Charlie's notebook

@cloudySummer If changes to the user interface are possible (which I doubt) I would prefer to ask the recipient of the message "Are you sure you want to see this?" It seems to me the only good reason for the censor's existence is to protect the recipient, not to scold the sender.

By the way, in the main thread on this someone reported that a message to their therapist was censored. I think this makes it more likely the whole thing is a mistake—someone rewriting code for the pure joy of introducing bugs.

Charlie

@RarelyCharlie Good point, with whom it's supposed to protect. I was thinking more along the lines of giving people a chance to think about what they were posting again, similar to 'taking a deep breath', in case they were truly insulting, or sharing their contact info. Both might make sense.

@RarelyCharlie I had a chat censored before when I tried to explain that I was sad because a family member was suicidal. The continual popups suggesting that I was the one in crisis and needed to log off actually just made me feel so much worse, and I wasn't able to continue the conversation. I feel like the way it was set up is stigmatising to family members of suicidal people, and to people who want to mention having previously been suicidal in the past. Always preventing people from talking about topics like that isn't helpful as many people have shame around it already. Of course sometimes it may not be appropiate, but I think that decision should be made by an actual human who can understand context.

@resourcefulPond1641 Makes sense, thank you for the insight!

@resourcefulPond1641

@resourcefulPond1641

Suicide and incest are among the few universal taboos....

Given the way it's treated by everybody around the world, I'm not suprised by the way 7Cups is going on about it.

It's still sad though...

Automatic links

There has always (or as long as I can remember) been a bug in chats and chatrooms. If you type three dots (an ellipsis) like this... then 7 Cups automatically makes it into a link, so in the past you would get this... Well, someone has changed the code so that doesn't happen any more. Instead, you get: http://this... That's right, they made it worse!

In fact automatic links are quite difficult to get right. The enhanced editor that I'm using in the forum to type this post also has an automatic links feature. It correctly leaves things like this... alone, but it still doesn't get absolutely everything right. I noticed a while ago that a link containing an equals sign wasn't being converted correctly, so this morning I fixed that.

A URL like this should now be converted into a link correctly: https://www.urbandictionary.com/define.php?term=linkify

While I was there, I added a face with medical mask to the emoji

Charlie

Noni, the video?

A couple of years ago I tried chatting to several online bots, with disappointing results. I didn't know until today that someone had made a short film dramatization of a conversation with one of those bots. It also dates from around two years ago:

Soft Awareness (12 minutes)

The bot seems OK if there's nothing much on your mind and you just let it change the subject all the time. It's a long time since I chatted to Noni, and I wonder if there are still members who chat to her a lot. Maybe someone will make a video

Charlie

California

Last week I came across an article in The New York Times from June 2019 about 7 Cups' work for the state government in California:

...the 7 Cups program, which started a year ago [that is, 2018], has been delayed by the state, because of an internal state financial review and concerns about some of the company

@RarelyCharlie

@RarelyCharlie

iNTERESTING PIECE O INFORMATON. wHERE DID YOU FIND IT?

@IntrovertedDreamer73409 There was a link in someone's blog, I think, a review of some other mental health app. I'm sorry, I don't remember exactly where.

Charlie

It was a foolish hope The focus of the update was on quantity, and quality wasn't mentioned.

Charlie

That's rude!

Research into taboo words published in the Psychonomic Bulletin & Review, a journal of experimental psychology, provides some interesting scientific background to 7 Cups' banning of certain words from chats: Building the perfect curse word: A psycholinguistic investigation of the form and meaning of taboo words

Researchers in Philadelphia obtained ratings for more than a thousand common American English words. The ratings ranged from 8.5 (very rude) to 1 (not rude at all).

The rudest word (rated 8.5), is a word that is so rude that most people like to pretend it must never be used…even though at the same time everyone knows it's used extremely often, and extremely casually, by some people.

Of course 7 Cups has banned this dreadfully rude word from chats. (In deference I'll not include any banned words in this post.) If you misspell this word so that it becomes the name of a country in West Africa, as I mentioned before, then it is still banned—which seems tough on the one listener and any members we have from that country. If you misspell it any other way it's allowed.

