Psychological and Behavioral Topics – Page 4

Just What Exactly Did the Doctor Order for the Healthy Living?

Three weeks ago, my 81-year-old father had to go to a hospital for angioplasty. Truth be told, I'm not a big fan of my parents, but the tearful monster of the inevitable guilt demanded my dutiful attendance there.

Aside from keeping company with someone who is forced to be in a scary medical place, where everyone's job is to cause you pain and discomfort for the sake of possible betterment, my presence there was actually useful in multiple ways. As sharp as my Dad still is and as good as the hospital staff turned out to be, the situation does call for a third-party facilitator: faster paperwork and check-in, better understanding of medical terminology, firmer grasp on the authority structure, timelier requests for assistance, etc. – little things that help. I hope they did.

(I have to make a CFO's aside here. In the past 30 years I've observed and directly dealt with many profit, non-profit, and government organizations, in professional capacity and as a functioning individual; in different countries around the world, in various social and economic systems. Based on my cumulative personal experience, I am strongly inclined to conclude that Mount Sinai Heart – the internationally celebrated cardiology division of Mount Sinai Hospital – is one of the most organized, efficient, smoothly functioning business establishments I've ever seen, with the most sensible technology utilization to boot. Considering that most of our existence nowadays takes place in the vile swamp of unmanaged laziness and pervasive unprofessionalism, being there was like a breath of fresh air. I honestly didn't think that it was possible to have such an experience in our times.)

Everything went quite well and we were getting discharged in the early afternoon of the day after the procedure. All documents that my Dad needed to take with him, for his personal records and to pass onto his referring doctors, were organized for him in a folio: surgeon's summary, nuclear images, blood work, EKG's, follow-up instructions (i.e. important documents) in the right-side pocket; hospital's legal documents, releases, disclaimers, general recommendations for cardiac patients (i.e. generic bullshit) in the left-side pocket.

I checked thoroughly everything on the right and glanced through the other side without intending to actually read anything there. But a sheet of paper right on the top of the left-side pile caught my attention. Not I only did I read it, but I also pulled it out of the folder and kept it, because it contained

Seven Tips for Healthy Living

Move More
Cut Fat
Reduce Stress
Wear Your Seat Belt
Floss Your Teeth
Keep a Positive Mental Outlook
Drink Plenty of Water

First, the list amused me with its glorious banality and brevity. I mean, all that sophisticated and extraordinarily expensive research and diagnostic equipment in the hands of doctors with international renown and exorbitant fees – and it all comes down to just these seven items?! Where do I even start or end? We are being fried by the unfiltered UV rays all year round. We breathe the air that exponentially increases annual asthma statistics. Everyone has some sort of an allergy and the skin conditions have intensified to the point of Desonide shortage on the market. We don't know what we eat anymore. Yes, there is information on the packaged food, but there is none on the tomatoes or any other loose vegetables. Even if they carry the "certified organic" stickers, do you really trust USDA? By the way, what about smoking, drinking, overmedication? Is all of that less important than flossing? That's hilarious!

On the second glance, the list bewildered me by its ambiguity and the fact that even as is, with all those missing pieces, it's absolutely unattainable.

Okay, maybe I'm over-thinking it. I showed it to someone incredibly level-headed and unruffled. She was curious and unfazed: "Is this in order of importance?" she asked. "Well, dear, I cannot really fucking tell!" Let's say it is. Some people I know would be appalled by the bottom placement of the water consumption. Others (also personally known to me) would rejoice in seeing that their running two miles a day at a sprinter speed for the past 50 years appears to be at the top of the list.

But I personally would definitely like to ask for more clarification. And not only about the ranking of the tips. Move more how? Any type of movement? Running, walking, flapping your hands in exasperation? Fat – cut it down or cut it out? All kinds of fats? What about the ones that help the absorption of vitamins and nutrients? And are people okay holding their phones in their hands while driving as long as they are wearing seat belts? Even flossing! After every meal like I do; once a day at night; before or after brushing?

