analyst Dan Pink examines the puzzle of motivation, starting with a fact that social scientists know but most managers don't: Traditional rewards aren't always as effective as we think."
Lawrence Hrubes

BBC - Capital - Trusting your gut: Smart management or a fool's errand? - 0 views

www.bbc.com/...0923-should-you-trust-your-gut

TOK intuition hunch business management photography arts

shared by Lawrence Hrubes on 24 Sep 13 - No Cached
  • Lawrence Hrubes on 24 Sep 13
     
    ""A lot of people think intuition is general purpose, but intuition is actually domain specific," said Massimo Pigliucci, a philosophy professor at City University of New York, and author of Answers for Aristotle: How Science and Philosophy Can Lead Us to A More Meaningful Life. "Intuition is the result of your subconscious brain picking up on clues and hints and calculating the situation for you, and that's based solely on experience.""
Lawrence Hrubes

Underhill: Rubber Time - 1 views

www.unc.edu/...underhill3.html

TOK perception time culture

shared by Lawrence Hrubes on 13 Oct 14 - No Cached
  • We soon realized we were dealing with differing concepts of time. In our culture, time has substance. It is not to be wasted. It is a container to be filled. We maintain calendars and make schedules to manage separate blocks of time. We measure accomplishment by how well the allotted segments are used. We take appointments seriously, and see promptness as a virtue. Our language is full of adages urging us to use time wisely, "to fill the unforgiving minute with 60 seconds worth of distance run." Our approach to time, which developed after the invention of the mechanical clock, is probably one of the reasons why Europe, a stagnant and peripheral backwater in the year 1000, became the predominant culture by 1500. Our own industrial and scientific preeminence and material wealth is also rooted in efficient use of time. But we have paid a price. We think that with schedules we can control the future, but often find instead that we have become the prisoners of schedules. We are compulsive about filling blocks of time with useful activity and hurry like the Mad Hatter from appointment to appointment. We are frustrated when a task takes longer than the time we had planned. We interrupt work we have almost finished and stop activities we're enjoying because we're "running behind schedule." From this can come stress and alienation. Seeing reality as a series of segmented time compartments can blind us to the wholeness of life.
  • "Wasting time" for the Indonesian is a meaningless concept. Time is seen as a gentle river carrying everything along. Little effort is made to "manage" the flow. "Morning," "noon," "afternoon," "evening," divide the day adequately. Indonesians explain to Westerners that they live in "rubber time." Appointments, when made, are vague, provisional indications of intention. Harmonious interaction with other people in a flexible, spontaneous, unstructured context is the norm they seek. Interpersonal skills are valued and highly developed. This approach to time is reflected in their language. Verbs in Indonesian have no tense. A time indicator is used, if necessary, at the beginning of a thought, but the verb remains the same for the past, present, future, and pluperfect subjunctive.
markfrankel18

The Search for Our Missing Colors - The New Yorker - 0 views

www.newyorker.com/...-search-for-our-missing-colors

TOK perception technology

shared by markfrankel18 on 04 May 16 - No Cached
  • But, no matter how closely you watched the news reports or ogled Pantone’s Web site, you never actually saw the color Emerald: the vast majority of televisions, computer monitors, and mobile devices are unable to display it, as Jeff Yurek, a communications manager at Nanosys, a company that makes color-display technology, revealed in a blog post. That’s not the only color we’re missing. If you watched this year’s Super Bowl on television, you never really saw the true shade of the Broncos’ blue helmets (Pantone No. 289). And viewing online photos of London’s famous red double-decker buses (Pantone No. 485) while you plan your vacation falls far short of experiencing that color in person. It’s easy to assume that our constantly proliferating digital devices can easily generate any color we want. But, in fact, our screens paint from a depressingly small palette: most can only recreate about a third of all the colors that our eyes can perceive.
Lawrence Hrubes

