Public Health & Medicine

Welcome to this edition of our Tools for Thought series, where we interview founders on a mission to help us achieve more without sacrificing our mental health. Welf von Hören is the founder of Potential, an app that helps users reclaim their attention by giving them back agency over what they do, how they feel, and who they become. In this interview, we talked about the misused power of persuasive technology, the impact of the attention economy on our well-being and productivity, how to turn intentions into habits, how to implement fallback strategies, and much more. Enjoy the read! Hi Welf, thank you so much for agreeing to this interview. Let’s start with a big question. What does it mean to you to live intentionally?  It means choosing and acting consciously, rather than being driven by mindlessness and compulsion. It means knowing the long-term consequences of my actions. It means living a life that you can look back on without regret. It means living in a way that is true to my values, my aspirations and my purpose. It’s a quest for wisdom, meaning, and fulfillment. It’s striving to live up to my potential, to live to the best of my ability. To deepen my idea of who and what I truly am and could be. To take a good look at the world at this moment in history and do what I feel called to contribute. Practically it means figuring out how to integrate those aspirations with the reality of our monkey minds in the context of endless entertainment and cheap dopamine. In that sense, living intentionally means figuring out how we can systematically become more capable of living up to our higher intentions.  Technology often seems to get in the way of intentional living. What inspired you to build Potential?  A few years ago, it occurred to me that everything I want out of life is on the other side of overcoming the intention-action gap. Some people struggle with this more than others. For me it was the existential struggle. Why am I not doing the things that I want to do, that I know are good for me? What can I do to change that? That’s what led me down the rabbit hole of personal development, behavioral psychology, and eventually persuasive tech. I learned that technology can be designed to change human behavior. There I was, struggling to wake up early, meditate, read, go to the gym. And then I realized that there’s a trillion dollar industry using the power of persuasive design to make us scroll more, watch more, click more. That seemed like an incredible mismatch. Fast forward five years and we have persuasive technology pointed at more than three billion minds, optimizing for advertising revenue and addiction. It undermines human dignity and freedom at the most basic level: the agency to direct our attention towards what’s important to us. At this scale and pervasiveness, it damages our well-being and productivity, and it debases our shared capacity for solving the world’s hardest problems. It’s sick. It’s disrespectful of the human spirit. And I believe there’s a good chance that future generations will literally judge this as crimes against humanity. The question is, what do we do about that? If we have digital environments that inevitably condition the minds and behaviors of billions of people, what’s an ethical way of relating to this reality? How can we make technology that’s a worthy steward of our attention?  With Potential, we are exploring what I call “Augmented Intentionality” — technology that supports our capacity to do the things we truly want to do. Interfaces that allow us to choose consciously, from our own menus, based on our values and priorities. Instead of countless random distractions, a few meaningful real-world choices, made as easy and joyful as possible. And how does it work exactly? Potential is centered around your intentions. It has elements of a daily planner and a habit tracker, and it is supercharged with integrations. It doesn’t just keep you accountable, it actually makes your desired behaviors 1-tap easy. You can add your intentions and either group them together in schedules (e.g. Morning, Deep Work, or Wind Down) or just add them independently. You can tap them to open integrations, and swipe to complete or skip. The idea here is not to make an overwhelming todo list of “25 things I need to do every day”, but instead make your own menu with the kinds of things you might want to choose from. There’s what we call ‘fallback’ intentions that enable you to add tiny versions of a habit as a fallback. If you have the intention of lifting weights, you might add 20 push-ups as a fallback intention. That way, instead of skipping it, you replace the intention with the tiny fallback. With our widgets, you’ll see the menu of intentions for the current time on your home screen, and you can tap the integration to jump right into your desired behavior.  Can you give us some examples of integrations and how they can fit in a user’s life?  Integrations are a really big part of Potential. You can add them to your intentions to open apps and links or run shortcuts. Shortcuts are great for jumping right into your daily meditation, recording a new activity with Strava, putting your phone into airplane mode, and so much more. And then there are our auto-complete integrations. You can connect Apple Health, Oura, and Duolingo, to set conditions for automatically completing your intentions. We recently also shipped Waking Up courses, enabling you to jump into the next session of any Waking Up series. There’s a lot more custom integrations coming up That sounds amazing! Can you tell us a bit more about the accountability aspect of Potential? The history of your completions gets aggregated on the Insights screen, where you can see a weekly and monthly overview of your activity. On the social side, we currently have a very simple activity sharing: you can share completed intentions with friends. We believe social accountability can help many people stick to their intentions. We are exploring a lot of possibilities in this direction, and you can expect features like groups, commitments, and public profiles to be shipped over the coming months. At the end of the day however, the question of single-player or multiplayer is one of personal preference. With our upcoming Attention Settings features, you’ll also be able to hide all social features. What kind of people use Potential?  Many of them are engineers, designers, psychologists, or entrepreneurs. They all want to live intentionally and better manage their attention. They are highly aware of the role their digital environment plays in that project… They use meditation, fitness, and productivity apps.  Many have built their own systems and workarounds: elaborate habit tracking sheets, using grayscale, iOS Shortcuts, Notion and Roam templates, distraction blockers. There’s probably few better places to nerd out about intentionality-related software than our Discord community! What about you… How do you personally use Potential? I love a good morning routine. I always adapt it to my day-to-day moods and available time: waking up early, and then some combination of exercise, yoga or stretching, breathwork, meditation, and sometimes journaling. I have a work schedule with intentions that are relevant throughout the day, like deep work sessions or a meditation timer, and an evening schedule with options for winding down. I get a lot of value from fallback intentions. Sometimes I don’t feel like doing a workout, but I’m happy to do 25 push-ups instead. Or I don’t have the time for a full yoga session, but squeeze in 5 minutes of stretching. Keeps the habit alive and is a vote for the person I want to be. James Clear would be happy to read this! What kind of results have users seen so far? We have only launched the beta 6 weeks ago, so we are still waiting for those newsworthy testimonials, like someone doing an ironman or having a thousand day streak on meditation. Our early customer shared that it helps them actually act on their intentions and some have reported that they’ve seen a significant change in their behavior. Potential is a premium app. Can you tell us a bit more about your business model? The attention economy is driven by a business model that misaligns the company’s incentives with the user’s best interest: Advertising. We don’t like it. At Potential, you’re the customer, never the product. We’re on a mission to make technology that is deeply aligned with your best interest. We take that seriously. And the only way to do this sustainably is if we’re funded by the very people we’re serving. There’s still so much work to do if we want to take back control of our attention. Where would you like Potential to be in the next few years? We want to make Potential into the best digital tool for intentionality that we can imagine. Over the course of this year, Potential will become much better at what it’s already doing. From a super smooth UX for setting intentions and scheduling your day, to a social layer and powerful integrations across multiple platforms — we are really excited for what’s ahead. Beyond that, there are more questions than answers… What would it take to build the inverse function to the attention economy? Can we repurpose this stack of technologies that are currently exploiting our psychology, to support and advance our well-being and development instead? Can we make technology that helps us understand what our actual needs are, and what we can do to meet them effectively? Can we have a world-class AI coach that asks us all the right questions on our path to wisdom and fulfillment? Can we build a brand that makes our collective self-actualization more attractive than the hell of eternal dopamine that the metaverse inevitably will become? And while these questions guide our work, we’re aware that this is a project much bigger than any one product or company. We’ll continue to dedicate ou...

Should you stick to what you know, or is it wiser to broaden your abilities? Some people may tell you to only take on projects that fall within your circle of competence, while others will advise you to get out of your comfort zone. Who’s right? The circle of competence model states that everyone has an area, or circle, of expertise. However, the circle of objective competence may be surrounded by a larger circle of subjective, and often over-inflated, belief in your ability. Your circle of competence represents what you really know, versus what you think you know. Discovering your circle of competence A circle of competence is a mental model that helps mitigate the risk of failure associated with overconfidence by having a realistic view of your strengths. The term was first coined by Warren Buffett, one of the world’s most successful financial investors. Buffett advised: “Know your circle of competence, and stick within it. The size of that circle is not very important; knowing its boundaries, however, is vital.” Alongside his business partner Charlie Munger, Warren Buffett found success in only making financial investments in sectors that he had a comprehensive grasp of. In this way, Buffett avoided overconfidence in his knowledge or abilities, and instead relied on objective competence. By mapping his circle of competence, he reduced the risk associated with making poor investment decisions in sectors he had little experience of. Buffett has since attributed his overwhelming financial success to adhering to this mental model. To determine your circle of competence, you have to understand where your true competence lies, without allowing subjective beliefs to create undue assurance in your abilities. To determine the breadth of your circle of competence, you need to have an honest look at your background, training, qualifications, or personal familiarity in a subject.  This self-reflection process will allow you to discover the areas in which you have deep, well-rooted knowledge and experience, versus the ones where you only have basic or surface-level knowledge. Stepping outside of your circle of competence Buffett and Munger believe that staying within your circle of competence is vital for success. According to them, understanding your strengths and avoiding unfamiliar areas is an effective way to mitigate risk. If a challenge falls outside of your circle of competence, you can minimise the risk of failure by declining that opportunity. Sticking with what you know could also give you an edge on your competitors, and prevent you from making mistakes. Chief investment analysts Rusmin Ang and Victor Chng write: “Remaining within one’s circle confers a number of benefits, such as an unfair information advantage, the narrowing of available options, and the reduction of poor decision making.” However, there may be times when stepping outside of your circle of competence can be a good idea. Although there may be risks associated, new discoveries can be fostered when experimental and innovative approaches are employed. Or, as some may say, you can’t make an omelette without breaking a few eggs. In 2015, Dr Ikhlaq Sidhu of UC Berkeley’s Center for Entrepreneurship and Technology, and Dr Paris de l’Etraz, Professor of Entrepreneurship at IE Business School, investigated the effect that remaining in their comfort zone had on entrepreneurs. They hypothesised that people who stayed in their comfort zone would not feel at risk, leading to an anxiety-neutral state, and their progress would remain steady. However, Sidhu and de l’Etraz found that the steady, low-risk approach was unlikely to truly benefit entrepreneurial individuals. They explain: “The potential of an entrepreneur or innovator is much more correlated with higher tolerance for uncertainty than it is with their field of study.” In other words, if your goal is to avoid risk, you should stick to your circle of competence; however, if your goal is to innovate, you will be better off stepping outside of your circle so you can come up with non-obvious solutions. Although some very accomplished businessmen suggest that success lies in never stepping outside the boundaries of your circle of competence, this may stunt your creativity and ability to discover new ideas. How to make the most of your circle of competence To take advantage of your circle of competence is to find a balance between honestly acknowledging your capabilities, and strategically striving to expand your knowledge and horizons. The Pareto Principle states that 80% of all output results from just 20% all inputs. Spend 80% of your time working from within your circle of competence, and 20% expanding your boundaries and exploring new territories that may feel less comfortable. Here are few steps you can take to make the most of your circle of competence: 1. Ensure predictable progress. Define the limits of your circle of competence to ensure progress. By spending 80% of your time in your area of expertise, you are likely to make steady progress that will benefit your career and personal life. The time spent working within your circle of competence is akin to creating a safety net for yourself. 2. Push your boundaries. The remaining 20% of your time can be spent exploring new, exciting areas that may have a higher potential for risk.  Acquire new skills, set ambitious goals, offer your help on a project you are unfamiliar with. The time spent working outside of your circle of competence is when your performance has the chance to improve in an exponential fashion. 3. Reassess your circle of competence. By leaving your comfort zone for just one-fifth of the time, there is potential for learning, growth, and behavioural change. Your objective circle may therefore grow to encompass your newly developed expertise. Make sure to regularly reassess your circle of competence and to incorporate this knowledge into your decision-making process. As a result of your drive to grow, some professional or personal decisions may now be less risky. The circle of competence model serves to indicate a person’s true strengths and expertise, while preventing overconfidence and related risk-taking behaviours. Remember that your circle does not need to be big for you to be successful. You just need to know its boundaries so you can be smart about when to stick within it, and when to step outside of it. The post Your circle of competence: should you stick within it or step outside of it? appeared first on Ness Labs.