Never mind the individual interpretations, however! At least items 1, 2, 4, 5, and 7 can be actively controlled by a person striving for a healthy living. But the numbers 3 and 6 are totally different animals altogether! Any doctor who gives a "reduce stress" advice is an equivalent of an accountant whose business recommendations amount to "buy low and sell high." Dah! Any other bright ideas? There are so many factors that contribute to our stress levels, it would be stressful even to attempt listing all of them. You can meditate for an hour, decompress, and whatever, but you cannot stop your mind from reacting to your reality: as soon as the first thought about your life, and never-ending obligations, and overwhelming responsibilities, and guilt, and uncertainties creeps onto that clarified canvas, the stress is back on!

And don't even get me started on the Positive Mental Outlook! Look around yourself – you literally have to be mental to be positive right now. Didn't you notice how the people with supposedly the most positive of outlooks, i.e. pregnant women with small children in tow, actually look completely deranged?

So, let's not worry about the silly list from the famous hospital. I choose to believe it to be a joke from some humorous nerd in the hospital's administrative offices. The good news is that we most likely don't need to work too hard on trying to stay healthy anyway. The probability of the damage we caused this planet hitting us back real hard with one or another pandemic extermination is way too high. And I'm pretty sure that doctors know that as well.

Quote of the Week: The Doomed Choices We Make

"She had always known that in making certain choices one committed oneself to a sequence of actions – which inevitably meant a switch from being master of one's fate to being its slave – but she had hoped that she could decide when to make that switch, instead of having it forced upon her."

Paul Griner

Collectors: A Novel

A Little Study in Overcompensating

The book I am reading right now is written from inside of its female protagonist's head. Not in a floody stream-of-consciousness sort of way and not in a first-person POV either, but rather something in the middle – a third-person narrative that's interested only in what this woman sees and how exactly she feels about it. Everything and everybody else is sketchy. She is an interesting woman, though – an ad exec with a disturbing past and an uncertain future, severely unhappy and alone, and I am fascinated by the nuanced way the book's author (a man) depicts her impulses, reactions, and emotions. Her feelings, if not her character, are quite relatable.

About one-third into the book, there is this scene: The protagonist just spent several hours on a sailboat with a man she met only a few weeks ago. This outing was their first date and it went quite well in all expected and unexpected ways. She is sure that the wonderful day will smoothly roll into a fantastic evening. (We are in her head, remember? So, we are following various promising scenarios she envisions.) They are walking along the dock towards her car and she feels incredibly elated.

Now, without changing his stride and still holding her hand, the guy tells her that cleaning the boat after the trip is a big job and he'd better get on it right away. Basically, he is dismissing her and, as far as she is concerned, for no good reason. Internally she is dismayed, but she keeps her cool – still holds his hand and says calmly, "I understand perfectly. I've work to do myself."

As I said, I am sympathetic to this character. Plus, situations like that, when reality totally clashes with your expectations and you have to find the best way out in a matter of seconds – they are not specific to intimate relationships; they are universal and I encounter them practically daily. So, my ears got pricked up by the behavioral subtlety of the moment and I mentally congratulated the heroine on not falling into a socially awkward disaster and handling it well, without showing her actual emotions. I'm hoping here that she gets into her car, smiles goodbye, doesn't say a word, and drives off.

Bzzzzzzzzz! My compliments were premature! Right in the next paragraph, she let's go of the man's hand, starts walking faster to pull ahead of him and says over her shoulder, "I probably shouldn't have come at all."

Oh my God, overcompensation to the nth degree! By trying to be excessively cool in order to cover her embarrassment, she made it only too obvious. (I must state here that, from the literary standpoint and for the sake of the character's true nature, this faux pas was the only possible action and it foreshadowed the novel's resolution. But let's get back to the overcompensating issue.)

Whether in intimate encounters like this one or in any other interactions with our partners, coworkers, bosses, subordinates, clients, casual acquaintances, and accidental contacts (e.g. a coffee shop's barista or a waiter), the true damage of overcompensating in social situations is the fact that it produces an effect exactly opposite to what you are trying to achieve. Instead of concealing your weaknesses and insecurities, you blow your cover and display your anxiety in its full nakedness to the very person whom you are trying to impress with your strength, power, independence, composure, superiority, or whatever.

