On Art

But the point that is not to be glossed over here is that like fashion, contemporary art has infiltrated all aspects of life, influencing the ways we travel, spend our time and increasingly our money, and the way we organize our surroundings. And if we can relax for a moment, we might find how much pleasure it brings. This thing we like to think of as art has as much to do with work hanging on a wall in a museum as fashion does with clothes on models walking down a runway. Which is to say everything and nothing.

-- from the Times Magazine

Going along with the rise of Chinese artists, one of my favorites is Cai Guo Qiang. An image from "99 Golden Boats" is below:

Positive Psychology and Christianity

So as I mentioned yesterday, I went to one of the talks in the Veritas Forum. The annual Forum is always produced very well, with panels focusing on the tough questions, the why questions, and the God questions.

The panel was titled "Can't Get No Satisfaction? What Positive Psychology and Christianity Have to Offer." First, Carol Kauffman, a psychiatry professor and a personal "coach" gave a presentation outlining positive psych but mostly giving advice for people. She was really easy to listen to and assuring, speaking like Laura Roslin from Battlestar. Some of her tips sounded kinda like what you'd find in one of those "X Steps to Complete Fulfillment" books in the self-help section, but they were backed by SCIENCE, so I suppose they're more reliable. Anyhoo here's some notes:

- before, psychology focused on pathology, now it's turning to well-being and virtue and the study of conditions and processes that lead to these things; before, "happiness" was not something you could publish on

- as people have gotten wealthier by 3 times over the last 50 years, they have gotten 0 times happier

Then she discussed steps to improve one's happiness:

1) reverse the focus

• what we pay attention to affects how we feel


• the Zeigarnik effect: people pay attention to what is incomplete and out of order, what they did wrong instead of what they did right


• so one needs to consciously hang on to the positive: before you go to sleep, think about 3 good things you did that made you feel good


• positive Pygmalion effect: if you are looking for positivity, you are more likely to find it

2) identify and harness your strengths

• take the VIA test to identify your strengths


• match your work style with your strengths; I think she said people who were told to do this for a week felt happier and worked more efficiently and were better off six months later

3) power of positive effect

• What is happiness? apparently there's an equation for this:
  
  SWB (subjective well-being) = 50% B + 10% LC + 40% VB
  B = biological/genetic influence
  LC = life circumstances
  VB = voluntary behavior


• So, success doesn't make you happy, happiness causes success.

4) coaching for flow

• famous psychologist Csikszentmihalyi: believed one is most happy in a state of flow


• Flow occurs when one's challenge matches one's skill level: if the problem is too hard, one feels overwhelmed, if it is too easy, one feels bored.


• so one must raise or lower the bar of either the challenge or the skill level

The next speaker was Stephen Post, a professor of various fields, and also head of the Institute for Research on Unlimited Love. His talk was about how people feel good when helping others, a fact which is supported by studies, and about how that ties in with what Christianity tells people to do. Some things he mentioned:

• C.S. Lewis said "Joy is the serious business of heaven"


• Various quotes from the Bible: to give is better than to receive, etc.


• Studies have shown that married people, people who worship regularly are happier than others, along with people whose purpose in life extend beyond themselves


• There was a study where they hooked up devies to people recording their activities throughout the day, and later found that 70% of the time they were happy occured when they were helping others


• Some TIME magazine poll found that ~70% of people were most happy when contributing to the lives of others.


• "The secret virtue of Jesus is mirth"

So, not the most informative of talks, and indeed he sounded like he was preaching a lot of the time. I don't have a problem with his urging people to do good, it's just sometimes it seemed he was using the scientific studies to prove the truth of the moral importance of doing good (See the Bible says it's better to give than receive. How can that be true? Well here's this study that showed that people feel better when they give..). One can tell people to do noble things by saying it'll make them feel better, or by telling them it's their responsibility. The two reasons don't necessarily intersect (Post mentioned that when he was on 20/20, John Stossel asked him that by feeling good for doing good, doesn't that make a person selfish, and he responded that he'd encourage everyone to seek this happiness, that it's not a problem. I don't think he resolved the issue.) And you can't really support the moral imperative with polls or evidence. The overall message isn't bad, it's just not completely logically sensical.

Well I'll stop playing the devil's advocate. Tonight I'll think about 3 things that made me happy today.

Edward Tufte, An Academic and Otherwise Life

Last night, Professor Edward Tufte came to speak at an IIC seminar. He's a pioneer in the study of visual data representation, and though I haven't read his books, they are reputably beautifully written and crafted (he's designed all of them himself). Well you can read the rest of his impressive CV on his site.