Welcome to this edition of our Tools for Thought series, where we interview founders on a mission to help us think, work, and collaborate better without sacrificing our mental health. Alexander Embiricos is the co-founder and CEO of Remotion, a virtual office that connects hybrid-remote teams like everyone’s together with quick calls, coworking rooms, emoji badging, live selfies, and more. In this interview, we talked about the challenge with traditional portfolios of culture initiatives at work, how virtual coworking can help build trust and momentum within a remote team, designing online communication tools for people who are “somewhat social”, managing online distractions, how remote remote companies can foster a more inclusive culture, and more. Enjoy the read! Hi Alexander, thank you so much for agreeing to this interview. What do you think are some of the main benefits of virtual coworking? Thank you so much for having me. Virtual coworking is an essential tool for any distributed team to build trust and momentum. It makes work more fun and productive!  Many distributed team leaders we talk to find that it’s harder to develop relationships and culture remotely. A potential cause: no office chit-chat and small talk. Unfortunately, trying to recreate the watercooler remotely doesn’t work, but we think there’s something there: small group, casual conversations are incredibly helpful in building relationships. That’s where virtual coworking comes in. It’s a shared experience that doesn’t get in the way of work, and creates space for the casual conversations that build relationships. It’s definitely harder to stay connected while working remotely. Lots of tools are attempting to tackle that challenge — what makes Remotion different? If you’re a remote founder, people leader, or even a manager on a small team, you have a portfolio of culture initiatives. The biggest one is probably a recurring offsite. Then you have your all-hands programming, happy hours, social events, 1:1 roulettes… These are great, but they are meeting blocks for your team to find on their schedule and carve out time to participate in. Remotion is unique in that it’s not a specific meeting or moment that takes you away from your work. Just like the physical office, it gives you a background awareness of what your team is up to. That helps you feel like you’re a part of something, and also fosters opportunities for those small group casual conversations that build relationships. We have also kept Remotion’s UI footprint incredibly small so that it’ll also work for people who are on hybrid teams, running around with laptops in the physical office. You mentioned a portfolio of culture initiatives for the work environment. Beside doing actual work together, how can Remotion users connect in authentic, human ways? Great question. You have basically described our product goal in a nutshell. We aim to create spaces that are lightweight and comfortable enough for people to naturally want to hang out in while they work. The main way we do that is with coworking rooms, which are audio-first spaces with shared music.  The shared music creates a shared non-work experience — music as a connective agent is a thousand-year-old secret. But more importantly, the music takes the edge off feeling like someone needs to fill silence with talking. And that “silence” creates space for more authentic conversations about someone’s day, family, pets, feelings, or whatever comes to mind. Another unique feature of Remotion is the live selfies. Can you tell us a bit more about them? Yes, we have had selfies in the product from day zero, and we even considered pivoting to a selfie tool instead of a virtual office! Live selfies are another way we try to bring your team to life. With a couple clicks on your avatar in Remotion, you can replace it with a three-second recording from your webcam. It’s great for sharing a bit of personality in a low-stakes way. Selfies with kids or pets tend to be a favorite that get celebrated. And that’s how you look to your team for the rest of the day — giving everyone a sense of your presence vs. a stale headshot or green dot that indicates you’re online. My cofounder Charley and I are both “somewhat social” — we like to see and be around other people, but we don’t like to be “always-on”, and we need breaks between interactions. When we were building the first prototype of Remotion, we were exploring the spectrum between building a fully asynchronous app, an always-on video app, and everything in between. That included wacky options like automatically taking selfies every few minutes. We realized that we wanted to have our teammates “a glance away” like in an office, but it didn’t need to be a live video. We wanted people to be in full control of how and when they were seen, so we made a dead-simple selfie flow behind a user click. Online communication tools sometimes make it harder to stay focused when working. How does Remotion address this challenge? Today’s productivity stack is overloaded with notifications and unread messages. Frankly, it’s harmful to our attention spans and well-being. Notifications should be reserved for truly urgent times. However, we’re constantly getting unread notifications for information that might be useful in the moment, but are otherwise not worth the distraction. With Remotion, we hope to reduce the need for shoving that information into your inbox. Instead, we present it as something you can be aware of in the background. If you notice something and act on it, that’s great! If not, there’s no unread message to check. Tactically, Remotion has very few notifications and no concept of unread messages. Remotion only comes out of the background when someone is reaching out to you. Most conversations in Remotion happen in rooms, so even that is rare. Finally, we have prominent calendar integrations and focus mode that you can use to be actively unavailable. That sounds great. What are some other features you are particularly proud of? The Remotion dock is the first thing that comes to mind: It’s like the macOS Application Dock or the Windows Taskbar, but for your teammates. We have obsessed over this tiny piece of UI so that you don’t have to switch windows or open a new browser tab to connect with your team. They’re just a glance away. I’m also proud of our automated status updates. Our strategy is to update your status with anything that affects your real-time availability: are you talking to someone in Remotion, Zoom, or Meet? What’s your calendar status? When you can see when your teammates are hopping in and out of conversations, you can spontaneously squeeze in short, energizing conversations.  On the other hand, we’ve explicitly decided not to update your status based on what app you’re in, or what web page you’re on. We think that would incur a major loss of privacy without much corresponding value to you or the team. Do you have any tips to share for people who want to improve remote collaboration with their team? It’s hard to share general advice without knowing specifically what folks are trying to achieve, but a common mistake is to focus on tools and tactics without aligning on the intention behind them. Here is how I would begin. Start by aligning on what type of remote culture you want to create. There are folks on the internet who’d have you believe that there are clear-cut answers on how to collaborate remotely, but this isn’t a one-size-fits-all question. Next, assess how you’re measuring up to that ideal remote culture. It can be difficult for remote leaders to empathize with the rest of the team’s experience, so it takes effort. I recommend breaking down your goals into questions and surveying the team anonymously. That gives you a prioritized list of problems to find solutions for — a great place to start. A great place to start indeed. To go a little deeper, how do you think remote companies can foster a more inclusive culture? For leaders, I think the foundation of an inclusive culture is bringing curiosity to people’s challenges. That helps us lean on the whole team to surface issues and solve them collaboratively. And I think there’ll always be places to improve: An inclusive culture is constantly evolving. On our team, we try to encourage candid conversation about the team’s culture as a tangible thing that we are shaping together. This takes many forms but my favorite is our quarterly culture survey. First, it’s a highly visible reminder to the team that their thoughts matter. Second, I always learn something new during the sync writing follow-up, where we play music and type in a doc at the same time. Finally, it was conceived of and is run by an engineering leader on our team. The story of how we set the quarterly culture survey up was a big learning moment for me: During a one-on-one with that engineer (one of our first teammates), she was sharing concerns about our culture. I will admit — in the moment I felt pretty defensive and it took some time to channel the surprise into curiosity. But we dug in and decided to run the survey. The results came back not-so-stellar, as we’d feared. We leant in again and shared with the team. The ensuing discussion was one of the best we’ve ever had in the company, and led to major improvements. Bringing this back to curiosity, when I hear about an issue I resist the initial urge to problem solve and instead wait to tease out underlying causes. When people see leaders leaning into feedback, it creates a safe space for calling out bigger or more delicate problems, such as those around inclusivity. I find that after new teammates see this a few times, they’re much more willing to call out problems and enlist the team in solving them. This is amazing. Besides your team, what kind of people use Remotion? 80% of the teams in the product are created by people who lead teams, usually managers. This makes sense to ...

