I've been skimming through Ehrenreich's Bright-Sided and it strikes me that positive psychology is just a tool with no factional preference. She describes how conservatives of both the capitalist and Christian bents (groups that overlap frequently but far from always) embrace it, as do liberals of every bent. Capitalists can believe that those who fail in our economy are simply not maintaining the right attitude--it's their fault! Christians and other religious conservatives can believe that sin and misfortune are the inevitable consequences of not holding the proper mindset, i.e. the proper beliefs. They tried, they preached the good news, and all who embraced it and felt good were lifted up, and those who didn't have the right attitude obviously hadn't embraced the right teachings and that's why they failed.
Liberals can believe that all of the social problems that they seek to remedy have easy solutions. Reformers will have to work but not, you know, too hard. They just need to impart the right attitude to kids, and if the attitudes don't solve problems then it's either because the kids didn't embrace it (if you're willing to go there) or, if you prefer not to go there, their parents and teachers didn't reinforce it, or the rest of society didn't see them through the same happy lens, or whatever. Bottom line, if there's a problem, it's that somebody out there in this cold, cruel world just wasn't happy-shiny world wasn't nice enough and open enough and we just need to fix that and then it will be great.
As for me, I believe that there are no secret tricks, no correct politics. Just liars and lunatics.
Saturday, December 21, 2019
Bright-Sided, First few chapters
This book is largely a history of "positive thinking" and various movements to get people to be irrationally optimistic on the premise that it will yield dividends. I don't have it in me to blog every detail, but there's one bit that stands out:
Apparently a lot of the enthusiasts for various "positive thinking" remedies, whether pushed by religion, psychologists, or business consultants, are sales people. On one level this seems like an utterly obvious and unremarkable observation. Salesmen and saleswomen are cheerful and personable. Of course they're upbeat! However, Ehrenreich points to interviews in which salespeople (and the "positive thinking" enthusiasts who shill to them) often find it difficult to project that persona. They buy these books because they need constant infusions of kool-aid to keep up the appearance. In private, many of them are unhappy with their lonely lives on the road, surrounded only by people whom they want things from, and who in turn want only free samples and low prices. That frankly sounds like a hellish life.
When I think more about the people in my profession who are most publicly adamant about various "positive thinking" approaches (even if not in so many words), I realize that some of them wish they weren't professors, or at least that they weren't in STEM fields. I won't use a public blog to identify them or say why I think they regret their choice of field, but I've seen enough to make me quite certain that they wish for something else and don't know how to escape. For myself, I hate many things about the current direction of my profession and institution, but I am quite certain that I want to teach physics and do research in physics. So I pity them, and I start to understand why they are desperate for the quick fixes peddled in pop psychology. And I see the overlap between their restlessness and that of the people who buy self-help books and attend motivational seminars.
Apparently a lot of the enthusiasts for various "positive thinking" remedies, whether pushed by religion, psychologists, or business consultants, are sales people. On one level this seems like an utterly obvious and unremarkable observation. Salesmen and saleswomen are cheerful and personable. Of course they're upbeat! However, Ehrenreich points to interviews in which salespeople (and the "positive thinking" enthusiasts who shill to them) often find it difficult to project that persona. They buy these books because they need constant infusions of kool-aid to keep up the appearance. In private, many of them are unhappy with their lonely lives on the road, surrounded only by people whom they want things from, and who in turn want only free samples and low prices. That frankly sounds like a hellish life.
When I think more about the people in my profession who are most publicly adamant about various "positive thinking" approaches (even if not in so many words), I realize that some of them wish they weren't professors, or at least that they weren't in STEM fields. I won't use a public blog to identify them or say why I think they regret their choice of field, but I've seen enough to make me quite certain that they wish for something else and don't know how to escape. For myself, I hate many things about the current direction of my profession and institution, but I am quite certain that I want to teach physics and do research in physics. So I pity them, and I start to understand why they are desperate for the quick fixes peddled in pop psychology. And I see the overlap between their restlessness and that of the people who buy self-help books and attend motivational seminars.