The second and third rudest words, one sexual and one racist (both 7.5), are allowed by 7 Cups. I can only assume that whoever thought up 7 Cups' list doesn't get out much and hasn't come across them.

The most frequently used word that 7 Cups bans is not very rude at all. According to the research it's precisely as rude as fat (5.1), which 7 Cups allows. And 7 Cups also allows the British version, shite (not rated in the American research), and any misspelling of your choice.

The least rude word that 7 Cups bans is rated the same as cocaine, stereotype, cancer and poverty (2.6) all of which 7 Cups allows. Its British synonym, knickers, and the masculine version, pants, are both allowed.

The research also investigated compound words, such as the insult "loofah-faced", which can be much more rude than the individual components. This particular example became famous in 2017 when it was used on Twitter by a US Senator.

Both loofah and faced are allowed by 7 Cups, but you can include extremely rude words in a compound as long as you don't use a hyphen. For example, if you remove the hyphen, then that same US Senator's other insult, shitgibbon, can be used in chats.

One of the conclusions from the research is:

The data suggest that American English follows a recipe for tabooness both for single words and to a lesser extent for compound words.

This, in turn, suggests that a smarter way to censor words might be possible in future, with everyone being able to set the level of rudeness we are individually willing to tolerate. Whether such a thing will ever be possible at 7 Cups is far from certain, because 7 Cups' technological sophistication remains unimpressive.

For example, when a member I was chatting to tried to use a very well known and pretty rude (6.9) word recently and just got ***, they immediately tried again in capitals with full stops between, hoping that F.U.C.K. would work. Almost. 7 Cups' technological sophistication turned it into a link: http://F.U.C.K.

Charlie

@RarelyCharlie
Damn this is interesting. Where do you get this from?

Personally I think that no words should be all-out banned on 7Cups. I feel that spmething similar to the spoiler fonts can be used to hide them, and only reveal them if the reader wishes to see them.
(also fix the censor list lol)

But youu're right.. the site's technological prowess is far from impressive..

@IntrovertedDreamer73409 Someone mentioned the research in a blog, I think.

Charlie

@RarelyCharlie

HAHAHAHAH http://.... XD omg

Recovery, Resilience, Growth

The latest community update, Recovery, Resilience and Growth, celebrates the very welcome news that:

Since the beginning of the year, 7 Cups has started to gain real strength and significantly grow again.

…resulting in a strong and growing stronger community…

Listeners that have been here for years are saying that our community is returning back to how it was years ago.

The statistics posted in that update are looking good.

I checked Amazon's competitive analysis tool, Alexa, to see the numbers there.

It reports today that engagement at 7 Cups is up 20% (over a 90 day period) in terms of daily page views per visitor, and up 8% in terms of daily time spent on the site per visitor. These improving numbers back up the internal statistics quoted in the community update.

But Alexa also reports two metrics that are in the red. The bounce rate (visitors who arrive but immediately leave) is 13% worse, and the overall site rank (among all websites) is down 10,700. How can this be?

Perhaps all mental health websites have been experiencing the same. No, our two main competitors' bounce rates have barely changed and their rankings are both up.

This reminds me of a great job I had at one time. I was part of a highly creative and productive team. The work we were doing was challenging and fun. Customer satisfaction was rising year after year. Then it all went bust and we lost our jobs. What went wrong?

It turned out it was the customer satisfaction that went wrong. Our customers were more and more satisfied, but there were fewer and fewer of them, until eventually there weren't enough customers to pay the bills.

Although it's really difficult to be sure, something like that is what we seem to be seeing in 7 Cups' statistics right now. Internally we're seeing more and more engagement, and it's a great feeling. But in relation to the competition we seem to be falling behind.

Let's all hope that the recovery, resilience and growth we've been seeing internally will soon start to translate into success in the wider world.

Charlie

@RarelyCharlie

This is certainly intriguing, Charlie! I appreciate the insight. Thank you for sharing it with us!

