Charlie's notebook

Albert, Bertam and Charles

Dews trained three octopuses, and found that all three of them did learn to operate the lever to obtain food. When they pulled the lever, a light came on and a small piece of sardine was given as a reward. Two of the octopuses, named Albert and Bertram, did this in a

Charlie

How to Have Impossible Conversations

In some ways I quite liked the book How to Have Impossible Conversations by Peter Boghossian and James Lindsay, but for several reasons I'm not putting it on my Listeners' reading list.

The book does have a lot to say about listening, and what it has to say is good. It's really about how to communicate effectively with people who have radically different beliefs in these polarized times. It provides a detailed explanation of techniques you can learn to avoid conversations like this example from Chapter 1:

S: You're *** annoying. Seriously, I can't believe you're a teacher.

B: I'm sorry you feel that way. Maybe if you could better defend your beliefs you wouldn't be so annoyed with someone who's asking you softball questions.

S: What do you teach your students?

B: You're not my student. And don't get so upset.

S: You're an asshole. We're done.

However, a lot of the book's recommendations are not illustrated with sample conversations. This makes the whole book seem rather theoretical.

And some of the examples that are given seem a little creepy to me. For example, one recommendation from the Master Level chapter is to say:

It's clear that being a good person is important to you.

If anyone said anything as judgemental as that to me I'd feel they were being very inauthentic, manipulative or even hostile, and I'd be suspicious of their motives. The book doesn't give a example of how someone might reply to that statement.

Sometimes, too, it's not clear what the ultimate goal is—whether it's to understand both sides of an issue, or whether it's to drag someone over to your side of it.

So maybe if you really do have trouble communicating with people who have radically different beliefs, this book could be a source of useful ideas. But although it does have some good hints about listening, I didn't feel a lot of the book addresses the kind of conversations that 7 Cups listeners are likely to have.

Charlie

Teaching Charlotte to speak nicely

While I was away last month I had some fun trying to teach Charlotte to speak nicely. The Charlotte I'm referring to is Charlotte V3, one of the many voices of an IBM artificial intelligence.

The AI has some understanding of English (US and UK), Arabic, Portuguese (Brazilian), Spanish (Castilian, Latin American and North American), Chinese (Mandarin), Dutch, French, German, Italian, Japanese and Korean. This means it can parse text written in any of those languages and read it out loud with reasonably human intonation—and not just single words and sentences, but paragraphs and longer passages.

Charlotte V3 speaks British English with the kind of accent that suggests a very expensive private education, but she sometimes makes weird mistakes. Some of the things she says sound impressively natural, but some of them sound flat and robotic.

It's possible to help the AI out by adding hints in a special format called SSML, and that's what I spent some time doing in order to get Charlotte to speak nicely. I was only partly successful. I think this AI is very impressive but a long way from perfect.

You can try the system for yourself on IBM's Text to Speech demo page.

I plan to publish the results of my experiments in a video that I'll describe in my next post here.

Charlie

Managing Emotions

While I was on a break recently with a very erratic Internet connection, I amused myself by making a video of a simulated chat, which I was mostly able to do offline.

IBM's Charlotte V3, whom I mentioned in my last post, provided the voiceover. The visuals are all simple images or screenshots, and the messages you see in the chat are generated by a computer program.

The fictitious listener in the chat, Morinda, is related to the 7 Cups bot, Noni, in a way that you can easily discover by searching the Internet The fictitious member doesn't really exist, of course, and the storyline is also complete fiction.

You can watch the video here: Managing Emotions (9 minutes)

Note that YouTube currently streams low quality video, but you can click the cogwheel icon and set it to 720p to make the chat easier to read. The subtitles work quite well but they're not perfect.

Charlie

Mans Search for Meaning

This short and unpleasant book, written just after World War II, begins with the words:

This book does not claim to be an account of facts and events…

It's worth keeping this in mind as you read it.

Part I, the main part of the book, describes itself as "the inside story of a concentration camp, told by one of its survivors", Viktor Frankl, who wrote it as if he was a survivor of the Nazi concentration camp at Auschwitz. Historical research later established that he had been held for three days in a railway depot near Auschwitz, but he was never in the camp there. He was in other camps, and of course he might have heard stories about things that happened at Auschwitz, and he might have included those stories in his book to make it seem like they happened to him.

The stories about Auschwitz Frankl tells are not even consistent. For example, in one place he tells us (p. 34):

In general there was also a "cultural hibernation" in the camp. There were two exceptions to this: politics and religion.

But just a few pages later he reports that (p. 39):

A kind of cabaret was improvised from time to time… There were songs, poems, jokes… a prisoner climbed onto a tub and sang Italian arias.

