New Year’s is for amateurs, and not just the Eve

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As anyone who works in the health, law enforcement or hospitality sectors knows full well, New Year’s Eve is Amateur Night. Millions who do not go out regularly, and have no idea how to pace themselves, decide that they are obliged to pretend that they have something to enjoy and so proceed to get as plastered as possible, preferably well before the chimes of midnight.

All in search of a mythically perfect NYE celebration, many end up welcoming the New Year from a toilet bowl, a gutter, a police cell or an Emergency Department.

However, the amateurism isn’t limited to the Eve. It also occurs on New Year’s Day, when millions decide on their New Year’s Resolutions. Perennial candidates for inclusion are stopping smoking, losing weight, doing more exercise, finding a more satisfying job, and so on. The trouble is that while lists are easy to compose, they are rarely adhered to. Surveys suggest the failure rate approaches 90%.

Why so bad?

Simply because the Resolutions are made with the same amateurism that characterises the Eve before. People make them with little real plan as to how the Resolution will be implemented. If you seriously want to stick to your Resolutions, here is my advice, based on the SMART criteria beloved of project managers worldwide:

• Be Specific: for example, “losing weight” is meaningless. Set a specific weight loss target, and a timeframe for achieving it
• Make sure your resolution is Measurable: chart your progress as you go, and avoid resolutions that can’t be measured. “Being a better person” is all very well, but “donating to charity once a week” can be measured.
• Keep it Achievable: picking a resolution that is simply too difficult is to set yourself up to fail. If in your heart of hearts, you don’t really want to quit smoking, you won’t. Perhaps it might be better to limit yourself to a packet a week?
• Stay Relevant: don’t pick a resolution that has no beneficial outcome. You won’t invest the effort it requires. Resolving to joining a gym is a waste of money if you never go to it; choosing to use the stairs rather than the elevator at work, or cycling to the train station instead of driving, may be more relevant to your lifestyle.
• Apply a Time-limit: open-ended resolutions will be very hard to stick to as you’ll easily find reasons to postpone acting on them. Instead of “wanting a new job”, break that task down into identifying what your strengths and weaknesses are, and so what job you might prefer, by the end of February, with smaller time-limited tasks along the way.

Don’t be an amateur in your partying tonight, and be equally professional about your Resolutions tomorrow.

Good luck, and Happy New Year to you all!

A Glittering Festive Tree

Susanoo, God of Storms, feuded violently with his sister Amaterasu, the Sun Goddess.

Susanoo’s actions proved so distasteful to Amaterasu that she retreated to a cave, hiding her light from the world and plunging it into the darkness of winter.

At the height of winter, the other gods of the Japanese Shinto pantheon planned to rouse her from her cave. They adorned a tree with jewels and bronze, burnished to a mirror shine.

Lured out by the racket of their merry dancing around the festive tree, Amaterasu peered out from her cave, and the ray of light so released was the Dawn. It glanced off the mirror and Amaterasu was fascinated by the beautiful face that looked back at her. She came out of the cave, and the other Gods quickly barred her retreat, ensuring the end of the long cold darkness.

On Christmas Eve, as millions follow the ancient pagan German tradition of decorating a tree with shiny baubles, albeit now to welcome the birth of Christ, it’s interesting to note that there is a distant echo of this adorning of a tree to wake a deity in a very different culture.

A Very Merry Christmas to those who celebrate it!

Wandering the Desert

At least three world religions were born in the Desert.

Judaism, Christianity and Islam all owe their origins to the baking heat and sparse environs of the desert landscape. Abraham, Moses, John the Baptist, Jesus Christ, Mohammed; they all had their greatest revelations when alone in desert (or at least very barren) landscapes. Depending on their leaning, the religously-minded would suggest that this is because communion with God is only possible either when Man divests himself of physical distractions and so can focus on spiritual matters, or when he undergoes sufficient physical and emotional turmoil to turn to God for salvation.

A secularist reading of the pattern would suggest that these individuals – already unusual or eccentric, and possibly predisposed to odd beliefs and experiences – sought out solitude because that predisposition led them to be dissatisfied with a mundane life. And then in that harsh environment, they became sufficiently physically distressed to become delirious, an experience they interpreted as spiritual in nature.

Whichever reading is true (and in the end, the answer that satisfies you most boils down to which interpretative model you have most faith in), wandering the desert has acquired symbolic significance as a rite of passage. Whether literal or metaphorical, the idea that Man has to separate himself from the rest of the world to achieve higher purpose is a theme common to both religion and mythology, as well as being present in several schools of philosophy.

