Start Where You Are
September 7, 2021
In Winter Notes on Summer Impressions, Dostoevsky famously suggested that the reader try not to think of a white bear. The reader, he added, will soon notice that “the cursed thing will come to mind every minute.” He underestimated.
In a 1987 study, psychologists found that people instructed not to think about a white bear not only thought of the bear more than once a minute, they thought of the bear more than subjects who had been told to think about a white bear. This is what psychologists call an “ironic process” — more effort gets precisely the wrong outcome.
The other day I was thinking about, well, a white bear, while reading The Practice of Groundedness, a brand new book (literally, out today) by Brad Stulberg. Early in the book, Brad reveals his own battle with unpleasant, intrusive thoughts, and his eventual diagnosis with obsessive-compulsive disorder (which he wrote about for Outside).
Given that he’s an executive coach, and had already co-written a popular book on mental performance, he was especially bemused to find himself struggling with mental health. “This is a nightmare; it’s not really happening,” he writes in his new book. “There must be a way I can will myself better.” And so, initially, Brad went with the white bear approach — trying harder not to think those intrusive thoughts. But trying to will it all away backfired. “The more I pushed against my experience of OCD, the stronger it became.”
Brad’s path back to a healthier mental state involved a therapist who helped him “surrender,” as he put it. He let go of his increasingly intense focus on how he felt his life and his mind should be, and accepted how they actually were. Negative inner chatter was Brad’s white bear, and the therapist helped him stop trying so hard not to think about it.
Reading Brad’s story reminded me of a shift of mind that I found helpful back when I was a college 800-meter runner. I was a walk-on, and when I started, the gap between where I was and where I wanted to be was so chasmic that I nearly quit. I had specific time goals I wanted to run, and every time I missed one (which was always, at first), I became more frantic about reaching it the next time.
Eventually, I learned that that only added counterproductive pressure, and having a strict time goal really didn’t help me. A specific time goal didn’t dictate my training — since that was dictated by what I was capable of at the moment — and it only served to make me unhappy after I crossed the line and didn’t reach it.
Part of the remedy, ultimately, was de-emphasizing the rigid long-term goal in favor of focusing on improving a little bit this week. Sometimes that meant starting an interval session a little faster than I had previously; other times it was getting ahead on homework so I could get more sleep the night after a hard workout.
By the end of college, I’d gotten a whole lot better. I was a member of the school record 4x800 team, and I actually ditched making specific time goals altogether. That would’ve been unthinkable to me a few years earlier, but instead I focused on the part of the path right in front of my nose — how to improve a little each week.
When I started both of my books, at first I fell into the same mindset trap of thinking too far ahead — “OMG, 100,000 words to go, why did I get myself into this?!?” Now I keep the phrase “cutting stone” on a little white board on my desk, a reminder just to take each single, barely perceptible axe-chop at the stone at a time, and eventually it will be ground to dust.
And on that note…
For the final time, a reminder: this newsletter is moving — tomorrow! Your subscription will be automatically transferred, although you will be presented with an opt-out option and can unsubscribe at any time. These posts, (which have been aperiodic), will become weekly. The Range Report isn’t currently where I want it to be, but I hope you’ll stick with me as I try to get just a little bit better each week;)
Thanks for reading. Coming up: the introductory post for the revamped newsletter… David
[/vc_column_text][/vc_column][vc_column width="1/4" offset="vc_col-lg-offset-1"][vc_raw_html]JTVCbWM0d3BfZm9ybSUyMGlkJTNEJTIyNDklMjIlNUQ=[/vc_raw_html][vc_basic_grid post_type="post" max_items="3" element_width="12" grid_id="vc_gid:1630767949433-1138e4e5-3cc6-6" taxonomies="14"][/vc_column][/vc_row][vc_row][vc_column][vc_wp_posts number="3"][/vc_column][/vc_row]Afghanistan Doomscrolling and the Reality of Deterrence
August 19, 2021
I value Twitter because it helps me stumble upon interesting people and information that I might not otherwise encounter. But I’ve also had a propensity to doomscroll when breaking news feels overwhelming.
About a year ago, I came across a research finding that going down an internet rabbit hole can actually stimulate creative thinking, so long as you start with a specific question. So now, when I find myself starting to doomscroll, I try to come up with a specific question related to the news — preferably one that can make me a more informed citizen — and then veer off to investigate that. Dear reader, you will not be surprised to learn that I have found this more enriching than doomscrolling.
On Monday night, amid the tragic images coming out of Afghanistan, I felt myself starting to doomscroll, and decided to come up with a question I could investigate instead. I had already watched several clips in which pundits proclaimed a U.S. “credibility” crisis (apparently a long-running hobbyhorse from some of those pundits). Breaking news articles declared that “Western deterrence now looks hollow,” and described “the erosion of American credibility and deterrence.”
Each credibility-crisis hot take was a little different, but the theme of what I saw was that U.S. credibility is now damaged among allies, which will lead to more aggression in the long run from adversaries who perceive both U.S. resolve and alliances to be weak. Former Vice President Pence encapsulated the theme pretty well in writing that this week’s news has “caused allies to doubt our dependability, and emboldened enemies to test our resolve.” (This same theme made headlines when President Trump withdrew troops from northern Syria in 2019.)
The question I alighted on: What usually happens? More specifically, do past military actions impact a country’s ability to deter violence against allies in the future?
That question quickly led me to an interesting paper: “What Makes Deterrence Work?” (You can register for a free account to read it.) The paper examined 54 instances over the twentieth century in which one country (the “defender”) sought to deter another country (the “attacker”) from attacking a third country (the “protégé”).
The researchers examined all sorts of variables to see what influenced deterrence, from a defender’s prior willingness to fight, to the existence of formal alliances between defender and protégé, to the relative strength of defender and attacker militaries, to the possession of nuclear weapons. And their conclusions are, I think, somewhat surprising.
Formal alliances did not predict deterrence success, and neither did the overall strength of a defender’s military. Three factors predicted a defender’s likelihood of forestalling an imminent attack on a third party: 1) Robust trade between the defender and protégé 2) The protégé getting most of its weapons from the defender 3) Local military might — the strength of the military force on the ground in the country being defended right now. That’s especially interesting because it means that if, say, the U.S. is the defender, the fact that the U.S. military is far mightier than the attacker did not matter unless that might was presently apparent on the protégé’s ground. Military potential, in other words (including possessing nuclear weapons), did not matter, whereas present military commitment on the ground did.
I’m cramming a lengthy paper into a newsletter-nutshell, but the overall picture I took away was that attackers are usually deterred when a defender has an enormous economic interest in the protégé country, and has shown how eager they are to defend it; defenders express that eagerness through providing the protégé with loads of sophisticated weaponry and boots on the ground.
The importance of economic interest, while intuitive, really jumped out. The greater the share of a defender country’s imports and exports that a protégé country accounted for, the more likely the defender country was to successfully deter the onset of violence. According to the model the researchers constructed, when a defender and protégé did not have a business relationship, the chance of the defender halting a threat from an attacker before violence ensued was a coin flip. If a protégé accounted for 6% of a defender’s imports and exports, the model predicted an 86% chance of successful deterrence. Defenders, it seems, put their money where their money is.
So, ya know, follow the money — what else is new? But it’s interesting that would-be attackers are clearly gathering strong signals about the potential consequences of violence based on how economically linked the defender and protégé are.
I found two other conclusions of the paper surprising and interesting. First, based on this study, the “credibility” argument I saw while doomscrolling doesn’t look convincing. The researchers, Yale professors Paul Huth and Bruce Russett, note that “the ‘need’ to demonstrate resolve was a key rationalization for America’s experience in Vietnam and throughout the post-Munich era,” but they conclude that “the defender’s past behavior against a threat does not predict whether the defender will be able to succeed in deterring a later attack.” In fact, “the defender’s past behavior in crises seems to make no systematic difference.” Past performance — apparently not a predictor of future results when it comes to deterrence. (Once I latched on to this credibility question, I saw that journalists and political scientists have been writing about the “credibility trap” for years.)
The second conclusion that ran contrary to my intuition was that formal alliances actually had a slight negative influence on deterrence success. Attackers, according to the study, do not appear to value formal alliances as a signal of a defender’s commitment. France famously signed off on Hitler’s annexation of part of Czechoslovakia (in return for a promise of peace), despite a formal military alliance between France and Czechoslovakia meant specifically to deter German aggression. As the paper authors note, alliances didn’t deter the onset of violence in either world war, “although the alliance system did insure that war, once begun, would cascade to include most of the great powers.”
Then again…
...this paper was merely a starting point in a search for something more thoughtful than what doomscrolling was getting me. (Low bar, I know.) I’m not entirely convinced. This kind of mathematical modeling of the past in order to predict the future is fraught with statistical pitfalls. It is very important to ask what usually happens — it is, in fact, known as “reference class forecasting” (a topic in chapter five of Range) and has been shown to improve judgment — but there are many devils in details of any specific model.
The fact that, in this paper, formal alliances had a small negative influence on successful deterrence (as opposed to just no effect) should raise a flag. Does a formal alliance really contribute to deterrence failure? More likely is that attackers — who are aware of the alliance — only threaten an allied protégé when they’re really serious about attacking. (Huth and Russett, to their credit, acknowledge this likelihood.) We shouldn’t conclude from this paper that not having alliances would make for better deterrence, even though that’s what you might think from a context-free interpretation of the study results. Models are tools to aid thinking, not license to turn off your brain. So after reading Huth and Russett, I went looking for contrary studies.
