Aftermath Part 2: Apology

Are you going away with no word of farewell
Will there be not a trace left behind
I could have loved you better, didn’t mean to be unkind
You know that was the last thing on my mind

from Last Thing on my Mind
by Tom Paxton

After the fire I went to Jonathan’s apartment three or four times to try and salvage some of his belongings. What seemed like it could be saved I brought to my house and stored in the garage. A bit over a week ago Diane and Ingrid came to my house to go through the boxes. A couple of days later I was out there trying to clean up the video games systems so they could go to Benjamin, who spent a lot of time playing games with Jonathan. I picked up one of the game controllers – something that he held in his hands and took so much joy from – and the paper towel I was using came away black as pitch, black as hell itself.

And I lost it.

I’ve been thinking a lot since then. Those thoughts led to this Aftermath series of postings. In the last one I beat up on God. This time it’s my turn.

I said last time that a big part of my self-concept is that I’m a Dad. I’m starting to think that I’m not very good at it.

One thing that has haunted me is that Jonathan died alone. When he really needed someone, there was no one there – I wasn’t there – for him. I know that’s irrational, but who expects feelings to be rational? If I had known, I would have done anything I could to prevent his death. Still, I feel like I failed him when he needed me most. And I’ve been thinking about other times…

Jonathan loved video games. From the time he was little he was just fascinated by them. When he couldn’t actually be playing video games, he was pretending to be video game characters (mostly Mario). I, however, was concerned about his socialization, so he wasn’t allowed to have them at my house. He did have them at his Mom’s and he had some games on my computer, but he couldn’t have his video games at my house. I finally relented when he was 13. And you know what? The sky didn’t fall and he ended up making some pretty good friends over the years. His socialization skills obviously weren’t deficient.

A similar thing happened with karate. He loved the Ninja Turtles and the Power Rangers. He really wanted to learn karate. Some of his “friends” (the reason for the scare quotes is a whole other story) in the neighborhood were taking lessons, but again I was concerned about socialization and I wanted him to wait until he understood that you don’t use your friends as practice targets. We made him play soccer for a few seasons, but it was clear that he really didn’t enjoy it. He started tae kwon do lessons when he was 8. The sky didn’t fall then, either. He was still studying and teaching martial arts when he died.

Last summer Benjamin moved into Jonathan’s old room in my house. I soon realized how poorly the AC system worked in his room; it was sometimes nearly 90 up there when it was around 72 on the main level. It must have been like that when Jonathan lived here, but I was so wrapped up in my marriage that I didn’t know. I really should have.

And then there was the first time Ingrid, Benjamin, and I went to Ocean City. Jonathan had to work and couldn’t go. He went to an ophthalmologist appointment the day we left (we were only going for one night) and the guy sent him to Baltimore to Johns Hopkins. Jonathan sat there for hours alone and his girlfriend called to break up with him while he was there. I really should have gone to be with him.

I could have loved you better, son. I’m sorry.

Aftermath Part 1: The Book of Job

From dictionary.com:

Aftermath: something that results or follows from an event, especially one of a disastrous or unfortunate nature; consequence: the aftermath of war; the aftermath of the flood.

The purpose of this blog was to talk about what I’ve learned in my life and how I got to where I am now. The loss of my son Jonathan has put me in a place I never conceived of being, not even in my worst nightmares. I have felt like I needed to write something for some time, but I wasn’t quite sure what it was that I needed to write. Life, death, the afterlife, God, religion, coping with loss, fatherhood, how to cope while being alone, how to help my son Benjamin – so much has come up in the last three months. I’m still not sure what to write about, but I thought I’d start typing and see what comes out. So, here goes.

I’ve been thinking a lot lately about Job. Before I go there, though, I need to say a couple of other things. The first is that a big part of my identity is that I consider myself a family man and a Dad. Even as a kid I knew that being a Dad was important to me. I was raised Catholic and when I was confirmed the saint’s name I chose was Joseph, because he was a father. As an adult, my desire for more time with my family (especially at holidays) was a major factor in my decision to leave retail management and go back to school. Being a Dad has always been important to me.