Wednesday, December 18, 2019
Next book: Bright-Sided by Barbara Ehrenreich
My next reading/blogging project is Bright-Sided: How the relentless promotion of positive thinking has undermined America. It's also by Barbara Ehrenreich, and apparently discusses the problems with pop psychology. Maybe it will give me some insight into the kool-aid.
Monday, December 16, 2019
Einstein's Clocks, Poincare's Maps
I'm reading Einstein's Clocks, Poincare's Maps: Empires of Time by Peter Galison. It's about the preludes to the theory of relativity. I won't blog the book in detail, but I want to record a few observations so I remember what I read.
Time and space measurements were a big deal in the 19th century. Telegraphs enabled people to communicate rapidly, which both meant that people could exchange clock readings and that they'd want to (so that they could time-stamp communications). Trains needed precise timing, so that if a schedule said you'd arrive at noon you knew if that meant when the sun was overhead at the arrival station or at some central hub where the schedules were being set. And longitude measurements (which required determining the time when you observed a celestial object at a particular position in the sky) were crucial for navigation and also for treaties between colonial empires. As a result, mathematician Henri Poincare (who was also an engineer involved in a lot of issues of timing and longitude) put a lot of thought into the notion of times and distances being the products of defined human procedures rather than immutable and absolute features of the universe.
On page 200 I learned that Poincare delivered a presentation at a 1900 philosophy conference and questioned whether the science of mechanics needs reformulation. He questioned absolute time, absolute position, simultaneity, and even whether Euclidean geometry was just a linguistic convention. As strange as the last one sounds, he was heavily involved with geometry on spherical surfaces (navigation and surveying) so he was used to the idea of very real problems of a very real world requiring geometry on curved surfaces.
Furthermore, he was in dialogues with Lorentz and others, who were questioning whether electromagnetism could be fixed by redefining space and time. The Lorentz transformations were known before Einstein, but people used these formulas in a conceptual framework that distinguished between absolute time and the timing of things relative to the ether. Einstein's leap was to do away with ether, not to invent these formulas de novo. I was aware of this part previously, but the book fleshes out some of the timeline and correspondence.
There's also a lot of geopolitics that I can't bring myself to care about.
Time and space measurements were a big deal in the 19th century. Telegraphs enabled people to communicate rapidly, which both meant that people could exchange clock readings and that they'd want to (so that they could time-stamp communications). Trains needed precise timing, so that if a schedule said you'd arrive at noon you knew if that meant when the sun was overhead at the arrival station or at some central hub where the schedules were being set. And longitude measurements (which required determining the time when you observed a celestial object at a particular position in the sky) were crucial for navigation and also for treaties between colonial empires. As a result, mathematician Henri Poincare (who was also an engineer involved in a lot of issues of timing and longitude) put a lot of thought into the notion of times and distances being the products of defined human procedures rather than immutable and absolute features of the universe.
On page 200 I learned that Poincare delivered a presentation at a 1900 philosophy conference and questioned whether the science of mechanics needs reformulation. He questioned absolute time, absolute position, simultaneity, and even whether Euclidean geometry was just a linguistic convention. As strange as the last one sounds, he was heavily involved with geometry on spherical surfaces (navigation and surveying) so he was used to the idea of very real problems of a very real world requiring geometry on curved surfaces.
Furthermore, he was in dialogues with Lorentz and others, who were questioning whether electromagnetism could be fixed by redefining space and time. The Lorentz transformations were known before Einstein, but people used these formulas in a conceptual framework that distinguished between absolute time and the timing of things relative to the ether. Einstein's leap was to do away with ether, not to invent these formulas de novo. I was aware of this part previously, but the book fleshes out some of the timeline and correspondence.
There's also a lot of geopolitics that I can't bring myself to care about.
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