Just as the identities we create for other people and things help us model their behavior, the identities we create for ourselves help us model our own behavior. We have a great deal of control over our own behavior, so our predictive models, in some respects, are also self-fulfilling prophecies.

If you think that you are the type of person who would rush into a burning building to save a child, then there is a good chance that you will. If you don’t live up to this self-image, you will either have to change it or continue pretending to be something you are not.

We constantly modify our self-images. How often have you done something and then said to yourself “That wasn’t like me at all!”? When that happens, you are faced with the choice of changing your identity model to fit the facts or deciding that you will not do such a thing again.

- God Wants You Dead
by Sean Hastings and Paul Rosenberg

An apt description of what drives people to do things even they don’t understand.

… [T]hings that are familiar are—generally speaking—less risky. This is the same impulse that makes us buy the same soap or automobile over and over again: It’s worked in the past, so it’s likely a safe bet again today. With recognizable people, that positive feeling, that sense of comfort, often feels like a warm glow.

- A warm glow in Bangkok
We’re Only Human
2010-01-29

… and what could be more familiar than the little voice at the back of your skull with its constant reminders: strange is dangerous, different is strange, any deviation is different, and you must not deviate from the master plan.

[We] live in a world very different from the one we evolved in. Our reflexive defenses might be optimized for the risks endemic to living in small family groups in the East African highlands in 100,000 BC, not 2009 New York City. But we can go beyond fear, and actually think sensibly about security.

Far too often, we don’t. We tend to be poor judges of risk. We overact to rare risks, we ignore long-term risks, we magnify risks that are also morally offensive. We get risks wrong — threats, probabilities, and costs — all the time. When we’re afraid, really afraid, we’ll do almost anything to make that fear go away. Both politicians and marketers have learned to push that fear button to get us to do what they want.

- Fighting The Fear Factor
by Bruce Schneier
2009-11-03

Most therapists discourage the use of extreme terms.

For example, a wife would be challenged when she says, “he never spends time with the kids,” unless she can prove that the term never is factually accurate. More often than not such a term isn’t entirely on target and, moreover, it often generates defensiveness on the person toward it is directed.

If the wife makes a slight change and says, “he doesn’t spend nearly as much time with the kids as I would like him to,” not only is she conveying a likely more accurate statement, but she’s setting up a productive, problem-solving dialogue with the husband.

- A Russian Doctor Hates Me
ShrinkTalk.net
2009-10-20

The power of words – I think we hold our internal monologue (my voice) far too dear. It is wrong to attempt to force the world outside our preconceived notions to conform but that doesn’t stop us from trying.

How much conflict could be avoided if the words of each of our operators were accepted as that – merely words – reframed as advice and not dogmatic truth?

Advice? I am you.

Good resolutions are useless attempts to interfere with scientific laws. Their origin is pure vanity. Their result is absolutely nil. They give us, now and then, some of those luxurious sterile emotions that have a certain charm for the weak. That is all that can be said for them. They are simply cheques that men draw on a bank where they have no account

- The Picture of Dorian Gray
by Oscar Wilde, 1890

This traverse may the poorest take
without oppress of toll;

… how frugal is the chariot
that bears a human soul!

The kind of lies we find most detestable are those with a malicious intent of some kind: lies designed to swindle or hoodwink us, lies that will cause us some pain down the road.

- Are You a Liar?
PsyBlog

Some great statistics, too. Very believable.

Do not take the concept of interchangeable parts for granted.

1793 – One essential value of this organization is the idea of interchangeability. In 1793, Eli Whitney’s mass production of muskets, based on the principle of interchangeable parts, announced the dawn of the industrial age.

- Google Timeline: interchangeable parts eli whitney
retrieved 2009-10-02

The paradigm which ushered in the Industrial Age begged to be applied everywhere – from muskets to sewing machines to locomotives to automobiles; machines which built machines became a matter of course.

In the “long run”, all of these factors of production can be adjusted by management. The “short run”, however, is defined as a period in which at least one of the factors of production is fixed.

A fixed factor of production is one whose quantity cannot readily be changed. Examples include major pieces of equipment, suitable factory space, and key managerial personnel.

A variable factor of production is one whose usage rate can be changed easily. Examples include electrical power consumption, transportation services, and most raw material inputs. In the short run, a firm’s “scale of operations” determines the maximum number of outputs that can be produced. In the long run, there are no scale limitations.