The second thing is that I’ve always had ambivalent feelings about whether God exists or not. I was – as I said above – raised Roman Catholic. I fell away from that through middle school, then returned to the church when I was in high school and was asked to join the folk group at the local Catholic church. I played in that group through high school and into my undergrad years at George Mason. As I went through undergrad I went from unquestioning acceptance that God was up there somewhere, to an appreciation of how Jesus gave the world a personal God (one who could be called Father), to a realization that I had fundamental differences with basic Catholic beliefs (I’ll get into some of those some other time). I came to realize that I could no longer call myself Catholic if being Catholic meant believing those things. It was actually a class on the New Testament (taught by an ordained minister) that provided the last bits of information that led me to decide that I simply do not know whether there’s a God out there. Nonetheless, when I was worried for one of the kids or my wife, a silent plea went out to someone to take care of them.

But now I know this: if there is a God out there, He’s got a hell of a lot to answer for[1].

And I will also say this. I no longer think the Judeo-Christian God is worthy of worship.

Why? Well, for a start check out the section on the Hebrew Bible in chapter 2 of Steven Pinker’s book The Better Angels of Our Nature: Why Violence has Declined or a somewhat similar list of reasons (atrocities) online here: http://www.infidels.org/library/modern/donald_morgan/atrocity.html. But really, what made me take the final step was the story of Job.

As I said before, I’ve been thinking a lot lately about Job. So, this week I pulled the old King James version off the shelf and checked out the Book of Job. It’s been a long time since I last read it and I was reading it with different eyes…

Job was a good, God-fearing man. “Fearing” is actually a pretty good description. He was so afraid of what his God would do – with good reason as it turns out – that he made sacrifices for his children in case they might somehow affront God. Job was a successful man and he had lots of stuff. He also had a wife and ten children.

So, one day God was having a visit with his sons and Satan. God (bragging?) points out Job as a good man to Satan. Satan suggests that Job is only good because God has given him lots of stuff, so God offers Job up as a test and allows Satan to take it all away. Job lost all of his stuff and all ten of his children were killed[2]. Why? For a test. So God could show Satan that his followers love him no matter what. Really? This is how a just, good God acts?

Job was understandably grief-stricken. He’d lived his life trying to be a good man. He was succeeding by all accounts – including God’s (see Job 1:8). Job wanted to know what he had done to deserve such treatment from God, yet he never cursed God for his losses. God’s response when he finally shows up? In a nutshell, “You don’t know what it’s like to be me, so how can you question me like this?” Job ended up apologizing for being such an ungrateful wretch so God gave him back twice as much stuff and ten replacement children. That last bit really set me back and got me thinking. Replacement children? Really?

That is no God I want to worship.

I think Job had a right to expect better from his God. And he had a right to question him. Children have a right to expect certain things from their parents. One big one is that parents should not abuse their children. And what God did to Job was nothing short of abuse and he did it just for bragging rights with Satan. Some of you might be thinking, this only applies if you accept Jesus’ conception of God as a parent. What if you believe God is the ruler of the universe. That makes him a leader and, if you’ve read some of my other writings, you’ll know that I have beliefs about leadership. One of most important of those is that leaders take care of their people. Yes, I never had to send someone to their death at Kmart and some leaders do have to make those kinds of decisions, but such decisons should never be made lightly. Was winning an argument with Satan really enough of a cause to allow the deaths of ten children?

I close for now with the question that Abraham asked God: Shall not the Judge of all the earth do what is just? (Gen. 18:25)

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[1] Ok, yes, God could also be a She or an It, but the sentence loses something written that way.

[2] I do feel compelled to point out that Job had 7 sons and 3 daughters. They were all at the eldest son’s house when it collapsed, but the verse (Job 1:19) only says “and it fell upon the young men and they are dead; and I only am escaped alone to tell thee.” The girls don’t even merit a mention?