*fingers crossed*

Charlie

Against Empathy

I've been reading the book Against Empathy: The Case for Rational Compassion, by Yale professor of psychology Paul Bloom.

Overall, I thought it was written in a confusing way. I wasn't quite sure whether this was just me being grumpy until I got to the end and started another book (Learned Optimism by Martin Seligman), which I'm finding refreshingly clear and will review here soon.

At the heart of the problem with empathy is that different people use the word to mean different things, and at the same time confuse it with sympathy and compassion. It's possible to be against empathy by choosing an extreme definition of empathy that you can argue against, and my feeling was that this is what this book does.

When I joined 7 Cups as a listener, empathy was one of the things listeners were rated on. The problem that different people use the word to mean different things was never specifically addressed, and eventually the rating system was changed. There's less emphasis on it now. Listener training still uses the word empathy to mean:

Draw[ing] on your own experiences to imagine how the other person is feeling and put yourself in their shoes.

I've always been concerned that this can lead some listeners to pay attention to their own imaginary feelings, while ignoring what the member they're chatting to is actually feeling. So the listener just ends up talking about themselves.

In the book Bloom explains that his notion of empathy is quite different from this:

The notion of empathy that I'm most interested in is the act of feeling what you believe other people feel—experiencing what they experience.

I think that phrase "the act of feeling" gives the game away, revealing that Bloom is considering empathy as an act, that you can decide to feel what you feel, and to experience what you experience. It seems to me this definition of empathy is a straw man that the rest of the book easily knocks down.

Later in the book there's an example that I felt was revealing:

I can worry about a child who is afraid of a thunderstorm and pick her up and comfort her without experiencing her fear in the slightest.

But to Bloom, while comforting her shows compassion, there is no empathy involved, in the particular sense he uses the word. He doesn't explain how you can possibly know that picking her up and comforting her is appropriate, if you are not affected in any way by her fear.

I use the word empathy in a different way. It seems to me that understanding the child is afraid requires empathy, but actually experiencing the child's fear yourself just means you have an overactive imagination.

At 7 Cups I suspect some listeners do have overactive imaginations and try to experience other people's emotions, and I wonder how much that's responsible for listeners either burning out and leaving, or busying themselves with other things at 7 Cups and avoiding chats with strangers.

Charlie

@RarelyCharlie

For a fascinating response to this by @AmalieAnne see: Against Empathy: A Mad Girls Reply

I really like the conclusion:

Care to learn the Waltz? If you want to be a listener or a wise person be prepared to learn it.

Charlie

@RarelyCharlie @AmalieAnne

And I am greatly fascinated by you both.

your great entries to be specific.

@LovingSparkle Charlie started it!!!

Learned Optimism

I've already mentioned liking Learned Optimism: How to Change Your Mind and Your Life by Martin Seligman.

As this is partly a self-help book it has a questionnaire. Stanford University put a version of the questionnaire online here: Learned Optimism Test

The questionnaire is said to take around 15 minutes (although I did it* quicker than that) and it calculates your scores for you at the end. Interpreting the results in full is a little complicated and you'll need the book to really understand what they mean, but the scores themselves will give you some idea.

Spoilers ahead: If you like to take psychological questionnaires, take the questionnaire before you read any further, in case you invalidate your score.

Although it's a self-help book, the first two parts tell the story of how a new theory of depression was discovered, beginning from disturbing research into the behaviour of dogs. The first part can be skipped by anyone who just wants to get the self-help.

The theory extends the meaning of the words optimism and pessimism. Dictionary definitions of these words are about applying them to the future, but in the new theory they are applied to the past—they describe how people explain past events, people's explanatory style.

Optimism, applied to the past, is redefined to mean that when something good happens you tend to explain it in a way that's permanent, pervasive and personal. But when something bad happens you tend to explain it in a way that's temporary, specific and external to you.

Pessimism, applied to the past, is the opposite. When something good happens you tend to explain it in a way that's temporary, specific and external to you. When something bad happens you tend to explain it in a way that's permanent, pervasive and personal.

