Heffernan Quotes

You cannot fix a problem that you refuse to acknowledge.

When we care about people, we care less about money, and when we care about money, we care less about people.

As long as it (an issue) remains invisible, it is guaranteed to remain insoluble.

The combination of power, optimism and abstract thinking makes powerful people more certain. The more cut-off they are from others, the more confident they are that they are right.

Silence is the language of inertia.

Being a critical thinker starts with resisting the urge to be a pleaser.

money appears to motivate only our interest in ourselves, making us selfish and self-centered...Money makes people feel self-sufficient, which also means they don't need or care about others; it's each man for himself

We know - intellectually - that confronting an issue is the only way to resolve it. But any resolution will disrupt the status quo. Given the choice between conflict and change on the one hand, and inertia on the other, the ostrich position can seem very attractive.

Humans do not have enough mental capacity to do all the things that we think we can do. As attentional load increases, attentional capacity gradually diminishes.

Dominant people, it appears, use snap judgements and conform to received wisdom more than do the less dominant. Those who need power, and those who have it, think differently.

Overall, people are about twice as likely to seek information that supports their own point of view as they are to consider an opposing idea.19

On a voyage of exploration, how can you price what you’ll find before you even set sail?

Those who consistently attempt multitasking find it harder to ignore irrelevant information and take longer moving between tasks—in other words, for all their frantic activity, they’re actually wasting time. And

according to the psychologist irving Janis, is that our sense of belonging (which makes us feel safe) blinds us to dangers and encourages greater risk-taking.

thinking: a rather prosaic, low-tech concept, easily forgotten and routinely underrated. But

As I sat alone at the computer hour after hour it seemed I was learning “computers.” In fact, I was learning culture.

The only consequence of their (employee) silence is that the blind (employer) lead the blind.

Indeed, there seems to be some evidence not only that all love is based on illusion — but that love positively requires illusion in order to endure.

It’s a truism that love is blind; what’s less obvious is just how much evidence it can ignore.

Questions are the heart and soul of constructive conflict. They open up the exploration, bring in new information, and reframe debate. When

the road to success is littered with mistakes, it matters more to build trust and encourage ambition than to reward obedience. At

The sooner we associate long hours and multitasking with incompetence and carelessness the better. The next time you hear boasts of executives pulling an all-nighter or holding conference calls in their cars, be sure to offer your condolences; it's grim being stuck in sweatshops run by managers too ignorant to understand productivity and risk. Working people like this is as smart as running your factory without maintenance. In manufacturing and engineering businesses, everyone learns that the top priority is asset integrity: protecting the machinery on which the business depends. In knowledge-based economies, that machinery is the mind.

Now let's make Virginia Heffernan a man. Can you imagine the same kind of spittle-flecked rage directed at a busy working father who admits to feeding his kids Annie's Organic Mac & Cheese?

It’s when we stop and think that we rediscover the courage, wit, compassion, imagination, delight, frustration, discovery, and devotion that work can provoke—in short, all the things at work that do count, beyond measure.

Over 100 years of research into productivity has shown that, after about forty hours a week, when we work longer, we make more mistakes – and the extra time goes to cleaning them up, the mess we made. ‘We see it here in England and in the

Money is just one of the forces that blind us to information and issues which we could pay attention to - but don't. It exacerbates and often rewards all the other drivers of willful blindness; our preference for the familiar, our love for individuals and for big ideas, a love of busyness and our dislike of conflict and change, the human instinct to obey and conform and our skill at displacing and diffusing responsibility. All of these operate and collaborate with varying intensities at different moments in our lives. The common denominator is that they all make us protect our sense of self-worth, reducing dissonance and conferring a sense of security, however illusory. In some ways, they all act like money; making us feel good at first, with consequences we don't see. We wouldn't be so blind if our blindness didn't deliver rewards; the benefit of comfort and ease.

In business,” Siilasmaa said, “we forget that we are human. Many strong leaders think they should not be friends with their colleagues. I disagree. Business is emotional. I like to be friends with my colleagues. You get through a crisis because you care so much.

