Depth Psychology

I spent most of my spare time rereading a couple of books for the past a few weeks. For The Passion of the Western Mind, I did not finish the last one third of the book in my first attempt. Once I was done with whole book I was surprised that the author puts so much weights on the influence of depth pschology like Jung's work(As a matter of fact this is one of the criticism of the book). Since I was also rereading some chapters of Boundaries of the Soul: The Practice of Jung's Psychology , it makes me to want to read a bit more about Jung. So I ordered two new books about Jung: Jung to Live By and Jung: A Very Short Introduction.

I admit that I might have been too much into Jung at this moment, but what the heck, that's usually the way we get to know things: we overshoot and overcorrect, but eventually we will end up with the right spot. We will see how it goes.

Out-growing

The greatest and most important problems of life are all in a certain sense insoluble. They must be so because they express the nessary polarity inherent in every self-regulating system. They can never be solved, but only outgrown. This "out-growing" on further experience was seen to consist in a new level of consciousness. Some higher or wider interest arose on the person's horizon, and through this widening of his view the insoluble problem lost its urgency. It was not solved logically in its own terms, but faded out when confronted with a new and stronger life-tendency. It was not repressed and made unconscious, but merely appeared in a different light, and so, did indeed become different. What, on a lower level, had led to the wildest conflicts and to panicky outbursts of emotions, viwed from the higher level of personality, now seemed like a storm in the valley seen from a high mountain-top. This does not mean that the thunderstorm is robbed of its reality, but instead of being in it one is now above it.

This is Jung talking about the goals of analysis.

Verb vs Noun

Verbs are more important than nouns. Verb implies action, the dynamics, the give and take, stimuli and response, input and feedback, trial and error. Noun, on the other hand, tends to focus on the snapshots, the static, the labels, the stigmatized definitions. With the help of noun we simplify this world, categorize phenomena and ideas, make (casual) connections among them whenever possible. Along this process of Platonifying the world around us, however, we risk losing the texture of reality, its nuance, its colorfulness. Verb gives us a more solid footing on an empirical ground, learning from our mistakes and updating our prior knowledge with new developments.

For that matter we ought to pay more attention to the "living" of our live, not the live itself. We should favor the studying over studies, organizing over organizations, loving over love.

One of Weick's catchy phrase is "Leap before you see" -- exactly the opposite of conventional wisdom of "See before you leap". The essential point here is, unfortunately, especially in a complex situation, we can not see until we act.

My BS,updated

I know I am quite open to new ideas and thinking, and I am not afraid of changing my mind in the light of new evidences or findings.

My diet has changed a lot over the years. I did not used to care anything about my diet, then I moved on to be calorie conscious -- reading labels carefully before putting into my mouth. At one time I became obsessive with staying away from any sugary stuff, which I still do, but not acting like a Puritan. My view toward starchy foods also changed over the time, from my staple food to now days occasional intake mainly for pleasure.

The way I exercise also evolves. I started as a swimmer -- I used to swim for a few hours every day to lose the weight I put on after quitting smoking. Then I started running, mixing up with wight lifting along the way, but still aerobics was my main goal for a long time. Right now I spend a lot less time in the gym, seeking mostly intermittent high-intensity workout while cutting down a lot on aerobics. Playing basketball, short sprint, jumping and sometimes vigorous swimming are the way to go. I still go to the gym for aerobics classes a few times a week, and I attend my Yoga session every Friday religiously(This is probably among the few things I've stuck around for a long time). I pick what works for me and ditch what does not, and I feel I am in the best shape ever in my life: my body fat sits at 5% level and I don't have to be a gym rat to achieve this.

Compared to my philosophy of fitness, there are more vacillating of my views toward this world. I was brought up with a strict sense of moral values and discipline, I was instilled with reverence toward teachers, parents, authority, and experts. But deep inside there has always been the rebellious nature, suppressed and potent. After coming to the States, I've come more under the influence of libertarianism, with Bill Maher playing an important role in this regard. The studies of economics prompt me to look at things from a utilitarian perspective, which actually does not click with me naturally -- I've never been a cynical person: as a matter of fact it's just the opposite, having a quite cynical mother has shaped my instinct aversion to cynicism.

Karl Weick's sensemaking has had by far the biggest impact on me. The quintessence of his idea is that you can only start with a general direction of your life, and with forceful actions things will make sense to you retrospectively, and there is nothing wrong with self-fulfilling prophecy. Don't over plan, leap before you see, improvise along the way but be heedful to what's going on, seek plausibility over accuracy.

In Black Swan Taleb also touches upon the idea of self-fulfilling prophecy, but in terms of a negative tone, i.e., narrative fallacy and conformation bias. Maybe my pendulum has swung a bit too far toward Weick, and I need to pull back somehow. Weick, as a social psychologist, tries to understand social phenomena, while Taleb as a trader has a strong empirical bent. But the most important point I take from Black Swan it's the skepticism: too often it's harder to doubt than accept.

Having said all these, I don't see signifcant changes or departure from the BS I put together back in January. The overarching theme of my BS lies in my evolutionary perspective toward pretty much very thing. we, as the citizens of this modern world, are trapped in an archiac mind and body which are suitable to a primitve environment, but are ill-prepared to the modern world. Our dualistic nature of human and animal, something we can not deny or change, lies in the roots of the struggling of the civilized and educated men and women.

Black Swan

This is a quite controversial book. Overall I like the book, and most likely I will read it for a second time with a highlighter. I guess most the criticism comes from the author's relentless attack on mainstream economists and statisticians.

The author makes a lot of (good) points about how we deal with uncertainties, synthesizing them into one big theme -- Black Swan, the rare and highly consequential events that seem more likely ex post. 9/11, stock market crash, and best sellers are all examples of Black Swan.

I will try to summarize his points from different perspectives. Most of them are not that original, as the matter of fact I sort of knew a lot them before reading the book, scattered around in different fields. But this in no means diminishes the author's achievement in this book by putting them together in a bold, provocative, sometime quite emotional way.

Philosophically the author makes a few points in epistemology. We tend to place more weight on what we know than we don't know. It's often the part that we don't know we don't know that will come back to haunt us. Also we to tend theorize more than necessary, we overstate the causal links that might not be there. The author goes a great length to attack "platonified" knowledge, the overcatogerized, ossified, dogmatized theories.

Psychologically we fall into a lot fallacies: the survival bias, the conformation bias, the narrative fallacy. As the result the world appears more orderly to us than it is.

For the technical point of view, we are trapped(fooled) by the dominant notion of normal distribution, the bell-curve, or broadly speaking the Gaussian family of distribution. But in reality a lot of random variables in so-called extremistan don't not follow Gaussian at all, instead power law distribution is more appropriate. So by blindly sticking to the bell-curve, we vastly underestimate the odds of rare event since it's probability drops so quickly once it's beyond a few standard deviations.