Jonathan Paul Daily (1987 - 2012)

This blog was called An Examined Life because I intended to share some of the thoughts I’ve had about my life and how I got to be the person that I am. Today, though, I want to talk about someone else’s life. I want to talk about the life of my son Jonathan, who died in a fire at his apartment on March 1, 2012. This entry is adapted from the eulogy I gave for my precious son.

*****

I want to talk to you about Jonathan, my son, about his life and the kind of person he was. I have been struggling to find the right words. I remember when he was a baby, and a toddler, and in grade school, and high school. I remember holding him in times when he was sick, or scared, or tired and times that he was happy and silly and we wrestled on the floor. And for every memory I have that suggested a trait that described him, I have another memory of another point in his life when that trait didn’t describe him. For days, everything I came up with was not the Jonathan I knew, was not the Jonathan who I treasured and loved. The Jonathan I want to tell to you about.

I also kept coming back to the last time I saw him. He’d come over to the house to play a new board game that he’d gotten with me and Benjamin. After that, we watched an episode of the show Firefly. That show was quite possibly Jonathan’s favorite TV show of all time. It was a science fiction show set in space aboard a ship called Serenity. I starting thinking about what it was that might have attracted him to those people. The crew of the ship Serenity really weren’t epic heroes like in Star Trek or Star Wars. The captain, Malcolm Reynolds was certainly no Jean Luc Picard or Luke Skywalker. He was no saint. But he wasn’t exactly a sinner. Over the course of the series you found out that he was just a basically decent guy, an independent guy, living life on his terms.

And then it hit me. That’s the kind of person my Jonathan, the Jonathan I remember, the Jonathan I loved, that’s the kind of person he was. Not a saint. Not a sinner. Just a really decent kid trying to live life on his terms.

And having said that, now I think I can talk about the things that made Jonathan unique in all the world and they won't come across as a caricature.

First, he was great big brother. I’m not sure how many 24 year old men would spend huge blocks of time on a regular basis with their 16 year old brothers, but Jonathan did. He’s the kind of big brother I wish I’d been, that I wish I'd had, when I was a kid.

Some of you may know Jonathan as a student of martial arts. What you might not know is that he’d been interested in martial arts since he was little. He used to watch the Power Rangers and the Ninja Turtles on TV and talk about wanting to learn karate. We made him do soccer for a few season because it seemed more social, but it was clear that his heart wasn’t in it. We signed him up for tae kwon do lessons when he was 8 and he’s been training almost continuously since then. Jonathan was a brown belt instructor in the International Kenpo Karate Organization and was preparing for his black belt test at the time of his death. In honor of his commitment to the discipline, Jonathan’s instructor, Michael Seigel, and other officials in the organization have since awarded Jonathan his black belt.

Jonathan also loved video games. Whether it was on a dedicated gaming system or a computer, he was fascinated with them. I remember having a conference with one of his grade school teachers who told me that she was forbidding him to write any more school assignments on video games. She said that she knew he played soccer and went to movies and tons of other things, but all he ever wrote about were video games. He maintained that love all his life.

Jonathan was bright. He was placed into gifted programs in grade school and academically I don’t think I ever saw him break a sweat. I know that some of his teachers challenged him and inspired him, but I don’t think any of them ever found his limit.

I think the last few years were some of the happiest in his life. He was on his own with a job he loved and the future looked bright. He was exploring everything and laying out the terms by which he’d live his life. I’m so proud of the man he was becoming.

I’d like to finish by sharing a bit of a book that means a lot to me. It is the story of a little prince, who leaves his home on a journey to find out what’s important in life. Along the way he comes to Earth, where he meets a fox who teaches him the value of taming, of befriending, another person…

“My life is very monotonous,” he [the fox] said. “I hunt chickens; men hunt me. All the chickens are just alike, and all the men are just alike. And, in consequence, I am a little bored. But, if you tame me, it will be as if the sun came to shine on my life. I shall know the sound of a step that will be different from all the others. Other steps will send me hurrying back underneath the ground. Yours will call me, like music, out of my burrow. And then look: you see the grain-fields down yonder? I do not eat bread. Wheat is of no use to me. The wheat fields have nothing to say to me. And that is sad. But you have hair that is the color of gold. Think how wonderful that will be when you have tamed me! The grain, which is also golden, will bring back the thought of you. And I shall love to listen to the wind in the wheat…”

The fox gazed at the little prince, for a long time.

