Category: Psychology

Venturesome Heroes Who Made the “Miracle” of Aviation Possible

(p. 14) Aviation has become just another boring part of modern infrastructure. Some people are afraid of it. Most people endure it. Few people bother to look out the window for a view of Earth that was unimaginable to most of our ancestors, or to reflect on the miracle of technology, engineering and organization that daily airline operations represent. Before the pandemic, roughly three million passengers took flights to or from U.S. airports each day, which averages out to more than one billion passenger journeys per year. (Traffic has nearly returned to that level.) Over the past 13 years, through more than 10 billion passenger journeys, a total of two people have died in U.S. airline accidents.

Among the many virtues of John Lancaster’s delightful “The Great Air Race” is how vividly it conveys the entirely different world of aviation at the dawn of the industry, a century ago. Many airplanes in those days were literal death traps. A biplane known as the DH-4, used as a bomber by Allied forces in World War I, had its gas tank immediately behind the pilot in the cockpit. As Lancaster explains, “Even in relatively low-speed crashes, the tank sometimes wrenched free of its wooden cage, crushing the pilot against the engine.” To get a DH-4 properly balanced for landing, a co-pilot or passenger might have to leap out of the open cockpit and climb back to hang onto the tail. And this was one of the era’s most popular and successful models.

Some planes had no gas gauge, so pilots would learn they had run out of fuel only when the engine stopped. Just a tiny portion of the country was covered by charts; pilots’ navigation tools were a magnetic compass and their own eyes. (Mapping was one of the industries that aviation’s growth fostered.)

. . .

For readers familiar with modern U.S. aerospace pre-eminence — Boeing, despite its problems; governmental and private space programs; military aviation and corporate jets — perhaps the most startling aspect of American aviation a century ago is how uncertain its future seemed.

. . .

I have read a lot about aviation and the aircraft industry over the years, but almost everything in this tale was new to me. You might take it on your next airline flight, pause to look out the window and spare a thought for those who helped make it all possible.

For the full review, see:

James Fallows. “The Wild Blue Yonder.” The New York Times Book Review (Sunday, December 4, 2022): 14.

(Note: ellipses added.)

(Note: the online version of the review has the date Nov. 15, 2022, and has the title “When Flying a Plane Was Thrilling — and Often Fatal.”)

The book under review is:

Lancaster, John. The Great Air Race: Glory, Tragedy, and the Dawn of American Aviation. New York: Liveright, 2022.

Workers Who Feel They Matter Are More Satisfied with Their Lives and Are “Less Likely to Quit”

(p. C5) So how do you know if your employees and co-workers feel that they matter? In a 2021 study published in the Journal of Positive Psychology, researchers developed a scale to measure mattering in the workplace. In online surveys involving nearly 1,800 full-time employees at a variety of companies, participants were asked to rate on a 5-point scale how much they agreed with statements such as “My work contributes to my organization’s success” and “The quality of my work makes a real impact on my organization.” Other statements had to do with feeling valued and recognized: “My organization praises my work publicly” and “My work has made me popular at my workplace.”

Participants were also asked about job satisfaction, recent raises or promotions, and whether they intended to leave their job. What the researchers found was that mattering isn’t only good for employee well-being, it’s also good for a company’s bottom line. Employee turnover is costly and disruptive, and “when employees feel like they matter to their organization, they are more satisfied with their jobs and life, more likely to occupy leadership positions, more likely to be rewarded and promoted and less likely to quit.”

. . .

Research by Dr. Prilleltensky and colleagues shows that being treated fairly increases workers’ sense of mattering, . . .

For the full commentary, see:

Jennifer Breheny Wallace. “The Power of Mattering at Work.” The Wall Street Journal (Saturday, Dec. 3, 2022): C5.

(Note: ellipses added.)

(Note: the online version of the commentary has the date December 1, 2022, and has the same title as the print version.)

“Woke” Bankman-Fried’s FTX Played “Dumb Game” of Virtue Signaling

(p. A17) There was a time when people engaged in doing good addressed problems that, so to speak, you could get your arms around, such as improving school performance, providing potable water or preventing malaria. But at some point, the impulse to do good transformed into a combination of moral tendentiousness and grandiosity.

. . .

. . ., inside the Bankman-Fried fairy tale rests a smaller tipping point, which suggests his generation senses that their preachy elders may have led them down a moral garden path.