One that took them on directly (you can read it with a free account) found that the characteristics that Huth and Russett highlighted do matter for deterrence, but that overall military strength and alliances also matter. Another contrary study found that reputation from past behavior does matter for future deterrence, but most strongly in repeat interactions with the same attacker as part of the same larger conflict, and less strongly when subsequent conflicts aren’t identical to past ones.
Maybe the overall picture, as a 2013 Washington Post article about Syria policy put it, is that attackers are “smart enough to know that different situations are, well, different.” Reputation may matter, but as part of a complex stew of deterrence that is much more nuanced than headlines would have me believe.
That might be an unsatisfactory conclusion, but the inquiry that led me to these papers has me thinking more critically about the news. I ended up seeing more complexity than simplicity, which does feel a bit confusing, but I also think it’s more representative of reality.
Next time you’re stuck in a late-night doomscroll, zoom out for a moment. Come up with a question that might prompt productive searching instead. You might be surprised by what you find, just like I was.
Thanks for reading. Until next time…
David
P.s. Just a reminder: in coming weeks, this newsletter will relaunch on another platform. Your subscription will automatically transfer, but you will receive a notice allowing you to opt out. And if a friend sent you this newsletter, you can subscribe here.
[/vc_column_text][/vc_column][vc_column width="1/4" offset="vc_col-lg-offset-1"][vc_raw_html]JTVCbWM0d3BfZm9ybSUyMGlkJTNEJTIyNDklMjIlNUQ=[/vc_raw_html][vc_basic_grid post_type="post" max_items="3" element_width="12" grid_id="vc_gid:1629421255929-278bed7b-9882-8" taxonomies="14"][/vc_column][/vc_row][vc_row][vc_column][vc_wp_posts number="3"][/vc_column][/vc_row]Getting Over Gold: Athletes and Mental Health
July 29, 2021
In 2009, I wrote an article for Sports Illustrated about a U.S. four-man bobsled team known as the “Night Train” — so named for the sled’s matte black finish. The following year, at the Vancouver Winter Olympics, they won the first U.S. gold in 62 years. They didn’t just win, they dominated. An epic photo of the team — running over the ice, about to pile into the sled beneath gently falling snow — ran on the cover of SI.
In the years since, Steve Mesler, a three-time Olympian and member of that team, became one of my close friends. I’ve been around plenty of world champions during their moments of elation, but my friendship with Steve has given me a window into something more fascinating, more difficult, and more important: the glide descent back to Earth after a life-changing triumph.
With Simone Biles openly (and bravely) discussing mental compartmentalization — a tool that Steve identifies below as crucial in the short-term for athletes, but harmful in the long run — I’ve found my mind returning to my conversations with him.
Five or so years ago, Steve stayed with me while he was in town for work. I took him, and his gold medal, to meet the sports-crazy seven-year-old twin boys who lived next door. Everyone took a turn trying on the medal. When the boys’ father got his turn, he draped the saucer-sized medal over his neck, turned to Steve, and asked: “So, when you got this, was it just like, everything for the rest of your life is fine?” It was a compliment about Steve’s achievement, but also betrayed the gap between perception and reality when it comes to the lives of Olympians.
“If you would have asked me that question before I won gold,” Steve told me, “I would have said, ‘Yes, I’ll be good for the rest of my life.’ Bobsled was my identity, and that was everything that I wanted.” But over the next few years, Steve would struggle with building a new identity. He would also bury two teammates, both of whom struggled with mental health issues, and he would recognize and get help for his own depression.
Today, Steve is thriving. He’s the CEO of Classroom Champions, a growing nonprofit that connects Olympians and Paralympians to classrooms for virtual mentoring; a member of the board of the U.S. Olympic and Paralympic Committee; and a girl dad. Amid all the gauzy human interest stories you’re seeing on NBC during the Games (and don’t get me wrong, I love ‘em), I wanted to share a decidedly rarer look at an Olympian’s path.
Below is an edited version of Steve telling his story — it’s one of grit, triumph, and tragedy. The italics are my narration; everything else is Steve. This Range Report is longer (10-12-minute reading time) than normal, so I’ve bolded a few important quotes below for anyone who only has time to skim. And, just a warning, there will be discussion of suicide:
Steve grew up in Buffalo, and at age 11 was a youth national champion in track and field. He later accepted a scholarship to the University of Florida to compete as a decathlete. He had his sights set on the Olympics, but every one of his college seasons ended in injury. When graduation rolled around, he wasn’t sure what to do….
I didn’t know anything else other than being an athlete. That was my identity. And I didn’t feel like I’d accomplished the goals I’d set for myself. I didn’t like that feeling. So it was August of 2000, I was sitting on my couch in Gainesville, Florida, two days after I had Tommy John surgery on my elbow, and it was clear my track career was over. I don’t know if it was the painkillers, but I had this little voice in the back of my head — it was the guy who recruited me to Florida, and he always compared me to an athlete he had back in the day who went from track to bobsled. I just laughed it off. But when I was sitting on the couch, I thought, well, maybe I can do it. And literally, I wrote an email to the U.S. Olympic Committee, and said ‘I’m this big, I’m this strong, this fast. Can I do this?’ I got an email back the next day. They’re like, ‘You have to gain some weight, but you’re the right size.’ Of course, my good Jewish mother, her first response was, ‘Go get a job.’ And I said, ‘Just give me a year.’
You can read the actual email Steve wrote if you scroll down here. He survived on odd jobs — substitute teaching, coaching a high school track team, and more — and trained by pushing his roommate’s car up the ramp of a parking garage. The next year, he visited the Olympic Training Center in Chula Vista.
I remember showing up and seeing these guys who were just ginormous. Like, massive human beings, and I almost left. But the next day we started doing testing, and I realized I’m faster than almost all these guys, and I’m not that much weaker. Ok, I can do this. And that was the beginning. And then I got invited out to the Lake Placid Olympic Training Center. When I was there, it was four guys to a room. Two normal beds, and a bunk bed, with grown men.
Steve was picked for “USA-3,” i.e. the third-ranked U.S. bobsled team, which meant he would begin representing the country in competition. Most spectators are only aware of bobsled every four years, but between Olympics there’s a World Cup circuit, mostly in Europe.
What you see on television every four years, that is reality, but for 16 days. Then there’s the rest of the time, more than 1,400 days between Olympics where you’re living like you’re in college again, at best. But in retrospect, it was awesome. That’s actually the stuff I miss most. I miss getting in the truck after a race in Winterberg, Germany, and knowing the autobahns so well that I could get from Winterberg to Altenberg, which is six hours away, without a map. And I learned to speak German, because, well, the offseason for a bobsledder is not a lot of brain exercise. One of my proudest moments was after we won gold, getting to do an interview with a German broadcaster, and doing it in German.
Steve thrived within the structure of bobsled training.
I excelled at executing a plan. And luckily coach Stu McMillan was very good at allowing me to be part of building the plan. But the structure and the rigor...I mean, one of the things I miss the most about sport is you get to wake up every day and get better, and you know how to get better. When you enter what an athlete would call the “real world,” there aren’t those lines drawn for you. It can be really hard to tell how do you get better. In sport, and especially at that level, you know if you eat that extra egg, you get six extra grams of protein. If you get six extra grams of protein on a daily basis, you’re going to get better. If you finish the last rep of the last set, you’re going to get better. If you can sleep that extra hour, you’re going to get better. So every single thing you’re doing for 24 hours a day is focused on that goal. I’m not even exaggerating. And then there are three other guys who are focused on that exact same goal, and there’s no questioning what the priorities are.
Now I run an organization, and yes everybody’s striving to make Classroom Champions better, but ultimately that’s not their number one goal in life. They have family, they have mortgage payments, they have things they do for recreation. Classroom Champions is hopefully in the top few priorities, but it’s one of many. When I was training for bobsled, I had one goal. I appreciate that even more now that I can look back on it. You know, over the three Olympics I competed in, most of the guys were single a lot of the time because ultimately, who wants to be in a relationship with someone where you’re not the priority? And when we were competing, nobody else could be the priority. You don’t really get that much in life in general, four people all going after one goal, unquestioned. That’s a really amazing environment to be in.
At the 2006 Torino Games, Steve was on a sled favored to medal, but they choked and came up empty. Then in 2010, the Night Train team was one of the stories of the Games, not only because of their commanding win, but because driver Steve Holcomb had an amazing personal story of driving while nearly going blind from a degenerative condition. The team was also, quite simply, joyful. The goofy “Holcy Dance,” (with Mesler singing), did the rounds on TV — here with Steven Colbert. Steve Mesler was the oldest team member, and the only one who retired right after winning gold. As the euphoria receded, he took stock of what he’d learned.
I’ve spent a lot of time speaking to businesses, and there are things I learned in sport that transfer to the rest of the world, but there are a lot of things that don’t. Obviously, putting 500 pounds on your back and squatting doesn’t. That sets you up for winning the Olympics, but not for health or the rest of your life. And there are mental things like that. For example, compartmentalizing is a fantastic tool when you’re an athlete, just blocking everything out that isn’t in line with one goal. But it’s terrible for other aspects of your life; it’s terrible for relationships. And I think we’re not doing our athletes today much justice by not teaching them that some of these things are short-term great, and long-term bad.
Just search “Simone Biles compartmentalize” to see how frequently it comes up in relation to the gymnastics GOAT — from her and others around her. Steve’s compartmentalization included blocking out thoughts about post-gold-medal life.
