Ditching Peer Review

If we let people say whatever they want, they will sometimes say untrue things, and that sounds scary. But we don’t actually prevent people from saying untrue things right now; we just pretend to. In fact, right now we occasionally bless untrue things with big stickers that say “INSPECTED BY A FANCY JOURNAL,” and those stickers are very hard to get off. That’s way scarier.

Adam Mastroianni writing in Experimental History

And the prison door will swing open

In the Tao Te Ching, Lao Tzu wrote, “Care about people’s approval and you will be their prisoner.” He no doubt intended it as a dire warning. But as the years have passed, I have come to interpret it as more of a promise and an opportunity. 

I have learned that the prison of others’ approval is actually one built by me, maintained by me, and guarded by me. This has led me to my own complementary verse to Lao Tzu’s original: “Disregard what others think and the prison door will swing open.” If you are stuck in the prison of shame and judgment, remember that you hold the key to your own freedom.

Arthur C. Brooks writing in The Atlantic

When Optimization Rules

A focus on optimization can lead technologists to believe that increasing efficiency is inherently a good thing. There’s something tempting about this view. Given a choice between doing something efficiently or inefficiently, who would choose the slower, more wasteful, more energy-intensive path?

The problem here is that goals such as connecting people, increasing human flourishing, or promoting freedom, equality, and democracy are not goals that are computationally tractable. 

Rob Reich, Mehran Sahami and Jeremy M. Weinstein, System Error

We can Choose

All of the Auschwitz survivors I met had one thing in common with me and with one another: We had no control over the most consuming facts of our lives, but we had the power to determine how we experienced life after trauma. Survivors could continue to be victims long after the oppression had ended, or they could learn the thrive. In my dissertation research I discovered and articulated my personal conviction and my clinical touchstone: We can choose to be or own jailors, or we can choose to be free.  

Auschwitz survivor Edith Eva Eger in her book The Choice

Conditional Acceptance

Too often we claim that we accept others for what they are when we truly mean that we accept them as long as they do what we want them to. When we truly accept others the way they are we no longer have to take unnecessary responsibility for others’ emotions an behaviors, we maintain emotional balance at a time when it is most needed, and we encourage the other person to be more responsible for his own emotions and behaviors.

Les Carter, Imperative People: Those Who Must Be in Control

Choosing Prison

Our capacity to choose changes constantly with our practice of life. The longer we continue to make the wrong decisions, the more our heart hardens; the more often we make the right decision, the more our heart softens – or better perhaps, comes alive.

Each step in life which increases my self-confidence, my integrity, my courage, my conviction also increases my capacity to choose the desirable alternative, until eventually it becomes more difficult for me to choose the undesirable rather than the desirable action. On the other hand, each act of surrender and cowardice weakens me, opens the path for more acts of surrender, and eventually freedom is lost. 

Erich Fromm, The Heart of Man