Because that’s what a comic is, ultimately: a collection of pages. It’s not a flatpanel or a touchscreen, even though that’s where it might eventually be displayed. It’s a page.

For good ideas and true innovation, you need human interaction, conflict, argument, debate

When we are tired or preoccupied - what psychologists call 'resource-depleted' - we start to economise, to conserve those resources. Higher-order thinking is more expensive. So too is doubt, scepticism, arugment. 'Resource depletion specifically disables cognitive elaboration,' wrote Harvard psychologist Daniel Gillbert...Because it takes less brain power to believe than to doublt, we are, when tired or distracted, gullible. Because we are all biased, and biases are quick and effortless, exhaustion tends to make us prefer the information we know and are comfortable with. We are too tired to do the heavier lifting of examining new or contradictory information, so we fall back on our biases the opinions and the people we already trust

Digital forms are best illuminated by cultural criticism, which uses the tools of art and literary theory to make sense of the Internet’s glorious illusion: that the Internet is life. Because

this was a piece of gross presumption on Mrs. Kehoe’s part but also that the decision to give her, the most recently arrived, the best room in the house not only would cause bitterness and difficulty between herself and Patty, Diana, Miss McAdam and Sheila Heffernan but would come to mean, in time, that Mrs. Kehoe herself would feel free to call in the favour she had done her. She

Tweets are not diseased rings of glitchy minds. They’re epigrams, aphorisms, maxims, dictums, taglines, captions, slogans, and adages. Some are art, some are commercial; these are forms with integrity.

Because it takes less brain power to believe than to doubt, we are, when tired or distracted, gullible.25 Because we are all biased, and biases are quick and effortless, exhaustion makes us favor the information we know and are comfortable with. We’re too tired to do the heavier lifting of examining new or contradictory information, so we fall back on our biases, the opinions and the people we already trust.

If all three major American TV networks (NBC, CBS, and ABC) had been broadcasting for twenty-four hours a day, seven days a week, for sixty years, they wouldn’t have created the amount of content uploaded to YouTube in two weeks.

In treating people as less important than things, work becomes both demoralised and demoralising and we become blind to the moral content of our decisions...Money and wilfful blindness make us act in ways incompatible wiht what believe our ethics to be, and often even with our own self-interest...the problem with money isn't fundamentally about greed, although it can be comforting to think so. The problem with money is that we live in societies in which mutual support and co-operation is essential, but money erodes the relationships we need to lead productive, fulfilling and genuinely happy lives. When money becomes the dominant behavior, it doesn't cooperate with, or amplify, our relationships; it disengages us from them.

Cruise through the gargantuan sites—YouTube, Amazon, Yahoo!—and it’s as though modernism never existed. Twentieth-century print design never existed. European and Japanese design never existed. The Web’s aesthetic might be called late-stage Atlantic City or early-stage Mall of America.

As any American with children knows, our children have at least one bright, clear reason for being: to furnish subjects for digital photographs that can be corrected, cropped, captioned, organized, categorized, albumized, broadcast, turned into screen savers, and brandished on online social networks.

When we trade the effort of doubt and debate for the ease of blind faith, we become gullible and exposed, passive and irresponsible observers of our own lives. Worse still, we leave ourselves wide open to those who profit by influencing our behavior, our thinking, and our choices. At that moment, our agency in our own lives is in jeopardy.

Seventy percent of US companies now use open-plan offices and hot desking in the hope that these free-form physical structures will provoke free-form thinking. This architectural determinism isn’t entirely convincing—there’s plenty of evidence that people find open workspaces noisy, distracting, and impersonal. Walking through several such workspaces recently, I couldn’t help but notice how hard everyone was working to simulate privacy. Plugged into headphones, surrounded by stacks of books and temporary dividers, defensiveness was more evident than openness. Architecture alone won’t change mindsets and tearing down physical walls won’t demolish the mental silos that trap thinking.