That would have been almost like sacrilege. Anything that wasn’t the goal was a distraction. I remember being back in Buffalo a few months after we won, and this guy saying to me, “What’s it like to write the first line of your obituary at the age of 31?” And, oh wow, you know, hopefully you’ve got 50 or 60 years of life left in you, but you’re never going to do anything that big ever again. And that hits you for sure.
One of Steve’s Olympian friends who struggled after his own triumph was aerial skier Jeret “Speedy” Peterson. Peterson was one of the darlings of the Vancouver Games thanks to his patented “Hurricane” maneuver of three flips and five twists.
I remember watching Speedy win the Olympic medal that he’d strove for, and wanted for his whole career. He’d been through his ups and downs, and in February of 2010, he wins his silver medal. In July of 2011, he phones the police and lets them know where they can find his body. And he walks out into the woods in the mountains with a shotgun and…. So, you know, here’s Speedy in 2010, winning a medal, and a year later he’s dead. Speedy had that joyful side, and he also had a darker side. You know, our experiences were pretty similar in that we both reached our goals. Pavle Jovanovic, who was on my team in 2006, he had the opposite experience.
The 2006 team was the one that was favored, but then didn’t perform well at the Games. So despite being one of the best bobsled pushers in the world for years, Jovanovic’s career ended without an Olympic medal.
I learned a lot of my best training habits from Pavle. In the evenings, he’d stretch every night, religiously. He’d do a thousand crunches religiously. And I get a phone call last spring, and his brother found him dead [by suicide] in their shop.
In a lengthy instagram post after Jovanovic passed, Steve wrote: “What happens when the person who is best known as being 150% focused or nothing– finds the nothing becoming what they become 150% focused on?”
Pavle and Speedy had very different experiences, and they wound up with the same result. I had a similar experience to Speedy, and I wound up with depression. It was delayed for me, and I think part of the delay was that in bobsled, you’ve got 20 guys, you know, knocking on the door all the time to take your spot, and vulnerability is a bad thing. Those guys will smell blood and come for your job. So I learned how to be the best in the world by not showing vulnerability. And that is about one of the most unhealthy habits you can have. For me, I think it was a toxic combination of being used to an environment where vulnerability was bad, maybe being more susceptible to depression with multiple head traumas through the sport of bobsled, and also just the pressures of life, and trying to succeed. Growing a nonprofit, and also the pressure of being on the Olympic and Paralympic Committee board and taking a lot of heat for things going on there. So it was a different evolution for me than for other athletes, but one of the biggest realizations for me is that, whether you have that success like Speedy or myself, or you miss it, like Pavle, either way you still end up losing this thing that you were pursuing, and that really was your identity.
In addition to Speedy and Pavle, in 2017, Night Train driver Steve Holcomb was found dead at the Olympic Training Center in Lake Placid. A toxicology report found that he had alcohol and sleeping pills in his system. Holcomb was a five-time world champion and had an Olympic gold and two silvers; he had also long struggled with mental health.
I’m 42 now, and I have physically buried two teammates. I slid with six different guys at the Olympics, and buried two of them. Another former teammate and roommate survived a suicide attempt. That’s not the kind of batting average you want. That will change your perspective on how to approach mental health, because I don’t want that for my family, and I don’t want that for my friends, or old teammates.
As a USOPC board member, Steve is hoping to make it easier for athletes to open up about their mental health, just as they would a physical ailment, and to get help. He’s talking about this publicly because he wants to normalize the conversation.
I’m starting to talk to other athletes about, you know, some of the behaviors that you have are good for your sport, but not good for other parts of your life. And ultimately, I’m starting to recognize that it’s almost like you’ve got to go through the stages of grief, because you’re experiencing loss even when you win. Because I had this thing in my life, this pursuit of being the best in the world. I had these people in my life who are all going after the same thing, and then we accomplished it, which is fantastic. But nothing replaces that journey and camaraderie. That part of me is gone now. Whether it’s a win or a loss, the outcome is only a moment in time. February 27, 2010, that was the day I won a gold medal, but from June 1990 until February 2010 was the pursuit. And so you tell me which one you think is going to be easier to get over, the thing that happened in one day, whether you won or lost, or the thing that was 20 years?
Steve used to view depression with the same “suck it up” stigma that a lot of people do, so he was reluctant to get help. Once he began thinking of it as a physical ailment — like many others he’d had treated over the years — it became easier for him to seek solutions. From there, he had two personal revelations: that being vulnerable could be a strength in his new life, and that excessive compartmentalizing — i.e. blocking out everything but an immediate work goal — could undermine his long-term life goals and relationships.
Everything in life is a skill, and you’ve got to learn when to use it and when not to use it. And the problem for us athletes is we’re pretty pigheaded and we became the best in the world at using certain skills, so of course we assume those same skills are going to help us be successful in every other aspect of life. And sometimes that’s true, and sometimes it’s not. And as soon as I was able to understand that, and admit that to myself, boy oh boy, I got through my depression pretty quickly.
Now my hope is that, 20 years from now, some other 42-year-old bobsledder doesn’t have to talk about the handful of friends they’ve had to bury. And, you know, that’s not a very high bar. But, ultimately, it’s really tough because you’re talking about people who are the most obsessive, focused individuals on the planet. And whether you’re an Olympian, or an entrepreneur, or just somebody who’s really trying to be better or one of the best people in their field, those mindsets are basically the same.
That’s where my conversation with Steve ended, and it left me thinking about my own experience with books. Both of my books grew organically out of long-held interests — the balance of nature and nurture in sports; how broad or specialized to be. They were both commercially successful beyond my expectations, and yet, the grieving period that Steve described resonates. I’m grateful for those successes, but it’s still true that, in each case, my overwhelming feeling after publication was one of missing the learning (albeit not the work hours!). One reason I started a newsletter just before Range came out was so that I’d have a place to humor (and share) my curiosity in the absence of a book project. Perhaps, as any project that’s important to us comes to a close — whether we succeeded or not — we should be thinking about how to preserve the bits of the process that we love.
Thank you for reading. Until next time….
David
p.s. If a friend sent you this newsletter, you can sign up here.[/vc_column_text][/vc_column][vc_column width="1/4" offset="vc_col-lg-offset-1"][vc_raw_html]JTVCbWM0d3BfZm9ybSUyMGlkJTNEJTIyNDklMjIlNUQ=[/vc_raw_html][vc_basic_grid post_type="post" max_items="3" element_width="12" grid_id="vc_gid:1627564876292-4bfe59c4-959b-7" taxonomies="14"][/vc_column][/vc_row][vc_row][vc_column][vc_wp_posts number="3"][/vc_column][/vc_row]Wait, Weed Makes You Faster??
Jul 6, 2021
Whenever doping stories go viral, I get flooded with interview requests, thanks to the high-profile doping stories I’ve written in the past, both at Sports Illustrated and ProPublica. So last week was a deluge. As track coach Steve Magness put it: “We found the issue that can unite America’s political division, that brings conservatives and liberals together on the same side… Sha'Carri missing the Olympics for testing positive for pot.”
Next to Jamaica’s Shelly-Ann Fraser-Pryce, who has the fastest 100-meter time in the world, Sha’Carri Richardson would have been the top contender for gold in Tokyo. Assuming you aren’t the protagonist of Plato’s cave, you’ve heard that Richardson has been disqualified from the individual 100-meters because she tested positive at the Olympic Trials for THC, the main psychoactive ingredient in marijuana. Richardson admitted that she smoked before Trials after learning of the death of her biological mother.
I don’t intend to add to the remarkable sum of hot takes about this on the internet. But the questions that some reporters asked me betrayed fundamental misconceptions that I think harm the public understanding of this news story. Based on the misunderstandings I’ve gleaned, below are a few points of context for anyone with a newfound interest in anti-doping policy.
Misconception 1: The law of the land matters when it comes to anti-doping.
It does not. Congresswoman Alexandria Ocasio-Cortez, among many others, pointed out that Richardson smoked in Oregon, where marijuana is legal. But anti-doping regulations run according to the World Anti-Doping Agency’s rules, (aka. “the Code”), and its master list of substances that are prohibited in Olympic sports. The Olympic committees of 206 countries are signatories to the Code. As you might imagine, Oregon, the Netherlands, and Saudi Arabia don’t have the same marijuana laws, so regional laws would not currently work as a way to standardize anti-doping. (And even if national law somehow were used, marijuana is still illegal according to U.S. federal law.)
Furthermore, a substance can actually be completely legal in the entire U.S. and still banned in sports. DHEA is a good example. It’s a testosterone precursor that avoided becoming a federally controlled substance, thanks in part to former Utah senator Orrin Hatch. (DHEA was big business in Utah, and Hatch’s son was a lobbyist for the dietary supplement industry.) You can get DHEA at your local CVS, but it is nonetheless banned in Olympic sports.
Misconception 2: The U.S. Anti-Doping Agency could overturn the suspension.
With Congressman Jamie Raskin, Ocasio-Cortez called on the U.S. Anti-Doping Agency to reverse the suspension that will cost Richardson a chance to run in the 100. USADA is the body that enforces WADA Code for American athletes in Olympic sports. USADA has no discretion to overturn the suspension in a case like this. To overturn the procedures that are formally agreed-upon by 206 Olympic committees (and a bunch of other entities involved in international sports) would be the sports equivalent of overturning an election result because one constituent party doesn’t like it. It would render the entire code obsolete. (If national bodies could summarily unban their own athletes, you would have seen a lot of Russian athletes getting unbanned in recent years.) Even USADA CEO Travis Tygart has made clear in his public statements that he’s not thrilled with this outcome. But it’s not up to him.