This manifestation of one's social anxiety is incredibly hard to control. For self-aware people it's like the mortal battle between the consciousness and the subliminal impulses. And because the latter work faster, there is frequently not enough time to bite your tongue or correct your attitude. You say to yourself, "When you see her, smile sweetly as if everything is fine. She doesn't need to know that you feel tortured." But then you actually see her, and the pain comes all over your face without you even registering it.

It doesn't matter how cocky and confident you appear most of the time. If from time to time your tendency to overcompensate gets out of control, everyone exposed will know that you have weaknesses and buttons that can be pushed. In fact, the worst cases of overcompensating I ever observed were presented by individuals who are generally perceived as self-assured and even arrogant (yours truly is included).

I don't know whether people like me, who are really afflicted with the propensity to overcompensate, should be giving any advices on the matter. Still, I would like to share my thoughts.

When I analyze the situations, in which I managed to have a full grip on my compensatory urges, I find that not saying anything at all works the best – just staring without letting your eyes show any emotions at all, not uttering a word. For me personally, it turns out to be even better than coming up with a seemingly appropriate response, because what appears witty and so fucking right at the moment, may seem dull, stupid, inappropriate, and powerless after the retrospective self-analysis that will, no doubt, come sooner or later. And it doesn't matter if what you said actually worked on the other person. Insecurity is incredibly self-centered. For us, it is not about what actually happened, it's about how it makes Us feel.

So, silentium est aurum. In fact, I have various short and long "Stop Talking" notes to myself placed in strategic locations everywhere – a note in my iPhone, an enveloped card in my pocketbook, a letter in my office diary, an earmarked entry in my desktop notebook at home, a sticky in my pencil drawer, etc., etc. Do they help? 95% of the time in professional situations; 50% with strangers; almost never with those who cause me personal pain – that's where we are the weakest.

Video Quote of the Week: The Best Meditation Guidance for the Frustrated Likes of Us

No comments necessary!!! Simply the best!

Just relax and enjoy:

F*ck That: An Honest Meditation

Post Scriptum to Pseudoscience Post: Michael LaCour

A week ago I posted my comments on pseudo-economics and a couple of days later someone drew my attention to Michael LaCour's mess.

That's right, I am not up to date on my bullshit news! And if some of you are not either: Michael LaCour is a political-science PhD aspirant at UCLA. Last year, he successfully pushed through academic approvals and straight into mass media his research, which "empirically proved" that voters' opinions on gay marriage could be positively shifted based on a single 20-minite conversation with an LGBT person relating his/her story.

Of course, it was a fake! Not only the results were falsified, the entire study was a fiction. As I was trying to explain in the previous post, there is a lot of this shit going on, especially in social sciences. Surprisingly, it got exposed as a fraud within just one year!

Oh, my! What a case in point! Or rather a case in multiple points I've been addressing from time to time. Here are a few:

Point 1. Nowadays, you can literally fake anything – data, documents, careers, personae and personalities, talents, beauty, courage, loyalty, honesty, news, finances, science, art, national histories, even entire lives, as long as you wrap it in an impressive package and your lies hit the right spot in the target audience. The gullible, superficial, ignorant, and plain stupid majority of contemporary humans make terrifically fertile soil for all kind of schemers and fakers to sow their poisonous seeds. What used to be a crime of skillful con artists and corrupt governments has become a way of life for quite a few people; many of them very successful and well known.

Point 2. Nobody is doing their job and/or paying attention. It is impossible to count how many times I brought up this issue, both in writing and in conversations. LaCour's blatant fakery passed with flying colors through multiple stages of mandatory academic, "accuracy-liable" reporting, and widespread public assessments. Faculty advisers, peer reviewers, editors of research journals, social justice non-profits, mass-media reporters and their respective editors – they all accepted and approved the study's premise, methodology, findings, and conclusions.

Even LaCour's "co-author," Columbia University political science professor Donald Green didn't bother to check the validity of the data presented to him. (This is how it works, by the way, in academia in all countries – you need some professor's name on your papers to get them published). I can vividly see all these people, too impotent to engage any critical reasoning, speed-reading the first and the last 10 pages of the paper and being bedazzled by colorful charts and tables of numbers.