Now that you know this, you can analyse the questions in the questionnaire and understand what they are getting at.

All this is backed by extensive research over many years. The research shows that a pessimistic explanatory style, using the definitions above, is associated with depression, ill-health and generally doing badly in life. An optimistic style is protection against depression, and associated with good health and the ability to recover from life's setbacks.

It's an extraordinary idea, but, because of all the research, I found it pretty convincing.

The third part of the book really gets into the self-help, explaining what pessimists can do to change their explanatory style for the better. I skimmed through this part, so I can't report on how well it works.

In general I'm not very convinced by self-help books and I tend to avoid them. Parts I and II of this one did impress me with their storytelling and research.

I wouldn't be too surprised if the self-help in Part III actually works for some people, but my impression was that it's superficial and makes changing the way you think sound far easier than it really is. Even so, it might be a better approach than 7 Cups self-help guide on depression.

In the 30 years since the book was published its author has moved on and the ideas in the book have perhaps been superseded, but on the whole I thought it was interesting.

—
* Of the ten results I scored very optimistic on five, and either average or good on the rest.

Charlie

Sorry, one of the links went wrong. It should have been: Learned Optimism Test

Charlie

@RarelyCharlie Not too surprising. Total was "very pessimistic"; average on two and optimistic on two. One of those, Permanance good score, was "very optimistic", which I found a little surprising. The "very low self-esteem" result was no surprise at all.

Most of those amounted to a choice between two ill-fitting explanations to a situation I can't imagine myself in.

@stressBear Yes, some of these were very far-fetched! Same total here, different components, though.

But it's not all bad, blind optimism can be a problem, too.

@RarelyCharlie No wonder you skipped the self-help part, with those results :) I think it's probably also useful for listening on here, if one is an optimist.

@cloudySummer Useful for listeners and also for members, probably.

Both listeners and members are exposed to occasional random bad experiences on 7 Cups, and the issue is whether someone interprets them as permanent, pervasive and personal.

It has happened to me within the last 24 hours, as it happens. On this occasion I interpreted it as temporary, specific and external to me, which is what my results on the questionnaire would have predicted, so this morning I was able to log back in without any lingering bad feeling.

Charlie

@RarelyCharlie Mmh, I was more thinking of being better able to continue encouraging / supporting someone without getting frustrated too easily.

But I can see that the other case that you describe is also useful, as long as one has clear boundaries, and knows what to do in which case (and those tools work). Else, as my pessimism tells me, things can slide into (ab-)use.

@cloudySummer Oh, I see, yes that's a good point. Explanatory style would affect being able to continue supporting someone frustrating…or even hostile. I'm in the middle of writing a guide for listeners about hostile chats and I've made a note to myself to include that idea.

Charlie

The Art of Loving

I read the short book, The Art of Loving, after I saw it mentioned in the post Thank you for Listening 🙏. It's also quite well known generally. Unfortunately I fell out with it from the first paragraph, and things didn't ever get better. It begins:

Is love an art? Then it requires knowledge and effort. Or is love a pleasant sensation, which to experience is a matter of chance, something that one "falls into" if one is lucky?

Why not both? Or why not admit that words sometimes mean different things in different contexts? In ancient Greek there are three or four different words for different meanings of our word love, but Fromm didn't seem to be aware of this.

In its overall construction the book has two parts. The first asks "Is Love an Art?" (but assumes that it is). The second is called "The Theory of Love". There's no third part on the practice.

In disscussing art, Fromm seems out of his depth. For example, he claims the process of learning an art can be divided into theory and practice. This is sort of true. But he immediately claims that theory is necessary, and this is false—many people learn an art without knowing any theory.

For example, I once knew an accomplished traditional fiddle player who learned to play as a boy by watching his father and by listening. He has never needed any theory. Fromm seems to have been unaware of the possibility that art can be learned through human contact—through love, in effect.

Then Fromm claims that "the mastery of the art must be a matter of ultimate concern; there must be nothing else more important in the world than the art". This is generally false. For example, for that fiddle player playing the fiddle is only a hobby. He doesn't value total mastery, and other things are more important in his life.

