Charlie's notebook

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

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

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

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

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

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