In an exchange with Mr. Bankman-Fried, a writer for Vox asserts, “You were really good at talking about ethics.” He replied that “I had to be” because of “this dumb game we woke westerners play where we say all the right shibboleths and so everyone likes us.”

He is describing what has come to be known in our time as virtue signaling, . . .

For the full commentary, see:

Daniel Henninger. “WONDER LAND; The Moral Vanity of FTX.” The Wall Street Journal (Thursday, December 1, 2022): A17.

(Note: ellipses added.)

(Note: the online version of the commentary has the date November 30, 2022, and has the title “WONDER LAND; The Moral Vanity of Sam Bankman-Fried.”)

Due to Xi’s Communists, China’s “Depressed” Tech Entrepreneurs Spend “Their Time Hiking, Golfing and Drinking”

(p. B1) For decades, China’s business class had an unspoken contract with the Communist Party: Let us make money and we’ll turn a blind eye to how you use your power.

Like most Chinese people, they bought into the party’s argument that its one-party rule provides more efficient governance.

Now, the tacit agreement that entrepreneurs had come to count on is dissolving in front of their eyes.

. . .

(p. B5) “Under the leadership of this dictator, our great country is falling into an abyss,” said a hardware tech executive in Shenzhen. “But you can’t do anything about it. It pains and depresses me.”

Despite many conversations over the years, we never talked about politics. I was surprised when he called after the party congress to talk about his “political depression.” He said he used to be very nationalistic, believing that the Chinese were among the smartest and hardest-working people in the world. Now, he and many of his friends spend most of their time hiking, golfing and drinking. “We’re too depressed to work,” he said.

Until a year ago, his start-up was doing so well that he was planning to take it public. Then he lost a big chunk of his revenues, and his new hires sat idly with nothing to do when cities were locked down under the “zero-Covid” rules. He said now he had no choice but to lay off more than 100 people, sell his business and move his family to North America.

“Since the dark night has descended,” he said, “I’ll deal with it the dark night way.”

The tech entrepreneur from Beijing who texted me after the party congress recounted a chilling experience. In May, when there were rumors that Beijing could be locked down, he felt he could not tell his employees to leave work early and stock up on groceries. He was worried that he could be reported for spreading rumors — something that had gotten people detained by the police. He told them only that they should feel free to leave early if they had things to take care of.

This successful businessman is now applying to emigrate to a European country and the United States.

Just like many ordinary Chinese people, the executives I spoke to said they were horrified by the video of Hu Jintao, Mr. Xi’s predecessor as China’s top leader, being abruptly led out of the closing ceremony of the party congress. They did not accept the official government explanation that Mr. Hu had to leave early because of health issues.

If Mr. Xi could remove his predecessor like that, several of them said, he could do anything to anyone.

A well-connected investor in Beijing said his friends who were entrepreneurs now realized they could no longer remain indifferent to politics. At social gatherings, they have started discussing which countries to seek passports from, and how to move their assets offshore. At social gatherings, hosts are asking friends to surrender their phones to be kept in a separate place for fear of surveillance.

For the full commentary, see:

Li Yuan. “Xi Is Scaring Away China’s Business Elite.” The New York Times (Tuesday, November 8, 2022): B1 & B5.

(Note: ellipsis added.)

(Note: the online version of the commentary has the date November 7, 2022, and has the title “China’s Business Elite See the Country That Let Them Thrive Slipping Away.”)

“Everybody Wants Coconuts, but Nobody Has the Guts to Go Up There and Get Them”

(p. A32) Leaping out of a balloon gondola almost 20 miles above the New Mexico desert on a summer’s day in 1960, Joseph Kittinger seemed like something out of science fiction.

He free fell for 13 seconds, protected against air temperatures as low as minus-94 degrees by specialized clothing and a pressure suit. And then his small, stabilizer parachute opened as planned to prevent a spin that could have killed him. He free fell for another 4 minutes and 36 seconds, descending to 17,500 feet before his regular parachute opened.

Mr. Kittinger, who died on Friday [Dec. 9, 2022] in Florida at age 94, never rivaled the original Mercury 7 astronauts or the men who walked on the moon in terms of celebrity, but he was an aviation trailblazer in his own right, paving the way for America’s first manned spaceflights.

