Bias
A friend of mine sent me the most recent TED talk by Robert Sapolsky, a hybrid professor of primatology and neurobiology at Stanford, which is a synopsis of his most recent book distilled into the usual TED summary. In a nutshell, a couple of key points (and with apologies to Dr. Sapolsky): whether a violent act is deemed either good or bad depends on context and the person making the judgment, and the origins of human behavior (which include acts of violence) are difficult to ascertain within the silo of a single scientific discipline. I've just started the book; it's excellent so far.
In the TED talk, Sapolsky mentioned the Christmas truce of World War I, and Hugh Thompson Jr, a Captain in the Vietnam War who turned his guns on his fellow American soldiers and ordered them to stop killing innocent civilians during the My Lai Massacre. They're inspiring stories, and hearing about the details would warm the cockles of the heart of any non-sociopath.
They moved me. But I realized later that day, after watching the TED talk, that I had heard about both of these events before. I wasn't unfamiliar with them. It's just that the first time I heard about them, they didn't stick in my memory.
Ask me about World War I, and I'll talk about the misery of trench warfare and the horrors of chlorine gas. Ask me about the Vietnam War, and I'll tell you about the unneccesarily imperial nature of American foreign policy and the landmines that maim citizens in Laos even to this very day. I wouldn't tell you about these events of heroism and bravery.
It seems that my memory has a bias to recall the terrible things. Admittedly, either war, and my perspective on it, would be poorly summarized by the tiny exceptions noted above. But even if you posed the question to me: can you remember any positive examples of human nature at its best that occurred during either of these wars? I sincerely doubt I would have been able to retrieve either of these from memory.
They were in my memory banks someplace, but the relevancy index had them weighted extremely low, so low that they were functionally forgotten.
Why? Why is it that my brain will spit up memories that reinforce the worst aspects of human nature so easily, but it obdurately refuses to yield counterexamples of human beings doing good, even when deeply dredged? I could guess at this--genetic predisposition, my upbringing, the nature of news stories that I'm exposed to daily--and some combination of my hypotheses might be correct. But I'm really curious about two other things: 1. How do I rewire my brain to remember the good more readily than the bad, and 2. What would be the net benefit or (detriment) to me of doing so?
I work in software. It's a realm where engineering managers so often try to use optimism as a management strategy, which fails more often than not. I've read that laywers who are pessimistic by nature are more successful, since they are able to anticipate glitches in their legal strategies and fix them before putting them into practice. The downside? This pessimism, positively reinforced, spills over into other aspects of their personal lives.
It seems you need enough optimism to be confident you can do the job you're tasked with, enough realism to be competent to do a thorough job, and the ability to compartmentalize the difference aspects of your life, like work versus family.
Upon reflecting just now, I think that my intellectual faculties could use a strengthening of their realism muscles, while my emotional faculties could use a strengthening of their optimism ones. And perhaps, to borrow from the old AA prayer: my entire brain could benefit from the wisdom to know the difference between the two.
In the TED talk, Sapolsky mentioned the Christmas truce of World War I, and Hugh Thompson Jr, a Captain in the Vietnam War who turned his guns on his fellow American soldiers and ordered them to stop killing innocent civilians during the My Lai Massacre. They're inspiring stories, and hearing about the details would warm the cockles of the heart of any non-sociopath.
They moved me. But I realized later that day, after watching the TED talk, that I had heard about both of these events before. I wasn't unfamiliar with them. It's just that the first time I heard about them, they didn't stick in my memory.
Ask me about World War I, and I'll talk about the misery of trench warfare and the horrors of chlorine gas. Ask me about the Vietnam War, and I'll tell you about the unneccesarily imperial nature of American foreign policy and the landmines that maim citizens in Laos even to this very day. I wouldn't tell you about these events of heroism and bravery.
It seems that my memory has a bias to recall the terrible things. Admittedly, either war, and my perspective on it, would be poorly summarized by the tiny exceptions noted above. But even if you posed the question to me: can you remember any positive examples of human nature at its best that occurred during either of these wars? I sincerely doubt I would have been able to retrieve either of these from memory.
They were in my memory banks someplace, but the relevancy index had them weighted extremely low, so low that they were functionally forgotten.
Why? Why is it that my brain will spit up memories that reinforce the worst aspects of human nature so easily, but it obdurately refuses to yield counterexamples of human beings doing good, even when deeply dredged? I could guess at this--genetic predisposition, my upbringing, the nature of news stories that I'm exposed to daily--and some combination of my hypotheses might be correct. But I'm really curious about two other things: 1. How do I rewire my brain to remember the good more readily than the bad, and 2. What would be the net benefit or (detriment) to me of doing so?
I work in software. It's a realm where engineering managers so often try to use optimism as a management strategy, which fails more often than not. I've read that laywers who are pessimistic by nature are more successful, since they are able to anticipate glitches in their legal strategies and fix them before putting them into practice. The downside? This pessimism, positively reinforced, spills over into other aspects of their personal lives.
It seems you need enough optimism to be confident you can do the job you're tasked with, enough realism to be competent to do a thorough job, and the ability to compartmentalize the difference aspects of your life, like work versus family.
Upon reflecting just now, I think that my intellectual faculties could use a strengthening of their realism muscles, while my emotional faculties could use a strengthening of their optimism ones. And perhaps, to borrow from the old AA prayer: my entire brain could benefit from the wisdom to know the difference between the two.