BBC - Capital - Managers: Train your brain for ethical decisions - 1 views

www.bbc.com/...20131007-the-morality-muscle

TOK ethics moral dilemma business

shared by Lawrence Hrubes on 08 Oct 13 - No Cached
  • Lawrence Hrubes on 08 Oct 13
     
    "If you haven't already faced ethical decisions about whether to lie or cheat for your company, it's time to consider what you would do if you were faced with such dilemmas."
markfrankel18

Placebo-philes - Anxious Machine - 1 views

www.anxiousmachine.com/...placibo-philes

TOK placebo perception

shared by markfrankel18 on 13 Dec 13 - No Cached
  • It's easy to sneer at the placebo effect, or to feel ashamed of it when you're its victim. And that's precisely why I found Felix Salmon's piece revelatory, because instead of sneering at the placebo effect of fancy wine, its marketing, and its slightly higher prices, he thinks we should take advantage of it. If the placebo effect makes us happy, why not take advantage of that happiness?
  • n a recent article for the Atlantic, David H. Freedman argues that there's virtually no scientific evidence that alternative medicine (anything from chiropractic care to acupuncture) has any curative benefit beyond a placebo effect. And so many scientists are outraged that anyone takes alternative medicine seriously. However, there is one area where alternative medicine often trumps traditional medicine: stress reduction. And stress reduction can, of course, make a huge impact on people's health. The Atlantic article quotes Elizabeth Blackburn, a biologist at the University of California at San Francisco and a Nobel laureate. “We tend to forget how powerful an organ the brain is in our biology,” Blackburn told me. “It’s the big controller. We’re seeing that the brain pokes its nose into a lot of the processes involved in these chronic diseases. It’s not that you can wish these diseases away, but it seems we can prevent and slow their onset with stress management.” Numerous studies have found that stress impairs the immune system, and a recent study found that relieving stress even seems to be linked to slowing the progression of cancer in some patients. Perhaps not surprisingly, a trip to the chiropractor or the acupuncturist is much more likely to reduce your stress than a trip to the doctor. If anything, a trip to the doctor makes you more anxious.
markfrankel18

How politics makes us stupid - Vox - 0 views

www.vox.com/...d-how-politics-makes-us-stupid

TOK reason bias science

shared by markfrankel18 on 21 Apr 14 - No Cached
  • In April and May of 2013, Yale Law professor Dan Kahan — working with coauthors Ellen Peters, Erica Cantrell Dawson, and Paul Slovic — set out to test a question that continuously puzzles scientists: why isn’t good evidence more effective in resolving political debates? For instance, why doesn’t the mounting proof that climate change is a real threat persuade more skeptics?
  • The leading theory, Kahan and his coauthors wrote, is the Science Comprehension Thesis, which says the problem is that the public doesn’t know enough about science to judge the debate. It’s a version of the More Information Hypothesis: a smarter, better educated citizenry wouldn’t have all these problems reading the science and accepting its clear conclusion on climate change. But Kahan and his team had an alternative hypothesis. Perhaps people aren’t held back by a lack of knowledge. After all, they don’t typically doubt the findings of oceanographers or the existence of other galaxies. Perhaps there are some kinds of debates where people don’t want to find the right answer so much as they want to win the argument. Perhaps humans reason for purposes other than finding the truth — purposes like increasing their standing in their community, or ensuring they don’t piss off the leaders of their tribe. If this hypothesis proved true, then a smarter, better-educated citizenry wouldn’t put an end to these disagreements. It would just mean the participants are better equipped to argue for their own side.
  • Kahan doesn’t find it strange that we react to threatening information by mobilizing our intellectual artillery to destroy it. He thinks it’s strange that we would expect rational people to do anything else.
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  • Kahan’s studies, depressing as they are, are also the source of his optimism: he thinks that if researchers can just develop a more evidence-based model of how people treat questions of science as questions of identity then scientists could craft a communications strategy that would avoid those pitfalls. "My hypothesis is we can use reason to identify the sources of the threats to our reason and then we can use our reason to devise methods to manage and control those processes," he says.
markfrankel18