“Please – tame me!” he said.

*****

So the little prince tamed the fox. And as the hour of his departure drew near –

“Ah,” said the fox, “I shall cry.”

“It is your own fault,” said the little prince. “I never wished you any sort of harm; but you wanted me to tame you…”

“Yes, that is so,” said the fox.

“But now you are going to cry!” said the little prince.

“Yes, that is so,” said the fox.

“Then it has done you no good at all!”

“It has done me good,” said the fox, “because of the color of the wheat fields.”

All of us who knew Jonathan have our own personal wheat fields. As his father, I’d like to make just one request of you. Every so often, take a few moments and go down to your wheat field and spend just a while listening to the wind in the wheat…

I’ve Got a Name

I spent a fair amount of time in high school trying to figure out what I was going to change my name to when I could afford to pay a lawyer to handle the legalities of becoming someone else. To me, Larry Daily just seemed so incredibly plain. So boring. There was no proud history to my name despite the fact that I was named after my father. My parents split up when I was in first grade, so I never got to know my Dad enough to be proud that I was carrying his name[1]. At the time I really wanted to grow up to be John Denver (or at least the East Coast version of John Denver). I loved the Blue Ridge Mountains, but there were no cool cities near them that I could name myself after (Larry Sperryville? Larry Luray? Larry Front Royal? See what I mean?). For awhile after reading MASH I tried being Trapper John, but that didn’t work out so well. Looking back, I had no role models. I really didn’t know who I was, and my name didn’t really offer any clues.

There were bits and pieces of me floating around in my teenaged body. The Professor from Gilligan’s Island and Benton Quest were in that primordial identity soup (see my first posting). I was also influenced by Gandalf the Gray (Lord of the Rings) and Ged (from the Earthsea trilogy). There was a big dollop of John Denver in the mix as well. Then I got my job at Kmart. As I discussed in my last posting, I learned a lot from John Lipp. But there was another person at the store who impressed me and who I tried to emulate.

His name was Ted.

That’s all I remember now. I know he had a last name. At one time I might have even have known what it was. But around the store he was Ted. As I recall, Ted had worked (in management?) for the Kresge Company when Kresge stores still existed[2]. In our store, he was the manager of the hardware department. He didn’t carry keys, but he did most of the other things that we assistant managers did.

What impressed me about Ted was that he knew his department. He knew what sold and what didn’t. He knew what he had in stock, what was on order, and when it was expected to arrive. He was the expert. And Mr. Lipp knew it. If I had an item coming up on sale in my department and Mr. Lipp asked if I had enough on order, my claim that I did was always followed by, “You better check to make sure.” Actually, almost anyone’s claim in those same circumstances was followed by, “You better check.” But not Ted. If Ted said he had enough on order, Lipp would nod and move on to the next item on his agenda. I wanted to be like that. I wanted to be an expert. I wanted that kind of respect and one of my first important revelations was that you didn’t demand that kind of respect. You earned it by being very good at what you did.

Like Ted.

It was at Kmart that I began signing my name as Larry Z. Daily[3]. I’m not sure why I started doing it that way, but I know why I still do. I was a department head, in charge of rugs, furniture, and plastics (the faux Tupperware stuff). I stocked the shelves, kept them neat and in order, and placed orders for needed merchandise (which were reviewed by the assistant manager I reported to). One afternoon the district manager was in the store and ended up touring my departments with me[4]. At one point he asked me what the best selling color was for bathroom rugs. I knew what he wanted to hear – conventional wisdom in the company was that brown was the most popular color for bathroom rugs – but in my store I sold pink and powder blue bathroom rugs. Tons of them. So, that’s what I told him. He, of course, didn’t believe me. He made me get my order book and show him what I’d been ordering. He saw tons of orders for pink and powder blue. Then he made me show him through my stockroom, to make sure I didn’t have all those mountains of pink and blue rugs moldering away back there. There really weren’t any pink and blue rugs in the stockroom. At that point I saw something in his eyes that I hadn’t seen directed at me before. Respect.