My previous entry elicited an intriguing comment from Touch2Touch which tessellated elegantly with some of my own pre-existing thoughts, and inspired me to write a post on the theme of separation from others as a result of finding contentment, security and tranquillity in one’s own internal assessment of any given situation.

Social networks (using the term in its broadest sense, not the e-variety) can certainly help those who feel lost. They provide a means of temporarily laying off responsibility for one’s own actions, decision-making and emotional stability to others. Support systems can be vital in this context, but I always find myself cringing when people talk of supportive social networks in a longer-term sense. To me, this attitude belies the essential meaning of the word “support”. Before wanting support, the key question must surely be: “support to do what?”

I would suggest that the end goal is not to be permanently supported by others, constantly having to use friendships and acquaintances to buttress your own emotional and intellectual needs, but to feel strong and comfortable enough in one’s own skin to be independent of that need.

This requires uncommon clarity of thought and purpose, as well as an unusual degree of insight. It is also unlikely to result without a intense amount of self-confidence in the method by which these individuals assess the world. This will seem to border on arrogance, except that observers will notice the world bending around these individuals, moulding itself to their will, rather than hitting them head-on in a violent crash as inevitably happens to the genuinely arrogant.

Wandering the desert is not so painful for these individuals as it would be for others. They have an internal moral compass that generally points them in a direction they’re happy with, and seem to carry around a portable oasis that nourishes and refreshes them when need arises. They enjoy meeting fellow travellers; companionship and hospitality are good traditions and can bring fresh news. And sometimes they even travel together for a while with the more pleasant and wise of their fellow nomads. But eventually the call of the empty dune summons them back to a solitary journey.

The great unanswered question should be: “what lapse of thought called the prophets of world religion back from the desert to commune once more with an unwise and ungrateful population?”

Risk and Reward

Human beings cope best with causal black-and-white relationships: “if I eat that bright-red berry, I get sick”; “if I see a sabre-toothed tiger chasing me, I must run”; “if I have a job and a family; I will be happy”. They are much worse at understanding probabilities and weighing up opportunity cost: “red berries (and families) can either be tasty or poisonous; if I take the risk of having one at random, I need to know how debilitating the poison might be, before judging whether the potential benefit of being lucky enough to get a tasty one is worth it”.

This more nuanced view of the world requires a high level of both insight and cognitive processing, and an acceptance of uncertainty and risk. Most people can intellectually grasp the necessity of such an approach but recoil from implementing it in their daily lives. It is much simpler to operate under certainties, and most people’s daily lives are so busy that they lack the opportunity for reflection.

Modern society reinforces this intellectual laziness. We cram a vast quantity of multi-tasked activity into a day, and still feel the need for more. Adults have become infantilised, desperate for the reassurance of an umbilical connection to an omniscient and omnipresent mother, except this parental figure is now the disembodied social network of the internet, mediated via our phones and laptops, by Twitter, Facebook, WordPress and other media.

I note in passing that Mark Zuckerberg, the inventor of Facebook, has just been named Time’s Person of the Year, which reflects how pervasive his worldview of “connectivity = benefit” has become.

The similarity of our relationship to the internet to that of the child to the parent under Bowlby’s Attachment Theory and Mary Ainsworth‘s Strange Situation experiments is striking. When separated from the connection to maternal, even womb-like, presence of the internet, even adults show all the signs of a child bereft of a maternal presence: feeling somewhat lost, alone, unsettled, uncertain and ultimately glad of reconnection. Anyone who has lost their mobile phone will be familiar with this phenomenon.

This child-like regression shows that we have ceded more and more active processing of the world to intemediaries, and now expect those systems to solve our problems for us. Our willingness to take personal responsibility and balance risk against reward has diminished. Nowhere is this more striking in our collective response to the risk of terrorist atrocity. Since 9/11, there has been an implicit assumption that preventing another terrorist attack has overriding importance.

This is absurd. Terrorism is a fact of life, and its probability of occurence cannot be reduced to zero. Reducing its risk comes at a cost, both financial and societal. We recently saw this in the furore about airport security measures such as body-scanning and pat-downs. Defenders of the policy always fell back on a variant of “we must do everything we can to protect our skies” without acknowledging that this simply isn’t true. A more accurate statement would be “we must do everything we can to protect our skies, providing that doing so doesn’t damage our ability to live our lives freely any more than we as a society are willing to accept”.

