CONTENTS
🟢 On blood donation and beyond - empathy and altruism
🟢 “Navel pulling” and other weird practices that go viral
🟢 When the “mind’s eye” doesn’t exist
🟢 A TED talk on “nothing”
🟢 Second helpings - good reading from the web
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LEAD ARTICLE
Blood donation is easily the most universal act of demonstrating empathy. It costs nothing, takes a short amount of time, and gives you a sense of having done something selfless. Like most organisations and movements that rely on public giving, blood banks often run short of supply and have to engage in constant messaging, reminders, and blood drives.
Where did my blood go? I came across a paper that talks about a simple strategy to make people come back for repeated giving. Informing individuals who have previously donated blood about how and when their blood was put to use increases the likelihood that they will donate again. Compared to people who were simply thanked for their contribution, donors who were provided with additional information, such as the date and the hospital where their blood was used, were more inclined to contribute again. In the age of WhatsApp and other messenger apps, this is a no-cost method that "wins friends and influences people." We'll come back to this a little later.
Why give at all? Which brings us to the larger question of why humans feel the need to perform acts of charity and demonstrate empathy. Charity involves offering someone something that is a long way beyond the call of duty. From the Darwinian perspective of survival of the fittest, empathy and charity make no sense, yet they are an important element of what makes us human — and in the end, survive as a society.
At its most basic, charity means offering someone something they need but can't get for themselves. Alain De Botton, the well-known contemporary philosopher, reminds us how deeply it gladdens when we receive it ourselves.
One versus many The blood donation follow-up that we just talked about exemplifies another aspect of charity and empathy. People will give more readily to individuals than groups. A picture of a distressed child in the arms of a sorrowing mother will evoke a much better response than a refugee camp showing large numbers of people.
Psychic numbing. Having thousands of people die each day during the COVID pandemic should have sparked widespread compassion and a change in public behaviour. But not so. The indifference that sets in when we're faced with a crisis involving large numbers is known by mental health experts as psychic numbing or compassion fade. Someone’s concern about others in danger doesn't increase with the number of people affected. The decline in compassion may even begin with the second endangered life.
Psychic numbing is a lack of feeling associated with information. It's like saying, ''Don't intrude on my sense of safety."
Talking about individual cases is a good way to decrease psychic numbing. Stories of people are powerful.
Effective altruism: Bang for the buck.
We donate money to good causes. It gives us a "warm and fuzzy" feeling, but we rarely pause to consider whether our contribution is truly beneficial. There is no guarantee that the outcomes will match our expectations. Small donations, quite often cost more to process and deploy than the value of the amount given.
Enter effective altruism. In the past few years, effective altruism has come to be seen as a new way to think about giving.
"[Effective altruism is] a philosophical and social movement that advocates using evidence and reason to figure out how to benefit others as much as possible and taking action on that basis." - Wikipedia
There are many examples of gifted, young people taking high-paying careers just so as to live simply and donate all they don't use to good cause. In a sense, they follow the ethical philosophy known as utilitarianism.
Data, not emotion: Effective altruists use a data-driven approach to do good. They prefer to donate money or give their time to causes that have the largest impact. This is what one of the founders of the EA movement, William MacAskill has to say.
“[W]e live at a time in which we have the technology easily to gather information about people thousands of miles away, the ability to significantly influence their lives, and the scientific knowledge to work out what the most effective ways of helping are. For these reasons, few people who have ever existed have had so much power to help others as we have today.” ― William MacAskill
How do you know where your donations will be most effective? GiveWell, is a not-for-profit organisation that has been working since 2007 to answer this question. Their data and resources are available online to anyone at : The website
There are several other organisations that do similar services.
Effective altruism plus (or maybe minus). The guiding philosophy behind the effective altruism movement has been extended to propose actions that don't go down well with many.
Cause neutrality, which means supporting the cause that, based on evidence, has the highest expected positive impact, even if it might seem distant or disconnected from immediate, emotionally compelling issues.
Strong long-termism argues that the most important consequences of our actions lie in the long-term future, potentially at the expense of addressing pressing issues in the present.
Objection! In it's core, altruism should be detached from outcomes. You give and walk away. Effective altruism violates this principle and raises the question of whether it is altruism at all or merely aid with subtle strings attached.
Caveat emptor. Doing good so you can be bad. Humans condone bad behaviour for a variety of reasons. One such is moral licencing: doing good deeds to offset lapses of ethics, social conduct, or morality. Some Buddhist schools call this “buying merit." We are very good at making “mountains of morality out of molehills of virtue.” (Daniel Effron, London Business School)
Oscar Wilde, the famed essayist and playwright, had a gift, among other things, for counterintuitive aphorisms. He wrote, “Charity creates a multitude of sins.”
This essay was provoked by an interesting article on getting people to donate blood. Earlier on, we spoke about psychic numbing and the interesting reality that it is much easier for people to show empathy for single individuals rather than groups. This article supports the behaviour.
MORE HERE
▶️ Being told where their blood ends up encourages donors to give again – new research
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💬 “If our life has no meaning other than our own happiness, we are likely to find that when we have obtained what we think we need to be happy, happiness itself still eludes us.” ― Peter Singer
O TEMPORA, O MORES
What about the innies? I came across this new, trending fad called navel pulling (not naval, not tug boats, mind you), and this was my first question. Here's the explanation: like Dave Barry would say, "I'm not making this up." I learned that it was a new wellness tool where you put oil into your belly button, wait awhile, and then rub it all across your abdomen. Your aches and pains become history; you enter the Age of Aquarius. Which raises my next question, "What about the outies?" Where do they park the oil? Silence.