Our beliefs can help us navigate the world around us. However, when our beliefs do not line up with reality, they can cause harm to ourselves and others. Also, these beliefs can become so deeply ingrained that they become very challenging to unlearn, even when presented with new information. This phenomenon is called belief perseverance. When we cling to false beliefs Our beliefs about ourselves, others, and how the world works come from many places. In part, formal instruction and education inform our belief systems. The ideas we hold about ourselves and others also come from our experiences interacting with the world and secondary sources like the media. Belief perseverance happens when a person holds onto a belief even when presented with evidence that this belief is false. There are three types of belief perseverance. First, self-impressions, which are beliefs about yourself, such as “beliefs about your athletic skills, musical talents, ability to get along with others, or even body image.” The second involves social impressions, which are beliefs about specific other people, such as “beliefs about your best friend, mother, or least favorite teacher.” Finally, the third type is called naive theories — these are beliefs about how the world works, including beliefs about the causes of war or poverty, stereotypes about teenagers, lawyers or other cultures, and any other social theories. A common way researchers study belief perseverance is through the debriefing method. For example, the first study of belief perseverance involved an experiment that asked participants to complete a task. Once the task was complete, researchers gave the participants feedback on their performance. Either they completed the job successfully, or they failed. However, after sharing the initial feedback, researchers told the participants that the feedback was fake. Logically, if researchers asked the participants how they would do on the task a second time, they would ignore their initial false results in their self-assessment. However, that’s not what happened. The researchers report: “Participants who received fake success feedback continued to believe that they were pretty good at this task, whereas those who received fake failure feedback continued to believe that they were pretty bad at it.” Again, this is despite being told the feedback they initially received was wrong! Multiple similar studies that followed found the same results. So, why do we stick to beliefs even after being told they are not true? Researchers have offered several propositions. First, psychologists Corey Guenther and Mark D. Alicke suggest that our brains tend to stay “stuck” on the initial feedback we receive. An important source of cognitive biases relevant to belief perseverance is that people’s brains are wired to seek coherence and order. When that coherence is disrupted, we sometimes seek information that better aligns with our existing beliefs. This is a form of confirmation bias. Or, we interpret the new information in a way that works with our belief structures. For example, illusory correlations mean that we tend to remember times when we were successful more than when we failed/performed poorly. The availability heuristic also shows that we tend to assess our beliefs based on the most available memories in our minds. In the debriefing example, it appears that participants relied on their most recent memories about how they performed in the past to predict how they would perform in the future, despite being debriefed on the experiment. The impact of belief perseverance When our belief systems align with reality, belief perseverance can help us predict outcomes and feel some sense of control over our social environment. However, if we cling to false beliefs, we risk causing harm to ourselves and those around us. Researchers Morgan Slusher and Craig Anderson give multiple examples of how clinging to false beliefs results in adverse effects: People with negative belief perseverance about their social abilities may avoid interpersonal interactions and develop problems such as loneliness and shyness. Employees with a belief perseverance in their superior skills may fail to request the needed assistance when faced with a given challenge. Dangerous decisions may be made because of a belief in perseverance in one’s ability to manage risk. Using the example of the destruction of the space shuttle Challenger and the deaths of seven crew members, they write: “The expertise for the proper decision was available but ignored (several engineers on the project strongly recommended against a launch attempt in the abnormally cold weather).” Giving people the correct information about their beliefs may even backfire. For instance, a study with participants expressing their concerns of the side effects of flu shots found that they became even less eager to accept them after being told that the vaccination was completely safe. In other words, they used the updated information reinforcing the idea that they already had before, distrusting the vaccine even more as a result. How to manage belief perseverance You would think that belief perseverance can be managed by explaining that other factors that may have influenced a person’s success or failure that are outside of their control, giving a person new information that contradicts their beliefs, such as sharing news articles or research about a given topic. Or maybe by asking a person to be more open-minded and aware of their environment to see if new observations change their minds, or by interacting with others and using the experiences to challenge their beliefs. However, research shows that these four methods fail to reduce belief perseverance, though they seem the most logical ways to address it. The only way to somehow manage belief perseverance is to become aware of it. So, congratulations – you have completed the first step! The next step is to increase your self-awareness about your beliefs and where they come from. If you want to increase your self-awareness and challenge your beliefs about yourself and others, consider trying this short exercise, with only five questions: What beliefs do I have about myself and my abilities? What assumptions do I hold about other people? Where did these beliefs come from? (e.g., childhood experiences, feedback from authority figures, interactions with friends) Are the beliefs I hold about myself and others accurate? What experiences have I had that counter these beliefs? Remember that our minds are prone to cognitive biases that may discord the way we consider these questions. Our need for coherence, combined with cognitive biases, make it very difficult to unlearn our false beliefs. Trusted friends or colleagues can help jog your memory to moderate the availability bias, the confirmation bias, and stay clear of illusory correlations. Remember: when left unaddressed, belief perseverance has serious consequences for ourselves and others. Awareness and self-reflection are the best ways to address this phenomenon. Questioning our false beliefs can help us all grow and better achieve our goals. The post Belief perseverance: why we cling on to old ideas appeared first on Ness Labs.

New Things Under the Sun is a living literature review; as the state of the academic literature evolves, so do we. Here are three recent updates. Proximity, who you know, and knowledge transfer: Facebook edition The article Why proximity matters: who you know is about why cities seem to do a disproportionate amount of innovating. The article argues that an important reason is that proximity facilitates meeting new people, especially people who work on topics different from our own. These social ties are a channel through which new ideas and knowledge flows. The article goes on to argue that, once you know someone, it’s no longer very important that you remain geographically close. Distance matters for who you know, but isn’t so important for keeping those channels of information working, once a relationship has been formed. The article looks at a few lines of evidence on this. Diemer and Regan (2022) is a new article that tackles the same issue with a novel measure of “who you know.” Below is the new material I’ve added to my article, to bring in Diemer and Regan’s new work. The discussion picks up right after describing some evidence from Agrawal, Cockburn, and McHale that inventors who worked together in the past continue to cite each other work at an elevated level after they move far away from each other. While professional connections are probably the most likely to be useful for inventing, they are not the only kind of connection people have. If I make friends with people at a party, these friendships might also be a vehicle for the transmission of useful information. Diemer and Regan (2022) begins to address this gap with a novel measure of friendships: Facebook data. They have an index based on the number of friendships between Facebook users in different US counties, over a one-month snapshot in April 2016. Unfortunately, this measure of informal ties isn’t as granular as what Agrawal, Cockburn and McHale were able to come up with. If you’re an inventor with a patent, this Facebook dataset doesn’t tell the authors who your friends are and where they live; instead, it tells them something like, on average, how strong are friendship linkages between people in your county and other counties. Still, its one of the first large-scale datasets that lets us look at these kinds of social ties. Diemer and Regan want to see if these informal ties facilitate the transfer of ideas and knowledge by once again looking at patent citations. But this is challenging, because there are a whole host of possible confounding variables. To take one example, suppose: you’re more likely to be friends with people in your industry everyone in your industry lives in the same set of counties you’re also more likely to cite patents that belong to your industry That would create a correlation between friendly counties and citations, but it would be driven by the fact that these counties share a common industry, not informal knowledge exchange between friends. Diemer and Regan approach this by leveraging the massive scale of patenting data to really tighten down the comparison groups. Their main idea (which they borrowed from a 2006 paper by Peter Thompson) is to take advantage of the fact that about 40% of patent citations are added by the patent examiner, not the inventor. Instead of using cross-county friendships to predict whether patent x cites patent y, which would suffer from the kinds of problems discussed above, they use cross-county friendships to predict whether a given citation was added by the inventor, instead of the examiner. The idea is that both the patent examiner and the inventor will want to add relevant patent citations (for example, if both patents belong to the same industry, as discussed above). But a key difference is that only the inventor can add citations that the inventor knows about, and one way the inventor learns about patents is through their informal ties. So if patent x cites patent y, no matter who added the citation, we know x and y are probably technologically related, or there wouldn’t be a citation between them. But that doesn’t mean the inventor learned anything from patent y (or was even aware of it). But if patents from friendly counties are systematically more likely to be added by inventors, instead of otherwise equally relevant citations added by examiners, that’s evidence that friendship is facilitating knowledge transfer. Diemer and Regan actually look at three predictors of who added the citation: cross-county friendships, geographic distance between counties, and the presence of a professional network tie between the cited and citing patent (for example, is the patent by a former co-inventor or once-removed co-inventor). And at first glance, it does look like geographic distance matters: it turns out that if there is a citation crossing two counties, the citation is more likely to have been added by the inventor if the counties are close to each other. But when you combine all three measures, it turns out the effect of distance is entirely mediated by the other two factors. In other words, once you take into account who you know, distance doesn’t matter. Distance only appears to matter (in isolation) because we have more nearby professional ties and friendships, and we are more likely to cite patents linked to us by professional ties and friendships. Consistent with Agrawal, Cockburn, and McHale’s finding that 80% of excess citations from movers comes from people who are professionally connected, Diemer and Regan find professional network connections are a much stronger predictor of who added the citation than friendliness of counties, though both matter. Lastly, as with Agrawal, Cockburn, and McHale, when patent citations flow between more technologically dissimilar patents, the predictive power of how friendly two counties are looms larger. That’s consistent with friendships being especially useful for learning about things outside your normal professional network. But the bottom line is this - distance only matters, in this paper, because it affects who you know. Read the whole thing Even more knowledge transfer: reading edition Let’s stick with the theme of knowledge transfer for a moment. The article Free Knowledge and Innovation looked at three studies that document improving access to knowledge - via the Carnegie libraries, patent depository libraries, or wikipedia - has a measurable impact on innovation. Of these three studies, one by Furman, Nagler, and Watzinger looked at the impact of getting a local patent depository library, by comparing patent rates in nearby regions to the patent rate in other regions that were qualified to get a library but did not (for plausibly random factors). When I first wrote about it, the study was a working paper. It’s now been published and the new published version includes a new analysis that strengthens the case that increased access to patents leads to more knowledge transfer, and more patents. Below is some discussion of this new analysis. Furman, Nagler, and Watzinger … also look at the words in patents. After all, a lot of what we learn from patents we learn by reading the words. Furman, Nagler, and Watzinger try to tease out evidence that inventors learn by reading patents by breaking patents down into four categories: Patents that feature globally new words; words that never appeared before in any other patent Patents that feature regionally new words; words new to any patents of inventors who reside within 15 miles of the patent library or its control, but not new in the wider world Patents that feature regionally learned words; words that aren’t necessarily new to the patents of inventors who live within 15 miles of the library, but which were not used on any patents before the library showed up Patents that feature regionally familiar words; those that were already present in patents of inventors residing within 15 miles of the library, even prior to its opening. To take an example, the word “internet” first appeared in the title of patent 5309437, which was filed in 1990 by inventors residing in Maine and New Hampshire. So patent 5309437 features a global new word (Furman, Nagler, and Watzinger actually look at more than just the patent title, but this is just to illustrate the idea). I live in Des Moines, Iowa, where a patent depository library opened in the late 1980s. The first patent (title) mentioning the word “internet” with a Des Moines based inventor was filed in 2011. We would say that patent features a regionally new word, since no other Des Moines patents had the word “internet” in their title prior to 2011 but patents outside Des Moines did. If, in 2012, another Des Moines based-inventor later used the word “internet” in their patent we would classify that patent as a regionally learned word, since the word “internet” did not appear before our patent library was founded. Finally, a Des Moines based patent without the word “internet” or any other words that are new to the local patent corpus since we got our library would be classified as a familiar words patent. We would expect patent libraries to be especially helpful with regionally new and regionally learned words. These are signals that inventors in, say, Des Moines, are reading about patents from outside Des Moines and adopting new ideas they learn from them. And indeed, when you break patents down in this way, you see more patents of precisely the type you would expect, if people are reading patents and using what they learn to invent new things. From Furman, Nagler, and Watzinger (2021) On the other hand, we wouldn’t necessarily expect patent libraries to be as much help for globally new words, since those words are not found in any library - they are completely new to the world of patenting. Nor would we expect them to be much help for regionally familiar words, since those pertain to knowledge that was already available before the ...