Frankl's conclusion to Part I is a depressing black-and-white view of humanity (p. 69):

From all this we may learn that there are two races of men in this world, but only these two—the "race" of the decent man and the "race" of the indecent man.

Part II is a very short outline of Frankl's theory of logotherapy, a form of psychotherapy. He explains (p. 77):

Logos is a Greek word which denotes "meaning". Logotherapy…focuses on the meaning of human existence as well as on man's search for such a meaning.

Christians (for example) are likely to know that the Greek word logos really means both "reason" and "word", and is used specifically for the Word of God. This usage goes back to the ancient Greek philosopher Heraclitus of Ephesus, who used logos to mean "the divine reason or plan which coordinates a changing universe". Understanding this may shed light on Frankl's choice of the term logotherapy.

So, logotherapy helps people to discover divine meaning, except that in the book Frankl leaves the "divine" part of it unexplained. He does give several examples.

In one example (p. 86) an elderly doctor who had severe depression consulted Frankl. After hearing about the doctor's situation, Frankl asked him a question, and then Frankl himself explained the answer to the question. On hearing the question and its answer, the doctor was immediately cured of his depression.

In another (p. 90), a rabbi from Eastern Europe told Frankl about his feelings of despair. Frankl explained to the rabbi the meaning of his despair, quoting the Book of Psalms, and for the first time in years the rabbi found relief from his suffering.

In a third case (p. 93), a young physician consulted Frankl because of his fear of perspiring. Frankl advised him what to do, and within one week after hearing this single piece of advice the young man was able to free himself permanently of his fear.

The general pattern is that in logotherapy the therapist reveals to the patient the (divine) meaning of the patient's problem, and after this the problem goes away almost immediately. As you might expect, Frankl's logotherapy quickly became popular with evangelical Christians in the US and worldwide, making the book a great success.

Just as Part I of the book has been criticized for its lack of historical accuracy, Part II has been criticized for its authoritarian and quasi-religious approach to psychotherapy.

Frankl would have us believe that his experience in the camps led to his development of logotherapy, but as Timothy Pytell and others have established, it really dates from more than ten years before. A lot of things about this book are not what they seem.

I would suggest this is probably a book to avoid. Read together with Timothy Pytell's book, Viktor Frankls Search for Meaning, to provide factual context, it does, however, give quite an interesting insight into an extraordinary and influential man.

Charlie

Scripts People Live

On the whole I liked this book about transactional analysis, although I thought more examples would have been helpful throughout, and it lost momentum towards the end.

Transactional analysis (TA) sounds complicated but is really a simple but powerful way to understand how people live their lives and interact with each other. It was developed in the late 1950s by Eric Berne. This book, Scripts People Live, by Claude Steiner, explores in detail how TA can be used to understand recurring patterns of interaction that people get trapped in, known as life scripts or just scripts.

Fortunately Scripts People Live starts by explaining the basic ideas of TA, so you don't need to know anything about it in advance. The three most basic concepts are:

1. People are born O.K.
2. People in emotional difficulties are nevertheless full, intelligent human beings.
3. All emotional difficulties are curable, given adequate knowledge and the proper approach.

I think these basic concepts should also underpin everything we do at 7 Cups (although I'm not always sure that they do).

Additionally, TA introduces the concept of an ego state, which is really just a fancy term for a state of mind. Everyone is in one, and only one, of just three ego states at any moment in time (the basic theory is really simple!), and most people constantly switch from one ego state to another while interacting with others. The three ego states are:

Parent—a state of mind copied from parents or other authority figures
Adult—a completely rational state of mind
Child—a state of mind based on early childhood (up to the age of about 7)

There's a collection of other important concepts. They include the stroke, which is an interpersonal reward—like praise, recognition, or an actual physical stroke. People need strokes from other people in order to survive.

A game is a pattern of interaction in which people predictably switch ego states, following set rules, in order to get strokes. The book describes many common games, but I would have liked more examples.

An injunction is a prohibition imposed by a parent on a child, which can last for life like a curse in a fairy tale. An attribution is the opposite, when a parent tells a child what to do, and then selectively rewards it, so that the parent's expectation can also influence the child for life. A discount is when someone switches their ego state from adult or parent to child in order to invalidate someone else's spontaneous action or feeling.

Finally, a script is a collection of attributions, injunctions, discounts, games, etc. that limit and direct a person's life…unless the person discovers what's going on and rewrites the script.

The book identifies five broad categories of problematic script that lead to people seeking therapy. A lovelessness script dooms a person to a lack of intimacy (a lack of strokes). A mindlessness script prevents a person from being rational and using their knowledge of themselves and the world effectively (that is, limiting their adult ego state). A joylessness script cuts people off from their own deep-rooted sense of joy in themselves, their inner certainly that they were born O.K.