How Our Minds Mislead Us: The Marvels and Flaws of Our Intuition | Brain Pickings - 1 views

www.brainpickings.org/...daniel-kahneman-intuition

TOK intuition perception

shared by markfrankel18 on 23 Sep 14 - No Cached
  • One of the most fascinating examples of heuristics and biases is what we call intuition — a complex cluster of cognitive processes, sometimes helpful but often misleading. Kahneman notes that thoughts come to mind in one of two ways: Either by “orderly computation,” which involves a series of stages of remembering rules and then applying them, or by perception, an evolutionary function that allows us to predict outcomes based on what we’re perceiving.
  • Coherence means that you’re going to adopt one interpretation in general. Ambiguity tends to be suppressed. This is part of the mechanism that you have here that ideas activate other ideas and the more coherent they are, the more likely they are to activate each other. Other things that don’t fit fall away by the wayside. We’re enforcing coherent interpretations. We see the world as much more coherent than it is.
  • There is no sharp line between intuition and perception.
  • ...1 more annotation...
  • The confidence people have in their beliefs is not a measure of the quality of evidence [but] of the coherence of the story that the mind has managed to construct.
markfrankel18

Problems with scientific research: How science goes wrong | The Economist - 1 views

www.economist.com/...print

TOK science research

shared by markfrankel18 on 04 Nov 13 - No Cached
  • But success can breed complacency. Modern scientists are doing too much trusting and not enough verifying—to the detriment of the whole of science, and of humanity.
  • A rule of thumb among biotechnology venture-capitalists is that half of published research cannot be replicated. Even that may be optimistic. Last year researchers at one biotech firm, Amgen, found they could reproduce just six of 53 “landmark” studies in cancer research. Earlier, a group at Bayer, a drug company, managed to repeat just a quarter of 67 similarly important papers. A leading computer scientist frets that three-quarters of papers in his subfield are bunk. In 2000-10 roughly 80,000 patients took part in clinical trials based on research that was later retracted because of mistakes or improprieties.
  • Science still commands enormous—if sometimes bemused—respect. But its privileged status is founded on the capacity to be right most of the time and to correct its mistakes when it gets things wrong. And it is not as if the universe is short of genuine mysteries to keep generations of scientists hard at work. The false trails laid down by shoddy research are an unforgivable barrier to understanding.
markfrankel18

The Morality of Robotic War - NYTimes.com - 0 views

www.nytimes.com/...e-morality-of-robotic-war.html

TOK technology ethics

shared by markfrankel18 on 29 May 15 - No Cached
  • Humans must ultimately bear moral responsibility and face the horror of war squarely — not outsource it to machines. And people must be able to remain in control of a weapon and manage its behavior. We cannot have weapons that are intrinsically uncontrollable or wildly unpredictable. After you fire a bullet, you can’t take it back, but its trajectory is predictable. The key is to ensure that future weapons that behave like self-steering bullets do not run amok.
Lawrence Hrubes

Adapting Real-Life Events Like Klinghoffer's Death - NYTimes.com - 0 views

www.nytimes.com/...s-like-klinghoffers-death.html

TOK arts history ethics

shared by Lawrence Hrubes on 23 Nov 14 - No Cached
  • As far as I could tell, there were no protesters in the vicinity of Lincoln Center on Nov. 15 before a Saturday matinee, the final performance of “The Death of Klinghoffer” at the Metropolitan Opera. This was a big change from the opening night of the Met’s season in September and the premiere of the “Klinghoffer” production last month, when hundreds of angry demonstrators gathered to denounce this opera by the composer John Adams and the librettist Alice Goodman as an anti-Semitic work that dared to humanize terrorists. Of course, Saturday is the Jewish Sabbath. But the only sign I saw being held outside the Met at the sold-out matinee said, “I need a ticket!” in big red letters.This was also to have been the day of a live HD simulcast of “Klinghoffer.” But Peter Gelb, the Met’s general manager, canceled the broadcast, bowing to pressure from the Anti-Defamation League, whose leaders were concerned about the work’s gaining international exposure at a time of a rise in anti-Semitic actions.
markfrankel18