To readers of New Things Under the Sun, Back in August, I wrote: This project began as something I did in my spare time, until November 2021, when Emergent Ventures generously took a chance and gave me a grant that let me spend 25% of my work time on this project. Going forward, I am working with an organization that will provide funding for me to work on it closer to 50% of my time, while keeping the site free. I’ll have more to say on that when everything is finalized. That day is here! Institute for Progress - About I’m pleased to announce that the Institute for Progress has named me a senior fellow and is partnering with New Things Under the Sun. Institute for Progress (IFP) is a new nonpartisan think tank, founded by Caleb Watney and Alec Stapp, with a mission to accelerate scientific, technological, and industrial progress. You can read their (great, in my view) launch document here. Obviously I’m biased, but I think New Things Under the Sun is an important public good. That said, it’s a weird thing and doesn’t neatly fall into a traditional academic role. It’s not the kind of academic research you publish in peer-reviewed journals and get tenure for; neither is it teaching to tuition-paying students. Iowa State University has been quite willing to let me work on this weird project, for which I’m grateful, but I’ve always thought the project would probably best be served, in the long-run, with external support. That’s what the partnership with IFP provides. To be clear; I’m still an assistant teaching professor at Iowa State University. But now a larger part of my time will be carved out for building and maintaining New Things Under the Sun. And even though I’m partnering with IFP, I remain the sole writer of New Things Under the Sun and I retain complete editorial control. The main differences will be more frequent updates to New Things Under the Sun, as well as an updated design to the newsletter and website. Thanks to IFP support, for 2022, I’m targeting about three posts per month, at least on average. My rough goal is that two of those will be new articles, and the third will be a bundle of updates to existing articles (look for just such a bundle in your inbox today). At the same time, I’m very much aligned with the goals of IFP. As a senior fellow, I plan to do additional work specifically for them, helping them ground science policy proposals in rigorous evidence. That will influence the kinds of topics I prioritize writing about in New Things Under the Sun, since it will influence the kinds of things I read and think about. I view this as a feature, not a bug though. One of the goals of New Things Under the Sun has always been to try and highlight academic work that is relevant for understanding how the world works. That’s why posts are written around advancing a specific claim, rather than as a tour of thematically connected papers. It’s my hope that being in dialogue with people trying to find concrete ways to accelerate scientific and technological progress will keep me focused on the ways research can shed light on the world we actually live in. Cheers all, Matt

Welcome to this edition of our Tools for Thought series, where we interview founders on a mission to help us think better, be more productive, and more creative. Martin Schneider and Moritz Wallawitsch are the founders of RemNote, a powerful note-taking tool that features flashcards, PDF management, backlinks, and much more. Their goal is to build the go-to app to help you learn, stay organized, and think. In this interview, we talked about the difference between storing knowledge in your head and storing knowledge in your external brain, the power of spaced repetition, the importance of long-term personal knowledge management, how to foster concept-driven thinking by breaking ideas into “mind-sized bites”, and more. Enjoy the read, and when you’re done, go give RemNote a try: Moritz and Martin are also offering one month of free Pro features to all Ness Labs readers! Hi Moritz and Martin, thank you so much for agreeing to this interview. Let’s start with a bit of a philosophical question… Why do you think long-term personal knowledge management is important? Thanks for having us! Let me focus on each part of the phrase “long-term personal knowledge management.” First, “long-term” — the goal of any knowledge-management system should be long-term focused! Taking effective notes or learning something properly is hard work, and it’s only worth it if you become more effective in your work and become more likely to achieve your goals. If you’re learning for a class, for example, your notes should prepare you for your career or future project goals (not just your short-term assessments). If you’re organizing knowledge on the job, your notes should help you accomplish your future goals more effectively — solving problems, being creative, etc. While this may seem obvious, it’s pretty challenging to do in practice — our current tools just aren’t good enough. Too much information is filed away, never to resurface. In fact, most people I talk to still use paper and pencil for every note they take and study by cramming. So for us, the “long-term” focus is a core part of any learning or thinking tool and is strongly emphasized in RemNote. Second, the term “knowledge-management” — when done properly, I think that note-taking and long-term personal knowledge management are effectively superpowers that can dramatically expand our ability to be more effective problem solvers, thinkers, and creators. Human beings have the unique ability to manipulate and understand complex symbolic information. We leverage these capabilities to write, speak, draw diagrams, connect ideas, and more. No other animal can do this! It’s really remarkable. However, this native capacity is significantly limited if it is not leveraged properly. It’s only in the past few decades that we’ve begun to explore how to best use knowledge-management tools and processes to unblock and augment our learning and symbolic manipulation capabilities.  Finally, “personal” — there are already great products designed to help groups and teams work together more effectively. These tools solve an important problem, but the most important input to any team are the skills, creativity, etc. of the people on the team. We need to build tools that enable individuals to individually optimize their own thinking and learning so that we can collectively become better and more creative problem solvers. Furthermore, individuals’ systematic and ongoing development of knowledge will also grow society’s knowledge and accelerate innovation, progress, and solve more complex problems. As David Deutsch once said, all evils are caused by insufficient knowledge. We are in an age of technological acceleration and constant innovation, in which professionals are forced to keep up to date with the latest technology and build on top of existing knowledge. It’s important that we have tools that enable individuals to match the pace of their learning with the pace of knowledge growth. You mentioned our current tools aren’t enough… What gap exactly inspired you to start RemNote? RemNote originated from a place of personal frustration. In 2017, I (Martin) was at MIT, studying Computer Science. I have always loved to learn and to conduct research but struggled with two persistent challenges. First, classes felt artificially constrained by the four month time span of a semester. I would work hard to master course content, but would then forget what I learned a few months later. Second, I was frustrated with how hard it was to keep my thoughts, research, and projects organized. I needed a tool to streamline my thinking, connect ideas, and optimize my learning for the long term. Fortunately, these problems weren’t novel. I started to experiment with a variety of proven learning techniques and tools designed to address these challenges. I used Anki to explore spaced repetition, explored mnemonics through the USA Memory Championship, tried Evernote for my poor-man’s Zettelkasten, and more. I continued to search for an “all in one” thinking and learning tool and workflow but couldn’t find it. Soon, I realized that my workarounds and hacky automation scripts would never be sufficient for the fast, clean, and highly customizable “extension of my brain” that I wanted. I started to write RemNote’s initial code version in 2017. For three years, RemNote was a personal project. I worked on it a few hours a week while taking classes, working on other projects, and doing research. I think it’s critical for tool designers to personally and deeply engage with real problems as they design. This happened organically through this “side project” setup where I could implement an idea and directly assess and reflect on impact a few weeks later in my studies, research, and projects. It wasn’t until 2020 that I began to seriously wonder if others might find the tool useful as well. I released RemNote’s initial version online, teamed up with Moritz, and we’ve been hard at work refining, improving, and scaling the tool ever since!  We still feel that there’s a big gap around effective learning and thinking tools, and believe that we’ve only scratched the surface. We have a full team around the product now, and it’s really exciting to know that we can make a real dent here.  That’s exciting! And what exactly makes RemNote different? RemNote is different in both philosophy and focus. Every aspect of the tool is designed to support learning and long-term knowledge growth. We aim to make it easy for you to learn something once and then remember and leverage it forever. There are two sides to this: storing knowledge in your head and storing knowledge in your external brain. For “getting knowledge into your head”, we support the entire learning pipeline. You might start with organizing and capturing raw source materials using our PDF Annotator and Web Clipper. Leveraging our bullet-point editor, you can break down ideas hierarchically into notes, flashcards, and concepts. Next, you can use RemNote’s deeply integrated spaced repetition algorithms to practice and internalize what you’ve learned. Finally, you can use our knowledge-organization features (transclusion, linking, etc.) to structure and compound knowledge over time. The learning and idea generation processes all happen in one tool, with maximum speed and minimal friction. But, you don’t need to memorize or internalize everything! That’s where RemNote’s approach to knowledge management and long-term knowledge growth comes in. For example, I don’t need to memorize my friends’ phone numbers. I rely on my phone’s memory for this task. RemNote serves as a customizable and highly personalizable external brain for many types of knowledge — we want you to be able to organize and structure your rough ideas, long-term plans, Zettelkasten notes, scratch notes, and more. Our challenge is doing this in a way that enables super-fast access and organization, and we’ve tackled this with a unique mix of structure, linking, and transclusion features that we can talk about later. We have experimented a lot with figuring out how to help you organize knowledge in a way that scales effectively. Our concept-driven knowledge structure enables you to break down and organize ideas to keep your notes organized and automatically find insights even as your knowledge grows. For example, I have about 200K Rems and about 40K flashcards, collected over the last four years — and we have quite a few users with even bigger Knowledge Bases.  We want you to have 100% confidence that anything you put into RemNote won’t get lost, disorganized or unused. I think we’re a good part of the way there, and we are committed to continuing to innovate on top of our unique knowledge structure to get the remaining few percent. Information getting lost or unused is actually a major challenge with most note-taking tools. How is knowledge structured in RemNote? Everything in RemNote is a node in a graph — a “Rem”. This is true for bullets, flashcards, PDFs, documents, etc. We think our “everything is a Rem” approach is simple but very powerful. First, it enables easy linking and integrations with different kinds and types of media. For example, highlights made in our PDF Annotation tool can be directly linked or transcluded anywhere in your Knowledge Base using the exact same mechanism that you’d use to reference any other idea. A recent update allows you to capture web links and also reference, transclude, and organize them just as if they were another bullet in your graph (which they are). Second, this principle enables concept-driven thinking. When learning, a core goal should be to break ideas into “mind-sized bites” that you can then link back together. In RemNote, you can use the bullet hierarchy to break down ideas into “concepts”. These concepts can have definitions (which can be turned into flashcards), and can then be linked or transcluded to re-use and apply your ideas elsewhere. Third, thi...