Like Ted.

He asked me my name and I told him: Larry Z. Daily. For some reason he got hung up on the Z and I was forever Larry Z to him. I’m not sure he ever really knew my last name. But I got something from that experience. I began to realize that who I was didn’t come from my name. My identity, the meaning of my life weren’t handed to me when my parents named me. It was the other way around. The meaning of my name came from me. Whether my name was something to be proud of depended on what I chose to do, how I chose to live. Sure, I’ve made some mistakes since then. Some were small; some still give rise to pain and shame when I think about them. On the whole, though, I like to think I’ve done ok.

So, I’m Larry Z. Daily.

Who are you?

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[1] Call me Junior and I will have to hurt you.

[2] The Kresge Company grew up to be Kmart. Ever wonder what the K was for? Now you know.

[3] No, I will not tell you what Z stands for. And no, I will not confirm it if you guess it.

[4] Why he was touring my departments with me rather than the assistant manager is one of the enduring mysteries in my life.

Picard vs. Kirk: A Few Thoughts on Leadership

In my last entry I made an offhand comment about which Star Trek captain – Picard or Kirk – was better. If you’re the type to read footnotes on blogs, you’ll know that I believe Picard was the better captain. Thinking about that got me thinking about leadership: how I got to be a leader and what I’ve learned about leadership along the way.

My first leadership position came in the job I had right after high school. I was working in a theater. It was one of the big, old 1000-seat, single screen theaters that were dying a long, slow death in the mid- to late-1970’s. I was hired as an usher and eventually became assistant manager. But, I moved up when the people over me quit to get jobs that paid at least minimum wage. By the time I got to be the assistant manager there was no one under me. So, as assistant manager I was still performing all my usher duties, plus I got to unlock the front doors. I’m not sure that I learned much from that.

My next job was with Kmart. The store manager’s name was John Lipp. I learned a lot from him. Every so often I Google him, because I’d really like to find him so I can say thanks. So far I’ve been unsuccessful. So, Mr. Lipp, if you ever read this: Thanks.

I started as part-time help in the toy department at Christmas. I worked for an assistant manager named Patricia. Apparently I impressed someone, because after Christmas I was hired full-time and was made the department head of three departments: rugs, furniture, and plastics (the faux Tupperware stuff that Kmart sold). I did that for awhile and then was offered a promotion to assistant manager, with several department heads and other employees reporting to me. And I started working much more directly with Mr. Lipp.

I remember the first time I got a note from him assigning me some task to do. It was written on a leftover goldenrod inventory tag. I don’t remember what the task was now, but written under it were the letters WIT. As I recall, the task was clear and easy, but the WIT stumped me. I was pretty sure he didn’t want me to be funny while I did the job, but I just had no idea what the WIT meant, and I didn’t want to start on the task if WIT altered what I thought the job was. Eventually I gave up trying to figure it out, went back to the manager’s office and admitted that I didn’t understand. He looked up at me and said, “Get it done Whatever It Takes.”

There were other acronyms, but that’s the only one I can remember now. I spent most of my retail career working for John Lipp and a lot of my style (such as it is) comes from him. I worked for other managers at Kmart, but most of what I learned from them was how not to lead. There were other managers at other chains, too, but the only other one who I feel was a positive role model was Fred Cole at Marshall’s. Thanks to you, too, Mr. Cole.

So, what did I learn? I could be here a long time and not get it all down (plus you wouldn’t read it all if I did – assuming that you’re even reading this). So, here’s some of what I think are the more important things.