What's being pulled? In Ayurvedic tradition—by and large a holistic, in-its-time rational Indian system of health and wellness—there is a recommendation for what is labelled in English as "oil pulling". Every day, on rising, you rinse your mouth for a while with vegetable oil. This was a measure of oral hygiene in the era before toothpaste. What's with the pulling, then? I couldn't find an explanation; must be something lost or gained in translation.
Anyway, this piece is not about navel pulling but a bit of navel gazing at how fads develop. What used to be a slow, difficult process has now been speeded up enormously by the internet. Ideas, good or bad, become worldwide in minutes.
"Lies, damned lies, and"... bullshit. BS is the most subtle form of misinformation. It's a sophisticated method of lying that is made to sound credible using a veneer of fake facts. The release of GPT-3/4 marks the beginning of a new order of bullshit, where it is no longer a characteristic of just human speech. Statements are wrapped in a layer of polished, gramatically correct prose that makes it very hard to judge the truth behind them.
This new kind of nonsense comes not just from humans who don't care about the truth but also from robots that are inherently incapable of caring.
It's going to be really hard in the trenches. In an article in Medium, Tim Hartford, the well-known writer on economics for people like you and me, says:
The case for everyday practical numeracy has never been more urgent. Statistical claims fill our newspapers and social media feeds, unfiltered by expert judgment and often designed as a political weapon. We do not necessarily trust the experts—or more precisely, we may have our own distinctive view of who counts as an expert and who does not.
Nor are we passive consumers of statistical propaganda; we are the medium through which the propaganda spreads. We are arbiters of what others will see; what we retweet, like, or share online determines whether a claim goes viral or vanishes. If we fall for lies, we become unwittingly complicit in deceiving others. On the bright side, we have more tools than ever to help weigh up what we see before we share it—if we are able and willing to use them.
Wise words.
MORE HERE
Here's a short list of good reading on this subject.
▶️ The grim conclusions of the largest ever study of fake news - A very large study out of MIT developed a list of tens of thousands of internet rumours disseminated on Twitter from 2006 to 2016. Fake news outperforms genuine news, reaching a greater audience and penetrating deeper into social networks. Misleading statements are considerably more likely to become viral than truthful news, reaching individuals six times faster.
▶️ The information war is on. Are we ready for it? - As disinformation, misinformation, and social media hoaxes have morphed from a nuisance to a high-stakes information battle, our strategies for dealing with them have stayed the same. Malicious actors have learned how to use the whole ecosystem to create the impression of public agreement, frequently with the support of governments and other strong organisations.
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💬 “Instant communication is not communication at all but merely a frantic, trivial, nerve-wracking bombardment of cliches, threats, fads, fashions, gibberish and advertising.” ― Edward Abbey
Most of our personal history is a construct of our memory and mental images that we form. We talk about "the mind's eye" and assume it to be universal. Apparently not. Around 1 in 25 people have a condition called "aphantasia": a failure to construct mental images. People with aphantasia have trouble recalling prior experiences in their thoughts and must rely on verbal information rather than visual recollections.
Aphantasics perform as well as others in tasks requiring comparison of forms, colours, words, faces, and spatial relations, albeit they may take longer to complete imagery-based activities. The condition does not satisfy the definition of a handicap, and people with it are completely functional and successful in their lives and jobs.
A novel illness known as "Severely Deficient Autobiographical Memory" (SDAM) has been linked to aphantasia by researchers. People with SDAM lack the ability to relive past experiences in their minds. Up to 51% of people with SDAM also have aphantasia.
Here is a warm, first-person account of what it is to have aphantasia.
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💬 “In my mind's eye, I visualize how a particular ... sight and feeling will appear on a print. If it excites me, there is a good chance it will make a good photograph. It is an intuitive sense, an ability that comes from a lot of practice.” — Ansel Adams
MEDIA MATTERS
Everyone knows about TED and has viewed their hugely popular videos. If you don't or haven't, then "Hello, Rip Van Winkle."
Is TED dead? In recent years, there has been a strong undercurrent of feeling that TED has lost its mojo. The primary objective of TED is to forecast the future. The TED archive is a cemetery for ideas that never came to fruition, yet the platform is booming and financially succesful.
The TED formula — "inspiresting": Anyone can deliver a TED-style talk. All you need to bring it all together is an interesting topic and a motivating narrative. The term "inspiresting" accurately describes this potent mix.
TED's influence on intellectual culture was "taking something with value and substance and coring it out so that it can be swallowed without chewing." — Benjamin Bratton
An old one, but I couldn't resist putting it up. Seinfeld and Constanza would be proud of this. A parody on the formulaic sameness of TED.
▶️ How to sound smart in your TEDx Talk | Will Stephen | TEDxNewYork
SECOND HELPINGS
With reference to the article on blood donations , may I highlight an element that is missing in the ecosystem - namely information. For instance, I do not know whether I walk across to the nearest hospital at offer blood. just as a 100 number , could we not have number that would provide us with information on the nearest collection points, timing and other relevant data. The government did an excellent job with the Arogya Setu App. This could be replicated for blood donations.