Summary: Plato said that we move from a cave towards reality. In this post, I suggest that we’re only moving from cave to cave.

From Friends:

Ross: You don’t believe in evolution?
Phoebe: I don’t know, it’s just, you know…monkeys, Darwin, you know, it’s a, it’s a nice story, I just think it’s a little too easy.
Ross: Too easy? Too…. The process of every living thing on this planet evolving over millions of years from single-celled organisms is… is too easy?
Phoebe: Yeah, I just don’t buy it.
Ross: Uh, excuse me. Evolution is not for you to buy, Phoebe. Evolution is scientific fact, like, like, like the air we breathe, like gravity.
Phoebe: Oh, okay, don’t get me started on gravity.
Ross: You uh, you don’t believe in gravity?
Phoebe: Well, it’s not so much that you know, like I don’t believe in it, you know, it’s just…I don’t know, lately I get the feeling that I’m not so much being pulled down as I am being pushed.
(knock at the door)
Chandler: Uh-Oh. It’s Isaac Newton, and he’s pissed.

I went to a reasonably progressive high school in New York City. When I was a senior, the powers that be implemented a required course called Integrated Liberal Studies, a sort of finishing school for East Coast intelligentsia where we could learn the basics of Plato, Socrates and the like. For our final exam, we were required to come up with a thesis and defend it orally.

I didn’t do so well, and to this day I don’t know why, because I thought my thesis was pretty darn good. It went something like this:

In Plato’s Cave, we learned that the people in the cave mistook the shadows on the wall for reality because they didn’t know any better. When they went outside they realized the error of their ways, that this was really reality and the stuff on the walls was phony. I posit that a progression towards a greater understanding of reality is in itself an illusion, that what we see outside the cave is only a different set of shadows.

We labor under the impression that the more we learn, the more we know. How, then, are children so wise? How, then, are there truths that endure, from the Torah and the Bible and the Koran and the Bhagavad Gita?

Is it possible that we can take none of our beliefs for granted? Even those as patently obvious as to be ridiculous: that walls are solid, that water is wet, that things fall towards Earth?

PHOEBE: Ok, Ross, could you just open your mind like this much, ok? Wasn’t there a time when the brightest minds in the world believed that the world was flat? And, up until like what, 50 years ago, you all thought the atom was the smallest thing, until you split it open, and this like, whole mess of crap came out. Now, are you telling me that you are so unbelievably arrogant that you can’t admit that there’s a teeny tiny possibility that you could be wrong about this?

Today I spoke with a friend whose doctor husband’s revolutionary treatment has a 90% success rate against chronic pain; he struggles to gain acceptance in the wider medical community. I suggested that beliefs and facts have remarkably little to do with each other. I’ll revise that suggestion here:

Facts are beliefs that have won a popularity contest.

Ask any scientist who has ever made a discovery, ever, how ‘factual’ it had to be before it was believed. And then ask yourself, where do your facts come from? Where do your beliefs come from? How certain are you of those things you know to be true? And what would it take to change your mind?

In 1966, Cleve Backster, the world’s foremost lie-detector expert applied his polygraph to an unusual subject: the leaves of a Dracaena cane plant in his office. His odd impulse to put the plant in the hot seat had nothing to do with suspicions that it was being dishonest; instead, he thought it would be a good way to measure how long it took water to travel from the pot to the leaf. The electrode plates of the polygraph measured variations in electrical resistance, which would occur if the moisture content of the leaf varied.

Once Backster watered the plant, though, he noticed something odd. As Lynne McTaggart recounts in The Intention Experiment,

…what he was expecting to see was an upward trend in the ink tracing on the polygraph recording paper, corresponding to a drop in the leaf’s electrical resistance as the moisture content increased. But as he poured in the water, the very opposite occurred. The first part of the tracing began heading downward and then displayed a short-term blip, similar to what happens when a person briefly experiences a fear of detection.

At the time, Backster thought he was witnessing a human-style reaction…

Imagine for a moment you’re Cleve Backster, sitting in your Times Square office on a cold winter’s morning in 1966. You have an idle curiosity about how long it will take water to travel from your plant’s base to its root, so you hook it up to one of your handy-dandy lie-o-meters. Instead of a simple answer, though (something along the lines of ‘four seconds’ would surely have sufficed), it appears instead that your plant is running from the law. How would you react?

Backster responded in the logical manner: he tried to set the plant on fire:

[Backster] decided that if the plant indeed was displaying an emotional reaction, he would have to come up with some major emotional stimulus to heighten this response.

When a person takes a polygraph test, the best way to determine if he is lying is to ask a direct and pointed question, so that any answer but the truth will cause an immediate, dramatic reaction in his sympathetic nervous system: “Was it you who fired the two bullets into Joe Smith?”

In order to elicit the equivalent of alarm in a plant, Backster knew he needed somehow to threaten its well-being… It was obvious to him that he needed to pose an immediate and genuine threat: he would get a match and burn the electroded leaf.

