When you wonder if you’re the one in a bubble

A family supermarket at the heart of Abidjan, one which upper-class Ivorian and expats commonly savor. I was standing in front of a display of chocolates, an isle I regularly visit to check for any Swiss chocolates on sale. (Swiss chocolates here are equally as pricey as in any other parts of the world.) I had my eyes on a specific brand for several days now. I knew that they were approaching its expiration date.

2 days before the date marked in bold letters on the back of the package, I had expected that the price would soon come down. Instead, I found them sitting in the shelf just like the rest of the product line. I picked out a bar and approached a supermarket staff to ask him when the expiration date was, just in case they overlooked the dates. “Excuse me? What is the expiration date of this chocolate bar?” “It’s the day after tomorrow.” is the exact curt response I got. There was no discount that day.

I returned to the supermarket a couple of days later slightly despondent that I had missed the grand chocolate sale. I expected the chocolate bars to be sold off before it had expired. To my surprise, they were still sitting there, as if the dates after the letters “EXP” had no significance. I called the staff to let them know that they were selling expired products. Soon there were 2… 3… 4 staffs scouring through the chocolate section pulling out products with a past expiration date.  There were about 50 Swiss chocolates worth 5 US dollars each that they had to take off. That’s a lot of money lost for a retail business.

What was my takeaway from this awkward experience other than the fact that I should bring chocolates from Japan rather than wait for ones in Abidjan to go on sale? I was also struck by the fact that people here didn’t get the basics principles of retail management. And this is not a mom-and-pop size store; it’s a huge franchised supermarket. Inventory control is the heart of a successful retail management, and the employees didn’t understand it, at least the one I had talked to previously to ask about the expiration date.

Yet it’s also true that as a consumer, a couple of days, weeks, maybe months past expiration of a chocolate is not of grave concern. I was even willing to pay for the expired chocolates had the supermarket sold them at 1 US dollar per bar. In the view of civilization, a vendor overlooking an expired product is a grave issue, but maybe the staff who paid no attention to the dates inscribed at the back of the package had a point. Who cares about the dates; they are still edible chocolates.

I don’t think I am alone in feeling slightly confused from such an experience. Millennials may often be faced with a sense of fear that we have gone out of touch with our human intuitions and what actually matters. My act of appealing to the staffs about the expired chocolates was sort of an admonition to the supermarket. But maybe Cote d’Ivoire was never ready to adopt such complex system as a franchised supermarket in the first place. I wonder if businesses in countries such as Cote d’Ivoire are all of a sudden being vested with authorities they are unable to handle. And maybe that’s okay. What’s wrong with living in a world where people judge whether a commodity should be sold based on the texture, the smell, the taste of the product, rather than on a 6 digit number we aren’t even quite sure how they are decided? I wonder if I am in fact the one in the bubble, playing along with the game set by modernized societies.

Even when not subjected to the nature of my job, would I continue to preach what expiration dates are and the implications when they are ignored? I do at times wonder if that would distort the other’s world,  and what the consequences of that may be. I do find comfort living in the developed world I am used to, but I do feel a bit of qualm every time I talk about “our norm” to people living in a more simplistic world unaffected by intricate modern systems.

Epistemology in Workplaces

Donald Rumsfeld, when he was asked if there was an evidence of Iraq owning weapons of mass destruction, said,
“there are things that we know,

there are things that we know that we don’ know

and there are things that we don’t know that we don’t know”
This is an interesting statement from the view point of epistemology.

It seems like every knowledge fall into one of those categories.

We know the speed of light.

We don’t know what exists outside of the universe.

But we cannot tell what it is that we don’t know that we don’t know because we just don’t know it.
I know that this kind of theoretical and philosophical argument is generally disliked because it is not useful. It does not generate money.

Right?
But working as a manager in a company, I find this framework of thinking quite useful.
By expanding the reach of known knowns, we can be experts.

But this is not good enough.

To be a good manager, we need to be aware of known unknowns too.