First, you set the tone for your organization (your store, your department, your business). You do that directly by how you lead. If you’re a little ankle-biter, yappy dog of a micromanager you’re probably going to be leading a group of people chewing on their fingernails and watching the clock waiting for their shift to be over. They won’t go the extra mile for you, because you’re standing over them to make sure they do the required mile exactly to your specifications. You’re going to make them nervous and edgy and, I think, you’ll sap whatever creativity they might have. You’ll probably also make them a bit resentful – why did you hire them if you don’t believe they’ll do the work without you telling them every minute how to do it? That leads me to the indirect way that you set the tone for your group: you set the tone by hiring the people you hire. If you hire a bunch of jerks[1], you’re going to have a group that really doesn’t work well (Think about it. Who would really want to work with Dr. House?).

As a leader, you want to hire good people and then treat them right. Obviously, you want competent people (or ones you can train), but you also want someone who gets what your organization is about and who fits with your group (see the above comments on, umm, jerks). Given a choice between someone with lots of experience who’s a jerk and someone I’ll need to train who fits in, I’ll go with the later every time. The best of all is the job candidate with experience and who fits in. You also want to avoid judging on appearances. A good employee might not be the one who’s most polished in the interview. I remember one Christmas I was hiring part-time people to staff the toy department. I hired three people who didn’t fit the conventional mold (one, for example, wore faded denim and chains to the interview). The Boss (I won’t say which one) was leaving on vacation and said that my three would be gone before he got back. He much preferred a different more polished three who’d been hired for other departments. When he got back, the polished three were gone. Two of my three eventually ended up in management positions (the third left to go to college).

Once you’ve got good people you need to treat them right. You want to train them, let them know what’s expected (and high expectations are good), and then get the hell out of their way and let them do their jobs. Praise them when they do well, but let them know when they do something wrong (after all, how can they correct the problem if they don’t know it’s a problem). Another part of treating them right is the tone of the organization (you set that –see above). By way of example, retail stores tend to be a bit busy between Thanksgiving and mid-January. The first part of that is the Christmas season. After Christmas, most chains then do their yearly inventory. Everybody works hard. The best people I worked for asked for a lot during that time, but as soon as inventory was over, all the assistant managers found three-day weekends worked into their schedules. The lesson: ask a lot but give something back. Thank you notes are another way to let people know that you value them. Keep in mind, though, that three-day weekends and thank you notes only go so far. Thank you notes don’t pay the mortgage. Part of treating your people right is to pay them well.

A final point: you can’t lead by just quoting the rule book. No set of rules, no matter how well-thought-out they are, can ever cover every possible situation. As a leader, the situations that don’t fit the rulebook – either there’s no rule that speaks to the issue or someone’s asking to violate a rule – will come to you for your decision. It’s uncomfortable, but no one ever promised that leadership was easy. By accepting the position you’ve put yourself right where the buck stops. In those situations, you need to keep in mind the mission of the organization. You also need to bear in mind any general principles that your organization might have. Sometimes those general principles will be spelled out (see, for example, the APA Ethics code at http://www.apa.org/ethics/). Most times they won’t be. If they’re not, study the rules. They were written for a reason. If you can figure out that reason, that purpose, you’ve got the general principles. A rule against accepting a starter check for payment at a store probably wasn’t written simply to turn down starter checks. It was probably written with the larger purpose of avoiding bad checks. You need to make decisions that are consonant with those principles and further the mission of the organization.

So, why do I prefer Picard to Kirk? In my opinion, Kirk violated too many of these principles I’ve learned. First and foremost, Kirk didn’t let his people do their jobs (with the exception of Scotty. Kirk never went to engineering to repair the warp drive). If anything was going to get done, Kirk was going to do it. He had all these competent people sitting around watching him do all the work. Give me a break. Picard, on the other hand, let his people do their jobs. As a matter of fact, he demanded that they do their jobs (“Give me options,” he’d often say). He also had good people who didn’t fit the conventional mold: in the first few seasons a blind man flew the ship, a machine was third in command, a former enemy was the security officer, and his first officer often wouldn’t let him do something he wanted to do. And they did amazing things and had a bit of fun doing it.

That’s leadership.

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[1] I’ve often thought (and said) that one of the greatest benefits that psychology could give to humanity would be to create a jerk test².