At the very moment he had that thought, the recording pen swung to the top of the polygraph chart and nearly jumped off. He had not burned the plant; he had only thought about doing so. According to his polygraph, the plant had perceived the thought as a direct threat and registered extreme alarm.

In answer to your questions, yes, he replicated the experiment; yes, he did so under controlled conditions; yes, he brought others into his experiments; yes, he found even more astonishing results as he explored further:

The plants grew attuned to the comings and goings of their main caretaker… His major difficulty was designing experiments that could demonstrate an effect scientifically. Even though his laboratory experiments were now entirely automated, when he left the office, the plants would remain attuned to him, no matter how far away he went.

Your thoughts are real things. Your intentions are real things. They are measurable and have an impact on the world around you. So pay attention to them.

Do you talk to your plants?

Do you think you know me?

Does reading my blog give you an understanding of who I am as a person?

Let me give you a hint: you do and you don’t; it will and it won’t.

The opinions and beliefs I share here are from my heart, and to that extent the blog will give you a window. But no blog tells the whole story.

It doesn’t, for example, tell you which of my beliefs are left of liberal and which are as conservative as Chuck Norris. It doesn’t tell you whether I can remain calm and kind under stress or whether I blow up and lose my cool.

When you read a blog, you’re like a blind man with an elephant.

The same is true when you first meet people. You see them in a specific environment, under specific circumstances, interacting specifically with you. Their behavior may or may not be indicative of what they are like in other environments, under other circumstances, interacting with other people.

Love is the ability to delight in the whole elephant.

Have you patted an elephant today?

Over at Online Spin, Max Kalehoff has re-activated the hornet’s nest originally molested by Chris Anderson, touching on an issue that is large and growing larger:

money is not the only scarcity. While costs of technologies or information may be moving toward free, the scarcities of reputation and 1. attention are very real.

So I’m getting lots of things for free in exchange for my attention, which is kind of ironic because the free things are also demanding my attention.

Some of you may recall my agony over the growing number of unread items in my Bloglines account. I solved it, momentarily. Then I realized that if I let a weekend go by without clearing the deck, I’m overwhelmed again by Monday.

And I choose to enjoy my weekends. They are for sanity. I don’t want to die from blogging. So I have no choice but to declare bankruptcy, and default on some of my mental obligations. I can’t read everything. I can’t be an expert on everything. I can’t spend 147% of my time clearing Google Alerts out of my inbox and the other 92% of the time reading Bloglines and the other 68% on Twitter and the rest on Facebook. At some point, I have to do something productive.

And what’s going to happen is what happens with all scarce resources. I’m going to have to make a choice.

Kalehoff references Forrester CEO George Colony:

1. First, there’s the value of time. Free means sacrificing your time so you can battle your way, with a machete, out of thick forests of mental traps and distractions.

2. Then there’s cognitive pollution. Free and the ensuing entrapments — often advertising — seldom bring serious learning, teaching or valuable advice. Overexposure to ad impressions or other extraneous activity dulls and distracts the mind. That’s not a preferable mental state in an information economy.

Colony understands this: not everybody wants free.

I pay someone to wash my car because the time is worth more to me than the money. I pay someone to paint the house because I’d rather get it done right.

Many are willing to sacrifice time and attention to get their content free. But a growing market will pay to get just what they need, when they want it, with few or no ads.

If you are taking advantage of free (and I certainly am; Google isn’t the least of the benefits I receive from the new economy), be aware of the price you do pay: in time, in attention, in sanity.

If you take too much for free, you’ll run out of attention with which to pay the bills. You’ll have to declare mental bankruptcy: ‘Sorry, GMail and Twitter and Facebook and Bloglines and New York Times and Wall Street Journal and Mark Halperin at The Page. I’d love to keep paying attention, but I’ve overspent my budget, so I’m just going to default.’

Isn’t our sanity worth anything?

I am not a great mountain biker, but it’s not because I lack physical ability.

It’s because I decide my limits in advance.

“I can’t clear that rock,” I think, glumly. “I’m not fit enough to make it all the way to the top of this climb without stopping,” I convince myself. “I hope I don’t fall,” I fret, pessimistically.

I feed on these thoughts, absorb them and their nutrients, make them a part of who I am. Yet they are no better for me than potato chips or ice cream.

Brian Hayes just sent through a Scientific American article: How Stereotyping Yourself Contributes to Your Success (or Failure). It describes the phenomenon of behaving in exactly the way that our preconditioned beliefs dictate, regardless of objective ability:

For instance, a woman who knows that women as a group are believed to do worse than men in math will, indeed, tend to perform less well on math tests as a result.

The same is true for any member of a group who is aware that his or her group is considered to be inferior to others in a given domain of performance—whether it is one that appears to tap intellectual and academic ability or one that is designed to establish athletic and sporting prowess. Just as women’s performance on spatial and mathematical tasks is created by, and appears to “prove,” the stereotype of their spatial and mathematical inferiority, so, too, the sporting performance of a team of long-failing underdogs will tend to live up (or, in fact, down) to its low expectations.