Misconception 3: Baseball and football players don’t get suspended for weed, so Sha’Carri shouldn’t either. There should be a single standard for all athletes.
Philosophically, I think this is a fine argument to make. In current reality, though, it isn’t useful. In 2014, I broke the news of the product that led U.S. sprinter Tyson Gay to get suspended. He was taking it in part because he’d been told by a healthcare provider that NFL players were also taking it, and they weren’t failing drug tests. The product listed DHEA, which would be no problem for an NFL player — it isn’t banned by the NFL — but a big problem for an Olympian. Again, DHEA is legal in the U.S., and not banned in the major U.S. pro sports. But it is prohibited by WADA, which is what matters for Olympic sports.
Beyond just the list of prohibited substances, there’s another reason that anti-doping differs between Olympic sports and the major U.S. leagues. Back at SI, every time I wrote about the NFL’s lax anti-doping, I (or my boss) would get a letter from the league about how it had the strongest anti-doping protocols in sports. Lol. (You can listen to retired star receiver Calvin Johnson make light of the NFL’s testing in this recent podcast.)
The fact is, testing in the major U.S. pro sports is limited for two main reasons: first, the leagues police themselves, and you can imagine how much they enjoy foisting scandals upon their own heads. Second, in the major pro sports, the athletes have unions that engage in collective bargaining. Anti-doping policies are arrived at through negotiation between the respective league and players’ union. The result has been anti-doping efforts that are far less stringent than in Olympic sports. (I must say, I was surprised when two Super Bowl MVPs in four years — Von Miller and Julian Edelman — managed to run afoul of NFL drug rules. But I’m not even sure most NFL fans realize that happened.)
I think there are pros and cons to both systems, but it is inarguable that collective bargaining leads to much easier testing protocols in the pro sports leagues. Baseball is an interesting example, where Major Leaguers have a union, but Minor Leaguers do not. Back when I was actively covering anti-doping, testing in the Minors was more stringent. In fact, the Minors served as the place where testing itself was sometimes tested before it went to the big leagues.
Misconception 4: Unless Sha’Carri was running for a bag of chips, weed wouldn’t have made her faster so it shouldn’t be banned.
Honestly, even if she were running for a bag of chips, it would probably just make her think she was faster. Seriously, though, I sympathize with this argument. Personally, I do not think WADA should be testing for marijuana, and — as a year-round track fan — I would be thrilled to see Sha’Carri run in Tokyo. That said, even if everyone agreed that marijuana only makes you slower, (and they might), it could still be banned.
First off, the WADA prohibited list is not sport-specific — with one exception that I know of. For the most part, a substance is either banned or not; it isn’t banned by sport. So let’s say a sedative is banned in archery or shooting, where athletes have used calming drugs to improve performance. Then it’s going to be banned in track, too, even if it wouldn’t help. The lone exception (that I know of) is for beta blockers, common prescription drugs that lower blood pressure and slow heart rate. Beta blockers are banned in archery and shooting, and a few other sports, presumably because of potential performance enhancement. (Shooters try to fire between heartbeats.)
Unlike, say, anabolic steroids, marijuana is only banned in competition, and a 2011 WADA paper gives the reasons why. In a nutshell, the paper claims that marijuana meets all three criteria of a prohibited substance — and it only needs to meet two to get on the list: 1) Health risk: impaired reaction time and decision making could endanger the athlete or other athletes. 2) Potential performance enhancement: the paper contends that studies and athlete interviews suggest it could help with some sports. (The paper mentions that marijuana dilates blood vessels and airways, which “could improve oxygenation.”) 3) Violates the spirit of sport: it’s illegal in most places, and hence doesn’t make for good role modeling for young people.
The third criterion is plainly subjective. (And given that THC is only banned in competition, that criterion may not be carrying much weight.) The evidence for the other two, in my opinion, is extremely thin. If I were emperor of WADA, the agency would simplify testing more generally and would not be testing for marijuana. (Believe me, if I were WADA emperor, I’d have changed lots of things over the years.) Like any international body, WADA tends to be a slow-moving ship. But, to its credit, it removed CBD from the prohibited list in 2019, so perhaps THC will be reconsidered in the future. The 2011 paper did note that the issue is controversial, and knowledge on it is evolving.
I was really looking forward to a showdown between Richardson and Fraser-Pryce. And I’m still holding out some consolation-prize hope. Richardson’s ban will cost her an entry in the individual 100-meters, since her win at Trials is cancelled. But she may still be selected for the 4x100-meter relay, so maybe we can still get a showdown in the relay.
(*Update*: Richardson was not selected to the relay team. U.S.A. Track and Field issued a statement saying that anti-doping policies around THC should be reevaluated, but that it would stick to its own policy of putting top finishers from the Olympic Trials on the relay team. Given that Richardson's performance at the Trials was nullified, she isn't in that group.)
Thanks for reading. Until next time….
David
p.s. If a friend sent you this newsletter, you can subscribe here. The Range Report will move to a new home soon, but will remain free, and your subscription will be automatically transferred.[/vc_column_text][/vc_column][vc_column width="1/4" offset="vc_col-lg-offset-1"][vc_raw_html]JTVCbWM0d3BfZm9ybSUyMGlkJTNEJTIyNDklMjIlNUQ=[/vc_raw_html][vc_basic_grid post_type="post" max_items="3" element_width="12" grid_id="vc_gid:1625660463059-888746f2-5e46-10" taxonomies="14"][/vc_column][/vc_row][vc_row][vc_column][vc_wp_posts number="3"][/vc_column][/vc_row]How to Turn “High Conflict” into Good Conflict
May 18, 2021
For 17 months, six "astronauts" from four countries were crammed together in a 775-square-foot concrete building, simulating a trip to Mars. They had no contact from friends or family.
Four crew members developed sleep trouble; one became depressed. Interpersonal conflict was a constant. Fifty times during the simulation, conflicts were significant enough that a crew member filed a report about it. Even among astronauts who are highly prescreened for their ability to handle stress, conflict is both frequent and inevitable. “It happens on every single space mission,” Amanda Ripley told me. “Every single one.”Ripley is the author of the new book, High Conflict: Why We Get Trapped and How We Get Out. Her reporting spanned astronauts and gang members to married couples and politicians, so I invited her to join me for a recent episode of “How To!” , to talk about strategies for turning "high conflict" — the kind that devolves into "me versus you" or "us versus them" — into productive conflict.
In terms of space missions, Ripley told me, the most predictable conflict is between the crew and mission control. “There’s a lot that is lost in that back and forth,” she said. Given that NASA hopes to put astronauts on Mars in a decade, the space agency has taken a special interest in effective communication and conflict resolution. What NASA has learned, Ripley said, is that “communication needs to be slowed down, and much more iterative than we expect.” Ripley is, in my opinion, one of the best non-fiction writers in the biz, so High Conflict is a page-turner just for the stories. But she also came away with a toolbox for that kind of slower, iterative communication that forms the foundation of productive conflict. On the latest “How To!”, Ripley counseled a listener who is stuck in an intractable conflict with her partner, and below are (in small nutshells) three tips she shared that really apply to any kind of conflict:Figure out what you’re actually upset about: “In most conflicts,” Ripley said, “there’s the thing we’re arguing about and the thing it’s really about. Every conflict has an understory, so to speak.” Ripley wrote about one couple who was getting divorced and went to war over who would get custody of… the Legos. Seriously. The couple didn’t realize it at the time, but the reason they were so heated over the Legos was that, in their minds, toys represented their child’s affection. Often, by the time people understand what they’re really upset about, it’s too late. Don’t wait until it’s too late to start taking a step back from the heat of arguments and searching for the understory — what you or the other person are really upset about.
Practice “looping for understanding”: When you’re in a contentious conversation, force yourself to repeat back what someone just said to you, in your own words, and then ask, “What am I missing?” That might seem tedious, a little cheesy, or just very difficult in the heat of an argument, but force yourself to try it. That simple act of making someone feel heard, and of making it clear that you’re truly trying to understand what they mean, can stop the barreling conflict snowball in its path. It can be the start of productive friction.
(This is a tactic that NASA mission control uses with astronauts, as part of frequent communication "check-ins," but it hit closer to Earth for me. I have a two-year-old, and it immediately reminded me of pediatrician Harvey Karp’s book, The Happiest Toddler on the Block. In it, Karp describes his “fast-food rule.” At a fast-food order window, if you ask for a burger and fries, the first thing the order-taker will probably say is, “So that’s one burger and an order of fries. Anything else?” They are, essentially, looping for understanding — “This is what I heard, is that right? Is there anything else?” Karp suggests the fast-food rule for dealing with toddlers; I’ve found it very helpful, especially now that my son is trolling me.)The seven-minute writing exercise: In a fascinating experiment, couples were made to spend seven minutes writing about their most recent dispute, from the perspective of an imaginary third party who wants the best outcome for everyone involved. “Imagine a mediator,” Ripley said, “or someone in the room who’s watching, and imagine how that person might think about this fight. How might he or she find the good that could come from it? And then you write that down for seven minutes from that perspective. The next time you have that fight, which you will, or some version of it, think about that third party perspective.” The couples repeated that exercise every four months for a year, and not only did they report feeling less upset about their argument than couples who didn’t do “this marriage hack,” as Ripley put it, they actually did not experience the slow loss of satisfaction that typically occurs for couples over time. So, how about you commit 21 minutes over the next year to give this a try?
