A key to the successful explanation

Helen Keller was an American writer and activist, who had lived a long life advocating for disability rights. But back in 1887, she was a six-year-old child, blind and deaf child due to the severe illness at a younger age, and wild in her complete absence of established communication with people. That year, she was introduced to Anne Sullivan, who became her teacher trying to get her connected with the outer world.

The teaching wasn't going smoothly. Sullivan was showing her student different items and writing their names on her hand. But all the attempts had little effect, with Helen being naughty and aggressive most of the time.

As she wrote later in her autobiography, the teacher showed her a mug and tried to get her understand that the words "mug" and "water" are connected, but it didn't have any effect either. What finally brought success was a fateful scene at the well. They got there together with her teacher. Somebody was drawing water, and Sullivan put her student's hand under the stream, spelling the word "water". And suddenly an insight came into Helen’s mind:

"I knew then that "w-a-t-e-r" meant the wonderful cool something that was flowing over my hand. That living word awakened my soul, gave it light, hope, joy, set it free! There were barriers still, it is true, but barriers that could in time be swept away."

Later, that very day she learned many words, which her teacher had unsuccessfully been trying to teach her all the previous time.

Anne Sullivan had been a companion of her student until death.

Bottom line:

If you want to explain something to somebody, first you need to let them feel the result. Showing how to achieve the result comes the second.

Luck is the dividend of openness

Richard Wiseman, a British psychology professor, who studied the nature of luck for a decade, made an experiment. He gave participants a newspaper and asked them to count the photos all over the pages.

People who considered themselves as unlucky spent around two minutes on average to count all the images, while it took just seconds for people who tended to think that they were lucky.

The reason was simple – while the "unlucky" group was focused on counting and didn't pay attention to anything else, the "lucky" ones were able to notice the message on the second page, which was saying “Stop counting — there are 43 photographs in this newspaper.” Ironically, the letters of the message were so huge that they took almost half of the page – something that you would expect to be noticeable for any reader. There was also another large message saying “Stop counting, tell the experimenter you have seen this and win $250.” However, the "unlucky" people were so concentrated that they usually missed both messages (and the chance to win money as well).

Wiseman conducted some other tests and came to a conclusion: it's not the luck that makes people "unlucky" but their tension and anxiety, which prevents them to notice the unexpected.

Bottom line:

Be more open and relaxed, and you'll see the new opportunities surprisingly given to you.

The rolling swarm

Applied math is probably the last thing anybody would expect to learn from caterpillars. At least until one sees a thing known as a rolling swarm. Everybody who finds these creatures unattractive would arguably enjoy the look of the rolling swarm even less. It looks like a lump formed by several dozens of caterpillars moving together, one over each other, in one direction. But what’s the reason for this party?

If you walk on the escalator, you reach the floor faster than if you walked on your own or stand on the escalator still. The same applies to these caterpillars. The bottom layer moves at a regular speed. Their mates, who crawl over them like on a moving escalator, pass the same distance with 2x speed (their own speed + the speed of the bottom layer), which means that the average speed of the two-layers group is around 1.5x comparing to the speed of a single member (without counting the other factors affecting the movement, and measurement errors). Each new layer of caterpillars accelerates more so the bottom members could start their journey to the top faster.

If an inquisitive observer pulls out one of the members of this squad and makes them race, she would notice that the swarm moves faster than a single caterpillar, although each of the caterpillars in the swarm moves with the same speed.

Bottom line:

Sometimes all of us can move faster than any one of us could.

Blue jeans and Buddhism

Alan Watts, a philosopher and theologist, moved to San Francisco in the 1950s, where he started giving lectures on the Eastern religious and spiritual ideas and practices of Buddhism, Taoism, and Hinduism. He became popular among the generation of hippies and influenced their ideas.

According to some urban legend, one of the things that he had an impact on was the outfit. The legend says that Watts told the story of the Buddhists who started wearing orange so they could be equated with the prisoners of their time, who didn't have a choice in their garb. In 1960s California, prisoners wore (and still do) blue denim pants. So young people, inspired by the lectures of Alan Watts, decided to follow the example of the Buddhists and adopted a fashion of wearing blue jeans. 

Bottom line:

The most distinguished ethereal ideas can sometimes be translated into something very common and practical.