Are you more of a glass half full or half empty kind of person? Those who develop the ability to see the world from a positive point of view can reap significant benefits including improved health, lower stress levels, increased career success, and even a longer lifespan. This is the surprising power of learned optimism. Learned optimism is the concept that a positive mindset can be cultivated, even in those with pessimistic tendencies. Heavily influenced by psychologist Martin Seligman, learned optimism is part of the positive psychology movement. By learning how to cultivate positivity in everyday life, you can improve your productivity and your mental health. The 3 P’s of pessimism Even though optimists and pessimists are faced with the exact same events, pessimists may be more likely to predict negative outcomes. Whereas an optimist might bounce back when things go wrong, pessimists can be dissuaded from trying again due to nagging doubts and perceived stress. This is due to a different outlook on permanence, pervasiveness, and personalisation. Permanence. Whereas an optimist believes that the darker days will pass, a pessimist may ruminate during a negative time in their life and see the darkness as permanent. When knocked down, the optimist can get back up and try again, because they know that life will get better. The pessimist will lack this motivation, because they have no belief that their circumstances will improve.  Pervasiveness. An optimist might experience a failure at work yet still be able to see that they have been successful in other areas, such as their personal life. The pervasiveness of pessimism leads a pessimist to believe that failure at work is evidence of, or will lead to, failure in all other aspects of life. It is therefore no surprise that this all-encompassing pessimism can lead to increased stress and an increased risk of mental health disease. Personalisation. An optimist has learned to attribute success in life to their own efforts and abilities. They are also much better at finding an external force or situation to blame when things go wrong. Conversely, a pessimist will see their successes as being due to something external to them, and disappointments as being solely their own responsibility. With negative personalisation beliefs, the cycle of pessimism continues. Conversely,  These are known as the “3 P’s of pessimism” as formulated by Martin Seligman, who is considered the father of positive psychology. Martin Seligman has been studying psychology since the 1960s, authoring more than 20 self-help books and publishing 250 articles. His research has illuminated the power of positive psychology to fight the 3 P’s of pessimism by practising learned optimism. The benefits of learned optimism For decades, researchers have explored the benefits of learned optimism. Seligman’s book Learned Optimism explores the power of optimism in enhancing quality of life, as well as constructive tips on breaking negative habits and nurturing a more positive internal dialogue. Some of the benefits of nurturing such a positive internal dialogue can seem surprising. First, learned optimism leads to higher motivation. According to psychologists Charles Carver and Michael Scheier: “Optimism is a cognitive construct (…) that also relates to motivation.” With more motivation to succeed, optimists exert more effort to guarantee achievement, in contrast with pessimists who are more likely to give up. But it does not stop there. Carver and Scheier’s research found that optimism can predict good health, better career success and superior social relations. All of these outcomes reflected the motivation an individual had to pursue their goals. Even the better social connections of optimists are likely due to their sustained effort to maintain professional and personal relationships. Dr Heather Rasmussen and colleagues also found that optimism was a significant predictor of health outcomes. An optimist is likely to live longer, have superior immune function, and complain of fewer physical symptoms including pain. Furthermore, in those who had a positive outlook, better health outcomes were also observed in those undergoing treatment for cancer or cardiovascular disease, as well as during pregnancy. Not limited to physical health outcomes, the cultivation of positive thinking can also improve markers of mental health. An optimists’ expectation of positive outcomes leads to upbeat feelings. Conversely, when pessimists expect a poor outcome, it can cause negative feelings including anxiety, anger, or sadness. In one study, a group of children were identified as having risk factors for depression. Some of these children were taught the skills required to develop a more optimistic outlook. After two years, those who had not received the training in optimism were more likely to have developed moderate to severe depression. Receiving training in learned optimism could therefore protect against poor mental health. In another study of twins, “pessimism contributed independently to the prediction of depression and [poor] life satisfaction.” A negative mindset also increased the likelihood of hostility and cynicism.  Finally, Professor Antony Manstead of Cardiff University and his colleagues noted that there is a relationship between learned optimism and lower stress levels. Optimism is strongly associated with the presence of active coping mechanisms and positive reinterpretation of a stressful situation. Optimists also tend to be better at acknowledging the source of stress without becoming emotionally fixated on it. The mechanisms of coping associated with learned optimism therefore counteract stress. Learned optimism can contribute to higher motivation, good physical and mental health, better career success, superior social relations, lower stress levels, which all taken together translate to a longer life span. So how can you go about learning optimism? How to learn optimism It is clear from the literature that learned optimism has far-reaching benefits for holistic living. Pessimism is a mindset that can feel pervasive and persistent, but it is possible to break the cycle with optimistic models and approaches that can increase self-belief and your drive to succeed: Carver, Scheier and Segerstrom confirm that anyone can learn optimism. Furthermore, optimists’ behaviours are almost always beneficial and therefore provide excellent models of living for those wishing to reap the benefits of positive thinking. The good news is: it doesn’t have to be hard. Martin Seligman has developed a simple ABCDE approach to go from learned helplessness to learned optimism. Let’s use the hypothetical example of fearing you will fail a professional exam to explain each step of Seligman’s method. It can be helpful to grab a pen and paper while you go through these steps. Adversity. Start by describing a recent experience of adversity. Be as specific and factual as possible in your description. Using our hypothetical example, you could write that you are procrastinating and having difficulty doing any preparation for an upcoming exam. Belief. Then, write down all the thoughts running through your mind while thinking about this adverse experience. Record the exact sentences, for example: “I’m not good enough to pass this exam” or “I’m not cut out for this job” — don’t try to be positive at this stage, the goal is to capture the essence of your pessimism so you can change your outlook in the next steps. Consequence. Now, consider the impact of these beliefs on your feelings and on your behaviour. For example: “These beliefs made me feel overwhelmed with anxiety” or “These beliefs made me procrastinate” — and don’t judge yourself, these consequences are perfectly natural given the negative beliefs they are based on. Disputation. It’s time to put your beliefs into perspective. You can either find a piece of evidence that disproves the negative belief (“This belief is inaccurate because I have already succeeded at such stressful exams in the past”) or an alternative view of the belief (“Another way to see this is that I care a lot about this job, and this is why this exam is making me feel anxious”). Energisation: Use the newfound energy from the disputation step to cultivate a more positive outlook on the challenge you are facing. Consider the progress you have made, and how this exercise has helped you better manage your negative beliefs. It is important to note that optimism and pessimism are not binary, absolute concepts. In his research paper “The Neural Basis of Optimism and Pessimism”, David Hecht of University College London’s Institute of Cognitive Neuroscience explains that positive and negative expectations of life are part of a continuum. Optimism in one part of your life, such as your career, can be contrasted by pessimism in another area, such as physical health. In addition, absolute optimism should not become a goal. While pessimism can lead to avoidance behaviours and even low mood, over-optimism can lead to reckless, risk-taking behaviours. Hecht notes that to live successfully, a fine balance must be found between the two states of expectation. This balance can be cultivated. To begin developing optimism, take time for self-reflection using the ABCDE method. Consider your natural response to difficult or stressful situations, as well as your motivation to return to better days. Even if your glass seems half-empty today, you can learn optimism to improve your expectation of the future and your drive to achieve it. The post Learned optimism: how to cultivate a talent for positive thinking appeared first on Ness Labs.

What is something we only become capable of doing after age eleven, that helps us solve complex problems and write poetry, but needs to be yielded carefully? That’s abstract thinking, a powerful tool for creativity and innovation which anyone can learn how to use better. The difference between concrete and abstract thinking Concrete thinking is closely related to experiences that can be directly observed. It involves everyday, tangible facts and physical objects. On the other hand, abstract thinking is a higher-order reasoning skill. It deals with conceptual ideas, patterns, and theories. For instance, thinking about the Statue of Liberty is a concrete thought, but thinking about what it represents — the idea of liberty — is an abstract thought. Listing the names of everyone on the team who are working on a specific project is concrete thinking, but questioning whether this is the best team for the project is abstract thinking. Another way to put it is that concrete thinking asks how whereas abstract thinking asks why. In the words of researchers from Tel-Aviv University: “Focusing on the means required to achieve a specific goal ultimately entails transforming an abstract idea into a concrete action and thus primes a concretizing mindset; likewise, focusing on the purpose of an action primes an abstracting mindset.”  According to famous psychologist Jean Piaget, it is not until around eleven years old that children become able to think abstractly and to use metacognition. Before that age, we are only able to think logically about objects we can physically manipulate. Our ability to think abstractly keeps on expanding as we grow up, but most people take this ability for granted, and very few proactively practice their abstract reasoning skills. Three concrete ways to practice abstract thinking It is possible to improve your abstract reasoning skills. Reframe the question. Go from “how?” to “why?” in order to take a step-back and tap into your abstract reasoning skills. For example, if you feel stuck trying to write a blog post, ask yourself: why am I writing this, who is this for, what exactly am I trying to achieve? This higher-order approach may help you discover a fresh angle to tackle your project. Look for patterns. Instead of looking at each concrete element in isolation, practice networked thinking to uncover abstract patterns and underlying dynamics in the relationship between those elements. Don’t be afraid to use your imagination. Sometimes patterns can be hard to detect, but the simple process of looking for them will help you improve your abstract reasoning skills. Take inspiration from abstract thinkers. Philosophers, artists, and scientists are great abstract thinkers. Like a philosopher, examine the nature of ideas such as success, reality, or community. Like a poet, go from concrete thinking to abstract thinking by using metaphors, simile, analogies, and symbolism. Like a scientist, formulate a theory by going from the particular to the general. Is the concrete event you are currently observing an occurrence of a wider phenomenon? Could you test your hypothesis? Abstract thinking is essential in order to solve complex problems, come up with innovative ideas, and collaborate with other people. It allows us to analyse situations, understand new concepts, formulate theories, and to put things in perspective. Without abstract thinking, we would not be able to grasp concepts such as friendship, hope, democracy, imagination, success, wisdom, happiness, or even love. However, while it’s a powerful tool to add to your thinking toolbox, it should not be the only tool, and it should be used wisely. A balancing game As with any powerful tool, abstract thinking can be a double-edged sword. First, abstract thinking without concrete thinking amounts to imagination without execution. Creativity requires an ambidextrous mindset which balances exploration and exploitation. Once you have figured out why an idea needs to see the light of day, you need to think about how you will make it happen. In other words, you need to go from abstract thinking to concrete thinking. It can also be dangerous for your mental health to always default to abstract thinking, especially when thinking about past events. Psychology researchers explain that “abstract rumination is characteristic of depressed individuals, as is the tendency to experience post-decisional regret.” It is particularly true of thinking about traumatic events, where concrete thinking has been found to be much more helpful than abstract thinking. Despite these caveats, abstract thinking skills are particularly helpful in situations that require thinking outside the box, uncovering hidden patterns, and generating innovative ideas. Just make sure you are balancing it with concrete thinking and monitoring your thought patterns so abstract thinking doesn’t turn into abstract rumination. The post The art and science of abstract thinking appeared first on Ness Labs.