Taking part in experimental Air Force programs in the skies over New Mexico in the late 1950s and early ’60s to simulate conditions that future astronauts might face, Mr. Kittinger set records for the highest balloon flight, at 102,800 feet; the longest free fall, some 16 miles; and the fastest speed reached by a human under his own power, descending at up to 614 miles an hour.

. . .

When Joe Kittinger was 13, he once scrambled atop a 40-foot-high tree to snare some coconuts, ignoring warnings to stay put. His father recalled that venture as symbolizing the derring-do that would be his son’s life.

As the elder Mr. Kittinger put it: “Everybody wants coconuts, but nobody has the guts to go up there and get them.”

For the full obituary, see:

Richard Goldstein. ‘Joseph Kittinger, 94, Adventurer Who Paved Way for Astronauts, Dies.” The New York Times, First Section (Sunday, December 11, 2022): A32.

(Note: ellipsis, and bracketed date, added.)

(Note: the online version of the obituary has the date Dec. 9, 2022, and has the title “Joseph Kittinger, a Record-Setter High in the Skies, Dies at 94.”)

Dependent, Missionless Resignation Can Be “Fundamentally Degrading”


(p. A13) At the Harvard Business Review, Joseph Fuller and William Kerr wrote this spring that the Great Resignation was an “unprecedented mass exit” but also the reversion to a long-term trend, one we’re “likely to be contending with for years to come.” Quit rates have been rising steadily for a long time. When the pandemic first hit, workers held onto their jobs for fear of layoffs and recession. But by 2021 stimulus money hit the system and uncertainty abated. That’s when the Great Resignation hit. “We’re now back in line with the pre-pandemic trend.”

. . .

. . . political economist Nicholas Eberstadt of the American Enterprise Institute . . . notes that recent workforce changes follow a postwar pattern. Usually after recessions, male labor-force participation drops, and when the recession ends it ticks up, “but never gets back to where it was.” Labor-force participation for both sexes, he notes, peaked in 2000 at 67%. We’re now 5 points lower than that.

The work rate for those in their prime working years, 25 to 54, has been declining since the turn of the century. The economic implications are obvious—slower growth, less expansion—and the personal implications are dire. “By and large, nonworking men don’t ‘do’ civil society,” Mr. Eberstadt says. They stay home watching screens—videogames, social-media sites and streaming services. There is something “fundamentally degrading” in this, and Mr. Ebestadt refers to an “archipelago of disability programs” that help make not working possible.

Staying apart, estranged from life and not sharing a larger mission can create “really tragic long term consequences,” Mr. Eberstadt says. These young people aren’t taking chances, leaving a job to start a small business. They aren’t finding themselves. They aren’t even looking.

For the full commentary, see:

Peggy Noonan. “DECLARATIONS; The ‘Great Resignation’ Started Long Ago.” The Wall Street Journal (Saturday, July 23, 2022): A13.

(Note: ellipses added.)

(Note: the online version of the commentary has the date July 21, 2022, and has the same title as the print version.)

Auto Experts Are Skeptical of EVs, but Are Afraid “So They Can’t Speak Out Loudly”

(p. A1) “People involved in the auto industry are largely a silent majority,” Mr. Toyoda said to reporters during a visit to Thailand. “That silent majority is wondering whether EVs are really OK to have as a single option. But they think it’s the trend so they can’t speak out loudly.”

. . .

(p. A6) The world’s biggest auto maker has said it sees hybrids, a technology it invented with the debut of the Toyota Prius in the 1990s, as an important option when EVs remain expensive and charging infrastructure is still being built out in many parts of the world. It is also developing zero-emission vehicles powered by hydrogen.

“Because the right answer is still unclear, we shouldn’t limit ourselves to just one option,” Mr. Toyoda said. Over the past few years, Mr. Toyoda said, he has tried to convey this point to industry stakeholders, including government officials—an effort he described as tiring at times.

Global car companies have made a sharp pivot to electric vehicles within the last few years, driven in part by the success of EV-only maker Tesla Inc.

. . .

At the same time, the legacy auto makers have a much broader base of customers, including many living in rural areas and developing economies with unreliable electricity supplies.

And their gas-engine businesses are still driving the bulk of profits needed to fund the costly shift to electric vehicles, which not only requires the development of new models but also construction of new facilities and battery plants.

The infrastructure to charge electric vehicles is meanwhile still lacking in the U.S. and many other parts of the world, making owning an EV still a challenge for many types of consumers.

. . .