Photo: an inmate firefighter demonstrates chainsaw skills at Sierra Conservation Center, circa 1965. California Department of Corrections and Rehabilitation

Non-fiction legends from the Atomic Priesthood

In the 1980s, the US Department of Energy commissioned a report dedicated to the nuclear waste repositories. The paper would devise ways of warning future generations not to dig at the site where the repositories are located. Given that the nuclear waste had a half-life of 10 000 years, the department needed to work out solutions that would last for 10 000 years. The task was executed by a group of engineers, anthropologists, nuclear physicists, behavioral scientists, and other experts teamed in the Human Interference Task Force.

The researchers looked at all the things you can write on, but obviously, all these things last for a certain amount of time, not to mention that language changes, and words change their meaning. Even the skull symbol indicating the potential danger would have quite a different meaning for other cultures.

The main conclusion was that the most reliable way to store information for such a long time lies in the field of non-physical. Some of the historical parallels might be the well-known curses associated with the burial sites of the Egyptian pharaohs, which didn't deter robbers from digging for treasures though. But that is how the idea of the "Atomic Priesthood" appeared. This community would have to preserve the knowledge by creating rituals and legends. A linguist and semiologist Tom Sebeok concluded that you could create a legend that would last for three generations only. But if this story is interesting and important enough so our grandchildren might want to tell it to their grandchildren the mission would probably be successful.

Bottom line:

Stories make life worth living, and sometimes they keep us alive.

Story: told by Neil Gaiman 

Long-term planning peculiar benefits

In the early 1830s, a Swedish delegation was looking for spots across the country to plant new trees for shipbuilding. It ended up on Visingsö, an island located in the lake of Vättern. Three gorgeous oak trees were growing there, near one of the local farmhouses. It seemed that Visingsö had all the conditions for lumber production.

Within the next decade, around 300 hundred oak trees were planted on the island, with the other tree species located between the rows, forcing the oaks to grow taller. Due to the slow growth of oak, the Navy management had made the plan far ahead for more than a hundred years till the trees are ready.

Indeed, the trees had grown remarkably tall and straight by the middle of the 20th century. However, during the same period, wood had lost its importance to shipbuilding, giving way to metal. The forest covering around 360 hectares became unnecessary from the point of view of the original objectives.

Nothing has been forgotten, though. Instead, the oaks have been used as a perfect material for veneers, flooring, and furniture.

Bottom line:

Thinking far (centuries) ahead is a good thing and tends to pay off, even if in ways that are different from what you originally expect.

Story: Atlas Obscura

Photo: "Visingsö 2011" by YlvaS under CC BY-NC-ND 2.0

The long and glorious life of the temporary Building 20

During World War II in 1943, a timber three-floor structure was hastily erected on the central campus of the Massachusetts Institute of Technology (MIT). As one of its architects, George McCreery, said, the life of the building was supposed to be for the duration of the war and six months thereafter. It was indicated as Building 20 among the other temporary structures built there and became a home for the Radiation Laboratory, or Rad Lab, which works made a significant influence on science during WWII.

The war ended, and the Rad Lab shut down. But the student enrollments increased in the university, and the temporary structures continued to serve the university needs in post-war times. Building 20 had been used for workshops, offices, and labs, and its occupants utilized their environment in ways that would not be tolerated in a permanent building.

Eventually, Building 20 became the “magical incubator” for many remarkable projects and startups. MIT professor Jerome Y. Lettvin called it the procreative “womb” of the institute. Some of the famous occupants in Building 20 were the LIGO gravitational-wave antenna project, the Strobe Lab of high-speed photography trailblazer Harold "Doc" Edgerton, and the “father of modern linguistics” Noam Chomsky.

Building 20 had been operating for 55 years until it was demolished in 1998. It was one of the longest-surviving World War II temporary structures on the MIT campus.

Bottom line:

Sometimes temporary is the most permanent not because it's the most solid, but because it is the most adaptive. If you try to solve an immediate problem with an immediate solution, it can last for decades. But if you try to solve a 5-month problem with a 50-year solution it will most often get torn down in 5 months.

Determination at first sight

Researchers Brian Wansink and Andrew S. Hanks from Cornell University, New York, observed the foods people were choosing from a breakfast buffet during a conference event. There were two separate buffet lines with seven identical options: cheesy eggs, potatoes, bacon, cinnamon rolls, low-fat granola, low-fat yogurt, and fruits. The difference was in the food order. One of the lines started with fruits and ended with cheesy eggs, while the second one's order was reversed. In other words, the line either started with the most or the least healthy food.

The study showed that people tended to select the first items they see regardless of health benefits. Three quarters from all the diners took the very first item in the buffet they saw. And the first three courses in the line accounted for 66% of all the food taken.