Was I wilfully blind when I married Michael? Of course I was. I knew about his heart condition - everyone did. But I fell in love with him and decided it didn't matter. We were going to live for ever, somehow. Now I know that the fact that we had the same initials, were both expatriates, had gone to the same university, and were of medium build made the relationship highly determined. But I might have done the research and discovered his short life expectancy or talked to psychologists about the pain of grieving or read books about the sadness of widowhood. But I didn't do any of those things. I looked away from those sad certainties and pretended that they weren't there. Love is blind, not, as in mythology, because Cupid's arrows are random but because, once struck by them, we are left blind. When we love someone, we see them as smarter, wittier, prettier, stronger than anyone else sees them.

Knowing the hard limits to our cognitive capacity and the huge cost of working long hours should not be an intractable problem to address. We have a century of data and a roll call of the disastrous consequences that follow those who insist that heroic hours are a proof of commitment to an employer. Companies that measure work by hours could make themselves smarter by the simple act of measuring contribution by output and rewarding those who go home.

The forty-hour week is there for a reason; it gets the best work from people. The first four hours of work are the most productive and, as the day wears on, everyone becomes less alert, less focused, and prone to more mistakes. In 1908, the first known study by Ernst Abbe,5 one of the founders of the Zeiss lens laboratory, concluded that reducing the working day from nine to eight hours actually increased output. Henry Ford, who studied productivity issues obsessively, reached the same conclusion and infuriated his manufacturing colleagues when, in 1926, he had the audacity to introduce a forty-hour work week. Subsequent studies by Foster Wheeler (1968), Procter & Gamble (1980), members of the construction industry, and many, many more show that, as the days get longer, productivity declines. No study has ever convincingly argued otherwise.6

Moreover, sleep deprivation starts to starve the brain. There is a reason why we start to eat comfort food—doughnuts, candy—when we’re tired: our brains crave sugar. After twenty-four hours of sleep deprivation, there is an overall reduction of 6 percent in glucose reaching the brain.9 But the loss isn’t shared equally; the parietal lobe and the prefrontal cortex lose 12 to 14 percent of their glucose. And those are the areas we need most for thinking: for distinguishing between ideas, for social control, and to be able to tell the difference between good and bad.10 To Charles Czeisler, professor of sleep medicine at Harvard Medical School, encouraging a culture of sleepless machismo is downright dangerous.11 He’s amazed by today’s work cultures that glorify sleeplessness, the way the age of Mad Men once glorified people who could hold their drink.

This is the thinking behind Amazon’s anticipatory shopping patent.43 Instead of customers making their own decisions, Amazon decides for them, sending what they want before they know they want it. It is, as one commentator noticed, one more step towards cutting out human agency altogether.44 Pervasive monitoring devices – smartphones, wearables, voice-enabled speakers and smart meters – allow companies to track and manage consumer behaviour. The Harvard business scholar Shoshana Zuboff quotes an unnamed chief data scientist who explains: ‘The goal of everything we do is to change people’s actual behavior at scale . . . we can capture their behaviours and identify good and bad [ones]. Then we develop “treatments” or “data pellets” that select good behaviours.’45 MIT’s Alex Pentland seems more interested in enhancing machines than human understanding. He celebrates the opportunity to deploy sensors and data in order to increase efficiency

made some teams much better than others. What they found was that individual intelligence (as measured by IQ) didn’t make the big difference. Having a high aggregate intelligence or just one or two superstars wasn’t critical. The groups that surfaced more and better solutions shared three key qualities. First, they gave one another roughly equal time to talk. This wasn’t monitored or regulated, but no one in these high-achieving groups dominated or was a passenger. Everyone contributed and nothing any one person said was wasted. The second quality of the successful groups was social sensitivity: these individuals were more tuned in to one another, to subtle shifts in mood and demeanor. They scored more highly on a test called Reading the Mind in the Eyes, which is broadly considered a test for empathy. These groups were socially alert to one another’s needs. And the third distinguishing feature was that the best groups included more women, perhaps because that made them more diverse, or because women tend to score more highly on tests for empathy. What this (and much more) research highlights is just how critical the role of social connectedness can be. Reading the research, I

You know, I grew up down here, and my mama always took me to church when I was a kid. But the church folk you got down here now - especially the white church folk - they scare the bejesus out of me." "Why is that?" "Because they're all nuts, Harry. Every damned one of them.