This report describes how children and adolescents were more likely to receive a new diabetes diagnosis after infection with SARS-CoV-2, the virus that causes COVID-19.

Researchers found a link between mild Covid infections impaired hippocampal neurogenesis, decreased oligodendrocytes and myelin loss in mice one week after infections persisting until at least seven weeks leading them to conclude that even those with mild symptoms in the acute phase may experience lasting cognitive dysfunction.

Most people feel that, within the constraints they need to navigate, they are in control of their decisions. But we often automatically follow a train of thought or an external cue without noticing the selective factors in our attention. This phenomenon is called the attentional bias, and it affects many of the decisions we make. When our unconscious takes the lead The attentional bias can be defined as our tendency to focus on certain elements while ignoring others. Jonathan Baron, Professor of Psychology at the University of Pennsylvania, explains: “Attentional bias can be understood as failure to look for evidence against an initial possibility, or as failure to consider alternative possibilities.” Our attention can be biased by external events as well as internal thoughts and emotions. For instance, being hungry may make you pay more attention to food, and holding certain beliefs will skew your thinking towards decisions that are aligned with these beliefs. A famous example of attentional bias based on external events is found in cigarette smokers. Research using eye-tracking technology shows that, due to their brain’s altered reward system, pay more attention to smoking cues in their environment. That’s partly why ​​a staggering 75% of quitters return to smoking within a year. We tend to pay more attention to salient information, whether it’s relevant or not. In an experiment, Dr. Jan Smedslund, Professor Emeritus and Specialist in Clinical Psychology, asked a group of nurses to look through a hundred cards representing what they were told were excerpts from the files of a hundred patients.  For each patient, the card indicated whether the symptom was present or absent, and whether the disease was then found to be present or absent. Some patients had symptoms but no disease, others did not have symptoms but had the disease, some others did not have any symptoms nor the disease, etc. The nurses were asked to figure out whether there was a relationship between a particular symptom and a particular disease. Now, let’s have a look at the table below, which shows the repartition of the cases: Disease present Disease absent Symptom present 37 17 Symptom absent 33 13 Based on this table, Pr. Jonathan Baron points out that it is possible to determine that “a given patient has about a 70% chance of having the disease, whether this patient has the symptom or not.” In other words, “the symptom is useless in determining who has the disease and who does not, in this group of patients.” And yet, after going through the cards, 85% of the nurses concluded that there was a relationship between the symptom and the disease. Dr. Jan Smedslund concludes that “they tend to depend exclusively on the frequency of true positive cases in judging relationships.” Pr. Jonathan Baron adds that “many other experiments have supported [the] general conclusion that subjects tend to ignore part of the table. (…) People who have the chance do not inquire about the half of the table to which they do not attend.” But attentional bias can arise from within our minds as well. In a similar experiment, researchers Richard Nisbett and Lee Ross asked participants the following question: “Does God answer prayers?” Potential answers can be explored with a similar table: Prayer No prayer Manifestation Yes No No manifestation No No Again, people who pray will be more likely to answer “yes” to this question, justifying it by saying “​​many times I’ve asked God for something, and He’s given it to me”, and ignoring the other possibilities. Pr. Jonathan Baron explains: “If you think that God answers your prayers, it stands to reason that some piece of good fortune is a result of prayer.” However, he doesn’t think attentional bias is a fixed trait. He adds: “Further thinking might involve looking for alternative possibilities (such as the possibility that the good fortune would have occurred anyway) and looking for evidence that might distinguish these possibilities from our favored possibility (what happens when you do not pray). Attentional bias can therefore be correctable by actively open-minded thinking.” How to manage the attentional bias While it is impossible to completely get rid of the attentional bias, being aware of the existence of these unconscious processes that act like an invisible puppeteer behind our choices is a first step in reducing their impact on our decision-making. By applying metacognitive strategies to the management of your attention, you can take back control of some of your train of thoughts. Pay attention to your attention. Whenever you feel your attention being automatically pulled into a specific direction, ask yourself why this is the case. Is it a particularly salient piece of information, a cue that is linked to a past or current addiction, an answer that perfectly aligns with your existing values and beliefs? Go beyond the most obvious answer. If you find the answer to a question completely obvious, chances are some of your thinking is based on heuristics that may not be the only way to approach the problem at hand. Are there any alternative explanations? Did you fail to consider a different point of view? What answer would someone with different pre-existing beliefs give to the same question? You can take notes while you brainstorm, and list all of the alternative explanations you come up with. If you are in a work environment, this exercise also works well as a team. Cultivate open-mindedness. None of the previous metacognitive strategies will work if your tunnel vision prevents you from honestly considering the unconscious processes that guide your decisions, and if you are unable to consider alternative ways of thinking. Being open minded is not something you just decide to become. It can be cultivated by asking good questions, reading books outside of your usual interests, and connecting with people who think differently. Proactively managing your attentional bias requires a bit of effort, but it will make you a better thinker, leading to better decisions and a higher sense of self-awareness. It’s worth giving it a try! The post Attentional bias: the invisible puppeteer behind our decisions appeared first on Ness Labs.

​​The number of recent influenza cases is typical for this time of year, but the last time flu cases reached this level was before the coronavirus pandemic began.

Like the rest of New Things Under the Sun, this article will be updated as the state of the academic literature evolves; you can read the latest version here. Suppose we think there should be more research on some topic: asteroid deflection, the efficacy of social distancing, building safe artificial intelligence, etc. How do we get scientists to work more on the topic? Buy it One approach is to just pay people to work on the topic. Capitalism! The trouble is, this kind of approach can be expensive. To estimate just how expensive, Myers (2020) looks at the cost of inducing life scientists to apply for grants they would not normally apply for. His research context is the NIH, the US’ biggest funder of biomedical science. Normally, scientists seek NIH Funding by proposing their own research ideas. But sometimes the NIH wants researchers to work on some kind of specific project, and in those cases it uses a “request for applications” grant. Myers wants to see how big those grants need to be to induce people to change their research topics to fit the NIH’s preferences. Myers has data on all NIH “request for applications” (RFA) grant applications from 2002 to 2009, as well as the publication history of every applicant. RFA grants are ones where NIH solicits proposals related to a prespecified kind of research, instead of letting investigators propose their own topics (which is the bulk of what NIH does). Myers tries to measure how much of a stretch it is for a scientist to do research related to the RFA by measuring the similarity of the text between the RFA description and the abstract of each scientist’s most similar previously published article (more similar texts contain more of the same uncommon words). When we line up scientists left to right from least to most similar to a given RFA, we can see the probability they apply for the grant is higher the more similar they are (figure below). No surprise there. From Myers (2020) Myers can also do the same thing with the size of the award. As shown below, scientists are more likely to apply for grants when the money on offer is larger. Again, no surprise there. From Myers (2020) The interesting thing Myers does is combine all this information to estimate a tradeoff. How much do you need to increase the size of the grant in order to get someone with less similarity to apply for the grant at the same rate as someone with higher similarity? In other words, how much does it cost to get someone to change their research focus? This is a tricky problem for a couple reasons. First, you have to think about where these RFAs come from in the first place. For example, if some new disease attracts a lot of attention from both NIH administrators and scientists, maybe the scientists would have been eager to work on the topic anyway. That would overstate the willingness of scientists to change their research for grant funding, since they might not be willing to change absent this new and interesting disease. Another important nuance is that bigger funds attract more applicants, which lowers the probability any one of them wins. That would tend to understate the willingness of scientists to change their research for more funding. For instance, if the value of a grant increases ten-fold, but the number of applicants increases five-fold, then the effective increase in the expected value of the grant has only doubled (I win only a fifth as often, but when I do I get ten times as much). Myers provides some evidence that the first concern is not really an issue and explicitly models the second one. The upshot of all this work is that it’s quite expensive to get researchers to change their research focus. In general, Myers estimates getting one more scientist to apply (i.e., getting one whose research is typically more dissimilar than any of the current applicants, but more similar than those who didn’t apply) requires increasing the size of the grant by 40% or nearly half a million dollars over the life of a grant! Sell it Given that price tag, maybe a better approach is to try and sell scientists on the importance of the topic you think is understudied. Academic scientists do have a lot of discretion in what they choose to study; convince them to use it on the topic you think is important! The article “Gender and what gets researched” looked at some evidence that personal views on what’s important do affect what scientists choose to research: women are a bit more likely to do female-centric research then men, and men who are exposed to more women (when their schools go coed) are more likely to do gender-related research. But we also have a bit of evidence from other domains that scientists do shift priorities to work on what they think is important. Perhaps the cleanest evidence comes from Hill et al. (2021), which looks at how scientists responded to the covid-19 pandemic. In March 2020, it became clear to practically everyone in the world that more information on covid-19 and related topics was the most important thing in the world for scientists to work on. The scientific community responded: by May 2020 and through the rest of the year, about 1 in every 20-25 papers published was related to covid-19. And I don’t mean 1 in every 20-25 biomedical papers - I mean all papers! From Hill et al. (2021) This was a stunning shift by the standards of academia. For comparison, consider Packalen and Bhattacharya (2011), which looks at how biomedical research changed over the second-half of the twentieth century. Packalen and Bhattacharya classify 16 million biomedical publications, all the way back to 1950 and look at the gradual changes in disease burden that arise due to the aging of the US population and the growing obesity crisis. As diseases associated with being older and more obese became more prevalent in the USA, surely it was clear that those diseases were more important to research. Did the scientific establishment respond by doing more research related to those diseases? Sort of. As diseases related to the aging population become more common, the number of articles related to those diseases does increase. But the effect is a bit fragile - it disappears under some statistical models and reappears in others. Meanwhile, there seems to be no discernible link between the rise of obesity and research related to diseases more prevalent in a heavier population. Further emphasizing the extraordinary pivot into covid-related research, most of this pivot preceded changes in grant funding. The NIH did shift to issuing grants related to covid, but with a considerable lag, leaving most scientists to do their work without grant support. As illustrated below, the bulk of covid related grants arrived in September, months after the peak of covid publications (the NSF seems to have moved faster). From Hill et al. (2021) On the one hand, I think these studies do illustrate the common-sense idea that if you can change scientists beliefs about what research questions are important, then you can change the kind of research that gets done. But on the other hand, the weak results in Packalen and Bhattacharya (2011) are a bit concerning. Why isn’t there a stronger response to changing research needs, outside of global catastrophes? It’s hard I would point to two challenges to swift responses in science; these are also likely reasons why Myers (2020) finds it so expensive to induce scientists to apply for grants they would not normally apply for. Both reasons stem from the fact that a scientific contribution isn’t worth much unless you can convince other scientists it is, in fact, a contribution. The first challenge with convincing scientists to work on a new topic is there need to be other scientists around who care about the topic. This is related to the model presented in Akerlof and Michaillat (2018). Akerlof and Michaillat present a model where scientists’ work is evaluated by peers who are biased towards their own research paradigms. They show that if favorable evaluations are necessary to stay in your career (and transmit your paradigm to a new generation), then new paradigms can only survive when the number of adherents passes a critical threshold. Intuitively, even if you would like to study some specific obesity-related disease because you think it’s important, if you believe few other scientists agree, then you might choose not to study it, since it will be such a slog getting recognition. There’s a coordination challenge - without enough scholars working in a field, scholars might not want to work in a field. (This paper is also discussed in more detail here) The second challenge is that, even if there is a critical mass of scientists working on the topic, it may be hard for outsiders to make a significant contribution. That might make outsiders reluctant to join a field, and hence slow its growth. We have a few pieces of evidence that this is the case. Hill et al. (2021) quantify research “pivots” by looking at the distribution of journals cited in a scientists career and then measuring the similarity of journals cited in a new article to the journals cited in the scientist’s last three years. For example, my own research has been in the field of economics of innovation and if I write another paper in that vein, it’s likely to cite broadly the same mix of journals I’ve been citing (e.g., Research Policy, Management Science, and various general economics journals). Hill and coauthors’ measure would classify this as being a minimum pivot of close to 0. I also have written about remote work, and that was a bit of a pivot for me; the work cited a lot of journals in fields I didn’t normally cite up until this point (Journal of Labor Economics, Journal of Computer-Mediated Communication, but also plenty of economics journals). Hill and coauthors’ measure would classify this as an intermediate pivot, greater than 0 but a lot less than 1. But if I were to completely leave ec...

