Category: Psychology

The scientific study of the nature, functioning, and development of the human mind

Thinking of going phone-free

My three-year iPhone contract ends in February, and I am thinking about selling the phone. I am tempted to go entirely phone-free, but there are times when having a phone is necessary to get information (like when things are available for pickup) or for coordinating meetings.

Part of my reluctance to continue with smartphones is the cost. My monthly bills were consistently over $100 until I called Fido to try to cancel and they switched me onto a $60 ‘retention’ plan, which provided more than my previous $100 plan.

Another major motivation is distraction. One part of that is the annoyingly intrusive character of all phones. They allow anybody to demand your immediate attention at any time. Mine is usually on ‘airplane mode’ or off, but that doesn’t entirely eliminate the anxiety, since there is always a nagging sense in my mind that someone might be setting down a batch of missed calls.

A bigger distraction issue comes from just having a smartphone with you. Ordinarily, that means getting periodically interrupted by texts and emails. More subtly, there is the constant temptation to take a peek at the news, have a glance at Twitter, and the like. It takes a person out of the present moment, which makes relatively unpleasant tasks like comp prep more difficult and makes relatively pleasant tasks like walking on a cool fall afternoon less immersive.

The constant tracking and NSA / CSEC paranoia is another cause for skepticism about cell phones.

Going phone-free is probably a bridge too far. I would go with that option if I had someone who could take the occasional message for me and pass it on by email, but I don’t want to burden anyone with that, at least until I get an unpaid intern or two. More plausibly, I will get a very small, very cheap pay-as-you go phone for very occasional use.

It’s hard to say whether three years with the iPhone has provided good value for money. It’s certainly a capable device – especially when traveling – and I have made extensive use of the camera, email functionality, tethering capability, Google Maps connectivity, and web access. At $100 per month for most of the span, the total cost to date has been over $3500 – as much as a 5D Mark III (before battery grip and other necessary extras), or a couple of Fuji X100S cameras (one of which would be a gratuitous 30th-birthday-gift-to-self if I had the funds).

Once my contract ends, I think I can shift to paying month-by-month. As a trial, I may try cancelling it for 2-3 months without selling the phone and testing my experience with the pay-as-you-go option. At that point, I can re-evaluate.

Ignaz Semmelweis

Most people have probably heard how the first person who suggested that doctors wash their hands before delivering babies in order to prevent infections was ridiculed and rejected. I didn’t realize quite how far his persecution went:

After he published his findings, though, many of his colleagues were offended at the suggestion that they did not have clean hands. After all, doctors were gentlemen and as Charles Meigs, another obstetrician, put it, “a gentleman’s hands are clean”. Discouraged, Semmelweis slipped into depression and was eventually committed to a lunatic asylum. He died 14 days later, after being brutally beaten by the guards.

Perhaps the lesson to be drawn is: don’t underestimate how willing self-policing groups of experts can be to reject important new information in order to protect their self-image and prestige.

From MaddAddam

The people in the chaos cannot learn. They cannot understand what they are doing to the sea and the sky and the plants and the animals. They cannot understand that they are killing them, and that they will end by killing themselves. And there are so many of them, and each one of them is doing part of the killing, whether they know it or not. And when you tell them to stop, they don’t hear you.

So there is only one thing left to do. Either most of them must be cleared away while there is still an earth, with trees and flowers and birds and fish and so on, or all must die when there are none of those things left. Because if there are none of those things left, then there will be nothing at all. Not even any people.

So shouldn’t you give those ones a second chance? he asked himself. No, he answered, because they have had a second chance. They have had many second chances. Now is the time.

Atwood, Margaret. MaddAddam. 2013. p. 291 (hardcover)

Tom Flanagan’s ‘Ten Commandments’

In 2007, Harper strategist Tom Flanagan enumerated ten ‘commandments’ for the effective use of power by the Conservative party:

  1. Unity. The various factions and splinter groups within the CPC coalition have to get along.
  2. Moderation. “Canada,” says Flanagan, “is not yet a conservative or Conservative country. We can’t win if we veer too far to the right of the median voter.”
  3. Inclusion. This means francophones and minority groups.
  4. Incrementalism: “Make progress in small, practical steps.”
  5. Policy. “Since conservatism is not yet the dominant public philosophy, our policies may sometimes run against conventional wisdom. The onus is on us to help Canadians to understand what they are voting for.”
  6. Self-discipline. “The media are unforgiving of conservative errors, so we have to exercise strict discipline at all levels.”
  7. Toughness. “We cannot win by being Boy Scouts.”
  8. Grassroots politics. “Victories are earned one voter at a time.”
  9. Technology. “We must continue to be at the forefront in adapting new technologies to politics.”
  10. Persistence. “We have to correct our errors, learn from experience, and keep pushing ahead.”