- Production Theory Basics
rev# 317048388 at Wikipedia.org
2009-09-30 07:39

Could the theory of production be applied to more than inanimate objects?

The machine-building machines still needed an operator who could be relied upon to behave without deviation.

Our knowledge about operant conditioning has greatly influenced educational practices. Children at all ages exhibit behavior. Teachers and parents are, by definition, behavior modifiers (if a child is behaviorally the same at the end of the academic year, you will not have done your job as a teacher; children are supposed to learn (i.e., produce relatively permanent change in behavior or behavior potential) as a result of the experiences they have in the school / classroom setting.

- Applications of Operant Conditioning to Education
Huitt, W., & Hummel, J. (1997)

Because students believe what they are told, explicitly and implicitly, about the world they are entering, they behave in ways that fulfill the prophecies the system makes about them and about that world. This is the linkback that completes the system: students do more than accept the way things are, and ideology does more than damp opposition. Students act affirmatively within the channels cut for them, cutting them deeper, giving the whole a patina of consent and weaving complicity into everyone’s life story.

- Legal Education as Training for Hierarchy
by Duncan Kennedy

A system of order is installed.

Complications were to be expected…

It appears then that there is a serious discrepancy between the American ideal of “rugged individualism” and its actual implementation. A teen-ager has to learn carefully that this blueprint for American individualism is not generalizable and that there are definite areas of limitations and prohibitions. The fact of non-generalizability destroys the simplicity and predictability of always responding to the same cue in identical or similar ways, thereby complicating the learning process and rendering the behavioral blueprint ambiguous and situational.

- Individualism vs. Conformity
life-us.blogspot.com
2009-11-19

It was an enormous pyramidal structure of glittering white concrete, soaring up, terrace after terrace, three hundred meters into the air. From where Winston stood it was just possible to read, picked out on its white face in elegant lettering, the three slogans of the Party:

• War is peace
• Freedom is slavery
• Ignorance is strength

- 1984 by George Orwell

… though, eventually, superior virtue will surely triumph.

All flaws exposed
You are raw material
Do good work for us

Ehrenreich argues that positive thought has at times made us deaf to the pleas of those who warn of potential dangers—the Iraqi resistance, Hurricane Katrina, 9/11, and the Wall Street implosion. Urging positivity is not just beside the point when our circumstances are rotten, it’s also dangerously distracting.

This is why Ehrenreich dedicates her book to “complainers everywhere,” inciting them to “turn up the volume.” But surely there’s a middle way between clueless cheerleaders and grumpy prophets. The Dalai Lama shows you can strive to be content and remain angry about injustice.

- Positively Downbeat by Julia Baird
Newsweek.com
2009-09-25

While this will likely come off (initially, at least) as a kind of self-absorbed diatribe against the way some comport themselves, I firmly believe that you should stick with it – I do not claim to have the answers here, but the issues at play are well worth examining for a variety of reasons and, if one is to be an agent of change, one must apply oneself and one’s social relations to the problem of rooting out the rancor of competitive bias, misinformed opinions, and needless argument.

The Problem: Overconfidence

Aristotle could have avoided the mistake of thinking that women have fewer teeth than men, by the simple device of asking Mrs. Aristotle to keep her mouth open while he counted.

- An Outline of Intellectual Rubbish from Unpopular Essays
by Bertrand Russell

We are all guilty of this basic interpersonal faux pas – we play the part of the know-it-all because, in most cases, it works.

In every walk of life – and in the information technology sector especially – personalities and careers are built around competence and knowledge. Many strive to be the go-to person or the lynch-pin of the organization: a cushy salary and job security are the obvious rewards.

Overconfidence kicks in when an individual assumes his or her abilities or knowledge in one specialized task will carry over into others; in the past week I have seen a handful of patently-incorrect statements of fact (all of them easily debunked) made by well-intentioned individuals when answering the questions of novices in technical forums.

While there should be no competition in the context of answering a simple technical question, some Reptilian-complex self-preservation response must be kicking in and triggering the default response – overconfidence (often coupled with a competitive attitude).

The tendency toward competitive action arises from a lack of understanding – particularly in the context of a technical forum: to make inaccurate assertions is damaging to the knowledge and growth of the individual asking the question and the reputation of the individual answering the question. So why do it?