Welcome to this edition of our Tools for Thought series, where we interview founders on a mission to help us better manage our thoughts, emotions, and knowledge. Kai Koch is the co-founder of Ahead, a mobile application designed to help people master their emotions in just five minutes a day. Developed in partnership with psychologists, Ahead uses behavioral science to teach emotional habits, so you can become more calm and conscious. It features short lessons, a progress tracker, and a space for guided reflection. It’s a bit like an emotional pocket coach. In this interview, we talked about the science-based benefits of emotional intelligence, the problem with traditional self-help content, the ripple effect of a high emotional quotient, the key difference between IQ and EQ, and much more. Enjoy the read! Hi Kai, thank you so much for agreeing to this interview. Emotional intelligence has only recently been put on the map. What does it mean exactly to be emotionally intelligent?  Thank you for having me. Great question. There are many definitions of emotional intelligence flying around. A simple one is this: the ability to notice and manage emotions. For example, an emotionally intelligent husband would notice when he’s getting angry and stop himself from doing anything stupid — like calling his wife a rhinoceros. Or an emotionally intelligent wife would be able to motivate her husband with charm, not pressure, to take out the trash. Most of us quickly recognize people with high EQ: they are highly respected, connected, and successful. I would disagree though that emotional intelligence has only recently been put on the map — it’s just been called different names in the past: social skills, manners, behaving like a grown up. What’s new is that people realize that improving their EQ is far more impactful for their lives than, for example, improving their Excel or French skills. That’s a great point about the long history of emotional intelligence. Now, what’s the origin story behind Ahead’s mission of mastering your emotions? My co-founder John and I have known each other for fourteen years and this is our second venture together. The idea for Ahead was born in a very intense period while in that previous company. I lost a lot of my hair and we both lost our relationships at the time. It became obvious to us that we — like most — have some quirks and unhelpful habits that were standing between us and success, both in our private and professional lives. But as we tried to get emotionally smarter, the self-improvement books, TED talks, and courses we used were a huge disappointment. Lots of inspiring words, but when it came to actually making it work in real life, they sucked. We’re living in the 21st century, but we still try to teach cognitive skills by making students listen to a teacher’s wise words — when what’s really needed is to practice those skills yourself. You can’t teach children to ride a bike by giving them a “ride-a-bike” book to read. Why try to teach how to stay cool, content, or charming that way? But people do keep on trying to acquire these skills by reading books, and personal development in general is a massive market. How is Ahead’s approach to self-improvement different from other solutions? We don’t need bogus gurus selling us their 3, 5 or 10 secrets to a better me by tomorrow, and still, that industry is $70 billion large. We need a learning environment that helps us try things out ourselves and learn by doing. A book lying on our nightstand or a coach we see once a month can’t help us do that. Our smartphone on the other hand can: it’s with us when emotions actually happen, allowing us to improve right then and there. It adjusts to what we need, giving us tailored advice and reminders when we need them. And it connects us with people on the same journey. Ahead is not about passively consuming advice. It’s about you finding what works for yourself: how to notice your (or others’) emotions are rising, how to best manage them? All of that put into an app that’s interactive and fun, that feels like a game, not like a chore. Because as soon as things become complex or boring, we all quit, even when it comes to our deepest dreams. Talking about complexity… It can be difficult to quantify something as complex as emotions. How exactly does Ahead monitor progress and suggest improvements? You are right. It’s harder to measure how much better you learned to handle your emotions than how much weight you lost. But it can be done. We’ve worked hard to build tools that help you gain clarity on your emotional moments and on what to improve. We’ve developed fun surveys that show you how those close to you already see the progress you’re making. We’ve designed your journey so you notice how you’re solving harder and harder challenges as you level up. And whenever you learn something about yourself, we use that to give you a learning path that’s even better tailored to your experiences, needs, and goals. Do you think there are any instances where EQ trumps IQ? I personally don’t think we should look at this from the angle of “which is better”. What’s exciting is that our IQ is more or less set in stone from birth, but our EQ can be trained like a muscle throughout our lives. None of us is at mercy of our emotions. Some research suggests that up to 60% of our job performance depends on our EQ. Of course our romantic relationships and friendships rely on it almost entirely. And even our health benefits from worrying or screaming less. And the better your EQ, the better you can improve other skills: once you know how to overcome emotions that keep you from getting better, you can learn anything. Then you know how to floss regularly or exercise — even if you don’t feel like it. The ripple effect sounds amazing. Why do you think people start using Ahead in the first place? The motivations to use Ahead are manifold. We see people looking to improve their (romantic) relationships or further accelerate their career. The unifying characteristic is that they all have a growth mindset. They believe that EQ can be improved. They believe they have what it takes to improve: They’ve made their way through challenging studies and jobs, built trustful relationships, and raised kind children. We have a channel where we collect all feedback from our users. It still awes me to read all the messages from people around the world that managed to get their frustration and anger outbursts under control — this is incredibly motivating for us in the team. What about you… How do you personally use Ahead? For me, Ahead has become a tool that helps me to understand myself better. I use it every day as an “extension” of my emotional brain. By now, observing myself and understanding what triggers my behaviors has become a little bit of a game to me. And I’m always excited to learn new techniques from our community of users to help me better recognize and manage emotions. There’s still so much to achieve around emotional intelligence. Where would you like Ahead to be in the next few years? We see it this way: evolution created emotions to keep us safe from lions and reproduce. But today emotions like fear, anger, sadness, etc. often doesn’t help, but hinders us. The good thing is: we are not at the mercy of our emotions — we can learn to manage them. We can learn the most helpful skill there is to be happy, successful, and connected. The bad thing is: So far we never did. We don’t learn EQ skills at school, university, or at work – and only if we’re lucky, do we randomly pick up a trick or two before we’re old. We want to change that and enable all of us to better manage emotions. So that we can all be happier together. Thank you so much for your time, Kai! Where can people learn more about Ahead and give it a try? You can download Ahead here and give it a try. We would love to hear your feedback! The post Become more calm and conscious with Kai Koch, co-founder of Ahead appeared first on Ness Labs.