The first selected items had also affected further choice, especially for the "cheesy eggs" line. Those who passed through it tended to choose traditionally matching products, such as bacon and potatoes, and also they took a larger number of items.

Bottom line:

What you see first matters. Depending on the objective, the right order may help to sell product or induce emotions. The smarter the design the more further buyer's moves it can determine.

A small greenhouse that broke monopolies

A physician Dr. Nathaniel Bagshaw Ward was a passionate botanist in XIX century London. He kept moth cocoons in sealed bottles, until one day he found that a fern spore and some grass had germinated on a bit of soil in one of them. The bottle stayed sealed for a few years, and he noticed that the plants grew and even bloomed once. However, the seal became rusted, and the plants died. 

Ward ordered a closely fitted glazed wooden case from a carpenter. This model appeared to be more applicable than a bottle, as ferns had thrived in it. Further in his experiments, he successfully transported a case with British ferns and grasses to Sydney and even back, in 1833. The plants were still in good condition despite storms during the trip. 

This is how the Wardian case came into existence – a modern terrarium and vivarium forerunner. The invention also opened new opportunities for plants importing, breaking some of the geographic agricultural monopolies. One of the first and most noticeable cases was a Scottish botanist Robert Fortune's venture: he smuggled tea plants from China in Wardian cases to start a new plantation in Assam, India, in the 1840s. The cases were also used in transportation of cinchona (quinine) plants from South Africa and rubber trees from Brazil. 

Bottom line: 

Humble-looking objects and inventions can have a disproportional effect on the world.

Information can be more powerful than regulation

The US government instituted the Toxic Release Inventory in 1986 – a new requirement for companies across a wide range of industries to report publicly their hazardous pollutant emissions every year. The document didn't define limits for the pollution nor special fines for the facilities with higher emissions. 

The program was created as part of a response to several events that raised public concern about the availability of information on hazardous substances. The vision for the Toxics Release Inventory is that it's recognized as a premier resource for accessing information on possible exposure to toxic chemicals and pollution prevention activities that can reduce this exposure.

According to the environmental scientist Donella Meadows, by 1990 emissions dropped 40% comparing to the first released data and continued to decrease. One of the reasons, as Meadows believed, was the corporate reputation. One of the main pollutant companies even reduced its emissions by 90% to get out of the top list.

Bottom line: 

Changing information flows can have a significant effect on physical reality, even without direct intervention. Making infrormation available is also usually cheaper and easier than trying to influence things through action and regulation.

The doctor who fulfilled his predictions

According to a story mentioned by behavioral scientist Robin M. Hogarth, there was a physician in the early twentieth-century New York, who became famous for his ability to predict if the patient would get typhoid fever. He did it by observing the patient's tongue, which was a pretty common procedure for medicine those days.

During the ward rounds, he was moving from one patient to another, palpating the tongue with his fingers and checking its structure, before moving to the next patient to repeat the manipulations. The doctor predicted the disease over and over again, and his forecasts were amazingly accurate even days before the patient had any symptoms. 

Indeed, the predictions could hardly be wrong because he was actually transferring typhoid with his fingers. 

Bottom line:

The ability to notice the connections is a powerful tool, but it doesn't guarantee that these connections interpreted correctly.

Photo: Wellcome Library

Reckless driverless cars

Some scientists believe that driverless cars will not work unless they learn to be irrational.

If such cars stop reliably whenever a pedestrian appears in front of them, pedestrian crossings will be unnecessary and jaywalkers will be able to marching to the road, forcing a driverless car to stop suddenly, a great discomfort to its occupants. To prevent this, driverless cars may have to learn to be angry, and you occasionally maliciously fail to stop in time and strike the pedestrian on the shins.

Bottom line:

If you are wholly predictable, people learn to hack you.

Nine collisions limit

Billiard players usually have an idea how to make a hit so that the balls move in the right direction. With more or less accuracy, they estimate the position of the balls, impact force, and other parameters to determine the trajectory.

Practice makes these calculations more accurate, but still, it seems rather easy to predict what would happen at the first hit. The second impact becomes more complicated. After a couple of collisions, the player is less able to determine where the balls go.

In 1978, a physicist Michael Berry calculated the number of collisions a billiard ball can make before a player has no way of knowing its eventual trajectory. It turned out that such calculations require taking into account not just mechanical forces but the gravity of Earth and the gravitational pull of objects close to the table. Berry estimated that if that object, for instance, is a person who weighs 50 kilos, the determinacy would be lost after 9 collisions (or even before if not considering the gravity impact).