Richard Bach puts it succinctly in Illusions, one of my all-time favorite books: argue for your limitations, he says, and, sure enough, they’re yours.

In my experience, the greatest illusion of all is that we are static creatures. How do you describe yourself, your friends, your lover? “Joe is generous, kind, and thoughtful.” “Mary always sees the funny side.” “Tom never lies.” Really? Always? Never? Wouldn’t it perhaps be more accurate to say, “Joe is usually generous with his mother, unless he’s in a bad mood, but he can be pretty stingy with his business partner”?

We are constantly changing, but the more we repeat an absolute statement about ourselves the more likely it is to harden into fact. What do you think happens to a woman who continually tells herself she’s not strong? Does she magically become strong, or does she behave in ways that reinforce her initial belief?

More from SciAm:

…elderly people have been found to perform worse on memory tests if they take them after being made aware of stereotypes that associate aging with deteriorating cognitive ability.

In the domain of athletic performance, studies of golf putting have shown that expert golfers tend to leave their putts farther from a target than they would otherwise do if they are exposed to a stereotype that members of their sex are worse at putting than members of the opposite sex.

I can’t remember how many people told me the All Blacks always choke before—surprise—they choked at the World Cup last year.

Think about this next time you make a blanket statement about yourself. I’m not trying to be holier-than-thou here—I have thoughts like these all the time. Just this week, for example, I’ve come up with another idea for a cartoon, but the online app I used to make the last one isn’t equipped for it. I’m trying to source someone to draw it for me because, “I can’t draw. I just can’t. I’m a terrible artist. I may be the worst drawer ever in the history of the world.”

…a 2005 study by social psychologists Mara Cadinu, Anne Maass and colleagues at the University of Padua in Italy showed that when women perform mathematical tasks after being exposed to the stereotype that they are worse at math than men, they report entertaining more intrusive negative thoughts about their own mathematical ability. That is, they find themselves thinking things such as “These exercises are too difficult for me” and “I am not good at math.”

So I’m not saying you should snap your fingers and never have another negative thought. I’m just urging a little awareness here.

What’s your experience with this behavior? And do you know how to draw?

Note: This post is dual purpose: it makes some points in which I profoundly believe, and it also enters me to win an Asus Eee PC from Marketing Pilgrim. Wish me luck!

We are all only human.

Sounds obvious, right? Then why are we so shocked if our politicians make the slightest mistake? Why do we mock celebrities for failing to maintain unattainable standards of perfection? Why are we so afraid to allow our customers to witness our flaws?

It’s because we suffer from Wizard-of-Oz Syndrome.

We expect our politicians to be infallible, and we are disappointed when they are not.

We wish to see in our celebrities the greatest heights of heroism, and we wring our hands at the depths to which they fall.

We believe that our customers will only appreciate us if we are like great wizards, and we work as hard as we can to keep the curtain shut, so they won’t see us for who we really are: mere mortals, just like they are, prone to mistakes and doubt and regret.

The world is changing, though, has changed. The curtain has been forced open by a wired and networked public, one that wants to know more about the man than about the wizard.

This is the first lesson of Radically Transparent, by Andy Beal and Dr. Judy Strauss: that it is no longer enough to succeed as a wizard; you now have to succeed as a human being.

Show what you are doing, reveal your processes, acknowledge your mistakes, and participate fully in conversation that concerns you. Be radically transparent or risk your reputation and top line.

In many ways, it is easier to be a magician. You control the experience and the perception. You don’t have to tell anyone how your tricks work. You decide who your volunteers will be and where the camera will be positioned.

The problem is that it’s no longer an option.

The community immediately comes down hard on those who employ conversation spin, control, manipulation or spam. Anonymity is discouraged, and nearly all posts to a conversation include the author’s real e-mail address.

…the internet is abuzz with conversation, and some of it is definitely about you and your company. With the explosion of social networks and consumer-generated media, no organization, brand, or individual escapes online mention by stakeholders, like it or not.

We don’t want wizards anymore; we already know they are phony. So there’s no mileage in pretending. Let go of your personas and be pleasantly surprised at how much people appreciate you for who you are and your company for what it is. Beal and Strauss offer ten Rules of Customer Engagement; from the seventh:

7. Be Authentic
Truth, honesty and authenticity are required if you want to have a good reputation online… you have to have a trustworthy character first, and hiding your flaws online will only make it worse when the citizen journalists discuss your cover-up al over the Web.

You have to have a trustworthy character first.

Once the curtain is pulled back and you can’t hide, you’d better have something to deliver. You’d better really care about your customers, about your community, about quality.

If the man behind the curtain can’t deliver on the promise, the first step is to admit it. Then get to work, immediately, to improve.

It is okay to be exactly who you are, and it’s only by accepting this that you can transform into the person or company you want to be.

Feedback welcome, as always.