I’ve recently finished a couple of interesting books and thought I’d comment on some of them here. Many of these books (especially those relating to finance) are actually reading suggestions taken from Charles Martineau, a fellow student who is currently doing his Ph.D. at the University of British Columbia. I have much respect for Charles’ drive, his openness as well as his intellectual curiosity and rigour (even though our opinions probably differ on many political and economic topics), and I strongly encourage you to visit his website.
Recent readings
Willpower and self-control
Here’s an interesting RSA video on a conference by psychologist Roy Baumeister, who argues that will power and self-control, far from being unchanging personality traits, rather depend on an internal energy which can effectively be “depleted” if over-used. In short, if you go through a difficult day that requires that you use a lot of self-control, chances are you will have less self-control in the evening than when you initially got up in the morning. My interpretation of this is: use your willpower and self-control strategically!
Cooperation and Competition: A Metatheory
Some thoughts and reading notes on cooperation and competition that I’ve grouped together. Not necessarily very coherent, but nonetheless interesting.
An ontological inquiry of cooperation and competition
Competition and cooperation are two distinct social mechanisms whereby actors coordinate their actions toward each other in the pursuit of their preferences. Both competition and cooperation obey specific fundamental rules.
Individuals can engage in competition if the implicit or explicit rule guiding their interaction implies that the object of desire cannot be obtained by both of them and that only one of them can win, thus effectively making them rivals in a game where they are facing a “win-lose” situation. Competition can arise spontaneously, as in two hungry men fighting over the last remaining fruit on a tree, or artificially through man-made rules and institutions, as in a football game.
Leist (2011) argues that “people cooperate if and only if they know of, and intentionally contribute to, a common goal, by intentionally coordinating their individual actions in a way presumptively conducive to the realization of the common goal.” (Leist 2011: 16) Bratman (1992) shows that this can only be done if agents (a) have a preparedness to mutually respond to and (b) support the others in their efforts.
Improvisation and Spontaneity
One of my former professors once told me that “real” originality is very rare; he would argue that while some people might look original, they would most often rely on some form of predigested material. Stories are generally built on previously existing information: the joke your friend told you this morning probably came from his father, who in turn heard it from his colleague at work, and so on. Coming up with something entirely new is something of an impossible task. After all, we are all “sons of our time,” and cannot simply make up stuff without having to rely on available information as well as inherited heuristics to interpret and understand it.
Alright. But seeing things in a social perspective, how can we at least look original? How do people improvise, how do they act spontaneously? What process, if any, do they rely on?
Storytelling Theory
What makes a good story? How much does the quality of a story depend on the story itself, and how much does it depend on the storyteller?
Being the social animals that we are, everyone of us is required to interact with other people countless times throughout our daily lives. Knowing how to tell a good story is thus an essential skill for anyone who wants to improve the quality of his social encounters. The ability to tell stories is part of what makes people interesting. I am still far from being an accomplished storyteller, but that does not mean that I cannot know what storytelling is about.
The Social Function of the Intellect
I recently looked up some information about psychologist Nicholas Humphrey and stumbled on his 1976 essay The Social Function of Intellect. The paper tries to answer the question “Why are we intelligent?” from an evolutionary perspective, and comes up with a very interesting conclusion. Our brain evolved to the point of giving us the gifts of consciousness and practical creativity because we are social beings. In short, intelligence gave the individual human a survival/reproductive advantage because it made him better off in transacting with other members of his species (not because it gives him access to practical skills for survival, as earlier theories would have held). As far as I know, this is the earliest paper to have founded such a perspective on intelligence.
The full article can be obtained here. Below are some key abstracts:
Strategy and Determinism
In 2000, economists Richard Langlois and Edward Steinmueller published an article entitled “Strategy and Circumstance: The Response of American Firms to Japanese Competition”. One of the striking features of the article, seemingly common to many economists’ analysis of firms, is the explicit organizational determinism implied in the authors’ view of the evolution of American firms, which goes as far as entirely neglecting the role of managers.