We often hear advice about how self-reflection can help us learn more about our true inner selves and can help resolve interpersonal conflicts. However, self-reflection should not be reserved for our personal lives only; it can also be richly rewarding for our professional careers. Self-reflection can be defined as the process of replaying recent experiences in our minds to discover insights about ourselves. Researchers describe it as “a personal process that can deepen one’s understanding of self and can lead to significant discoveries or insights.” These insights can include clues to our values, clarity about our behaviors, and the sources of our knowledge. Self-reflection is also a tool that helps us understand where we come from and how we define successes and failures for ourselves. It is an opportunity to test our assumptions about the world around us and uncover where we can grow and improve. Essentially, time spent on self-reflection creates a chance to learn more about ourselves and what we need to grow personally and professionally. Self-reflection for job performance When it comes to job performance, people tend to believe that practice always makes perfect. The more often we practice learning a new skill, the more likely we will be to master relevant tasks. However, a study suggests that reflection is a much more powerful learning tool when it comes to job performance. In the study, 101 employees at a large company were assigned to two groups: reflection or practice. The practice group spent the last 15 minutes of their day participating in regular job training, while the reflection group spent their last 15 minutes journaling about their experiences that day and the lessons learned from their training. All participants completed a skills test at the end of their training. Researchers found that those in the reflection group scored an average of 15 more points on the assessment than the practice group. The study shows the value of allocating time for reflection to increase new employees’ skills and knowledge. Engaging in self-reflection may also improve your job performance by protecting your mental health, and more specifically by helping you avoid burnout. In a study of English teachers in Iran, researchers found that teachers who spent more time reflecting on the day’s activities were less likely to experience burnout. In addition, the researchers suggested that those who engaged in self-reflection had a stronger emotional attachment and dedication to their job It may feel counter-intuitive, but self-reflection doesn’t have to be a solo process. ​​Having a colleague willing to help you can strengthen your reflection process. It can also allow you to form closer bonds with trusted colleagues and give you the chance to hear insights from others that you may not have seen yourself.  Dr. Rebecca Finley from Thomas Jefferson University suggests that mentors and colleagues can assist you by asking prompting questions such as: what happened, why does it matter, and what do you want to do now? Or: where are you right now, and where do you want to be? Reflecting on your professional experiences and learning from them can influence your career choices. Perhaps reflecting on a presentation you gave makes you discover you may need to take some public speaking classes, or perhaps you decide to hire an executive coach after you struggle to handle a conversation with your manager. You may also find a mismatch between what you value and the career path you have chosen, and you must make decisions about what you will do next. Reflection prompts action, so you can use the lessons you learned about yourself to take the next step forward in your professional life. How to practice self-reflection at work Researchers created a multi-step process for individuals who wish to reflect on their experiences. Based on their approach, here are some tips that can help you reflect on your work experiences. Find a quiet place: A quiet location with no interruptions is crucial for reflection. If the office is too loud during the day, consider waiting until the evening to sit down and review what went well, what didn’t go so well, and what you plan to do next. Record your thoughts. Journaling is a powerful reflection tool. Whether you decide to use an app or a good old notebook, make sure to write down your thoughts so your self-reflection practice becomes an actionable thinking tool. Examine everything. As you are replaying what you experienced at work in your mind, think about each decision you made along the way. What was the context when you made the decision? What did you accomplish or not accomplish by making this decision? What knowledge did you have that contributed to your choice? Imagine the alternatives. Ask “what if” questions. What would have happened if you made different decisions during the process or project? Would you have gotten closer to your goals or not? Organize your insights. Do you see any trends or patterns in your discoveries? Group them to analyze them more easily and decide which ones are the most relevant to your work. Turn your reflection into action. Decide if there are any actions that you need to take as a result of this process. Some situations may call for immediate next steps, while others can be integrated into your professional life over time. Self-reflection is a great tool that can help us learn more about ourselves on our career journey. The process can help us better understand our beliefs and behaviors, and inform the next steps of our professional growth. Self-reflection is also helpful if you are questioning some of your recent decisions, are experiencing a disconnect between your values and your actions, or are in the middle of a high-stress situation. Remember, whether you decide to reflect on your own or with a colleague, it is essential to find a quiet space without distractions. While we all have competing priorities, carving out time to learn more about ourselves is crucial for guiding ourselves towards our career dreams. The post The power of self-reflection at work appeared first on Ness Labs.

Whether you are trying to create an online course or write an article, it can be hard to generate good ideas. Whenever you feel stuck, it can be helpful to boost your creativity with a systematic approach. The Zwicky box is a simple and effective way to create many unique ideas by breaking the problem down into categories, adding values to each category, and combining these values to create unique answers. The secret behind the man who discovered dark matter Fritz Zwicky was one of the most prolific scientists of the twentieth century. The Swiss astronomer wrote over three hundred articles, ten books, held fifty patents, developed jets and rocket propulsion systems, and discovered dark matter. He also found over a hundred supernovae by himself, and he was credited with coining the term “supernova”. For his work in astronomy, he was awarded the Gold Medal of the Royal Astronomical Society in 1973 for “his many distinguished contributions to the understanding of the constituents of the Galaxy and the Universe.” He also received the Medal for Freedom in 1949 from President Truman for his innovation. To say that Zwicky had the incredible ability to generate unique solutions to the problems he faced is an understatement. Yet, many do not know his creativity, problem-solving, and ideation method. His secret sauce is the Zwicky Box (also called “morphological analysis”), a simple yet powerful strategy for generating ideas and solving problems. In 1971, Zwicky wrote: “I feel that I have finally found the philosopher’s stone in what I call the morphological outlook and method.” According to him, the Zwicky box could increase the efficiency of our brains by 100 times. Zwicky’s strategy for solving problems and generating answers is simple. Take a problem, break it down into categories, add various values into each category, and link the values together to create unique combinations. Here is an example of what a Zwicky box for building an app looks like: The problem with how we think “Zwicky believed that if only we could free ourselves from our pedestrian patterns of thought and learn to think morphologically, the future could be shaped by our images – however bold – rather than by the inertias of existing institutions and investments.” — Jesse L. Greenstein in Remembering Zwicky. When it comes to solving problems, our brains often jump to familiar answers. For example, if your phone is low on battery, charge it. If it’s cold outside, turn the heater on. While these familiar solutions are good in certain situations, they may not be enough to navigate more complex areas of our lives. Sometimes, the problem does not lie in coming up with ideas, but stopping too early when you only have a few solutions. Only when all the possible solutions are exhausted can we find the best answers. Thomas Edison had 1093 patents, while Mozart had 600 musical compositions. However, we only remember a few, and the groundbreaking ones were only possible thanks to the number of ideas they generated. Prolific creatives such as Ed Sheeran and John Mayer also attributed their success to coming up with many ideas before selecting the best ones. Zwicky’s work also involved solving complex and challenging problems. These are not problems you can answer with conventional answers. Instead of squeezing his brain to develop unique solutions, Zwicky used the morphological box to generate many ideas. Thanks to this approach, he could come up with a set of diverse answers and select the best possible solution. And the good news is: you can use his method as well. How to create your own Zwicky box A Zwicky box is powerful but is not hard to build. Break your problem into categories and add values to each category. Then, create unique combinations by combining the values from each category. Let’s say you want to come up with a new app. You can follow the steps along here by downloading our Zwicky box template. Step 1: Figure out your categories. The first step is to define our categories. Here is what your Zwicky box might look like at the start: Finding your categories is simple: take an example of a similar existing solution, list each part, and ask if you can turn it into a category. For instance, let us take Roam Research, and break it down into its components: Note-taking app – Product Knowledge workers – Demographic Subscription model – Revenue model Bi-directional linking – Unique feature Networked thought – Brand message Then, add each category into its column. You should have something like this: Step 2: Add the values Next, brainstorm values for each category. If you have a problem coming up with values, try looking for inspiration from existing solutions, searching online, or brainstorming with your team. As long as it is workable and realistic, add it into the Zwicky box. Step 3: Create unique combinations Next, combine the values to create a brand new idea. Randomly pick one of the values from each category and link the values together. For example: Combination 1: To-do list app, for students, one-time payment, language processing, and organize it all Combination 2: Read-it later app, for writers, subscription model, team workspace, fastest app Combination 3: CRM, for students, subscription, team workspace, think better Continue to create these combinations even if you don’t find anything valuable at first. The power of a Zwicky box comes from the many ideas it creates. Suppose you have a Zwicky box with five categories. Each category contains five values, leading up to 5 x 5 x 5 x 5 x 5 = 3125 unique combinations. With this many options, you are bound to generate at least one or two high quality, innovative ideas. Using the Zwicky box in your everyday life The process may sound quite theoretical, but the Zwicky box has many practical applications. Here are four ideas on using a Zwicky box in your everyday life: Creativity. From story planning to content creation, creatives can utilise the Zwicky box to generate original ideas. Innovation. You can use a Zwicky box for market innovation, business model creation, product development, and prototyping. Decision making. A Zwicky box can help you with strategizing, financial modelling, and daily decision making. Brainstorming in a team. It can be helpful to brainstorm ideas with your team with a Zwicky box where everyone can contribute to creating and filling the Zwicky box. The Zwicky box is a simple tool to improve your creativity and problem-solving. Simply break down your problems into their components, add values and link them together to create new ideas. It’s easy to set up and can be used for many situations, from creating your next business model or article. Get started by downloading our free Zwicky box template. The post The Zwicky box: a powerful method for problem solving and creativity appeared first on Ness Labs.

With wildfires burning in the western United States, smoke fills the air. This is an animation of the air quality during the past couple of months.

Covid accounted for 14 percent of all deaths in the United States from March 2020 until all adults became eligible for the vaccine in April, compared with 11 percent of deaths since then.

Companies growing explosively in the mental health arena face three key blind spots: too few clinical therapists, challenges in building a high-gross margin company, and the the possibility of doing more harm than good.

Venture capitalists, who provided a total of $35.2 million for mental health startups in 2011, upped their ante in 2020, providing nearly $2.4 billion in funding.

During the pandemic, about 4 in 10 adults in the U.S. have reported symptoms of anxiety or depressive disorder, a share that has been largely consistent, up from one in ten adults who reported these symptoms from January to June 2019

When asked questions normally used to screen patients for mental health problems, 24 percent showed clinically significant symptoms of major depressive disorder and 30 percent showed symptoms of generalized anxiety disorder.

In our 2020 commissioned survey, 60% of respondents said that current public investment in mental health research is not enough. This is a 9% increase, up from 51% in 2018.

Nepal has halted Covid-19 vaccinations in children ages 12 to 17 in eight districts because of a shortage of syringes.

Nicholas Christakis is director of the Human Nature Lab at Yale University and author of the bestseller "Apollo’s Arrow." He speaks with Hari Sreenivasan about the next phase of the pandemic based on previous pandemics.

Molnupiravir was associated with a decreased the risk of hospitalization from Covid-19 by only 30%, compared to a reduction of almost 90% with Pfizer's PAXLOVID. The FDA advisory committee also limited its use in non-pregnant adults because of their concerns about the potential risk of mutations in human DNA.

Around 30% of adults under age 35 said that mental health services are difficult to access near their home compared to just 12% of adults age 65 and older. Overall, only 1 in 2 adults said that mental health services were easy to access and 1 in 3 said it's easier to get mental health care today than it was five years ago.

A computational biologist thinks potentially half the globe may contract Omicron over the coming weeks and months.

The omicron wave appears to have peaked and is already subsiding in South Africa, with a relatively minor impact on their healthcare system. However, the positive rate is still around 29%, suggesting high circulation among their population. other fluctuations.