If a five year old can operate a smart phone, they can do a load of laundry. It takes a little training, but as they say “tell me and I forget, teach me and I remember.

It’s no wonder that a discourse around “mindfulness” and meditation has grown up in response to a digital world of wall-to-wall stimulus.

The program let you practice logical proofs, and it was so beautiful and fast I almost ached to use it.

wanting

Information may or may not want to be free, but it often wants to be porn.

Willful Blindness: Why We Ignore the Obvious at Our Peril (Ceguera Voluntaria: Por qué pasamos por alto lo obvio a nuestro propio riesgo) de Margaret Heffernan y Multipliers: How the Best Leaders Make Everyone Smarter (Multiplicadores: Cómo es que los mejores líderes hacen más inteligentes a todos) de Liz Wiseman.

Heffernan’s research was based in the rural area of Union Parish in Louisiana, where a booming poultry industry was expanding in the 1960s. Vertically integrated poultry production was still a radical concept back then, and Heffernan wanted to study it. So he undertook an effort that no one else seems to have duplicated. He went door to door, made phone calls, and drove hundreds of miles between farms. He surveyed farmers and documented their income and their debt. Crucially, he followed up with farmers in Union Parish every ten years until the turn of the century, building a dataset that was forty years deep. But Heffernan did something more than ask about money. He did something most agricultural economists never thought of doing: He asked the farmers how they felt. He asked them, decade after decade, how much they trusted the companies they worked for and how well they were treated. In doing this, Heffernan assembled a picture that most economists missed. He tracked the relationship between the powerful and the powerless.

Existential crises are intense experiences of free will, the possibility of choice.

others

contributes

Even more important, I needed to follow the advice of the emperor Hadrian, as imagined by Marguerite Yourcenar: "Our great mistake is to try to exact from each person virtues which he does not possess, and to neglect the cultivation of those he has." I needed to learn how to see that though the cashier is sullen, she makes perfect change and that is enough

Reading fiction—excerpts from National Book Award finalists, winners of the Pen/O. Henry Prize for short stories, or even Amazon bestsellers—has been shown to enhance theory of mind:

We shouldn't confuse grief over the passing of our favorite technology with resentment because some digital alchemy failed to preserve analog experiences. Whether or not we admit it, the internet and its artifacts are not just like their cultural precedents. They're not even a rough translation -- or a strong misreading -- of those precedents.

In those days, “Dartmouth sysprog” sounded tantalizing to me—the way “lead singer” sounded to some of my classmates.

If it’s ever fair to say that anything has “changed everything,” it’s fair to say so about the Internet.

There’s no place to get a breath in the Twitter interface; all our thoughts live in stacked capsules, crunched up to stay small, as in some dystopic hive of the future. Or maybe not the future. Maybe now.

It’s a gift if you can do it. They say it works even if you don’t believe in it. Whereof we cannot speak, thereof we must be silent.

read Margaret Heffernan’s book Willful Blindness: Why We Ignore the Obvious at Our Peril and Liz Wiseman’s Multipliers: How the Best Leaders Make Everyone Smarter. To

But even if, as Johnson argues, power and dominance serve no meaningful purpose, they always incur costs. In biology, the cost can be painfully visible. During courtship, the argus cock pheasant spreads his large secondary wing feathers, which are decorated with beautiful eye spots; the bigger they are, the more they stimulate the female. And the longer the feathers, the more progeny the cock will produce. So the more beautiful cocks produce more descendants. That should be a competitive advantage. But the evolution of the argus pheasant has run itself into a blind alley because the most gorgeous cock has feathers so huge and unwieldy that they may cause him to be eaten by a predator, because he can’t fly away fast enough. Oskar Heinroth, the teacher of Konrad Lorenz, commented: ‘Next to the wings of the argus pheasant, the hectic life of western civilized man is the most stupid product of intra-specific selection!

