PurpleCar

Ignore the maths in this book.

The Guardian has an in-depth piece on how amateur psychologist Nick Brown exposed the funny (read: false) math behind the “Positivity Ratio” that has been plastered all over the news and academia. You may have heard of it: You need to emphasize 3 positive things (or 2.9013 to be exact) for every 1 negative thing in order to keep a positive attitude and live a happy life.

Turns out it’s all bunk, of course:

“[Nick Brown] went back over Losada’s equations and he noticed that if he put in the numbers Fredrickson and Losada had then you could arrive at the appropriate figures. But he realised that it only worked on its own terms. ‘When you look at the equation, it doesn’t contain any data. It’s completely self-referential.'”

Positive Psychology should stick with the business-lecture circuit and stay out of the stats & measurement trenches if it wants to “flourish” instead of “languish.”

Hat tip to John Hunter on Twitter for the find.

What if we just admitted we didn’t want to be here?

The Great Distractor

Why do I open up my laptop with the intention of writing and then end up wandering around the Web? Why do I check my Twitter stream when I’m supposed to be enjoying my kid’s holiday concert?

I’m not the only one doing this crap. Study after study is published about how adults and children spend two, three, even ten hours a day online. Thoroughly distressed by these numbers, we ask, “What is all this tech doing to us?”

In short, it has caused a zombie apocalypse. We’re texting and driving (DRIVING!). We’re scrolling through our social networks at the dinner table. We’re Snapchatting during movies and culture events. The tech has made us into zombies. But the real question is, “Why?”

The answer to why we are all so distracted by our tech isn’t as simple as Shiny New Toy Syndrome or contagious bad etiquette. The answer goes much deeper, too deep for contributors (read: unpaid bloggers) at major media outlets like Forbes and  HuffPo to ponder. We are so loath to bring the root cause to the surface that an entire industry grew out of the need to keep it repressed. Let’s be brave here for a moment and bring a sample of root causes to the surface:

SOME TRUTH FOR ADULTS

5 REAL REASONS WHY YOU ARE LOOKING AT YOUR PHONE DURING YOUR KID’S EVENT:

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Water-Logged

A special kind of heartache is reserved for those of us who, after having searched high and low for our FitBits, find our tiny fitness trackers lifeless, still attached to clean, dried and neatly folded clothes from last week’s workout. At $100 a pop, realizing that you’ve drowned your tech amounts to no small dent in your day.

“Putting your wearable tech through the wringer” isn’t meant to be taken literally, but judging by the FitBit forums I’ve visited, washing-machine accidents seem to be the leading cause of death of the small-but-expensive activity monitors. I’m personally on my 2nd FitBit because of this not-so-clear and present danger. So far, “don’t leave your fitbit clipped to your clothes” isn’t a lesson I’ve had to learn twice. But I have to say, that first FitBit fail makes me less inclined to use my new tracker at all. I used to wear my FitBit 24/7 (yes, it monitors sleep activity), but now I wear it so infrequently that it sits power-drained for days and must charge for a few hours before I can use it. (This usually means I don’t wear it for that workout). Since yoga and pilates (which won’t exactly register with the Fitbit) have taken over my fitness schedule, I’ve almost abandoned tracking entirely.

Tech for Truth

My behavioral habit of wearing a fitness tracker was derailed by a technological limitation (lack of waterproofing). As the tech evolves, these tech glitches will be smoothed over. My guess is we’ll eventually move to implants. Why rely on fallible, washing-machine wielding humans to attach and [continue reading…]

Sacco Sunk

With issuing a crappy, insincere apology after her decidedly insensitive-at-best, racist-at-worst tweet (“I’m going to Africa. Hope I don’t gets AIDS. Just kidding. I’m white.”), Justine Sacco is proving to be even more annoying than she seemed when she was offline but going viral while flying on an airplane to see her father in his native South Africa (to be sure, a picture of her racist background, i.e. her father participating in the white flight from South Africa, is emerging).

The “duh” moment, of course, is that a Public Relations executive should know better than to tweet something so easily vilifying. Also, a seasoned PR person should know that one shouldn’t tweet anything immediately before going offline for over 12 hours. The marketing community on Twitter are all still in shock over the obvious gaffe perpetrated by a very senior exec at a ginormous NYC media company like IAC.

Digging Deeper

Enough has been written already about those obvious takeaways. What I’d like to talk about in the Justine Sacco saga is not Justine herself (whom I think should take this opportunity to learn from Jason Alexander’s example and really examine her belief systems) but rather the process through which we vilify and summarily judge other humans online and off.

Many newspapers, including Valleywag that broke Ms. Sacco’s tweet, wrote stories just around three facts: 1. The tweet itself. 2. Ms. Sacco’s job 3. Ms. Sacco’s inability to see the firestorm brewing online because she was on a long, signal-less international flight.

When I saw the tweet, I immediately understood what the hubbub was about but I could also see the tweet in a “compassion fatigue” context. I could read it with a tone of thinly-guised despair, like “South Africa’s high disparity between the number of white women and the number of black women who contract HIV is very upsetting to me, so I must joke about it.” I often joke (only in private with my husband) in that sarcastic manner about things that break my heart, like racism, poverty, etc. John Stewart makes a living joking sarcastically, teetering on the thin line between appropriate and shocking. I went with my merciful view of Ms. Sacco’s tweet and Ms. Sacco herself. Until I found out more.

Burying the Garbage

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