Ripley shared more useful tips, and background on the science behind them, in her book, and in the “How To!” episode, so check those out for more...especially if you find yourself fighting for custody of the Legos.
LIGHTNING ROUND
-An interview with the physicist (and incredible writer) Carlo Rovelli: "Einstein spent a year doing nothing – just being lazy and reading... this freedom of just following his own curiosity... was absolutely crucial for his major explosion of creativity. "
-An education-centric excerpt from the afterword to my book, RANGE, newly added for the paperback.
-Score one for noise-canceling headphones and office doors. A 10 decibel increase in ambient noise (that’s like adding a vacuum cleaner to a normal conversation) can reduce cognitive function 5 percent. (This is not wonderful news, but if you investigate this further, keep in mind that sound is measured with decibels on a logarithmic scale.)
-Incredible drone footage shows that great white sharks are closer and more common than you think. “These types of encounters have always been happening, which shows you really just how low the number of attacks are.”
Thanks for reading, until next time….
David
P.s. If you’d like to expand your range, you can see previous posts and subscribe here.
[/vc_column_text][/vc_column][vc_column width="1/4" offset="vc_col-lg-offset-1"][vc_raw_html]JTVCbWM0d3BfZm9ybSUyMGlkJTNEJTIyNDklMjIlNUQ=[/vc_raw_html][vc_basic_grid post_type="post" max_items="3" element_width="12" grid_id="vc_gid:1621337653782-16cb3c60-acdc-7" taxonomies="14"][/vc_column][/vc_row][vc_row][vc_column][vc_wp_posts number="3"][/vc_column][/vc_row]The Updated RANGE Is Here!
April 26, 2021
The paperback version of my book, Range: Why Generalists Triumph in a Specialized World, is out tomorrow, and I’m kinda excited. Specifically, I’m excited for the chapter-sized afterword to finally get out into the world.
Back when the paperback of The Sports Gene came out, with a new afterword, it was highlighted in a Washington Post article about how useless (and that’s my diplomatic wording) afterwords are. Whoops. I was a little surprised, as the afterword contained some new material. (In fact, it contained a seed that would lead me to Range.) But I happen to really value that particular critic’s work. (If not for him, I wouldn’t have heard of American War, one of my favorite novels.) I took the criticism from the article — of all the afterwords, not just mine — on board. As Malcolm Gladwell once said, when asked about my critique of something he wrote: “I have the luxury of learning from my critics.” And if I can’t learn from a critic whose opinion I value, then I am not — to put it in terms from chapter 11 of Range — a “learning organization.” My approach for the Range afterword was to include genuinely new material — a substantial new story, and research results that didn’t appear elsewhere in the book — and also to prioritize content related to questions I’ve gotten repeatedly from readers since the hardcover publication. Thus, the afterword contains:-
A detailed new story about the zig-zaggy path of an artist whose work knocked my metaphorical socks off. (And he won a MacArthur grant, so I’m not the only one he left without metaphorical socks.)
-
A discussion of the Army’s new “talent-based branching” program, and its lesson for anyone looking to improve career match quality.
-
International data I didn’t previously include about specialization versus breadth in education.
-
And, near the end, a few surprising details from a chat I had with Serena Williams.
Between turning in the manuscript of Range and publication, I became a parent. So I also share in the afterword how research that went into the book is shaping my own parental perspective. (Almost forgot, a lot of people asked me what Angela Duckworth thinks about my work; so I included in the afterword her take on the idea of a “sampling period.”)
I don’t know if the aforementioned critic would find any more value in this afterword than the last one, but I like this one much better than the last one. I’ll leave it to readers to judge whether or not I succeeded, but I’m thankful for the tough feedback. The full afterword is way too long for this newsletter, but I’ve pasted just the first section below. If you have the ebook already, an update with the afterword should be freely available, and I believe audiobooks will be updateable as well. If you don’t have it, it’s available in the paperback, which will be at bookstores starting tomorrow. Without further ado:ONE OF THE EARLIEST recorded uses of the phrase “Jack of all trades” as an insult dates to 1592. In the New Latin form “Johannes factotum,” it was contained in a pamphlet by a playwright criticizing his own industry. The jab refers to a poet with no university education who was apparently involved in various other roles, like copying scripts and bit-part acting, even trying to write plays. The poet on the receiving end of the insult: a young William Shakespeare. The phrase evolved over time, and today it’s usually “Jack of all trades, master of none.” I think it is culturally telling that we habitually hack off the end of the long version: “A Jack of all trades is a master of none, but oftentimes better than a master of one.”
Lately I’ve been thinking in a more personal way about the implications of these cultural cues, and of the research in Range. Between the time I turned in the final manuscript and the time the hardcover was published, I became a parent. I’ve been asking myself how, in this new adventure, I might (eventually) wield some of what I learned. That, in turn, led me to a bit of analogical thinking: at the moment, I’m conceiving of my role as akin to the role of a coach-like mentor in the Army’s “talent-based branching” program. I realize it might seem odd for me to liken my parenting strategy to a military program — one that I mentioned only in a footnote on page 140. But this is not a surface analogy, it’s a deeper, structural analogy.
The talent-based branching program grew out of the Army’s realization (discussed in chapter 6) that it had developed a match-quality problem, particularly with West Point and ROTC cadets who received scholarships. The Army persisted in a traditional model of talent development: assigning future officers to a career path before they knew much about their own abilities and interests, or much of anything about the career. Cadets could express preferences, but it amounted to requesting a profession they did not know well enough for the person they had not yet become. And once they chose, they were stuck. In a knowledge economy, bursting with sampling and lateral mobility, cadets simply left the service (in droves) if they turned out to have a subpar career match. The talent-based branching program was designed to help young officers get a better understanding of potential careers earlier in the selection process, and discover their own interests and talents at the same time. Essentially, it provides them with a sampling period.
As officers-in-training cycle through classes, internship-like work experiences, and field training that exposes them to different jobs, they are encouraged to take part in constant self-reflection, both on their own (which they can track in an online portal) and with mentors. (Learning about and reflecting on their own strengths and weaknesses, according to an Army Strategic Studies Institute monograph, “can sometimes be a bit of a shock.”) The idea is to foster better match quality, and in turn to improve performance, satisfaction, and retention. When talent-based branching was piloted with West Point cadets, nearly 90 percent of participating cadets changed at least one of their top three career preferences. Once again: we learn who we are in practice, not in theory.
I think that’s a useful model for parenting. First, I’d like to facilitate a sampling period for my kid — to expose him to a variety of experiences and possibilities. (A 2019 Organisation for Economic Co-operation and Development (OECD) report found that children already significantly narrow their ideas of possible careers by age seven. “We must fight to keep their horizons open,” said Andreas Schleicher, OECD’s director of education and skills.) And then my role is that of the mentor, supporting my son by helping him get the maximum amount of signal about his own talents, interests, and options from each experience. I hope that will help guide him to good match quality, broaden his toolbox en route, and form a habit of regular reflection reminiscent of the dark horses from chapter seven, who repeatedly say to themselves, “Here’s who I am at the moment, here are my motivations, here’s what I’ve found I like to do, here’s what I’d like to learn, and here are the opportunities. Which of these is the best match right now? And maybe a year from now I’ll switch because I’ll find something better.”
Shortly after Range came out, Ruth Brennan Morrey — a former college soccer co-captain and pro triathlete, Olympic Trials marathon qualifier, and psychology PhD — tagged me in an apt tweet: “Listening to @DavidEpstein ‘Range’ in the car with 12 year old daughter. ‘Mom, why do we make “What I want to be when I grow up” signs on the first day of school? We should make “Top 5 things I want to learn about this year” signs.’ Smart cookie. :-)” I think I’ll borrow the twelve-year-old’s idea.
Ultimately, I think helping individuals get the maximum match-quality signal from each zig and zag is a good model whether one is “managing” kids, mentees, teammates, employees, or, as management scholar Peter Drucker put it twenty years ago in a prophetic Harvard Business Review article, “managing oneself.” The summary atop the article — which predicts that workers would increasingly have longer and multifaceted careers — reads: “Success in the knowledge economy comes to those who know themselves — their strengths, their values, and how they best perform.”
And that’s where the first of six sections ends. Thank you for reading, until next time…. David p.s. If you’d like to expand your range, you can see previous posts and subscribe here.[/vc_column_text][/vc_column][vc_column width="1/4" offset="vc_col-lg-offset-1"][vc_raw_html]JTVCbWM0d3BfZm9ybSUyMGlkJTNEJTIyNDklMjIlNUQ=[/vc_raw_html][vc_basic_grid post_type="post" max_items="3" element_width="12" grid_id="vc_gid:1619209253751-c857f3b3-cb37-5" taxonomies="14"][/vc_column][/vc_row][vc_row][vc_column][vc_wp_posts number="3"][/vc_column][/vc_row]You’re Fooling Yourself, Which Is Great for Your Endurance
April 12, 2021
Alex Hutchinson, a.k.a. @sweatscience, is basically the taller Canadian version of me: we’re close in age, and he was also a national level middle-distance runner who transitioned from science into writing. Except, unlike me, he actually finished his Ph.D. program (in physics), and made his national team.
Far from making him my annoying professional doppelgänger, it has made him one of my favorite writers. His bestselling book, Endure: Mind, Body, and the Curiously Elastic Limits of Human Performance, is, quite frankly, a book I wanted to write. I’m glad Alex did, though, because I can’t imagine anyone having done it better.