The talk was at a room in the Biolabs, a quite hideous building, and getting to the room involved walking through a narrow hallway flanked with labs and having huge tankards of various gases and things obstructing the way. (It always amuses me to see the little shelves outside each door that serve to hold bottles of Coke and other beverages. Contamination threat!)

He looked very classy in a dark jacket and white shirt, no tie. He spoke of his life, of various "turning points" that got him where he was today, and at the end showed slides of his huge metal artworks (we also got free posters of them). Here're some notes from the talk:

- He began with an excerpt from T.S. Eliot's Four Quartets:

Time present and time past
Are both perhaps present in time future,
And time future contained in time past.
If all time is eternally present
All time is unredeemable.
What might have been is an abstraction
Remaining a perpetual possibility
Only in a world of speculation.
What might have been and what has been
Point to one end, which is always present.
Footfalls echo in the memory
Down the passage which we did not take
Towards the door we never opened
Into the rose-garden. My words echo
Thus, in your mind.

- from the age of 15, he knew he wanted to be a scholar

- his mother told him, there are no shoulders to cry on

- in high school in Beverly Hills, he met people for the first time that were as smart or smarter than him; they'd play classical music games where a part of a piece would be played and instead of identifying the piece, they'd have to identify the conductor

- The Center for Advanced Studies in Behavioral Sciences, where he once had a fellowship, was where people went to finish their books or decide what to do. It was described by some as the "leisure of the theory class."

- on a paper he wrote, one professor noted that a paragraph he wrote had echoes of Veblen. That's when he realized that he should be working in the "big leagues." (This was a theme he focused on a lot. He described the statistician John Tukey as in another league apart from the rest of the brilliant faculty.) He needed to work on "forever knowledge," whereas the most recent book on political science was filled with names and dates like Gerald Ford and 1976, which aren't eternal. He thought that up until then he'd been choosing problems to work on based on whatever came by his desk, or by a hallway chat with a colleague. Problems should be chosen by thought, and he decided to choose ones that were a) important and which b) he could make progress on.

- when trying to publish his first book, Harvard University Press wouldn't print it because it was too expensive to print the charts and images. So he decided to publish it himself. To publish a book you need three things: a garage, a lot of money, and a book designer. He spent a summer working with a designer learning about typography and laying out the book.

- his first three books were set in lead, because there was no digital version of the font Bembo that was of high enough quality. For his latest book he worked with a designer to make his own version of Bembo, "ET Bembo." (eee, type design!)

- he values his "acute sense of relevance," of being able to parse out the most important information from the noise, so that one could start to get "leverage" on a problem. He wishes people can cultivate this skill.

- scholars should be publishing their work. There's a large support system that got them where they were, and they are very overprivileged to do what they do. So to give back, they should show people what they're working on, what they've learned. If you don't publish your work, it doesn't exist.

- when he brought curators to see his art pieces, they'd say "that reminds me of so-and-so": very few people now speak in terms of visual experience. They talk in metaphors, about how something reminds them of something else, not about what's right in front of them.

- his next project is to work on representations in 3 dimensions. We are all used to seeing representations on paper and on screen, but there are always aspects (like volume of space), that they don't adequately capture.

That's the gist of what I can remember. The IIC site should have a video of the whole thing soon. Apparently the video is for internal uses only, according to Tufte's site.

Today I went to a forum about positive psychology and its links with Christianity. I'm too tired from reading, or attempting to read, this, so, til tomorrow.

The reason

I'm starting this to remember all the important things. The facts, the curiosities, the ideas, the advice, the anecdotes, the jokes, and hopefully some wisdom too. I respect eloquence and great writing, the cute turn of phrase, the unexpected metaphor, but these are not my strengths. So the words here will mainly come from others, sprinkled here and there with personal thoughts.

I'm also doing this to try to keep myself on a path that's at least somewhat parallel to a life of letters (or at least not completely orthogonal to, heh). It is so easy to lose sight of the world amidst the sections and problem sets and applications that never never end, and there are so many wonderful, fascinating things out there! It's sometimes hard to recall why I go to school, and more and more it seems like just a means to get a job (especially during internship/interview season, sigh), but I believe, I want to believe, that this is not just a means, it is the journey that is truly satisfying. A life in academia would be glorious, but right now I can't see myself there, so this is the best I can do for now.

Alas, it's time for class, I'll return later with some hopefully less cliché material..