Why can't the world's greatest minds solve the mystery of consciousness? | Oliver Burke... - 0 views

www.theguardian.com/...ds-solve-mystery-consciousness

TOK consciousness science psychology philosophy brain

shared by markfrankel18 on 24 Jan 15 - No Cached
  • There was only one truly hard problem of consciousness, Chalmers said. It was a puzzle so bewildering that, in the months after his talk, people started dignifying it with capital letters – the Hard Problem of Consciousness – and it’s this: why on earth should all those complicated brain processes feel like anything from the inside? Why aren’t we just brilliant robots, capable of retaining information, of responding to noises and smells and hot saucepans, but dark inside, lacking an inner life? And how does the brain manage it? How could the 1.4kg lump of moist, pinkish-beige tissue inside your skull give rise to something as mysterious as the experience of being that pinkish-beige lump, and the body to which it is attached?
  • in recent years, a handful of neuroscientists have come to believe that it may finally be about to be solved – but only if we are willing to accept the profoundly unsettling conclusion that computers or the internet might soon become conscious, too.
Lawrence Hrubes

Is Bilingualism Really an Advantage? - The New Yorker - 1 views

www.newyorker.com/...ilingual-advantage-aging-brain

TOK language human sciences social studies bias

shared by Lawrence Hrubes on 26 Jan 15 - No Cached
  • Many modern language researchers agree with that premise. Not only does speaking multiple languages help us to communicate but bilingualism (or multilingualism) may actually confer distinct advantages to the developing brain. Because a bilingual child switches between languages, the theory goes, she develops enhanced executive control, or the ability to effectively manage what are called higher cognitive processes, such as problem-solving, memory, and thought. She becomes better able to inhibit some responses, promote others, and generally emerges with a more flexible and agile mind. It’s a phenomenon that researchers call the bilingual advantage.
  • For the first half of the twentieth century, researchers actually thought that bilingualism put a child at a disadvantage, something that hurt her I.Q. and verbal development. But, in recent years, the notion of a bilingual advantage has emerged from research to the contrary, research that has seemed both far-reaching and compelling, much of it coming from the careful work of the psychologist Ellen Bialystok. For many tasks, including ones that involve working memory, bilingual speakers seem to have an edge. In a 2012 review of the evidence, Bialystok showed that bilinguals did indeed show enhanced executive control, a quality that has been linked, among other things, to better academic performance. And when it comes to qualities like sustained attention and switching between tasks effectively, bilinguals often come out ahead. It seems fairly evident then that, given a choice, you should raise your child to speak more than one language.
  • Systematically, de Bruin combed through conference abstracts from a hundred and sixty-nine conferences, between 1999 and 2012, that had to do with bilingualism and executive control. The rationale was straightforward: conferences are places where people present in-progress research. They report on studies that they are running, initial results, initial thoughts. If there were a systematic bias in the field against reporting negative results—that is, results that show no effects of bilingualism—then there should be many more findings of that sort presented at conferences than actually become published. That’s precisely what de Bruin found. At conferences, about half the presented results provided either complete or partial support for the bilingual advantage on certain tasks, while half provided partial or complete refutation. When it came to the publications that appeared after the preliminary presentation, though, the split was decidedly different. Sixty-eight per cent of the studies that demonstrated a bilingual advantage found a home in a scientific journal, compared to just twenty-nine per cent of those that found either no difference or a monolingual edge. “Our overview,” de Bruin concluded, “shows that there is a distorted image of the actual study outcomes on bilingualism, with researchers (and media) believing that the positive effect of bilingualism on nonlinguistic cognitive processes is strong and unchallenged.”
markfrankel18