Senator Bill Heffernan for being ‘deliberately barren’ and then had to stomach reading follow-up pieces like the one entitled ‘Barren Behaviour’ in The Australian, which stated:

Unless you are rich, and can con vales center in a sanatorium estate (where visitors came down a tiered, oceanside lawn to found you ato your easel) you have to keep going when you're depressed. That means phone calls, appointments errands, holidays, family, friends, and colleagues.

Unless you are rich and can convalesce in a sanatorium estate (where visitors came down a tiered, oceanside lawn to found you at your easel) you have to keep going when you're depressed. That means phone calls, appointments errands, holidays, family, friends, and colleagues.

Unless you are rich and can convalesce in a sanatorium estate (where visitors came down a tiered, oceanside lawn to find you at your easel) you have to keep going when you're depressed. That means phone calls, appointments, errands, holidays, family, friends, and colleagues.

Over the past two decades screens have proliferated, filling our purses, pockets, and bedside tables. The living room is no longer configured around a single blazing digital fireplace, the television; instead it flashes with decentralized brushfires: ereaders, tablets, laptops, desktops, smartphones, televisions, refrigerator screens. As for the radios and bookshelves that were supposed to vanish with the digitalization of the American home, they’ve stubbornly remained.

The turn away from the BlackBerry and toward the iPhone is a reckoning with our essential nature and how we currently process, deploy, and enjoy symbolic communication.

in the Internet age we form families so we can produce, distribute, and display digital photos of ourselves.

For a parent this time-consuming vocation has twin payoffs: it wins you a break from your actual children while bringing you closer to their images. Pictures of kids, like idealized Victorian boys and girls, can be seen but not heard.

For days I stayed close to #freeskip, refreshing my search like a drugged monkey.

many apps are to the Web what bottled water is to tap:

Back issues had piled up on my coffee table and then become part of recycling, landfills, and compost. They weren’t culture; they were carbon.

He wanted to cry out, longed to scream, to howl his misery to the heavens. But he couldn’t even manage a whimper. Tears streamed down his face, yet not so much as a sob left his lips.

Online research gives us information faster but it doesn’t last as long. The more we multitask, switching as frequently as every nineteen seconds between diverse sources of information and entertainment, the less capacity we develop to pay and hold attention.17 As scans reveal the physical changes this activity imposes on our brains, the downside of neuroplasticity becomes visible: all the gestational work of artists slips from our grasp.

Be patient towards all that is unresolved in your heart,” Rilke wrote, advising a young poet, “and to try to love the questions themselves like locked rooms, like books written in a foreign tongue.… Live the questions for now. Perhaps then you will gradually, without noticing it, live your way into the answer.… [T]his is what you must work on however you can and not waste too much time and too much energy on clarifying your attitude to other people.”9

What anyone else thought of the show, I don't know, although I once had a Liberal senator actually ring me to take me to task over the way we'd referred to him. He asked me to keep the conversation between us and I wouldn't betray his confidence just to sell a few books. It was Bill Heffernan.

In the eighties, according to William Heffernan, a sociologist at the University of Missouri, agriculture experts generally agreed that if four companies controlled over 40 percent of market share in a given field, it was no longer competitive. Today, however, Heffernan estimates, the four largest players process 81 percent of the beef, 59 percent of the pork, and 50 percent of the chicken produced in the United States. The same phenomenon is at work in grain: the largest four process 61 percent of American wheat, 80 percent of American soybeans, and either 57 percent or 74 percent of American corn, depending on the method.33 It is no coincidence that the internal motto of Archer Daniels Midland, the grain-processing giant notorious for its political clout and its price-fixing, is reported to be “the competitor is our friend and the customer is our enemy.