In other words, when judging how much security is required, one needs to quantity the extent of the damage caused by 9/11, and compare that to the small but cumulative damage caused by irritating large numbers of passengers. Quantifying these matters is complex, and touches upon the difficulty of assigning worth to non-tangibles, something I discussed yesterday. The refrain of “if it saves one life, it’s worth it” is plainly false, as if that were true, the way to achieve it would be to ban all air travel completely.

IATA is now planning the introduction of a much more sensible, risk/reward based approach to passenger screening. It sounds a far better way to deal with the issue than existing systems, but when it goes wrong – and no system can be perfect, as the risk is always higher than zero – it will face criticism that “we didn’t do enough” and the temptation will again be to add more layers, rather than deciding what level of risk is acceptable.

Leaving air travel aside, the more fundamental point is that the best way to progress as an intelligent society would be to encourage the understanding of probability, risk and opportunity cost. Not to mention encouraging independence of thought and a willingness to take personal responsibility for one’s actions. I have my doubts as to whether a critical mass of the population will do so. As rewarding as it is, such liberty is also frightening and that may be a step too far for most.

What are you worth?

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How do we define value? What makes one thing more valuable than another? And does that logic apply to human beings?

These questions hinge on a deeper question about reality. If reality is just a sum of human constructs – an agreed consensus framework – then value itself must also be subjective and ultimately a question of mutual consent. If reality is objectively true – if it exists independent of human perception – then it should be possible to use the framework of that higher reality to determine what is valuable and what is not.

Fundamentally, this is an unanswerable question, so I prefer to short-circuit it. There may or may not be a higher reality, but because I am human all I can know about reality is limited by my own perceptions, and the same is true for each living being on this planet. Therefore, even if there is a higher truth, humans have no objective way of assessing whether they recognise it correctly, so it is better and more practical for all concerned to be operate within the lower, subjective, consensus model of reality.

In this model, each of us brings to the table a unique perspective on the world. Reality is the net sum of all those perspective, weighted by our relative abilities to influence other people’s perspectives. The value of something is determined by the sum total of the world’s opinion on its value. This is a very circular proposition, as if something has traditionally been highly valued, it will tend to remain so. If it has traditionally been valued lowly, it would take a paradigm shift (e.g. a revolution) for its higher value to be recognised by a critical mass of humanity.

Thus, gold is valuable because it has been traditionally used as a valuable material. Proxy reasons include its relative durability, its scarcity, and its difficulty of extraction, but the same is true of any number of different commodities, metal or otherwise. Gold is pre-eminent in the human psyche as a marker of value because it has culturally cemented its position over millenia of use.

Over more recent centuries, certain currencies like the US Dollar, the Japanese Yen, and the British Pound Sterling have also been highly valued as so-called “reserve currencies“, held in relative esteem over others not because of the intrinsic worth of the paper – or electrons – underlying their value, but because of faith in those countries’ ability to repay their debts consistently. Whether they all hold their positions into the future remains to be seen, given Moody’s downbeat assessment of the USA’s credit-worthiness and the general concerns over sovereign debt levels.

But ultimately, whether these currencies retain their value or not will be down to the same reason why gold retains its value or not: faith in the mutually agreed consensus on reality and the worth of objects within it. It sometimes scares people to think of our entire financial system being built upon pure faith, but it should not be a frightening proposition once you consider that our entire reality is also built upon pure faith in much the same way. Of course, some have gone insane pondering that latter issue…

If the mutual consent of a large enough group of people can determine value, that means that ideas, and not just commodities and currencies, can be differentially valued. One aspect of this is politics. Over the long-term, countries get the governments the majority of their populations want. That applies just as much to tyrannies as to democracies; it’s merely the way that governments change that varies. Democracies are more sensitive to changes in large-scale public opinion, but it really is only a matter of degree.

If commodities, currencies and ideas can be valued in this way, it is not a significant stretch to realise that humans can also be compared, both as individuals and as groups. Some readers will be appalled by this, and point out that this line of thinking led to atrocities like the Holocaust and similar episodes of genocide and ethnic cleansing. They are right, of course. But the process of considering one person as more valuable than another still happens. For instance, on a small scale, family members and mutual friends generally value each others’ happiness higher than they do a stranger’s. If all humans were equally worthy in their eyes, this would not happen.

What then is the counterweight to prevent genocide?

Merely that a large mass of humanity also consensually agrees that despite our implicit measuring of value of one person versus another, we also choose as a population to limit the impact of that value judgement on smaller groups in society. This is a paper-thin protection against abuse, but all our societies can ultimately do.

