My YouTube obsession
My Youtube obsession
I’m finding it hard not to become obsessive about checking the viewing figures for my RSA Animate. It reminds me of a few years ago when I wrote a book with my old man. It got part serialised (in The Times I think) and for a day climbed the Amazon charts reaching the heady heights of the top fifty. Thereafter it fell inexorably and now every year I get a royalties statement from the publisher which is always a negative figure.
There was a point a few days in, when we were still in the top thousand, when I flirted (as so many other authors must have done) with buying ten copies myself to see if I could start a reverse trend. Given the pretty ghastly reviews the book received, the fact that I didn’t try to rig the market is one of the few scraps of dignity I can take from the whole episode.
But the YouTube number is continuing to rise, which makes it all the more addictive. I find myself day dreaming complex theories about on-line contagion effects. The viewing figure is rising steadily at about 5-6,000 a day, but how long until the momentum runs out? Is there a certain window of time in which an acceleration of take-up has to take place, and if so, how long is it?
The main value of the video is that it is helping get the RSA brand out world wide. But it is also great to see the ideas being debated. For example, blogs by Duncan Green and Julian Evans have been talking about them. Julian and I have had an email conversation following his post (I’m delighted that he is thinking of becoming a Fellow). Like a number of critiques of this and others of my lectures he worries about the strength and linearity with which I link evidence about human nature to actual human behaviour.
My defence goes back to my elephant rider metaphor in which our conscious self is the rider, our automatic systems the elephant and the social context the jungle. I like this metaphor but am having to accept that it doesn’t seem to resonate with other people. The point I am trying to make is not simply that what we can do is conditioned by who we are as a species and the situation in which we find ourselves, but also that we use our freedom as riders most effectively when we understand how we operate and how we are constrained. It is when we see how our conscious self is only a part of what we are that we understand what an amazing part it is and how best to use this amazing mysterious capacity to be fulfilled and effective people.
So, far from being a neurological determinist I believe that the key to being powerful self-directed individuals is to understand our physiological and social nature. But somehow I’m not managing to get this across. Is it because the point is simplistic, wrong, or the metaphor inept or something else?
Do tell me….
Stuck in the middle with you
From time to time I get asked to write an endorsement to accompany a new book. I am impressed by anyone who is able undertake a sustained piece of writing (regular readers will recall my travails over the mere 9,000 words of my recent pamphlet), so I tend both to say ‘yes’ and to be generous in my praise. As long as it’s written with good intentions and based on a reasonable amount of research there is something worthwhile to be found in any book (as there is in any conversation) and, anyway, I don’t flatter myself that many people buy books simply on the recommendation of someone whose name they are unlikely to recognise.
This week I have been dipping into a new book on the evolutionary basis of leadership. I shan’t say much more in case I am breaking some copyright rule or endorsers’ convention. But there was one argument I found particularly intriguing.
Having explained why it is we are primed by evolution to be most likely to want to follow tall healthy men or people who are good communicators, the authors have a section explaining why we tend not to like middle managers.
They argue that we evolved in small social units in which there was no need for an intermediate tier between the chief and the tribe. So, while we have an innate capacity to follow, and some of us to lead, we have no predisposition to feel attachment to those in-between. Of course, our evolution shapes us but it doesn’t determine our behaviour, so we can learn to love middle managers. But the book’s thesis does raise a couple of thoughts:
1. While many middle managers try to deal with the role by emphasising the challenge of being stuck between the General and the troops this is probably the worst approach. Instead, middle managers should adopt either a collegiate approach in which they present themselves as very much part of the tribe and therefore able to win peer respect, or as big autonomous leaders whose drive and personality obscures the other leaders standing behind.
2. The overwhelming majority of managers are middle managers. As well as the formal status of those working in medium sized and large organisations, many of those who may appear to be the chief (especially in the public and third sector) feel tightly constrained by targets, trustees or clients. Might it be that the general decline in societal deference in part reflects the predominant experience in bureaucratic mass societies of leadership as being compromised and constrained? Having an evolutionary disposition towards strong, assertive leadership, does the dilute, almost apologetic nature of most of the leadership we encounter engender a recurrent feeling of being let down?
I realise this is a pretty grand hypothesis, but at least you’ve got the weekend to think about it.
Steer way to heaven
Today the RSA publishes a new report: ‘Steer, mastering our behaviour through instinct, environment and reason’. It is a product of our Social Brain project and was authored by Matt Grist, who has just this week left to start a new job with Demos.
There are four things I like about the report:
1. It draws on evidence about what drives our behaviour but is measured and balanced, and avoids the temptation to reduce human behaviour to neurological processes. There is a study which shows researchers have only to use the word neuroscience for people to be more likely to believe in any results they are told. Pop neuroscience is everywhere, including a piece in today’s Times saying that Robert Green’s mishap was down to the fact that our brains perceive our hands to be nearly twice the size they really are. Steer avoids the ‘voodoo correlations’ of some applied neuroscience.
2. The core thesis is intellectually convincing and politically progressive. Instead of the benign paternalism of ‘Nudge’, it advocates giving people simple guides which make them better able to shape their behaviour. It recognises that much behaviour is automatic, not conscious, but it gives us the tools to consciously change our circumstances.
3. Although it is a small study, the research involved testing its ideas with a group of subjects. Finding out which ‘rules’ they found most useful immediately, and when asked a few weeks later, shows there is real potential in this approach (which we will be exploring in the next stage of the project).