A powerlessness script leads people to cycle between victim, rescuer and persecutor roles, and to draw other people into playing those roles too, in endless games based on imaginary victimhood. And an inequality script traps people in competitive power plays based on false beliefs—such as a belief that there is not enough to go around, or a belief that there are always winners and losers.

The book then examines how all this typically plays out in relationships, listing a whole lot of common scripts. I felt this part became a little like reading an encyclopedia. I can understand the need to include all the common scripts for reference purposes, but for me this section didn't flow well.

I didn't find the section on therapy very interesting either, but it's probably more interesting if you're a therapist. And I found the final section, The Good Life, annoyingly opinionated and lacking in examples.

Overall, though, scripts are a fascinating approach to thinking about being a person in relation to other people. I'm certain much of this could be applied at 7 Cups, to make sense of some of the issues that 7 Cups finds difficult to face.

Charlie

Getting Unstuck

I've been making a second video chat simulation, this time including some animation.

The idea of using animation came from @QuietCloud22 , an experienced animator who was very helpful when exploring ideas and technical solutions for putting this video together.

In the end I reused the Eunice character from my guides, animating her in OpenToonz on a transparent background that I later overlaid on the chat. But I composited the video in OpenShot like before, partly because I'm more familiar with it, and partly because it made it easy to generate the subtitles (closed captions).

The voices are synthesized by IBM Watson again. I noticed IBM had fixed at least one annoying bug since the last time I used this AI, and I continue to be very impressed by the results it can produce.

Overall this gives me a system that I can now use to make future videos more easily. I already have another script in draft form.

Although this new video is streamed from YouTube, I embedded it in a wrapper so you don't get so many of YouTube's distractions. You can watch it on YouTube if you prefer.

The fictitious listener in this chat is Citri, a new listener who has some trouble knowing how to avoid giving advice. Eunice keeps an eye on him and explains what he needs to do. The member and the storyline are complete fiction, of course.

You can watch the video here: Getting Unstuck (10 minutes)

Note that YouTube currently streams low quality video, but you can click the cogwheel icon and set the quality to 720p to make the chat easier to read.

Charlie

Listener Survey

Today I took part in a survey for listeners, which asks just three questions, in effect. Here are my replies, together with some more explanation:

• I became a listener first, then made my member account later. (I almost never use my member account, although I know that it would be interesting to get a better understanding of how members experience 7 Cups.)

• My reasons for becoming a listener: personal experience, family experience, to learn and practice active listening skills, desire to help others/give to the world, curiosity. (In fact, mainly curiosity about 7 Cups at first, but now mainly a way to help others.)

• A member should be able to get support without needing to know anything at all—7 Cups should be designed to be transparently clear. (When the new app is released, "real soon now" as they say, it will be interesting to see whether it's designed to make 7 Cups easier for new members who simply want to get support, or whether it's designed for insiders who already know how 7 Cups works.)

Charlie

7 Cups Community Improvement Survey

A community survey asked for a problem and potential solution in each of six areas, with each problem rated 1–10. I replied as follows.

A) 1-1 Chat

Problem: Distracting and inappropriate tips cluttering chats. (Rating 4)

Solution: For verified listeners, provide an option in the settings to turn tips off.

B) Member Group Chat Room
C) Listener Chat Room

I don't use chatrooms.

D) SubCommunities / Forums

Problem: Needs Reply views are inaccurate—they don't show which threads really need replies. (Rating 7)

Solution: Retain threads in Needs Reply when the only replies are by a) the original poster, giving additional information, and b) robotic non-replies that don't address the issue, like "I'm sorry you feel that way" or "Thank you for sharing". Remove threads with "checkin" or "check-in" the title, even if they have no replies. (All this can be automated.)

E) Safety

Problem: Some listeners try to play at being therapists, pretending to provide assessments, diagnoses and treatment plans. This puts members at risk, and the listeners may be breaking local laws. (Rating 10)

Solution: a) Clarify community guidelines to emphasize that unlicensed therapy is a form of medical advice, and therefore forbidden. b) Amend the Listeners Working with Members Support Plan and the Group Leadership Dynamics & Development Course to remove all the therapeutic jargon.

F) Resources

Problem: Members often come to 7 Cups looking for friendship, but we do not allow offsite contact and we provide no friendship resources. (Rating 7)

Solution: Add a friendship self-help guide (noting that this is not the same as loneliness). Failing that, add a page similar to the Crisis page to refer these members to friendship sites.

Additional comment:

Meaningful engagement with feedback in the forum would be better than offsite surveys like this one.

Charlie