On a less dramatic, but perhaps even more meaningful, scale, these relative valuations of one human’s life against another underpin the field of cost-utility analysis, which is increasingly used by governments, agencies and companies worldwide, to determine how best to spend money in order to maximise value. It’s all about getting the biggest bang for your buck for the most people for the greatest amount of time… and if you think about that carefully, you’ll realise that will always persistently work to the advantage of some groups relative to others. For instance, in healthcare, such QALY assessments will consistently benefit younger people relative to the elderly.

So, value is both mutable and dependent on mutual consent. Reality is as thin and fragile as a pane of glass, and it is only because we add our panes together that a viable edifice can be constructed. Our societies implictly use this model of value to determine the relative worth of ideas, objects, people and even money itself. And they will only value us as individuals or groups if we can convince a sufficient mass of others that we are indeed worthwhile.

If that sounds too tiring a task, the only alternative is limiting contact with society to necessity and protecting one’s isolated position by accumulating sufficient quantities of things that society already finds valuable.

The themes of this post are explored further in the next two entries:

• Risk and Reward
• Wandering the Desert

Turn Adversity into Success

Q. What separates the successful from the desperate?

A. A willingness to acknowledge the challenges that life throws at them, an ability to assess the situation rapidly and then to not only identify an escape route, but also a way to creatively turn the adverse situation to their personal advantage.

This requires a strong sense of self, with a keen awareness of one’s strengths and weakness, allowing one to have pride in one’s successes. Allied to a proactive sense of initiative and creativity, almost any situation can be turned to long-term advantage. What is good can be extracted, and what is harmful set aside and left behind.

The advertising poster to the left, running in the Financial Times this week, is an untouched photograph of Bernie Ecclestone, Formula 1 impresario, showing the injuries he received on being mugged last month. He lost £200, 000 worth of jewellery during the mugging, including a personalised Hublot watch.

The very same day, he contacted Hublot boss Jean-Claude Biver, suggesting that the company run an advert featuring his prominent injuries, with the tag-line: “See what people will do for a Hublot”.

Advertising at its inventive best, and a great example of Ecclestone’s famous hubris being channeled towards identifying an opportunity for profit even in a personal crisis.

Interviews and Life: finding your own path

Our recent ferociously cold snap paused for breath today, allowing for a Sunday stroll through Oxford on a sunny and bright afternoon. After the persistent subzero temperatures of the past week or so, today’s several degrees above freezing seemed balmy by comparison. It was also a window of opportunity to relieve a mild case of cabin fever since the forecast is for temperatures to plummet again tonight. On the walk home, I was struck by just how many young people were roaming around town, clutching holdalls and consulting maps.

The reason for all this activity is that tomorrow marks the start of the annual interview season, when over 10,000 nervous applicants descend on the University over the space of a fortnight, to be grilled by their potential colleges as to whether they will be offered a place to read the subject of their choice. Their odds are actually pretty good by the time they get to the interview stage (a lot of the whittling down having been done at the shortlisting stage) but the nervous expressions etched onto their faces are understandable as they feel their entire lives are dependent on how they perform over one or two 20 minute interviews.

It took me back to how I felt when I was in their shoes, which is now rather more years ago than I care to calculate. That year also had particularly bad weather, with snow falling heavily on the day I had to attend. Fortunately the car made it through the inclement conditions and I was able to settle in comfortably before interviews the following day. I was still rather tense but the interviews themselves were surprisingly enjoyable, believe it or not, and it was a relief to feel I’d done my best. A relief which turned to delight a couple of weeks later when I was offered a place.

Nowadays, I find myself in the position of helping young people learn the skills they need to get through the application process, and in fact next weekend I’ll be teaching an interview skills workshop as part of the Get into Medical School courses I run with a friend. It’s always an enjoyable course to teach, partly because we have time to offer each attendee a full-length mock interview, so we can give them feedback on what they do well and the areas they might want to consider improving. That lets us get to know them a bit better than on our regular one-day GeMS course which gives more of an overview of the entire application process. It’s a nice feeling to know that you’ve made a positive contribution towards helping someone talented achieve their potential.

As part of that plan to try to offer something a little extra, we’re also running a Summer School next year, so that international potential medical school applicants (and others who find it tricky to travel to our one-day courses) can also get the benefit. The Summer School will let them combine getting that advice and coaching with the chance to experience what it’s like living in an Oxford college for a week.