Ryan Gremore, an Illinois-based dealer, who owns several brand franchises, said he gets a lot of customers inquiring about EVs, in part because of limited supplies.

That might give the impression of robust demand, but it is unclear how it will materialize when inventory levels at dealerships normalize, he added. “Is there interest in electric vehicles? Yes. Is it more than 10% to 15% of our customer base? No way,” Mr. Gremore said.

Mr. Toyoda’s long-held skepticism about a fully electric future has been shared by others in the Japanese car industry, as well.

Mazda Motor Corp. executives once cautioned that whether EVs were cleaner depends largely on where the electricity is produced. They also worried that EV batteries were too big and expensive to replace gas-powered models and better suited to the types of smaller vehicles that Americans didn’t want.

For the full story, see:

River Davis and Sean McLain. “Toyota Skeptical of Going All-EV.” The Wall Street Journal (Monday, Dec. 19, 2022 ): A1 & A6.

(Note: ellipses added.)

(Note: the online version of the story was updated Dec. 18, 2022, and has the title “Toyota Chief Says ‘Silent Majority’ Has Doubts About Pursuing Only EVs.”)

Dogs Can Accurately Know by Smell When a Human Is Stressed


(p. C4) Dogs are champion sniffers, equipped with 100 to 300 million olfactory receptors in their noses—compared with a mere 6 million in our own—and an olfactory cortex 40 times as large as ours. They can be trained to detect disease in human beings, including cancer cells, a latent epileptic seizure, or a Covid infection, just by sniffing—no blood samples, biopsies, MRIs, antigen or PCR tests required.

. . .

In a study published in September in the journal PLoS One, Ms. Wilson and colleagues tested whether dogs can read and respond to our emotional states, without the benefit of facial expression, tone of voice, or social context. The researchers trained four dogs to detect and react to the smell of human stress, depending on their sense of smell alone to distinguish between a person’s baseline scent and the unique cocktail of volatile organic compounds (VOCs) in their sweat and breath when they’re feeling stressed out.

. . .

The results offered overwhelming confirmation that dogs can smell psychological states as well as physical ones. On average, the four dogs picked out the stress sample 94% of the time, with individual dogs ranging between 90% and 97% accuracy. “There’s a smell to stress,” Ms. Wilson concludes. “If we can add it to the dog’s repertoire, we can use it to identify anxiety and panic attacks before they occur.”

For the full commentary, see:

Susan Pinker. “MIND AND MATTER; Dogs Can Sniff Out When a Human Is Stressed.” The Wall Street Journal (Saturday, Oct. 22, 2022): C4.

(Note: ellipses added.)

(Note: the online version of the commentary has the date October 20, 2022, and has the title “MIND AND MATTER; Dogs Can Sniff Out Human Stress.”)

The “Longevity Under Adversity” of the Bristlecone Pine “Is a Metaphorical Dose of Qualified Hope in an Unstable World”

(p. C9) . . ., trees seem to grow on a timescale humans can comprehend. A seed planted by a child will be largely mature when she is—and will likewise get thicker and wrinklier as it ages. The tree, however, might long outlive her; there’s a reason we use the shape of a tree to chart the chain of human generations.

This intertwining of biology and chronology is the subject of Jared Farmer’s rich but overstuffed “Elderflora: A Modern History of Ancient Trees.”

. . .

Mr. Farmer, raised in Utah, is partial to the Great Basin of the American West, cradle of the oldest living things securely dated: gnarled specimens of bristlecone pine. The coronation of bristlecones in the 1950s followed a few decades of scientific progress. Counting rings had long been the main method of tree dating, one that held an intuitive power even beyond the laboratory. Slices of big trunks marked with purportedly significant dates had become popular exhibits, a way to make time tangible. Scientists at the University of Arizona perfected the trick of combining multiple samples and lining up shared clumps of thick and thin rings—caused by year-to-year variation in climate—to extend the chronology beyond the span of a single specimen.

Using this technique, the pioneering dendrochronologist Edmund Schulman pegged one bristlecone at more than 4,500 years old, announcing his discovery in a National Geographic article whose publication he didn’t live to see. Mr. Farmer chronicles Schulman’s career in novelistic close-third-person narration—one more idiosyncrasy in this fascinating farrago of a book—lingering on Schulman’s coinage “longevity under adversity.” For Schulman, the phrase was a tribute to the bristlecone’s ability to endure extreme conditions through partial death; for Mr. Farmer, it is a metaphorical dose of qualified hope in an unstable world.