² Ok, to be honest, jerk isn’t the word I really use, but I think my kid reads this.

Do You Believe?

In my last post I mentioned that deep down I wanted to be a scientist. I’m sometimes asked why. Often I answer that I wanted to be a scientist because of Gilligan’s Island and Jonny Quest. Usually around that time people seem to remember the old quip about psychologists – that there are two kinds of people who go into psychology, the ones who want to help and the ones who need help – and decide that I belong in the latter group. But stick with me a minute because it actually makes sense. First, think about the Professor on Gilligan’s Island. He was a scientist who knew just about everything (except how to fix a boat). He was the rational, objective guy who people went to in order to solve whatever problems might arise on the island. That’s a pretty cool kind of a guy to be, right? And it wasn’t Jonny Quest who impressed me, it was his father Benton Quest¹, the government scientist who was so important that he rated some sort of secret agent guy to protect his family so he could make cool jet packs and stuff without worrying about the bad guys. Again, a cool sort of a guy to be. So, I wanted to be a scientist. I ended up in psychology because I wanted to be a ghost buster (before the movie even existed), but that’s a story for another time.

Ok, so what’s so cool about science? I think the answer to that was summed up quite nicely by Carol Tavris, a social psychologist, back in 2001 when she wrote in the APS Observer, “When psychological scientists speak to or write for general audiences, they should take the opportunity to model the key themes of scientific and critical thinking: that what we know is inseparable from how we know it; that opinions must be based on evidence; that not all opinions have equal validity; and that science gives us probabilities - only pseudoscience gives us certainties.” What I think is important in this quote is the middle bit – the bit about opinions.

When I talk about that part, I start with the last statement – that not all opinions have equal validity – first. The whole idea that some opinions are more valid – are better – than others really rubs a lot of people the wrong way. In some realms, it might be true that one opinion is just as good as another. Whether Kirk or Picard is the better captain may be one of those², along with discussion of whether the blue or the green drapes go better in the living room. But, when you’re trying to discover what’s true about the world, some opinions are better than others.

The better opinions are the ones that rest on evidence. If, for instance, Waldo thinks that short-term memory has unlimited capacity and George thinks that short-term memory has a limited capacity, George has the better opinion: there’s tons of evidence that short-term memory capacity is limited to just a few items (beginning with Miller’s 1956 paper The Magical Number Seven, Plus or Minus Two: Some Limits on our Capacity for Processing Information).

Like opinions, not all evidence is created equal. Every first-year psychology student is taught the mantra, “Correlation does not imply causation.” For a great example why, see http://www.dilbert.com/2011-11-28/. The pointy-haired boss has evidence, but it’s not as good as he thinks. He should have run an experiment to test his hypothesis that Dilbert is dissing him; after all, as far back as 1600 William Gilbert wrote, “In the discovery of secret things and in the investigation of hidden causes, stronger reasons are obtained from sure experiments and demonstrated arguments than from probable conjectures and the opinions of philosophical speculators.” I could go on about the strengths and weaknesses of various research methods, but this isn’t the time or place.

Ok, some will say at this point, science is good, but it’s not the only way of knowing, right? What about the other ways? Often such people will point to Charles Pierce’s 1877 paper and say, he talked about all the different ways of knowing. What about those other ways? Sorry, but that’s not what Pierce was doing. Pierce was evaluating reasons people might have to hold beliefs (opinions). He talked about four reasons: tenacity, authority, the a priori method, and science. He concluded that the only one of those that results in holding true beliefs was science. (Don’t believe me? You can read the paper for yourself here: http://www.peirce.org/writings/p107.html).

So, what do you believe? Does life begin at conception, at birth, or some other time? Are humans involved in global warming or not? Is the death penalty effective at deterring crime? Can humans multitask well enough to drive and text at the same time?

Now tell me: why do you believe what you believe?

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¹ Put a pair of glasses and a sweater vest on this guy and who does he remind you of?

² Picard, obviously.