This is to say that we need to know what it is that we don’t know.

Since the required knowledge for managers is broad, ranging from IT to law to marketing to finance, it is almost impossible to know all of them.

What’s important is to know what you don’t know and who knows what you don’t know.

And the third category?

I think this has to do with our world view.

Though it is impossible to estimate the portion of this category by definition, if you think this area is not too big, you might have an organized world view.
Your world is filled up with known knowns and known unknowns.

With this world view, one might think that you can grasp the overall image of how the world works.
However, if you think that unknown unknowns share the majority of portion in the world, you might have a chaotic world view.

Nothing is predictable and everything can happen.
Which world view do I have?

Needless to say.

The Internet has failed us truth seekers

I don’t deny for a single moment that the Internet has grown increasingly dangerous as it continues to proliferate false information. I pity the once celebrated mainstream media that is being forced to lower its standards to compete with the novice reporters and bloggers who spawns whatever eye-catching account at a pace consumers can’t even keep up.

We’ve been warned about fake news, and I used to think that media literacy skills would help detect them. But I’m not so sure anymore. Even the well-educated who are deeply aware of media pitfalls don’t have the time to verify truth information from the false, unless they strictly control which source of media they chose to be exposed to. Some media channels, I would like to believe, run strict fact checks before they expose information to the public eye. Yet with so much propaganda lurking around us, I doubt whether screening out fake news entirely is even possible these days.

Nowadays, my belief foundations have grown shaky. I am starting to even doubt the things I used to think were solid facts. I try to fact check news and information on my own and to my best efforts, but there are too many plausible information, backed up with scientific evidence, that contradicts with one another. I’ve lost confidence in my ability to tell what is right and what is a byproduct of agencies with self-interests trying to manipulate the public. Now I’m starting to feel like we all live in a world of fiction.

But is this a symptom that began surface only recently, or was it always this way? Would I have felt as insecure as I feel now if I were born, say, in the late 1800’s? The situation probably wouldn’t have changed. For many years, the U.S. believed that trained monkeys helped farmers pick cotton on the field. If I had read the news, or heard about it, either I may as well have believed it, or have been skeptical of it for the rest of my life. There was no way I would have found out the truth unless I walked every cotton field in the country to verify with my own eyes.

We may think with the power of the Internet, there is more transparency, more access to what is true and what is real. Some of us may have been fooled into believing that with a single swipe on our smart phones, the truth is at our fingertips. Yet we are starting to realize that this is a myth. The Internet has not changed the fact that we know very little of the truth. Uncertainty will certainly continue to haunt us for many more ages to come.

Don’t end with information

What makes for people who successfully changed their habits against those who seem to be stuck in a status quo?

A common answer would be access to information. True to an extent, but not quite the entire formula.

 

Those smartphones you can’t put down even when you’ve seen countless videos warning us how it puts social connection at stake.

The deposits you let sitting at a bank when you know that there are products out there  that give you better returns.

Going on with an affair when you could be one in three who end up in a divorce as a consequence.

And the classic. Watching three movies on a Sunday devouring on a whole bag of popcorn just days after your check-up results came in telling you to get some exersize and cut down on colesterol levels.

 

What gets us to ignore all of the valuable information we are exposed to? Is it lack of time, fear of change, memory shortage, or is it that we don’t truly believe in what we hear?

 

I’ve given some thoughts about how information can translate to behavior change, because it’s essential to the work I do: development projects.

Under development projects, training is a trite method. It’s weak in its ability to make dramatic changes in the way people act. Yet most donors continue to provide training afte training after training.

 

The following are some recommendations I have gleaned from the web that transforms information to behavior change.

• Translate goal into behavior.
• Establish a clear context.
• Develop a reliable cue.
• Create a powerful reinforcement.
• Repeat it until its normal.

In other words, you have to get cozy with your new habits. Let it become your joy and pleasure, or at least bear neutral emotions.