The paperback is just out, with a new afterword, so I invited Alex to chat about human limits and the mind-body connection.
DE: How did you decide to take on this topic?
AH: The initial spark was some research by a South African scientist named Tim Noakes, who proposed that we have a “central governor” in our brains that slams on the brakes before we reach our true physical limits. As a long-time runner, I was fascinated by the idea that it’s my brain, rather than my lungs or my legs, that holds me back. And as a journalist, of course, I’m a sucker for “Everyone always assumed X, but it’s actually Y” stories.
DE: Ok but you’re also clear on the fact that this doesn’t just mean “It’s all in your head,” in the sense that physiology doesn’t matter. My read of your work is that it’s more like a racecar, in that the machine definitely matters, but in focusing our research on the machine, we’ve often overlooked the driver — i.e. the brain.
AH: Exactly — it’s not all in your head, any more than it’s all in your muscles. It’s 100 percent both — kind of like the nature/nurture debate you tackled in The Sports Gene. The big mistake is thinking that you can understand the body without including the brain’s input, or vice versa. As a classic study from the early 1960s put it, “psychology is a special case of brain physiology.” (That’s the study where they tested maximum strength after scaring the crap out of subjects by sneaking up behind them and firing a starter’s pistol in their ear. Fear increased strength. But I digress!)
DE: Wait, please digress! Can you tell me a little bit more about that study, and whether I need to scare myself before working out?
AH: It was a wild one. They had subjects doing what were basically all-out biceps curls once per minute, and then tried all sorts of things to alter their strength: sudden yells, injections of adrenaline and amphetamine, and even hypnosis. Ultimately, they were trying to understand the stories we always hear about mothers lifting cars or performing other crazy feats to save their babies. It’s clear that triggering that fight-or-flight system really does unlock some extra strength. To actually lift a car, though, the key is apparently to find a car with an asymmetrical weight distribution, a stiff suspension, and an easy-to-grasp bumper. That’s the inside info I got from Tom Magee, better known as the WWF wrestler MegaMan, who used to lift cars as part of his strongman act.
DE: An overall sense I get from your book is that our brain acts as an integrator; it’s collecting data from inside our body, and from the environment (how hot and bright it is, things like that), and spitting out a sort of composite, which is how tired you feel — sometimes called your “rating of perceived exertion” in studies. And that RPE is very much not a function only of your physical limitations, but also of things like the conditions around you, and even how much you care about whatever you’re trying to do. Is that a reasonable understanding?
AH: Yeah, that’s a hugely important point. Your subjective sense of effort acts as a sort of “master switch” that determines whether you can keep going: if it feels too hard, you’ll slow down or stop. It’s almost tautological. That feeling is not arbitrary: if you speed up or lift a heavier weight or don’t eat enough, it will definitely feel harder. But it’s not entirely deterministic, either: the exact same workout, under identical conditions, might feel harder this week than it did last week because you’re under a lot of stress at work.
DE: That kind of reminds me of studies that find that college athletes get injured more around exam time….
AH: And wound healing is slower during exam time too! Try to disentangle the physiology and psychology in that one. But you had mentioned heat, which is a great example, because it’s both a perception and a physiological reality. There’s a great study where they put cyclists in a heat chamber and found that 90 degree heat slowed them down. No big surprise there, and there are entire physiology textbooks explaining why that happens. But when they rigged the thermometers so that the cyclists thought it was only 80 degrees, the heat didn’t slow them down anymore. Heat definitely has real effects, but part of the reason it slows us down is that we expect it to.
DE: You just reminded me of the study that gave some high level cyclists amphetamines, and others placebo, and had them cycle really hard in a hot lab environment. In normal circumstances, when your core temperature gets around 104 °F, your brain makes you slow down. And that’s what happened for the placebo group, but the cyclists who got methylphenidate (a.k.a. Ritalin) blew right through that barrier without knowing it. Amphetamines aren’t like steroids, they aren’t acting on your muscles, but they removed the brain’s inhibition from overheating, which gave those cyclists more endurance. Of course, it could also put them in danger of heatstroke. In the 1960s, one of the best riders in the Tour de France died after he took amphetamines and overheated. Just like in the study you mentioned, the brain’s response to heat was changed, in the first study by rigging thermometers, and in the second with drugs. Totally fascinating. ...Ok, so of all the research in the book, what was the most surprising or coolest to you?
AH: I love all my babies equally, but the stuff that really blew my mind was on freediving. I have a chapter on oxygen, exploring whether getting out of breath really forces us to slow down, or whether it’s just a warning sign. I had no idea that some humans can hold their breath for more than 11 minutes, with no tricks. Or that others can dive more than 300 feet below the surface with nothing but a pair of flippers.
The science of how the body handles these kinds of oxygen shortages is really wild. Just dunking your face in water triggers a bunch of oxygen-conserving responses like a lower heart rate. If you persist, your breathing muscles will start contracting involuntarily. Eventually your spleen, which has a reservoir of oxygen-rich red blood cells, will squeeze itself like a sponge to buy you time. The same thing happens if you climb at high altitude—which, as an aside, is why Sherpas have bigger spleens than other Nepalis. In other words, you have to blow through a bunch of serious yellow lights before you hit an actual red light and truly run out of oxygen. That turns out to be a recurring theme in the book.
DE: Sweet, I’m going to challenge my niece to a breathholding contest, and I’m going to put my face in the water as a secret performance enhancer! I also know you added a new afterword to the paperback edition. What has changed since it first came out?
AH: There were two main things I wanted to address in the afterword. One is that Eliud Kipchoge actually ran a sub-two-hour marathon exhibition race in the fall of 2019. That was mildly inconvenient for me, since I’d used the open-ended quest for sub-two as a narrative framework for the book, and in some ways as a central metaphor for human limits! So I wanted to update that story, and reflect on the relative contributions of brain and body — and of technology, which I didn’t discuss much in the original book but definitely played a role in Kipchoge’s breakthrough.
The other question I wanted to tackle, or at least acknowledge, was how you put these ideas into practice. It’s one thing to realize that your brain is imposing limits on you that are often more cautious than they need to be. But it’s another thing to figure out how to change those limits.
DE: Are there any limit-changing ideas that you’ve incorporated into your own life?
AH: I have to admit that I’m a sad victim of the G.I. Joe Fallacy, which is the mistaken belief that knowing is half the battle. But there are a few areas where I’ve tried to make concrete changes. The most important is something you wrote about recently: grappling with my own negative self-talk, and learning to deflect it or ignore it or replace it with more positive messages.
Another really simple change I’ve made is paying attention to what my face is doing. There’s some really neat research linking facial expression to your perception of how hard a task is, or even to how efficiently you run. It turns out that I’m an instinctive scowler: it’s like I have to show the whole world how hard I’m thinking or running or whatever. Now when I catch myself, I just relax my face—and it’s amazing how quickly that change translates into feeling more relaxed. I’m even considering adding smiling to my repertoire, but I’m not sure I’m ready for it yet.
DE: Ha! I read a running book once that advised a “smile to go the extra mile” mantra, but I hadn’t thought about it in the context of looser facial muscles sending a helpful signal to my brain to keep me going. Thanks for all this Alex. You’re a much-linked figure in the Range Report, so nice to have you here directly.
And thank you for reading. Until next time….
David
p.s. If a friend sent you this newsletter, please subscribe here![/vc_column_text][/vc_column][vc_column width="1/4" offset="vc_col-lg-offset-1"][vc_raw_html]JTVCbWM0d3BfZm9ybSUyMGlkJTNEJTIyNDklMjIlNUQ=[/vc_raw_html][vc_basic_grid post_type="post" max_items="3" element_width="12" grid_id="vc_gid:1618053497076-2d30e574-c48e-3" taxonomies="14"][/vc_column][/vc_row][vc_row][vc_column][vc_wp_posts number="3"][/vc_column][/vc_row]How To Quiet the Chatter in Your Head
March 29, 2021
Psychologist Ethan Kross calls it "chatter" — the inner monologue that works tirelessly to drag you down. Kross runs the Emotion and Self Control Lab at the University of Michigan, and he's particularly interested in the voice in your head that is constantly self-critical, negative, afraid, counterproductive, or just plain annoying. The good news is that Kross, author of Chatter: The Voice in Our Head, Why It Matters, and How to Harness It, has studied your inner naysayer, and devised simple strategies for managing it. That's why I invited Kross to join me for a recent episode of "How To!" A listener, Emilia, wrote in about a relationship she'd started at 19, and that, years later, she couldn't get out of her head. While visiting Mexico on a break from college, Emilia fell for Ivan, who was handsome, popular, older, and well off. She continued visiting, and after college moved in with Ivan. They adopted a miniature Australian shepherd with blue eyes, and planned to make a life together. But the relationship started to fizzle. There was no blowup, and they were still in love. But Emilia was learning a lot about herself in her early twenties, and that included career ambitions that she couldn't pursue in the small town in Mexico. With a heavy heart, she left Ivan, and the Australian shepherd, for good. A decade later, Emilia is newly and happily married, but finds her mind returning to Ivan and that magical time in Mexico. "I call it the resident ghost," she told me, "because it’s like this thing that doesn’t have any meaning for my life anymore, but it’s still there...I’m kind of embarrassed to say this — it could be on a daily basis. Is that just life?" Yes and no. We can't simply prevent unwanted thoughts. In fact, trying too hard can result in what psychologists call "ironic processes." That is, you get exactly what you didn't want. The most famous research example was sparked by Dostoevsky, who suggested in "Winter Notes on Summer Impressions" that the reader should try not to think of a white bear, and will soon notice that they are thinking about a white bear every minute. Actually, Dostoevsky underestimated. In the 1980s, psychologist Daniel Wegner demonstrated that trying not to think of a white bear caused people to think about the white bear even more than once per minute, and — in the long run — even more than people who had been told to think about the white bear. This is a case where concerted effort gets exactly the wrong result. So, if we can't summarily banish unwanted thoughts, what can we do? Kross had five practical tips for Emilia, and really for any of us:- When you can't stop thinking about something, write it down. "Write your deepest thoughts and feelings about what happened to you," Kross advised. Don't worry about being eloquent, just keep your pen moving. Kross pointed out that when you do this for 15-20 minutes a day for a few straight days, you'll inevitably start giving the story a structure, including a conclusion. "When we have a story to make sense of our experiences, we start thinking about them a lot less," he said. "But if we don't have a really good story...our mind keeps on trying to get us to that place and it will, as a result, often bring those experiences to mind."