Point 3. Media and public perception will always prevail over reason and truth. Because for the past several years gay marriage has been one of the hottest topics on the journalistic radar, publication of the study in Science magazine worked like a spark for the international print media engine. As the result, the research was headlined in The New York Times, The Washington Post, The Wall Street Journal, The Economist, The Los Angeles Times, and This American Life.

Because people read about it in these "respected" newspapers and magazines (oh, they've failed us so many times – but people don't want to learn), nobody questioned the fact that the study contradicted the times-proven concept that the vast majority of people tend to hold on to their social and political opinions regardless of what they read or hear. Moreover, everyone's daily personal interactions are miniature studies in people's staunch stubbornness and inability to absorb opponents' arguments; alas, that was also ignored.

It takes an extraordinary power of persuasion of some very special people who possess illuminating brilliance of the mind, impressive oratory skills, and innate guruship (all of it at the same time) to alter minds and souls. And I don't think you can find 100 of those in Los Angeles, or the entire state of California, or any single nation. Hell, let me be honest – I think it would be hard to find 100 people like that on this entire planet.

Yet, the confused liberal do-gooders got so excited about the "scientifically proven" possibility of influencing potential voters through a simple tool of a 20-minute conversation, many of them shook their donors' wallets and scraped their budget barrels in order to fund multiple LGBT canvasing projects. Are you ready? Ireland's Yes Campaign publicly connects the successful legalization of gay marriage in that country six weeks ago to their use of LaCour's paper as a template in targeting conservative voters with personal stories' recounts. Not the years of political struggle, constitutional law reviews, tremendous cultural shifts of the past 20 years affecting generations of people in many countries, but one single (and short) conversation!

Point 4. Common sense is all you need to see the truth. (It's getting to be my mantra, isn't it?) David Brookman, another graduate student at University of California (only in Berkley, not LA) took a quick look at some of the input data presented in LaCour's research and went like, "What the fuck?" Or something to that effect - I wasn't really there. He didn't need any heavy investigative machinery or extensive computer modeling – just simple arithmetic in his head: 10,000 of "recorded" contacts at a disclosed incentives of $100 a pop, that's… $1,000,000!!! Who the hell funded this scientifically uncertain PhD research in the first place? (The fact that nobody, not even the co-author, has put two and two together before Brookman did literally makes my blood boil.) And was it some highly reputable survey organization that handled this substantial sum? Nah, the name didn't ring any bells, like at all. After that it was just unspooling the lies.

Point 5. The unrepairable damage of pseudoscientific bullshit. They come in different shapes and forms, and they can manifest themselves right away or in the distant future, but there is no question about it - nothing good ever comes out of pseudoscience and falsified research. Whether it's Nazi's eugenics providing foundation for racial extermination, or "medical cures" of homosexuality destroying lives, or pulp sci-fi replacing healthcare and education for millions of people around the world - some terrible fallout always follows.

Without getting all preachy and embarking on a rant about the amorality of LaCour's con, let me instead mention its two more tangible negative outcomes.

As soon as the fraud was exposed, The Wall Street Journal (one of the original heralds of the "revolutionary" findings), in a typical swing to the other extreme, gave its editorial page to some conservative "scientists" to vent their righteous indignation. These theoreticians, of course, couldn't possibly miss the opportunity to denounce all of social science (I guess, that includes Economics) as unscientific and nothing more than "liberal wishful thinking."

Because so many civil-rights advocacy groups associated themselves with LaCour's bullshit and, as I mentioned before, spent gifted, bequeathed, and granted funds replicating the experiment that never was, they discredited themselves as organizations and people who didn't know what they were doing. Even staunch supporters feel embarrassed by those leaders who succumbed to someone's unscrupulous methods of advancing their academic careers. I am guessing, a few non-profit heads will roll.

And truthfully I cannot possibly feel sorry for these fools. Just like I didn't feel sorry for Bernie Madoff's victims. These people want to hear the "good news" so badly, they become eager and willing participants in these not-so-clever schemes.

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