There was another scholar who explained that transferring aesthetics to control, and control to identity was the key to building new habits. Here again, it starts with emotion and end with emotion. You have to let new habits become your identity.

 

Earlier I wrote about how emotions can intrude our rational behavior, yet we are inevitably feeling creatures, and as grim as it sounds, we can only depend on our emotions as driver for behavioral change. I start to see that there is a loop, from emotions to new behavior and back to emotions, and the loop continues on and on.

 

As someone who facilitates people change their habits, I see that there is a lot of work that needs to be done. First you have to ignite emotion. Training under development projects often end here. But you have to quickly help convert the feeling into action. At first it may feel awkward to them, but you have to get them on board, and float their boat.

Only then you have yourself a project where it doesn’t only end with people with information, but with a changed habit.

Addicted to Consistency: what strengthens Confirmation Bias

It seems like we are required to be consistent or coherent all the time. We were taught to make coherent arguments in schools, papers should be written with consistent reasoning in universities and reports and proposals should be drafted with coherence in our work places.

Coherence and consistency are generally considered to be a positive personal traits.

 

 

But why is consistency important from the first place? Is it that obvious?

 

Nisbett (2003) attributes this inclination for consistency to ancient Greek, where debate played an important role in decision making as a nation. Those who won debates with consistent arguments hold power to implement public policy.

But he pointed out that this tendency is not observed in oriental culture. In Asia, contradiction and paradox were considered to be a part of nature.

 

So maybe, consistency and coherence are not that important as we, people educated under western system, think. Preference for coherence might be just a western construct.

 

 

Psychology gives us an important insight regarding this issue. Kahneman (2011) argued that we have psychological bias to construct coherent story and disregard evidences that does not support your view because our system 2 is lazy to collect information that falsify our theory.

 

So, the more we look for consistency and coherence, the more we tend to collect information that is convenient for our own beliefs. After all, it is almost always possible to find evidences that support your argument.

Thus, this kind of thing happen. : http://www.npr.org/sections/health-shots/2016/10/12/497550681/reviews-of-medical-studies-may-be-tainted-by-funders-influence?utm_campaign=storyshare&utm_source=facebook.com&utm_medium=social

Science might not be immune to this bias.

 

This is relevant because it seems like in many parts of the world, public opinions are bipolarized. If people look for consistency with this psychological bias, no wonder public opinions are bipolarized. People want to feel cognitive ease by constructing their own story, supported by convenient information.

 

Maybe there are solutions to this.

First, we should try to collect information that does not support our view intentionally. Always having a devil’s advocate in your mind is thus important. As Karl Popper argued, it is important to try to falsify your own theory repeatedly.

However, no matter how hard we try, it is impossible to collect all information in the world obviously. Physically, our cognitive ability is limited.

So here is the second solution: stop looking for consistency.

 

We do not always have to make sense of the world. Being able to enjoy inconsistency and lack of coherence might be an important ability.

 

 

References

Kahneman, D. (2011). Thinking, fast and slow. New York: Farrar, Straus and Giroux.

Nisbett, R. E. (2003). The geography of thought: How Asians and Westerners think differently– and why. New York: Free Press.

Danger of being too serious

In the previous article, I argued that working too hard is not productive.

But it is not only unproductive but also could be dangerous for the society as a whole. Why?

 

Working too hard is coming from being really serious about what you have been assigned. In a modern education system, we are taught that being serious and working hard is a good thing.

 

Hannah Arendt, in her work Eichmann in Jerusalem: A Report on the Banality of Evil,  described how serious and obedient Eichmann, one of the Nazis officials who conducted a massive genocide, was.

*I have not read the whole book yet.

She described that he was not a stereotypical evil person who would kill thousands of people ruthlessly but an ordinary figure who obediently implemented what was assigned.

 

We, people living in modern society, should not forget this lesson. An ordinary man could be contributing to the disastrous consequence of the society.

 

ーーーーーーー

But then, a question arises. Who judges if somebody’s act is contributing to the negative impact for the world?