Bottom line:

Dealing with a tightly coupled system is a difficult exercise of planning, as the complexity quickly arises even if the conditions were simple and clear at first glance.

Source: Regular And Irregular Motion by M.V. Berry (page 81)

AI sees AI does

The Amazon team had been developing a powerful tool to help the company's recruiters. The AI-algorithm was supposed to review applicants’ resumes, rate the candidates and choose the best ones to hire.

The program analyzed resumes that had been submitted to Amazon for over 10 years. And it found out that most of the applicants’ for technical jobs were men, a reflection of male dominance across the tech industry. So the algorithm taught itself to avoid people who graduated from women's colleges or who had the word "women" somewhere in their resume, as in "Women's chess club" or "Society of Women Engineers."

Technically, the program did what people asked it to do. The AI didn't know that it wasn't supposed to copy this particular thing that it had seen humans do. When the team discovered the issue, they gave up on the new tool, as insiders say. The developers edited the program, making it neutral to these particular terms, but there was no guarantee that the algorithm wouldn’t find another discriminatory way to sort the candidates. The recruiters used the program as an auxiliary tool when looking for talents but never relied on it.

Bottom line:

Working with AI is more like working with some kind of weird force of nature than an actually intelligent thing. This force can be destructive and not even know that. Humans have to learn how to communicate with AI and understand what it is capable of and what it's not.

Source: TED.com

Baboons that learned not to be aggressive

A neurobiologist Robert Sapolsky had been studying one of the most aggressive primates – Savanna baboons in East Africa. The main reason for stress for them is not predators but their fellows. They spend only 3 hours a day gaining food, leaving the rest of the day to make each other miserable. Males attacks were the main death cause among their groups during Sapolsky’s observation.

When the number of tourists in the area increased, one of the baboon troops quit their normal lifestyle and started feeding on the garbage near the tourist lodge. Soon, a part of males from the other troop two kilometers far discovered the garbage and started coming every day to join the feast. Once a lump of cow meat infected with tuberculosis got in the garbage. All the local baboons became sick, and they died. The same happened with the strangers from the other troop. These were the least social and most aggressive males.

Those who survived were females and some not aggressive and highly social males. The level of aggression within the troop significantly declined, and animals became much closer to each other. One could observe behavior patterns not common for other baboon troops, such as a lot of social grooming, or males helping to take care of the kids instead of being aggressive. Moreover, these animals were healthier due to lower levels of stress.

Sapolsky had stopped studying this troop for about ten years. When he came back, he found the troop remained the same. But all males that survived tuberculosis had died since long, and new ones were males who grew up somewhere else within the common aggressive conditions. They came into this troop around puberty and adopted new social patterns, learning mainly from the females. It turned out that aggression wasn’t the part of baboons’ immutable instinct but something that can be changed. The transition of their society came about in only one generation.

Bottom line:

Aggression is primarily a social phenomenon. It is not an inherent nature, and it can be changed to a better side. This leads to a less stressed and thus mentally & physically healthier society.

Photo by: Alex Petrenko

Memory, language and completing people’s sentences

Researchers the University of Pennsylvania have confirmed that language processing, cognition and memory and much more closely connected in the brain than previously assumed. Using a test that asked people to complete  unfinished sentences they observed more activity in the parts of the brain responsible for memory, than what they had assumed.

This suggests that many of us, when rushing to complete other people’s sentences, are actually just indulging in repeating what we have already thought or heard before. Enjoying “pattern completion” while neglecting the new information. Competing other people’s sentences most likely prevents us from properly comprehending the new ideas that the other person may have to contribute.

Trying not to play “autocomplete” when having conversations is not just about being less annoying to the person you are speaking with. It’s also about actually being able to truly understand what they are saying.

Bottom line:

Our memory, our language and our cognition are all interlinked very closely. So the next time you think you already know what people are going to say before they have finished the sentence - think twice, because it could just be your memory playing tricks and preventing you from hearing what the other person actually has to say.

Fashion from a grocery store

During the Great Depression in the US, flour sacks didn't end up in the garbage after all their content had been consumed by the household. Families made clothes from them, especially in rural areas. It was so common that flour sacks became a part of the local folklore.

So the flour manufacturers realized that their commodity product could have an added value and they starting using the added value in an attempt to gain a competitive advantage.

Soon most flour sacks had colorful patterns printed on them and buying flour became so much more than just buying flour.

Bottom line:

Every single bit of your product (including packaging) can provide an opportunity to bring added value to the consumers and gain a competitive advantage along the way. Even commodity products can become lifestyle brands if they dare to see beyond their own basic utility.