In a bad mood? Head to Facebook and find someone worse off -- ScienceDaily - 1 views

www.sciencedaily.com/...141002123058.htm

TOK technology psychology

shared by markfrankel18 on 07 Oct 14 - No Cached
  • When people are in a bad mood, they are more likely to actively search social networking sites like Facebook to find friends who are doing even worse than they are, a new study suggests. "One of the great appeals of social network sites is that they allow people to manage their moods by choosing who they want to compare themselves to," the authors said.
markfrankel18

Creativity Creep - The New Yorker - 3 views

www.newyorker.com/...creativity-creep

creativity TOK arts language

shared by markfrankel18 on 04 Sep 14 - Cached
  • How did we come to care so much about creativity? The language surrounding it, of unleashing, unlocking, awakening, developing, flowing, and so on, makes it sound like an organic and primordial part of ourselves which we must set free—something with which it’s natural to be preoccupied. But it wasn’t always so; people didn’t always care so much about, or even think in terms of, creativity.
  • It was Romanticism, in the late eighteenth and early nineteenth centuries, which took the imagination and elevated it, giving us the “creative imagination.”
  • How did creativity transform from a way of being to a way of doing? The answer, essentially, is that it became a scientific subject, rather than a philosophical one.
  • ...5 more annotations...
  • All of this measuring and sorting has changed the way we think about creativity. For the Romantics, creativity’s center of gravity was in the mind. But for us, it’s in whatever the mind decides to share—that is, in the product. It’s not enough for a person to be “imaginative” or “creative” in her own consciousness. We want to know that the product she produces is, in some sense, “actually” creative; that the creative process has come to a workable conclusion. To today’s creativity researchers, the “self-styled creative person,” with his inner, unverifiable, possibly unproductive creativity, is a kind of bogeyman; a great deal of time is spent trampling on the scarf of the lone, Romantic genius. Instead, attention is paid to the systems of influence, partnership, power, funding, and reception that surround creativity—the social structures, in other words, that enable managers to reap the fruits of creative labor. Often, this is imagined to be some sort of victory over Romanticism and its fusty, pretentious, élitist ideas about creativity.
  • But this kind of thinking misses the point of the Romantic creative imagination. The Romantics weren’t obsessed with who created what, because they thought you could be creative without “creating” anything other than the liveliness in your own head.
  • It sounds bizarre, in some ways, to talk about creativity apart from the creation of a product. But that remoteness and strangeness is actually a measure of how much our sense of creativity has taken on the cast of our market-driven age
  • Thus the rush, in my pile of creativity books, to reconceive every kind of life style as essentially creative—to argue that you can “unleash your creativity” as an investor, a writer, a chemist, a teacher, an athlete, or a coach.
  • Among the many things we lost when we abandoned the Romantic idea of creativity, the most valuable may have been the idea of creativity’s stillness. If you’re really creative, really imaginative, you don’t have to make things. You just have to live, observe, think, and feel.
Lawrence Hrubes

Why Swearing Makes You Stronger - The New Yorker - 0 views

www.newyorker.com/...hy-swearing-makes-you-stronger

language emotion psychology

shared by Lawrence Hrubes on 17 May 17 - No Cached
  • Swearing, Stephens thinks, may be a form of pain management, maybe even empowerment. Last week, he and a colleague, David K. Spierer, of Long Island University, described a new study in which swearing seemed to bolster physical strength.
markfrankel18

Art All Over - The New Yorker - 2 views

www.newyorker.com/...art-all-over

TOK art

shared by markfrankel18 on 08 Aug 14 - No Cached
  • At what point does a widely shared yen for aesthetic engagement alter the character of that engagement? We’ve reached that point on many days at the Museum of Modern Art, where the crowds experience mainly crowdedness, and the Picassos and Pollocks take on the glazed miens of traumatized warriors. MOMA’s own planned expansion bodes an architecture keyed to crowd management, which explains the logic behind even the cruel demolition of the intimate former American Museum of Folk Art.
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