In his day (the book is from 1956), Fromm was a leading Marxist, and he quotes Marx to make the absurd claim that in order to appreciate art you have to be an artist yourself: "If you wish to enjoy art, you must be an artistically trained person." No, the people who dance to the music of the fiddle player do not have to be able to play the fiddle themselves.

There's some attempt to establish what love is with reference to sources such as the Bible, but Fromm doesn't manage the attempt well. For example, in the story of Jonah he gets the ending wrong. (Strictly according to scripture, God teaches Jonah a lesson about the city of Nineveh by killing a plant, and love isn't mentioned.)

From the New Testament, Fromm refers to the gospels without mentioning any specific source: "love thy neighbor as thyself" (Matthew 22:39, Mark 12:31, Luke 10:27,  John 13:34). But Fromm mentions this in a section on brotherly love, and, unfortunately for Fromm, in the original Greek all four gospels agree that the kind of love in this commandment (agapē) is not brotherly love (philos).

The final pages make further wild claims. At first this seems fair enough:

Love, being dependent on the relative absence of narcissism, requires the developement of humility, objectivity and reason.

But a few lines later Fromm contradicts himself:

The practice of the art of loving requires the practice of faith.

Which is it, then? Objectivity and reason, or faith? The remainder of the book is a justification of this contradiction, achieved by asserting that there's a new thing Fromm has just invented called rational faith. And that's how the book nonsensically ends:

To have faith in the possibility of love as a social and not only exceptional-individual phenomenon, is a rational faith based on the insight into the very nature of man.

Taken as a whole, this book is just meaningless. Why, then did it become so well known? The answer may be that, while there is a vast amount of literature on love, most of which Fromm ignored, there was at the time no Marxist literature on love.

Maybe the book's references to Marx and its side-swipes at capitalism are the real reason it has done well. Maybe this quote from near the end is the real message, the entire book is really about socialist politics, and all the meaningless nonsense is just a smokescreen (original italics):

The principle underlying capitalistic society and the principle of love are incompatible.

Charlie

Get Together Again

I reviewed the book Get Together in January, and now it has become the basis for an online commnity building course at 7 Cups. The first part of the 4-part online course is now available, covering Chapters 1 & 2. I was able to compare it with the book, which I still have on my Kindle.

Sadly, the many wonderful examples that make the book clear and easy to read are missing from the course. The result is very dry by comparison. If you want to take the course, I suggest you get the book if you can.

In general, the course content follows the book quite closely so far, but it has been shortened so there are necessarily some omissions. However, explanation of how it all relates to 7 Cups has been added, and this is valuable because it could indicate where the application of these ideas might take us.

An example of an omission is that the book strongly warns (original boldface):

Continually revisit these questions:

1. What dimensions are my community members bonding over unintentionally?
Be conscious of how your community lacks diversity, and probe all possible causes…

2. How can I challenge my community to diversify?
The very first members you attract may feel homogenous, but you don't have to keep it that way…

Then the book illustrates this with a real-life example from We Run Uptown NYC. In the course this is all reduced to a vague statement about needing people from all walks of life, with different backgrounds.

It seemed to me the course also tried to make it seem like 7 Cups already follows the ideas in the book. If that was really true, then there would be no need for the course. The reason for putting all this effort into running the course is so that 7 Cups changes.

For example, Chapter 1 is about the first step in building a community, which is to pinpoint your people, identifying who you want to get together with and why you are coming together. By the end of Chapter 1 you have a bunch of people who have a common purpose. Chapter 2 is about the next step, which is to do something together.

If you're following the process you pinpoint a bunch of purposeful, committed people before you try to host an event together. But when applying this to 7 Cups, the sequence 1. pinpoint people, then 2. do something together, seemed to have been forgotten.

I think it would be better if the course were more open about how problems have arisen at 7 Cups when this process wasn't followed, about how we can learn from that, and about what discussions we need to have to bring 7 Cups on board with best practice.