Maybe an ordinary business man is contributing to the acceleration of global warming through his productive activity in a firm.

At the same time, maybe if you are jobless, you are being a free rider of social security system and wasting the resource of the society.

 

Who knows who is doing good or bad? Who decides what is good or bad?

This idea might lead us to skepticism or intellectual anarchism or nihilism.

 

But those might not be a bad thing after all.

 

One certain thing is that there is no guarantee that being serious is good for the society.

 

 

References

Arendt, H. (1994). Eichmann in Jerusalem: A report on the banality of evil. New York, N.Y., U.S.A: Penguin Books.

The Price of Working Too Hard

Recent case of Karoshi, a Japanese word for dying because of working too hard, of a young employee in one of the elitist corporations in Japan, Dentsu, is again heating up the debate concerning Japanese working culture.

 

It is well-known that Japanese work really hard. And yes, there are a lot of people dying from working too hard (including committing a suicide.)

More detail: https://www.ft.com/content/0cd29210-8dd1-11e6-a72e-b428cb934b78

———

 

In a modern society, productivity mainly comes from intellectual input and output rather than physical effort.

You should be mobilizing what Kahneman (2011) calls system 2 of our cognitive ability.

 

Since system 2 requires energy, if you are too tired, both mentally and physically, you cannot fully mobilize your system 2 when it is needed.

 

This is why working too hard could hamper your productivity.

 

———-

Surely, it is possible to mobilize system 1 rather than system 2. Then, you don’t need much energy because system 1 is always in operation automatically.

 

System 1 is a cognitive ability that we, human beings, have been nurtured throughout our historical evolution.

 

The thing is that though this system 1 has been serving humanity for its survival in the course of history, it comes with certain bias that could be inefficient in modern society.

System 1 is prone to what Arieli (2010) calls predictable irrationality. The role of system 2 is to check this and modify if necessary.

 

In the modern world, maybe system 2 plays more important role especially when it comes to productive activities. You need to take enough rest to fully mobilize system 2 when needed.

 

Notes:

• Why system 2 is more important than system 1 in productive activity remains questionable.
• To answer the question above, we need to think about where value comes from. I’m assuming that system 2 creates value more than system 1 but I need to explain why.

 

 

References

Ariely, D. (2010). Predictably irrational: The hidden forces that shape our decisions. New York: Harper Perennial.

Kahneman, D. (2011). Thinking, fast and slow. New York: Farrar, Straus and Giroux.

 

Definition of Trustworthiness

Now I work for a cross-border crowdfunding investment startup in Tokyo. This might sound a bit complicated but what we do is simple. We raise funds from Japanese investors (mainly individuals) online and invest it in emerging markets.

Capital is becoming more and more borderless. Now an entrepreneur in, say Cameroon or Peru, can raise funds from Japanese individuals.

The motto of our company is “connecting credit markets around the world.”

 

 

By the way, what is credit?

Surely in finance industry, it means something like

• money that a bank or business will allow a person to use and then pay back in the future

•  a record of how well you have paid your bills in the past

•  an amount of money that is added to an account

  (http://www.merriam-webster.com/dictionary/credit)

 

However, originally it means trust.

Unless your receipt of cash and provision of goods or services happen simultaneously, trust is essential in business. If there is no trust, there is no business. This is what they always say. Agree.

 

But what does this word “trust” really mean?

Who is a trustworthy person? What kind of company is a trustworthy company?

 

For example, in Japan, it is generally considered that unpunctual people are not trustworthy.

But is this rule of thumb applicable everywhere?

 

Maybe in some other regions of the world, punctuality is not an important feature to judge if one is trustworthy or not.

Certainly, there is a big difference among nations regarding what feature is considered to be a sign of trustworthiness.

 

This might be the reason why the world is not fully globalized.

You don’t live a single day without hearing a word globalization if you are in a business sector. Globalization became such a popular topic especially after Thomas Friedman published The world is flat.