For the full review, see:

Timothy Farrington. “Time Made Tangible.” The Wall Street Journal (Saturday, Dec. 3, 2022): C9.

(Note: ellipses added.)

(Note: the online version of the review has the date December 2, 2022, and has the title “‘Elderflora’ Review: Ancient Trees Grow Among Us.”)

The book under review is:

Farmer, Jared. Elderflora: A Modern History of Ancient Trees. New York: Basic Books, 2022.

Office Space Designers Finally Pull Back from Extreme “Open” Space that Forces Collaboration at the Price of Blocking Concentration

(p. 1) First there were individual offices. Then cubicles and open floor plans. Now, there is a “palette of places.”

. . .

. . . the move toward pure open floor plans that packed more workers into less and less space . . . was supposed to drive collaboration, but many experts agree it often went too far, with row upon row of desks and workbench-style seating more likely to generate ennui than efficiency.

. . .

The new model is largely open, but not entirely. Under the revised thinking, breaking down walls to bring people together is good, but so are “team spaces” and standing tables, comfortable couches and movable walls.

Privacy is also good, particularly for tasks that require intense concentration, the thinking goes. That doesn’t mean a return to the glory days of private offices, but it does mean workers have more space and more places to seek solitude than in the neo-Dickensian workbench settings. The new designs often include “isolation rooms,” soundproof phone booths, and even lounges where technology is forbidden.

. . .

(p. 4) But in 2010, Microsoft started testing open designs with a quarter of a floor, and then expanded. Since 2014, it has opened 10 renovated buildings without offices, including four this year.

Microsoft, Mr. Ford said, has taken a test-and-learn approach. It learned, for example, that its early designs were too open plan, with 16 to 24 engineers in team-based spaces. Engineers found those spaces noisy and distracting, and concentration suffered. Too much openness can cause workers to “do a turtle,” researchers say, and retrench and communicate less — colleagues who retreat into their headphones all day, for example.

Today, there are more private spaces, and the team areas hold only eight to 12 engineers. “That’s the sweet spot for Microsoft,” Mr. Ford said.

The company thinks it is working. Microsoft’s Azure cloud software business has surged in the last few years, as has the company’s stock price. Mr. Ford said about 20 percent of the workplaces have been redone on Microsoft’s campus in Redmond, Wash., and the surrounding area. Within five years, he said, he expects the renovated share to reach 80 percent.

For the full story, see:

Steve Lohr. “Don’t Get Too Comfortable at That Desk.” The New York Times, SundayBusiness Section (Sunday, October 8, 2017): 1 & 4.

(Note: ellipses added.)

(Note: the online version of the story has the date Oct. 6, 2017, and has the same title as the print version.)

A Dog (But Not A.I.) Can Put Together What It Learns in Two Separate Contexts, and Apply It in a Third Context

(p. 6) . . . an engineer named Blake Lemoine . . . worked on artificial intelligence at Google, specifically on software that can generate words on its own — what’s called a large language model. He concluded the technology was sentient; his bosses concluded it wasn’t.

. . .

There is no evidence this technology is sentient or conscious — two words that describe an awareness of the surrounding world.

That goes for even the simplest form you might find in a worm, said Colin Allen, a professor at the University of Pittsburgh who explores cognitive skills in both animals and machines. “The dialogue generated by large language models does not provide evidence of the kind of sentience that even very primitive animals likely possess,” he said.

Alison Gopnik, a professor of psychology who is part of the A.I. research group at the University of California, Berkeley, agreed. “The computational capacities of current A.I. like the large language models,” she said, “don’t make it any more likely that they are sentient than that rocks or other machines are.”

. . .

(p. 7) “A conscious organism — like a person or a dog or other animals — can learn something in one context and learn something else in another context and then put the two things together to do something in a novel context they have never experienced before,” Dr. Allen of the University of Pittsburgh said. “This technology is nowhere close to doing that.”

For the full story, see:

Cade Metz. “A.I. Does Not Have Thoughts, No Matter What You Think.” The New York Times, SundayBusiness Section (Sunday, August 7, 2022): 6-7.

(Note: ellipses added.)

(Note: the online version of the story was updated Aug. 11 [sic.], 2022, and has the title “A.I. Is Not Sentient. Why Do People Say It Is?”)