- Give yourself a break from analyzing your chatter. Kross said your thoughts are like a bus: passengers get on and off, some are well-behaved, others are rude. You can't control who gets on and off, but you can control how much effort you expend scrutinizing the rude passengers.
- Venting has a place, and often feels good, but it can backfire. Beware of "co-rumination." In other words, a friend who effusively affirms your feelings is obviously trying to help, but while they're satisfying your emotional needs (your need to be heard and validated), they're not helping with your cognitive needs (the need for closure and reframing). That can actually leave you dwelling on your inner chatter even more. So you may not want to approach your most solicitous friend. Instead, go for the one who tends to help your reframe things, or who asks if you might consider other perspectives. Kross said that once when he was really upset about something, a friend he vented to asked if he could just ride it out until he felt better. Kross realized he could, and did. It was simple, but helped shift his focus.
- Use "distanced self talk." Talk to yourself in the second or third person. Kross once received an anonymous threat, just after he and his wife had welcomed a new baby. He found himself pacing his living room with a bat and peeking through the blinds. He couldn't stop thinking about it. He was actually about to start searching for bodyguards for academics, before realizing nobody would ever think that's a sustainable business plan. "Ethan, what are you doing?" he asked himself. And that was enough to begin the process of settling his mind. (As I've mentioned before, distanced self talk has also been shown to improve endurance performance; opt for "You can make it up this hill," rather than "I can make it up this hill.")
- If you just can't stop asking yourself "What if?", try to replace it with "So what?" and see what happens. As in: "So what if I keep thinking about a white bear? Happens to the best of us." As Kross put it, "The beauty of 'So what?' is it flips the whole internal narrative on its head. It's neutralizing it."
- Alcohol doesn't make people more creative, but bars do. (h/t @emollick) This reminded me of Bill Gore, the engineer who founded the company that created Gore-Tex, and his saying that "communication really happens in the carpool."
- A study of 15,000 people who followed a once-a-week, 20-minute full body strength training program found impressive gains in exercisers who used the program for up to seven years. The subjects did start to plateau at about a year, but from the standpoint of a very efficient program that could have worthwhile longterm gains, this is encouraging. I was slightly surprised to see such solid gains from such a scant program.
- "Curiosity made the cat more creative." The takeaway from this study is that wandering the internet is better than traditional brainstorming for creativity, if — and this is an important "if" — your meander starts with a specific question to investigate. I was heartened to read this on a recent day when I was wasting time — er, I mean investigating why the periodic table symbol for tungsten is W. (This actually did lead me to read more about smelting, and then to something I may in fact write about.)
David
p.s. If a friend sent you this newsletter, please subscribe here![/vc_column_text][/vc_column][vc_column width="1/4" offset="vc_col-lg-offset-1"][vc_raw_html]JTVCbWM0d3BfZm9ybSUyMGlkJTNEJTIyNDklMjIlNUQ=[/vc_raw_html][vc_basic_grid post_type="post" max_items="3" element_width="12" grid_id="vc_gid:1617024194027-35965197-93dc-5" taxonomies="14"][/vc_column][/vc_row][vc_row][vc_column][vc_wp_posts number="3"][/vc_column][/vc_row]Some Personal News: I’m a Podcast Host!
January 26, 2021
Some personal news: I’m a podcast host! Allow me to explain, in a rangey way.
One of my favorite thoughts in Range came from Herminia Ibarra, a professor of organizational behavior at London Business School, who studies how people make successful (and unsuccessful) career transitions: “We learn who we are in practice, not in theory.”
Ibarra pushed back against a formidable and lucrative industry that promises to tell you exactly who you are and what you should be doing if you just take this quiz, or follow that simple program. She was bothered by conventional-wisdom articles like one in the Wall Street Journal on “the painless path to a new career,” which promised that the secret is simply forming “a clear picture of what you want” before taking action. In her research, and in her book Working Identity, Ibarra showed that this is approximately the polar opposite of sound advice.
“We discover the possibilities by doing,” she told me, “by trying new activities, building new networks, finding new role models.” Relying only on introspection doesn’t work because our insight into ourselves is constrained by our roster of previous experiences. You actually have to act and then think—try things and reflect on how they fit you, and what they reveal about your abilities and interests. We learn who we are, as Ibarra put it, "by testing reality," not merely by looking inside.
If you’re into art history, you may have heard the famous description of how Michelangelo worked, that he would see a fully formed figure in a block of marble, and just chip away the excess to liberate it. It’s a beautiful image. Also: totally not true. Michelangelo constantly changed his mind and altered his sculptural plans as he worked. He frequently ran out of rock because of the course corrections, and left three-fifths of his sculptures unfinished. In his late twenties, he actually ditched visual arts altogether to focus on writing poems—half of which he left unfinished. He was a relentless experimenter.
I aspire to a formative process akin to Michelangelo’s—start down a path, but keep my eyes open for promising turns, even if that means abandoning a prior goal, and especially when an opportunity offers experiments that can teach me more about my own strengths, weaknesses, and interests. (As I told Dan Pink for his PinkCast, I keep what I call my “book of small experiments” for my own experiment-and-reflect system.) So when Charles Duhigg, New Yorker writer, Pulitzer Prize winner, and author of The Power of Habit, called me recently, I realized he was offering just such a generative experiment.
For the last year-and-a-half, Charles has built and hosted the aptly named Slate podcast, “How To! With Charles Duhigg.” Each show pairs a listener who has a question with someone with relevant experience or expertise, and the host helps the pair distill a few lessons, or “rules.” The topics have run from the very silly (how to get your dog to stop eating underwear, with comedian Jenny Slate); to the very serious (an episode about how to walk away from an impossible parent went viral); to the very topical—last week’s episode featured former U.N. Ambassador Samantha Power telling new Congresswoman Marilyn Strickland how to balance her ideals with the practicalities of getting things done in D.C.
But now Charles is diving into the intense phase of a new book project, and so—very much out of the blue—he asked if the host role was something I might potentially be interested in. And then he asked if I’d like to sit in on a meeting with the production team to discuss ideas for upcoming episodes. I happen to be a sucker for playing fly-on-the-wall to other peoples’ jobs; it’s one of the perks of my work! So I did, and was reminded how much I’ve missed having a team since I left ProPublica to finish Range. As much as I appreciated the incredible mission-driven work at ProPublica, from a personal standpoint what I miss most was just thinking out loud about stories with my editor, Tracy Weber (Pulitzer winner), or my desk neighbor Megan Rose (Pulitzer winner). (Yeah yeah everyone has a Pulitzer except your faithful newsletter author;)
So I auditioned, and lo and behold, “How To! With Charles Duhigg” is, as of today, “How To!" hosted by David Epstein. The episode that drops today actually was my audition, and it’s all about delivering peak performance under pressure. The episode’s expert, Sian Beilock, is the president of Barnard College and a cognitive scientist I’ve known and followed for years. Her work on the neuroscience of choking is famous in the world of elite sports, but applies to everything from job interviews to math tests to auditioning for podcasts.
In the episode, Sian counsels a listener who has struggled to marshall her inner badass when it counts, on the tennis court and in her professional life as a public defender and realtor. Some of the tips we discuss:
-
Understand the “spotlight effect,” the idea that we dramatically overestimate how focused other people are on our screwups. You aren’t the center of everyone else’s universe, and that’s actually a good thing.
-
Low-stakes practice is crucial. Create situations where you can practice being self-conscious, but where the consequences of choking aren’t dire. Sometimes that means doing something that feels a little goofy. As we note in the episode, Serena Williams once served oranges over a fence and later said that, though her father wasn’t happy about it, it helped her hone her competitive instincts. (This part really resonated with me; when I started in journalism, I stunk at talking to strangers, but being forced to do the “man on the street” thing for the NY Daily News was a form of frequent low-stakes practice that eternally cured me of that problem.)
-
Pick a mantra, or a focus word, and employ “cognitive outsourcing” with it. That is, instead of holding it in your working memory, write the word or phrase somewhere you can easily look at it when you get nervous. That will help occupy your prefrontal cortex—the conscious control part of your brain—so it doesn’t descend along the mental spiral that leads to choking. (In the episode, the listener ends up writing her word on her hand with a Sharpie.)