It’s not always possible to predict where life will take you. When I first came for interviews here, I had no idea I’d still be living in this city many years later, let alone that I would be helping others get in. The illustration to this post is taken from the much larger fresco of The School of Athens, by Raphael, which is one of four frescoes dominating the Stanze di Raffaello in the Apostolic Palace of the Vatican City. It is thought to feature every major Greek philosopher, though the identities of some remain uncertain. Plato points to Heaven, Aristotle to the Earth, reflecting their different philosophical priorities. Thus, not everyone will find the same path to wisdom, but that the life task facing us all remains the same: finding what is best in ourselves by developing insight, maximising that potential through thought and study, and growing from the experience.

Role-playing

When was the last time you acted in a play?

It may have been more recent, and more painful, than you realise.

A comment on my recent post on stealth wealth led me to think about different roles we play in daily life. Each of us can be thought of as an array of different social roles (often with clothes to match, as the Vladimir Kush painting illustrating this post demonstrates). We rotate between these personalities depending on the setting we find ourselves in. We present a different aspect of ourselves to work colleagues, to friends, to family, and to lovers. Those particularly adept at this role-playing game are thought of as likeable and pleasant people, easy to get along with and reliable; those poor at the game, but persistent in playing it, come across as duplicitous and dishonest. Those who choose not to play the game at all can seem hostile, reclusive, unapproachable and arrogant.

The essential point is that the roles we play only hint at the person we actually are.

Often, we choose roles that either reinforce a strength we have or somehow compensate for a deficiency we – possibly subconsciously – feel. The former can be thought of as a good use of personal competitive advantage; the latter as an ego defence mechanism. The job we choose, or even the person we marry, may either represent a recognition of what is best about us or a never-ending reminder of what we lack.

Of course, having such a persistent reflection of our relative deficiencies can be very painful. It leads to a sense of internal disquiet, and that disharmony leads us to argue, shout, cry and generally be unhappy with life. There is a feeling of loss of control over our own destiny as the role we play does nothing to help us grow as a person, but acts as a cap on our potential.

Choose the roles you play carefully. Do not allow yourself to be typecast unfairly, and never take on work that is antithetical to your inner self. But sometimes a role can help reveal that inner self, even to yourself, and that is good too.

Giving the finger

Image by Daniel Stark via Flickr

Add this story to the ever-growing list of human conditions now linked to the size of your finger.

It describes a correlation between the relative sizes of your index and ring fingers and your risk of developing prostate cancer. For the men in the audience who are now looking down, it’s your right hand you need to examine.

If your index finger is longer than your ring finger, that’s correlated with a lower than average risk of developing prostate cancer, and vice versa. As for causation, well, that bit isn’t entirely clear, but finger length is associated with in-utero exposure to testosterone, and testerone levels are thought to affect the risk of prostate cancer, so you can vaguely guess that there may be some form of causal relationship, even if the details aren’t worked out yet.

Whether there’s any realistic utility to this minor discovery is another matter entirely, but it’s the latest in a long line of attempts to link outer appearance to inner biology. Sticking just to fingers, we’ve also been informed that long ring fingers are associated with improved mathematical ability but worse literacy, with higher earning power, protection from heart disease, homosexuality, and depression.

In truth, most of these are just demonstrations of correlation rather than fully worked through causal pathways, though potential causal relationships again revolve around the relative levels of testosterone to oestrogen in the womb. And they all discuss relative risk, rather than an absolute/inviolate relationship between one factor and the other.

While there’s little doubt that the methodology used in these studies is somewhat better and more reliable than that used a century or two ago, I can’t help but be reminded of the science of phrenology, where it was thought that man’s personality could be determined by the bumps on his head.

On a more sinister note, the idea of linking internal qualities to external physical attributes has been, and is, commonly used by propagandists and political cartoonists. In the past, this has included exaggerated racial caricatures, emphasising certian features such as long noses or large lips. More recently, we’ve seen cartoons and photo-manipulations such as the Bush-Chimp and Obama-Chimp which show that this remains a potent technique of reinforcing differentiation between a self group vs another group.

One can argue that there’s a difference between using scientifically-validated relationships to make a point and using arbitrary similarities, and I agree that there is. But the world is rarely so sensible as to actually make note of the difference.

Related Articles

• Is finger length a clue to increased risk of getting prostate cancer? (dailymail.co.uk)
• Study links finger length to prostate cancer risk (reuters.com)
• Finger length is a marker for risk of prostate cancer (telegraph.co.uk)