In January I wondered whether core ideas in the book will have to be ignored while we at 7 Cups pick and choose a few lightweight things that aren't too radical or disruptive. I think there's already some indication in the course that picking and choosing is happening, but the course has a long way to go and I could be wrong.

Charlie

The Journey to the East

Yesterday evening I read Hermann Hesse's 60-page novella, The Journey to the East, which I found to be a delightful but very weird and dream-like tale.

Spoilers below: If you like weird and dream-like tales then you might want to skip the rest of this post until you've read it yourself.

The title is more poetic in the original German „Die Morgenlandfahrt—literally morning-land-journey. I don't know why the translator didn't go for "The Journey to the Orient". The even more literal translation "Land of the Rising Sun" specifically means Japan, so I can see why that wasn't chosen. I digress…

The story is told in the first person by a narrator who describes joining a weird and ancient cult (to use a modern word for it). A group of cult members plans a journey, like a pilgrimage, from their native Germany to the Orient, hoping to see a variety of mystical people and things when they get to those far-away lands. The group takes a servant along to do odd jobs.

They travel through Germany and Switzerland, having a wonderful time, getting as far as a wild and rocky mountain gorge in southern Switzerland, near the Italian border, where the servant runs off, apparently taking some important stuff with him. The journey collapses in chaos. They all give up and go their separate ways.

Years later the narrator discovers that the servant was really the president of the cult. He had pretended to be a servant deliberately, as a test, to see whether the group would become dependent on him and fail to complete their journey after he ran off. The group failed the test.

Hesse published this tale in 1932, between major novels, and won the Nobel Prize in Literature in 1946. In 1958 The Journey to the East caught the imagination of an American management specialist, Robert K. Greenleaf, who adapted part of the story in order to envision a new form of leadership, servant leadership. The Center for Servant Leadership now promotes Greenleaf's ideas.

According to Greenleaf's idea of servant leadership, the best way to lead is not by having power and authority. It's by serving the people you're leading, by becoming a servant:

The servant-leader is servant first... Becoming a servant-leader begins with the natural feeling that one wants to serve, to serve first. Then conscious choice brings one to aspire to lead. That person is sharply different from one who is leader first... The difference manifests itself in the care taken by the servant first to make sure that other people's highest priority needs are being served. The best test, and the most difficult to administer, is this: Do those served grow as persons? Do they, while being served, become healthier, wiser, freer, more autonomous, more likely themselves to become servants?

Now, in 2020, this idea has been taken up by the founder of 7 Cups, who explained it to us all in a recent video (I also made a transcript). Servant leadership is going to become the new leadership model throughout 7 Cups, apparently.

The strange thing is that it all originally came from such a weird and dream-like tale by Hermann Hesse. In the tale, becoming dependent on a servant who was secretly a leader caused the group to fail in its task. The moral of the original tale seems to be that if you want to get anything done, be careful not to become dependent on a leader who's acting like a servant. It's like Greenleaf somehow changed the ending for his own purposes.

It remains to be seen how the idea of servant leader will work out at 7 Cups. I'm cautiously optimistic, but I fear it will run into huge resistance and take a long time to implement.

Charlie

Get Together Yet Again

Continuing this series of reviews of 7 Cups' community building course based on the book Get Together, this review is about Chapters 3 and 4. The topics covered are getting people talking, and attracting new people to the group.

This time 7 Cups' course includes some of the examples from the book, and I think this is a big improvement.

Amusingly, the illustration for the 7 Cups version of Chapter 3 has also been used to advertise a brand of powdered milk:

But never mind. The illustrations in the course are purely decorative, while the few illustrations in the book relate directly to the real-life stories the book tells. The course again omits the link to the book's website where you can read about the real-life examples and watch videos.

Curiously, the course does provide links to two videos by Marshall Ganz, How to Tell a Story and Public Narrative, but the book references a different video by him, When did you start thinking of yourself as a leader? (3 minutes), which I think is well worth watching.