Certainly, they have done better in electoral terms than many people expected. When I moved to Ottawa in 2007, many people expected the Harper minority government to come to an end reasonably quickly, probably after the Liberals rebuilt themselves. Not least because of the Green-NDP-Liberal split on the left, that has yet to happen.

Morrison Hall in the summer

Living in a residence where nobody knows anyone else and where no action can generally be attributed to a specific individual illustrates what happens when the bonds of community are thin.

The refrigerator is often crammed with rotting, stinking food – all of it heaped together in opaque plastic grocery bags. Someone has been dumping a pot worth of tea leaves into the sink twice a day all summer, never throwing them away or even washing them down the drain. Someone also seems to have a habit of drinking 4-6 disposable cups of coffee in one of the bathrooms, then leaving the cups strewn across the floor. The other day someone stole my (inexpensive) razor, which I had been using since I was an undergraduate and which I left in the main unisex bathroom accidentally for a few minutes. Desirable food regularly goes missing, the kitchen and common room are always gross (especially during weekends when there is no staff to clean), with stained couches and carpets, sticky counter-tops, and a microwave spattered with vaporized remnants of instant meals. People are often raucous and loud at night. At one point, someone discarded a large amount of food belonging to other people so they could put four 24-can flats of Coca Cola into the shared fridge at once.

Morrison Hall has been good in terms of proximity to libraries, air conditioning, and extremely fast internet access. I will naturally be happy to move back into Massey on August 30th. I just wish it were possible to do directly, without the 9-day purgatorial period that arises from Morrison’s August 21st move-out date.

Slattery on community

The human need for community can never be satisfied by a single, all-encompassing group, no matter how rich or pervasive its culture. Indeed, such a group would stifle the deep-seated need for a broad and varied range of communal bonds that overlap and intersect, jostling among themselves for our allegiance. In a word, community demands communities.

Brian Slattery, quoted in: Cairns, Alan. Citizens Plus: Aboriginal Peoples and the Canadian State. (2000).

Tim DeChristopher’s expectations about the future

Orion Magazine has posted the transcript of a highly interesting conversation between Tim DeChristopher and Terry Tempest Williams:

[T]here’s no hope in avoiding collapse. If you look at the worst-case consequences of climate change, those pretty much mean the collapse of our industrial civilization. But that doesn’t mean the end of everything. It means that we’re going to be living through the most rapid and intense period of change that humanity has ever faced. And that’s certainly not hopeless. It means we’re going to have to build another world in the ashes of this one. And it could very easily be a better world. I have a lot of hope in my generation’s ability to build a better world in the ashes of this one. And I have very little doubt that we’ll have to. The nice thing about that is that this culture hasn’t led to happiness anyway, it hasn’t satisfied our human needs. So there’s a lot of room for improvement.

We are in the process of committing the world to a terrifying amount of climate change. It seems plausible that as it gets worse, people will eventually become less willing to work together to deal with it. Hopefully the next few years will see the emergence of a movement strong enough to close off the worst possibilities of extreme warming, and capable of adapting to keep humanity on a comparatively sane and cooperative path in the future.

Pierre Trudeau on radical strategy

One passage from Pierre Trudeau’s Federalism and the French Canadians strikes me as especially relevant to climate change organizing:

In a non-revolutionary society and in non-revolutionary times, no manner of reform can be implanted with sudden universality. Democratic reformers must proceed step by step, convincing little bands of intellectuals here, rallying sections of the working class there, and appealing to the underprivileged in the next place. The drive towards power must begin with the establishment of bridgeheads, since at the outset it is obviously easier to convert specific groups or localities than to win over an absolute majority of the whole nation.

…

Consequently, radical strategy must be designed to operate under the present electoral system of one-man constituencies.

While all this seems plausible, it is also cause for special concern in the area of climate change. Political change may be necessarily incremental, but the time we have left in which to change the trajectory of future emissions is short. There is a long lag between when we produce greenhouse gas pollution and when we feel the full effects, and there is an enormous danger that by the time our politics has awoken to the reality of the permanent harm we are causing, we will have committed ourselves to an extreme quantity of harm.

Time management between terms

While it can be overwhelming at times, I think school during term-time sets a good tempo for life overall.

By contrast, working in a job that can be expected to continue indefinitely lacks contrast and rhythm; it risks becoming a dispiriting grind.

Totally unstructured time, on the other hand, is rarely as good for advancing long-term projects as a person might hope. It’s the inflexible dedicated blocks in a schedule that lend structure to everything that happens around them. With few or no time-specific commitments, one’s schedule has a tendency to get flabby, low priority activities can end up occupying an unjustified amount of attention, and sustained forward motion on important projects can be hard to sustain.