However, as Ghemawat (2011) pointed out, the world economy is not fully globalized at all.

Why? There might be physical factors that prevent goods and services from moving around the world.

But I feel like the biggest obstacle lies somewhere else. It’s in people’s head.

 

Since the definition of trustworthiness varies depending on nations, regions, cultures, religions, etc etc, people who have different definitions tend to misunderstand each other and hence, no business.

If you think your business partner is not trustworthy, it is highly likely that your business partner is thinking the same thing.

 

It might be useful to remember that a trustworthy person in your culture becomes completely untrustworthy in a different place.

 

References

Friedman, T. L. (2005). The world is flat: A brief history of the twenty-first century. New York: Farrar, Straus and Giroux.

Ghemawat, P. (2011). World 3.0: Global prosperity and how to achieve it. Boston, Mass: Harvard Business Review Press.

What good is emotion?

Emotions used to be important.

Emotions used to help us survive.

Amygdala is the part of our brain that allows this.

It detects threats and dangers as well as feel love and compassion.

Back in days when human fought with predators, amygdala reacted even before we would be conscious of it.

Love as a neurobiological reflex was also conducive to survival as it leads to reproductive activities.

 

Things have changed in the modern world.

We face different types of threats under the modern age survival game.

Getting fired from your job, loosing money from bad investments, mismanagement of household budget.

Or even a diet or riding cards can be a source of threat.

Our amygdala isn’t made to react to threats like these. They are beyond our amygdala’s comprehension, which means, we must count on our pre-cortex to logically detect threats.

What about love and compassion? What good are they in the age where death rate has decreased and people’s desire to procreate are withering?

The modern brain need much more work of the prefrontal cortex rather than the amygdala to survive. To think rationally and logically is the new way to stay afloat.

The brain is given more anxiety and stress because prefrontal cortex require much more horsepower than amygdala.

Intuition is of less value. In fact they could be trouble makers as it drives motivational reasonings rather than truth finding.

System 1 gets in the way of making informed wise choices, so we need to activate our System 2 a lot more than in the past.

So what good is emotion in the the modern world? Can we simply do away with them and still do a good job at surviving?

I wonder if life would have been easier if I were more a prefrontal cortex, System 2 person.

The poor and their grit

What determines student’s success on a test? It’s not IQ, not time spent on studying the material, nor family wealth or status. It’s grit.

This is what Anglea Duckworth claims to have found through her years of research, and the concept is going viral.

Grit one day flew in like a shining star, giving hope to anyone who has ever been told they just don’t have the skills and the talent, and should give up.

How do we make this magic work? The author says it takes 4 qualities.

• Develop a fascination
• Daily improvement
• Greater purpose
• Growth mindset

But how do we strip the list down even further?

The reason I ask is this because I work in developing countries on poverty reduction issues and deal with people who we have defined as being poor.

Because our goal is to eradicate poverty, we want the poor people to be serious about being un-poor. How do we prod the poor to be fascinated by the idea of being un-poor? How do we grind in the poor’s minds that their purpose is to become un-poor? How do we get them to be good at growing un-poor day by day?

So we use tools like capacity building and financial literacy training so that the poor can inch towards exiting the status of being poor. As development practitioners, we care a great deal about indicators such as income growth and 3 meals per day.

But wait. Do the poor really want to be un-poor?

If we ask questions like “what are you fascinated by?” or “what is your purpose in life?”, what if we get a completely different answer from ones that resonates better with our ambitions?

This may be the reason why microfinance has not been an effective tool to alleviate poverty. It may well be that the poor are not fascinated from more wealth or bigger business. Microfinance, being that it is one of the fastest growing industries in the world in terms of population, may be favored by the poor not because they can move out of poverty, but for other reasons.

We think we know what we want, but in fact we don’t. It may well be an illusion.

So why not try asking a poor person next time these questions? “what are you fascinated by?” or “what is your purpose in life?”, and work form there to enhance their grit.