The Evolution of My Cognitive Revolution

In the mid-1980’s I was extremely dissatisfied with my career. I’d left an assistant manager’s position at Kmart only to find that things really weren’t any more to my liking at Marshalls. After 3 or so visits with a career counselor, I made the decision to go back to school and finish my undergraduate degree in psychology.

I returned to George Mason University in the fall of 1986 as an undergraduate psychology major with the idea that I’d finish my BA and then get a Master’s degree and become a high school guidance counselor. I’d do that while I worked on my PhD. I wasn’t sure what I’d do with a PhD, only that I wanted an officewith my name on the door stuffed with books. I think I was planning to eventually be some sort of clinician.

A year and a half into my studies I was dissatisfied again. Deep inside I wanted to be a scientist. Psychology was claiming to be a science, but I just wasn’t seeing it in the courses I’d taken so far. It seemed that all you had to do to be a major theorist was to grow a beard and make up stuff about hating mommy. That wasn’t what I was looking for. But that semester I was registered for a course on the history and systems of psychology with Alan Boneau. In that course I found the science of psychology.

I also found a mentor. It was so clear to me that Dr. Boneau was thinking on a level far above the rest of us mere mortals and I wanted desperately to learn to think like that, even if only just a little. I rearranged my schedule for the next semester so I could take Memory and Cognition with him. That class was the one that altered the course of my life and changed my career plans. I gave up on wanting to be a guidance counselor or any other kind of counselor. I wanted to study human information processing.

I learned in that class about the cognitive revolution. In the 1950’s, American psychology was behavioral psychology. It was strongly empirical in the sense that it was widely accepted that humans are born as Locke’s blank slates and that all of our behavior comes from experience with the environment (i.e., learning). I have to admit that this is where I was ideologically when I went back to school. The problem was, there were significant aspects of behavior that behaviorism simply couldn’t explain. Developments from within the field and from other fields, led to a fundamental shift in the focus of American psychology. It was now permissible to study the mind again, but the mind as an information processing mechanism. Theoretical constructs (say, short-term memory) had to be operationalized and tested. This was science and it was my cognitive revolution. I spent the next 20 years investigating human working memory, culminating in a stint at Carnegie Mellon where I helped develop a computer model of working memory limits.

Recently, though, I was getting dissatisfied again. Every time I taught memory and cognition to a new group of students I was troubled by the fact that it all seemed so negative. Working memory capacity is severely limited and that limits performance on some tasks. We don’t make optimal decisions. We don’t store memories in perfect detail and we often twist what we do remember to match our preconceptions. Humans seemed like a bunch of information manglers rather than information processors.

My first glimpse of the answer was in a couple of pieces by Leda Cosmides (one with coauthor John Tooby; you can see them at http://www.psychologicalscience.org/observer/getArticle.cfm?id=1960 and http://www.psych.ucsb.edu/research/cep/primer.html). I knew that these were important, but I couldn’t quite get how. Then I checked out Shepherd’s copy of The Handbook of Evolutionary Psychology (edited by David Buss) and read a couple of chapters. It was eye opening, to say the least. It provided the beginnings of an answer to a question I hadn’t even thought to ask – why? Why would working memory capacity be limited? Why would we make less than optimal decisions?

The authors of the chapters (David Buss, Peter Todd, Ralph Hertwig, and Ulrich Hoffrage) provided a new framework for understanding humans as information processors. The original cognitive revolution left us with the idea of the mind as a general purpose processor of symbolic information. The evolutionary approach suggests that we have a mind built of modules, each adapted to solve particular problems faced by our ancestors. Instead of a mind similar to a general purpose computer, we actually have a mind something like a Swiss Army knife. In terms of working memory, the argument is that limited working memory capacity facilitates the learning of relationships between variables in the environment (say presence of a particular kind of poo and presence of a bear). It does so by forcing us to rely on small samples (limited capacity), thus skewing the sampling distribution.

So, what does this have to do with leading an examined life? Well, it is part of the story of how I got to where I am today. And it helps explain why my memory and cognition course is going to look a bit different when I teach it in the Spring of 2012.