The videos mentioned in 7 Cups' course seem to relate to Ganz's socialist political activism, while the video mentioned in the book seems to be politically neutral. I was disappointed to see 7 Cups sneak a partisan political viewpoint into the course by switching videos, even though Ganz is a good speaker who has a lot of interesting things to say.

The course also deviates from the book by mentioning AA. It doesn't explain what AA means, but I suppose it means Alcoholics Anonymous. In the UK, most people would assume AA means the Automobile Association, whose AA logo is well known, and whose yellow vans are seen patrolling the roads to provide assistance in case of breakdowns.

Alcoholics Anonymous is not mentioned in the book. 7 Cups added it. I think this was a mistake. No one says to their friends, "Come and join AA. Being an alcoholic is such fun!" AA is very different from the communities of practice in the book, and I'm sure this is why the book doesn't mention it.

There are significant omissions in the section about collecting shareable stories for the community. In the book there are three types:

1. In-person experiences
2. Training or learning
3. Contributing and sharing content

7 Cups removed 1 and 2. This seems really strange, because in-person experiences are at the heart of what 7 Cups is about, and training or learning is also very common at 7 Cups.

In the quiz for this part of the course there's a major error affecting two of the questions. The book and the course both say:

The goal of structure is to focus conversations (including the hard ones!) on the unique ideas that your community wants to explore together. To find the right balance, work with your early members on simple ground rules that describe how your community will both address and work through conflicts that occur in your discussion space.

The quiz misquotes this:

To focus conversations on the ideas your community wants to explore, you'll need to set ground rules that describe how your community will both address and work through conflicts that occur in your discussion space.

See what happened there? First the word "together" disappeared. Then the words "work with your early members on" got changed to "you'll need to set". It's changed from being (in the book) a leader collaborating with the community, to (at 7 Cups) a leader telling the community what to do. This is exactly the problem that Ganz's video (the one in the book) refers to.

The misquote makes the answer to one of the quiz questions wrong, and also affects the following question (but not its answer). It also goes against the other new training initiative at 7 Cups that's been announced, on servant leadership, which will be aimed at correcting authoritarian styles of leadership within 7 Cups.

This second part of the course seems to confirm that 7 Cups is picking some ideas from the book and rejecting others. I'm a little concerned that the end result might not be what was hoped for back in January. As an introduction to getting people talking and attracting new members it provides a bunch of good ideas, though.

Charlie

Mind Hacking

Someone recently suggested I read this strange book, which is really a website, Mind Hacking, but the website is also published as a book in case you like books. You can pay for the book if you like paying for books. Or you can find an online version for free. Or you can just read the website. And there's an app if you like apps, but I haven't tried the app.

The idea of mind hacking is that you can take control of your mind, a little like a computer hacker takes control of a computer. This is a weird idea.

For one thing, it assumes that the "you" who is doing the hacking and "your mind" are separate things. And indeed the book states precisely this:

You are not your mind.

But it provides no evidence. The idea actually somes from the 17th Century French philosopher René Descartes, or earlier, but the book doesn't acknowledge this. Descartes claimed that being conscious of your own mind proves you have a soul, and it's your soul that is the real "you" observing your mind.

Anyway, to justify this weird idea the book invites the reader to:

Close your eyes and think about your own mind for just a moment.

Then it goes on for a while about this and that. But of course when you close your eyes and think about your own mind, you are just imagining a mind. In your imagination, it's perfectly possible to think that you and this imaginary mind are separate things. But that doesn't mean you and your real mind actually are separate things. You're only imagining it.

So, in your imagination, you can become an imaginary hacker and hack your imaginary mind. That's what the rest of the book turns out to be about.

The most obvious thing about the book is that it's full of stories about the early days of personal computers, and about some of the characters from back in those days who turned out, in the long run, to be famous. It obviously doesn't mention all the characters from back in those days who turned out, in the long run, not to be famous.

The book claims that all these famous people became famous because they were mind hackers. But, for all we know, many of those other people who didn't become famous might have been mind hackers too.

Mind hacking itself turns out to be a collection of well-known self-improvement techniques. The book links each technique loosely to computer programming.