But every now and then, when the posters on these sites muttered about “lurkers,” I’d shudder like a Soviet mole in the Pentagon. Because, yes, I lurked: I visited boards but didn’t post; I took without giving.

That’s called “surfing” or sometimes “stalking,” and it may appear unfocused. In fact, as the lexicographer and publisher Lizzie Skurnick puts it, it requires no less than rapt attention not to lose one’s place. Reading a book straight through is much easier. For many of us this kind of Web project is also highly satisfying.

Your device may have failed. But everything you care about is in the Cloud.” And with that I discovered the apotheosis of data, the instant when pixels and bytes quicken into divinity. Text, images, film, and music had endured the death of the three-dimensional, time-and-space-occupying matter in which they were engraved. The stuff of consciousness

I don’t know why the telephone, the analog landline telephone, was never formally mourned. What a many-splendored experience it once was to talk on the phone. You’d dial a number, rarely more than seven digits, typically known by heart and fingers.

Audiophiles now miss vinyl, and I miss those calls.

Hurley didn’t seem to care that porn was where the money was, or the innovation. Instead he seemed to see it as I came to: as a pixilated kudzu, a plant charming enough in itself but rapacious in an ecosystem and capable of choking off other kinds of growth. The predator plant I described earlier.

Virtual reality was an abject failure right up to the moment it wasn’t. In this way it has followed the course charted by a few other breakout technologies. They don’t evolve in an iterative way, gradually gaining usefulness. Instead they seem hardly to advance at all, moving forward in fits and starts, through shame spirals and bankruptcies and hype and defensive crouches—until one day, in a sudden about-face, they utterly, totally win.

Jeremy P. Jamieson did a study that showed when people read a paragraph about the fact that stress actually allows them to perform better, they performed fifty points better on a practice GRE [graduate school entrance exam]. But the really cool part of the study is that two months later when they took the real GRE, they performed seventy points better than their peers who were not told, as they approached the exam, that stress could be helping them. Simply changing the mind-set around stress can impact performance.

... you have to keep going when you're depressed. That means phone calls, appointments, errands, holidays, family, friends, and colleagues. For me, this is where things got tangled. Depression brought me to a new rationing of resources: for every twenty-four hours I got about three, then two, then one hour worth of life reserves—personality, conversation, motion. I had to be frugal while I was hustling through a day, because when I ran out of reserves, I lost control of what I said.

Every day I felt sadder and stranger. If depression came into my life attached to heartbreak, as one virus piggybacks another, it soon asserted its independence bringing conclusions to my mind that were captious, adamant, and dark. I began to see life as too long, too easy to botch, and, once botched, impossible to repair. I took stock of how other people had or hadn’t ruined their lives; worse, I told him what I thought.

He’s so crooked, he can’t even lie in bed straight. That man’s never done anything without an ulterior motive.

taking care not to install the control buttons from which they must flee. We do this by noticing their growing wisdom and development … and honoring their increasing independence. We do this by recognizing them as the experts in their own lives, and by sharing our own experience when needed. We do this by backing away from believing every moment with our children must be productive and by returning to what has always worked—being together. Just being. Yes, they will fly away and the launching may even have its painful moments. But ultimately, we want to raise children who choose interdependence, knowing that nothing is more meaningful or makes us more successful than being surrounded by those we love.

My heart broke for the boy I thought she’d been and the woman she’d become.

Spritz is for not-real readers, evidently. And here’s where our most sacred class values come in, pounded with a mallet. It’s no surprise that the Atlantic and the New Yorker serve as the old guardians, policing the borders of literacy. Spritz works, they concede, for stuff you have to read—discovery, briefs, memos, and social media “updates” for data merchants and info tradesmen—but not for the pleasure reading of books that defines the bona fide man of leisure and letters. Juxtaposing a moral line on a class line, Spritz, several reviewers argue, is not for virtuous people who like to read. It is for subliterate business types who have to read.

A seminar topic one day was “the erotics of pedagogy”; around the table we were expected to examine our sexual fantasies about our professor.