4. It is short and well-written (always a relief when it comes to think tank reports).
Sadly, there is little sign of the work being picked up by the media – which given all the hype surrounding ‘Nudge’ is a pity. But who knows – maybe it’s a slow burner and I hope my wonderful (and, judging by yesterday’s discussion, deeply intellectual) blog readers will have a look and share it around.
Is Lord Rees proving Kant right?
This is the week of my annual lecture, which as regular readers know is on twenty first century enlightenment. Madeleine Bunting has kindly written a piece about it in the Guardian, although this has also meant opening me up to the strange world of readers’ posts on Comment Is Free. There are some useful comments pro and anti the thesis as Madeleine has described it but there are also several people who think my political past invalidates anything I ever say (apparently, even though I was running an independent think tank at the time, I am heavily implicated in the decision to invade Iraq!)
In discussing the idea of ‘autonomy’ in the pamphlet (published on Thursday) I refer to David Hume’s insight that reason rests on emotion:
“Reason is, and ought only to be the slave of the passions, and can never pretend to any other office than to serve and obey them.”
As I say, two hundred and fifty years after Hume, neuroscientists showed that Hume was right. Antonio Damasio’s patients with damage to the parts of their brain governing emotion were unable to make even the simplest of choices.
Yesterday I was reading an interview in the Sunday Times with one of my heroes Lord Rees, President of the Royal Society. In it Rees controversially suggest that human beings may never understand the universe because ‘it could just be too hard for human brains to grasp’.
I am hoping the philosophically literate among my readers can tell me whether there is any basis for me seeing an echo in this argument of Immanuel Kant’s idea of the noumenon.
I know Kant’s is a metaphysical rather than a scientific concept but the idea that there is a reality which is beyond the capacity of human sense organs to appreciate does seem common to both arguments.
Just as Hume anticipated neuroscience by three centuries did Kant’s metaphysics anticipate the impossibility of the human mind resolving the paradoxes of modern physics?
Reasons to be cheerful?
I spent too much of the bank holiday weekend sweating away at my essay and lecture on 21st century enlightenment. I now have an almost complete draft, which I hope to post as a wiki tomorrow, giving some time for comments and revision before it goes to the printers next Monday. The core argument concerns new ways of thinking to help us deal with the changes and challenges the human race faces and to enable us to live better lives in a better world.
I was given food for thought last week when I chaired Matt Ridley, author of ‘The Rational Optimist’. In fact, Matt was the latest in a set of authors who have spoken here recently to emphasise the progress the human race has made in its short history of civilisation as well as their optimism that we can achieve a great deal more in the future. David Eagleman’s account of how the internet will help us avoid all the problems that have brought down previous civilisations is another powerful example of optimism. Bjorn Lomborg’s controversial critique of environmentalist orthodoxy is also based on his optimism about the resilience of the natural world and human ingenuity.
The new optimism has a number of components. The first is the receding from popualr memory of the horrors of the mid-twentieth century. The issue of global terrorism and the clash between the West and radical Islam still casts a shadow, as does the recent economic crisis, but it has become more intellectually respectable to talk about the forward march of the human race.
Rational optimism also represents a backlash against green fundamentalism. Its advocates are not necessarily climate change deniers but they are more sceptical about the most gloomy hypotheses; they see climate change having upsides as well as down, and they are very confident we will find technological solutions. They tend to be particularly scornful of ideas like ‘peak oil’ which suggest civilisation will be brought down by the finite nature of natural resources. As Matt Ridley said, people used to think economic growth would be stopped by a shortage of whale oil, and ‘the stone age didn’t end because we ran out of stone’.
Optimists are also very excited about science and technology and particularly genetics and the internet. There is, they say, plenty of scope for another doubling of average living standards across the world, something which would effectively abolish extreme poverty and would give most people in the world the opportunity for a wonderful lifestyle.
All this leads the new optimists to tend to be sceptical of the need for governmental interference and enthusiastic about the capacity of human ingenuity and the hidden hand of the market. It is a turbo charged version of Francis Fukuyama’s end of history thesis. But although it is economically liberal, it is not easy to pigeon hole the new optimists on the right of the political spectrum. They are cosmopolitans, delighted by the way the world is changing. They care about reducing poverty, conflict and intolerance, but they think these goals are best achieved by letting people get on with what they are best at: inventing, trading, and acquiring.
If you want to read a powerful refutation of new optimism and of Ridley in particular, read George Monbiot in this morning’s Guardian. As Monbiot says, Ridley’s credibility as a free marketer is somewhat undermined by his former status as the Chair of Northern Rock when the bank collapsed.
It is the question of how we should live that most intrests me. New optimists don’t say people can’t change, nor even that they shouldn’t change, but that they shouldn’t be changed: we don’t face a crisis that requires an abandonment of modern ways of thinking; we should be proud of our acquisitive natures and what they have achieved. Most of all, we should reject the idea that we need gvernment to save us from ourselves.
This fault line – between the new optimists and those who say we need a changed consciousness to meet new challenges and to escape the dead ends of consumerist individualism – isn’t reflected in British party politics. Conservatives, for example, tend to combine economic liberalism with environmental concern and a strong dose of social pessimism.
I am on the new consciousness end of things, but I have to admit the optimists I have heard recently are playing the catchiest tunes. This is a debate the RSA will be finding new ways to address in the coming months.
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