For example, in programming there are things called loops, and many self-help books encourage positive self-talk, so this book mixes up the two unrelated ideas and invents "positive thought loops". The same chapter also claims that Benjamin Franklin was a mind hacker, by the way.

In my opinion the idea that you are not your mind makes no sense in reality. In imagination, fine. In reality, not useful at all.

The biggest problem with it is that if you imagine you are not your mind, and then you "hack" this imaginary mind in some way, the mind you've just hacked isn't real. It isn't you.

Therefore you cannot possibly change your real self using these methods. If you try really, really hard you can create an imaginary self who you imagine is better in some way than your real self. But if you go that far you just end up living in a fantasy world. In psychological jargon you end up no longer authentic.

Psychology Dictionary says:

AUTHENTICITY

1. the quality of being genuine and true to one's own values

I searched the entire book for the word authentic and it's not there. Seems like the author wasn't too concerned about authenticity.

So, on the whole I wouldn't recommend this book unless you'd like to read some very simplified stories about early computers. Avoid taking the rest of it too seriously. Some of the self-help techniques are OK in themselves, but they have nothing to do with hacking.

Charlie

@RarelyCharlie

Perhaps this book offers a way for people who find Platos Allegory too confusing with an altogether different set of approachable concepts, with a raft of examples that could provide this looking at the ‘Meta mind. Albeit I have to admit being more comfortable with Plato and other philosophers than computers and movies that express the same to an extent. Still, there are three areas which this book approaches. At first thought, this was a book about CBT but with altogether different goals. Breaking that down, it actually does use essentially CBT for the elimination of blocked thoughts, emotions and behaviours. If you take a look at day 7 of the 21 day follow along guide, it can clearly be seen that Emotions, Thought(s) and Actions are the topics of interest, mirroring CBT. While there is no issue with this method perhaps the mixture of the other two factors might confuse this process and somewhat undermines it.
The second aspect, rather than dealing with elimination it moves to being the process to the ‘position to gain. It is argued that this becomes very important, this is also where some criticism should be applied. Take for example the million-dollar check that Jim Carry wrote to himself, there is nothing wrong with that as a goal. Despite not knowing why so much money is necessary for one individual to have, now that I know Jim Carry is an actor, I went back to see what he is saying now. He himself sees this as a childish goal which does not bring about positive aspects people think it might. The major problem here is the illusion (or Platos cave) is being reinforced rather than deconstructed. There is nothing Meta about this, but the major problem, it can focus on one aspect of your life. Thus, limiting experience; people who focus on just one goal will often be miserable even when they reach that goal. Ishmael must catch his Whale would be a good analogy.
There is of course nothing wrong with having dreams, still when it becomes too focused, as it does in the book, it would be a shame that the experience of the now is less important than these dreams. A setting up of misery is an unsound plan. Take for example the writing of lists of daily tasks, it can often turn into a prison in which failure to complete them drives a completely different set of measures and produces internal failure. More so, those tasks themselves go from enjoyable to things that must be rushed through. The ‘Act of Failure is extremely important, true the book does talk about how some goals should not be long term, for example to stop smoking do not vow to never smoke again rather keep the mind in the position of stopping for the day. Tiny goals are good, but tasks to reach those goals in spite of the needs of the moment you find yourself in, well, it is certainly not a good way to become a good artist. The confusion around the first and second aspect are intermixed in an unhelpful manner.
This brings us back to the Meta Mind, the third aspect, the concept to me would be written more like this: a pure moment of clarity to which all anxieties and worries are lost and the senses are not guided by what is already known and expected to be known. This is rare, I would suggest that only once have I experienced anything like this, but often these sorts of accounts can only be found when people go through near death experiences. These Meta experiences are both rare and difficult to achieve leaving the same ability to hack your mind in a frustrating and demotivating position. It would perhaps be better to argue that we have two minds, the first driven by logic, the second by emotion. To achieve such a balance of the two minds would itself be the achievement. Rather than hacking the inverse would be to find that balance. There are some good ideas in this book, but most of it is based on somewhat dubious interpretations.

Written as an open document