I’m excited for you to listen! And since my goal is to learn (in practice, not in theory), I’d truly love to have feedback, positive or critical. Hit me up on Twitter (@davidepstein), or send thoughts to howto@slate.com. That email address is also where you can send your own questions, or a description of a challenge you’re grappling with, and we may invite you to be a guest on a future episode. (We will protect a guest’s anonymity when needed.)
So please give the episode a listen! And if you like what you hear, consider subscribing or leaving a rating.Thanks for reading. Until next time….
David
p.s. If you have a friend who might find this free newsletter thought-provoking, or if you'd like to improve the odds that the Range Report continues to exist, please consider sharing. They can subscribe here. p.p.s. Previous Range Reports are here.[/vc_column_text][/vc_column][vc_column width="1/4" offset="vc_col-lg-offset-1"][vc_raw_html]JTVCbWM0d3BfZm9ybSUyMGlkJTNEJTIyNDklMjIlNUQ=[/vc_raw_html][vc_basic_grid post_type="post" max_items="3" element_width="12" grid_id="vc_gid:1611763935045-65b44a03-2eeb-0" taxonomies="14"][/vc_column][/vc_row][vc_row][vc_column][vc_wp_posts number="3"][/vc_column][/vc_row]False Conviction
December 17, 2020
The Range Report is back after a little hiatus—(as are "Lightning Round" links to interesting articles, at bottom)—and what better place to jump back in than with one of the report’s regular themes: B.S. detection. This report is co-written with my attorney brother, Daniel Epstein, who has worked on cases involving forensic evidence. Without further ado:
Those shell casings came from the gun found in the defendants’ car. That was, in paraphrase, the testimony of a forensic expert in a case that resulted in the conviction of two young men in Brooklyn in 2009. We know about that case because one of us (David) was on the jury. The expert gave the impression that the possibility of a mismatch was infinitesimally small. The defense didn’t even bother to argue that point. And there wasn’t a single question asked about the forensic testimony during jury deliberations. That is how these things often go. Expert testimony is treated as gospel. And that is what makes a new scientific paper so disturbing, and deserving of much more media attention. The paper, "(Mis)use of Scientific Measurements in Forensic Science" by Itiel Dror and Nicholas Scurich, highlights a gaping flaw in how firearm and fingerprint comparisons are validated. Validated, in this context, means how forensic disciplines are tested to assess their reliability and the likelihood of producing false results. For firearms and fingerprints, this seems simple: Give experts fingerprints from known fingers, or shell casings ejected from known guns, and see if they can discern the matches from the non-matches. And that’s partly what happens. But there’s a catch, highlighted in this new paper. When forensic experts are tested in this way, they are generally allowed to answer that they’ve detected a match, a non-match, or that their findings are inconclusive. According to the scoring system, “inconclusive” is either a correct answer or doesn’t count at all. “Inconclusive” is never counted as incorrect. Let’s put this in perspective. Say you’re a forensic scientist, and I give you a 10-item test. You answer one question “match,” but it was not a match, so you get it wrong. You aren’t sure about the next nine questions, so you answer “inconclusive.” Your score? Ninety percent without having gotten a single question correct. Or, let’s say the “inconclusive” answers get dropped entirely. In that case, you'd just have to identify the easiest question, answer it correctly, then choose “inconclusive” for the other nine—voila, 100 percent accuracy. I know what you’re thinking: If only the tests I took in school had been scored like the ones some forensic experts take. How big a problem is this in reality? Dror and Scurich highlighted one study in which the same fingerprint experts were tested on the exact same fingerprints seven months apart. Ideally, the same expert would arrive at the same conclusion when examining the same fingerprints. In fact, 10 percent of the time, the same expert came to a different conclusion about the same exact print. Either the first or second conclusion (or both) about the same prints has to be wrong. And yet, if one of those answers was “inconclusive,” it wasn’t scored as an error. As you can imagine, the difference between an expert testifying that fingerprints exclude a defendant (or don’t) versus saying that the prints are inconclusive is enormously important in a criminal case. In another study, different experts in firearms forensics were given the same shell casings to examine, but sometimes reached different conclusions. That is, one expert said that a particular shell definitely matched the gun in question, while another expert examining the same shell said it was inconclusive. But because “inconclusive” was counted as a correct answer, the study reported a 0 percent error rate even though forensic experts sometimes reached different conclusions about the exact same shell casings. That is probably not what a jury has in mind when they hear that experts in a particular forensic domain are 100 percent accurate. To make matters more worrisome, Dror and Scurich noted, forensic examiners “resort to making more inconclusive decisions during error rate studies than they do in casework.” In other words, they are more conclusive when real lives are on the line. In another study of firearms forensics, Dror and Scurich noted, “98.3% of the decisions were inconclusive, leaving a maximum ceiling of only 1.7% as potentially the highest possible error rate.” The author of that study, an FBI firearms examiner himself, concluded that forensic experts are extremely accurate, while also pointing out that the test takers “understood they were participating in a blind validation study, and that an incorrect response could adversely affect the theory of firearms identification.” In simpler terms: They were incentivized to choose “inconclusive” lest they get answers wrong and diminish the reputation of their field in legal proceedings. Paradoxically, the overuse of “inconclusive” on validation tests allows forensic experts to claim in court that their discipline is more conclusive than it really is. In the test described above, all of the shell casings could be conclusively determined to be from the “same source” or “different source,” so “inconclusive” was, in fact, a wrong answer. That doesn’t mean forensic experts should never answer “inconclusive.” It may be the only responsible answer in cases when the evidence is truly inconclusive. Rather, there should be better validation testing methods and scoring practices, or at least more accurate ways of conveying the test results, so that judges and juries understand what these accuracy reports actually mean. Dror and Scurich aren’t just commenting on these misunderstandings as hypothetical problems. Both have provided expert testimony in criminal cases, including in death penalty cases, and including on opposite sides of at least one case. They collaborated for this study because they know how powerful—and dangerous—it can be when a jury hears that experts in a forensic discipline are 100 percent accurate. And they know that these disciplines are not, in reality, infallible, and that jurors deserve to know that. We want to highlight one final study that Dror and Scurich cite in their paper. This study included 2,178 comparisons in which shell cartridge casings were not produced by the firearm in question. Forensic experts accurately assessed 1,421 of those and made 22 false-positive identifications. The remaining 735 responses were “inconclusive.” How big a factor should those inconclusives be when we think about the results of this study? (And since the Range Report promotes opportunities to use simple calculation for B.S. detection, think about this one for a minute before reading on.) Those inconclusives are a really big deal. In this case, the study counted “inconclusive” as a correct answer, and so reported a 1 percent error rate in identifying different-source cartridges. (That is, 22/2,178.) Had the study left the inconclusive responses out, the reported error rate wouldn’t be much different: 22/(2,178 - 735), or 1.5 percent. But let’s say instead that “inconclusive” was counted as an error. Then the calculation is (735 + 22)/2,178, or a 35 percent error rate. So how accurate were those experts in identifying non-matches? Their error rate was somewhere between 1 percent and 35 percent, depending on how you deal with inconclusives. How accurate would they have been if they hadn’t been allowed to choose inconclusive at all? We have no idea—and that’s a huge problem. Ultimately, these tests are constructed so that forensic examiners can choose the questions on which they will be scored. In this example, one in five examiners answered “inconclusive” for every single comparison, giving them perfect scores. Again, if only the tests you took in school had worked that way. The point is, the potential error rate is much, much higher than the reported error rate. No matter how you choose to deal with inconclusives, we think that claiming a 0 percent or 1 percent error rate is misleading. If you were on trial for a firearms crime you didn’t commit, and a forensic expert failed to rule out your gun, you'd want the jury to know the real potential error rate. There is no way to know if that 2009 case in Brooklyn—the one where David was a juror—would have turned out differently if the validation issue had come up during the trial or in jury deliberations. But we’re all better served when we’re given an accurate understanding of the science served up in our courtrooms. And the reality is, these validation studies are obscuring the truth about forensic science rather than revealing it.LIGHTNING ROUND -Patients who undergo emergency surgery on the surgeon's birthday are a bit more likely to die. "These findings suggest that surgeons might be distracted by life events that are not directly related to work." (File surgeons under "also human.") -A 2020 list of groundbreaking (pun intended) discoveries by archaeologists and anthropologists. -"Core values, known as 'kakun', or family precepts, have guided many companies’ business decisions through the generations. They look after their employees, support the community and strive to make a product that inspires pride." (h/t @mkonnikova) -A Korean study of indoor diners showed that coronavirus transmission occurred quickly, and from far away, but only in a direct line of airflow. -Apparently Bill Gates really liked Range. And it's not every day someone reviewing my book opens with, basically, "When I was paired with Roger Federer..."
Thank you for reading. Until next time….
David
p.s. If you'd like to share this Range Report as a post, here it is. Previous Range Reports are here. p.p.s. If you have a friend who might find this free newsletter thought-provoking, or if you'd like to improve the odds that the Range Report continues to exist, please consider sharing. They can subscribe here.[/vc_column_text][/vc_column][vc_column width="1/4" offset="vc_col-lg-offset-1"][vc_raw_html]JTVCbWM0d3BfZm9ybSUyMGlkJTNEJTIyNDklMjIlNUQ=[/vc_raw_html][vc_basic_grid post_type="post" max_items="3" element_width="12" grid_id="vc_gid:1608095673743-2ddfe9a2-bd12-3" taxonomies="14"][/vc_column][/vc_row][vc_row][vc_column][vc_wp_posts number="3"][/vc_column][/vc_row]