“THERE IS NO GREATER PAIN….” (COMMENT). Mary Jane’s reaction to the Madoff post was that Dante had a different perspective on memories of happy times. She referred me to a line by Paola in Canto V in THE INFERNO. (Canto V tells of Paola and Francesca). The quote is: “Nessun maggior dolore che ricordarsi del tempo felice nella miseria.” In Sinclair’s prose translation: “There is no greater pain than to recall the happy time in misery.”
Archive for June, 2009
“THERE IS NO GREATER PAIN….” (COMMENT).
Tuesday, June 30th, 2009THE HAPPY MEMORIES OF CRIMINALS (COMMENT).
Tuesday, June 30th, 2009THE HAPPY MEMORIES OF CRIMINALS (COMMENT). Dick Weisfelder commented on yesterday’s post on Bernie Madoff that perhaps other criminals, including killers, have happy memories. I am in unhappy agreement. I hesitated on whether to make the Madoff post because I find it painful to think of criminals reminiscing happily. I think people like me tend to think of criminals who specialize in crimes involving money as being in it only for the money. Yet some criminologists believe that armed robbers are motivated by the joy of dominating people, of putting them in fear of their lives. Others enjoy the excitement of being outlaws, defiers of the legal order. All of which makes deterrence difficult.
BERNIE MADOFF’S MEMORIES.
Monday, June 29th, 2009BERNIE MADOFF’S MEMORIES. What must if be like to be Bernie Madoff? After a life of luxury, he is universally hated and reviled, rejected by his family, and today was sentenced to 150 years in jail. And yet, I wonder. He has his happy memories. Memories of the things that were important to him, memories of the days and years when he was always the most important person in the room, treated with deference wherever he went. Knowing that the respect was not deserved seems not to have mattered to him. I suspect that if Bernie Madoff had the opportunity to live his life over again, he would choose the same path.
THE BOSTON MOLASSES DISASTER.
Sunday, June 28th, 2009THE BOSTON MOLASSES DISASTER. Sam Anderson gives an amusing list of all the things that distracted him in the course of writing his article. One of the items is the Boston Molasses Disaster. Anderson says: “If I were going to excuse you from reading this article for any single distraction, which I am not, it would be to read about the Boston Molasses Disaster.” Here is a link to the wikipedia article on the Boston Molasses Disaster. When I studied American history in high school, I never encountered the Boston Molasses Disaster, but apparently both Annalisa and Nick learned that in 1919, a huge molasses tank in Boston collapsed, killing 21 people. I suppose the significance of the Boston Molasses Disaster for the teaching of history is that students would learn that in 1919–instead of sugar–“molasses was the standard sweetener in the United States.” It’s also a good story.
YOU CAN’T REALLY MULTITASK.
Saturday, June 27th, 2009YOU CAN’T REALLY MULTITASK. Sam Anderson says that despite all the talk about multitasking, with minor exceptions, people can really pay attention to only one thing at a time. The best we can do is to switch rapidly from one thing to another. The phrase for this is apparently: “continuous partial attention.”
ALLOCATING ATTENTION.
Saturday, June 27th, 2009ALLOCATING ATTENTION. Economists think in terms of allocating a limited amount of a resource. Traditionally, they deal with the problem of efficiently allocating a limited income. I posted here about how economists are now thinking about allocating time and that some psychologists are thinking in terms of allocating a willpower budget. Sam Anderson quotes the great economist Herbert Simon as pointing out in 1971 that: “a wealth of information creates a poverty of attention, and a need to allocate that attention efficiently among the overabundance of information sources that might consume it.”
AGREEING TO MY EXPERIENCE.
Friday, June 26th, 2009AGREEING TO MY EXPERIENCE. I posted here on Jonah Lehrer’s insights into Virginia Woolf. Lehrer concluded that: “Woolf realized that the self emerges via the act of attention.” Sam Anderson tells how Winifred Gallagher, the author of RAPT, a book about the control of attention, is able to ignore the sound of jackhammers outside her apartment window. “Gallagher stresses that because attention is a limited resource….our moment-by-moment choice of attentional targets determines, in a very real sense, the shape of our lives.” The epigraph to Gallagher’s book is from William James: “My experience is what I agree to attend to.” I think this is an empowering idea.
WHY FOCUS ON A DOT?
Thursday, June 25th, 2009WHY FOCUS ON A DOT? Alan Jacobs in The New Atlantis takes issue here with Sam Anderson’s article and with William James as well: “This is wrong-headed in a number of ways, but chief among them is this: there’s no good reason for focusing on a dot.”
PAYING ATTENTION TO A DOT.
Thursday, June 25th, 2009PAYING ATTENTION TO A DOT. I posted here about the difficulty four year olds have in not paying attention to a marshmallow. In this article Sam Anderson points out that William James argued that it was difficult for a person to focus attention. James set the challenge of focusing the attention on a dot. James contended that a human can’t focus on a dot for more than a few seconds. Our minds crave variety. Anderson took on the challenge. He tried to focus for thirty minutes and concluded that he had not been able to focus on the dot. He says: “The dot… becomes only the hub of your total dot-related distraction.”
BAD LINE CALLS.
Wednesday, June 24th, 2009BAD LINE CALLS. I have previously posted (for example, here) on error rates for sports officials. The Wall Street Journal recently alerted me to a study of tennis line calls by researchers at the University of California at Davis (see here and here). They reviewed some 4400 points chosen at random from the 2007 Wimbledon championship and found 83 bad line calls. The articles about the study seem to be most interested in the finding that a disproportionate number of incorrect “out” calls were made–70 as opposed to only 13 incorrect “in” calls. I am more interested that about two per cent of points are affected by errors. This is a higher error rate than I would have expected.
