Soon after I moved to Berkeley, someone I met on the street invited me to a dinner in the Berkeley Hills. I thought it was a religious group; it turned out to be more cult-like. The cult wasn’t named. Maybe it was Moonies, maybe Scientology. At the dinner, after the guitar-playing leader learned I was a psychology professor, she ignored me.
The New Yorker has just published a long fascinating piece about Paul Haggis’s defection from Scientology. It reminds me of a piece in Spy — an exchange of faxes between the screenwriter Joe Eszterhas and Michael Ovitz, who at the time was the head of CAA (Creative Artists Agency) and considered the most powerful person in Hollywood. Eszterhas called Ovitz a bully. It seemed to mark the beginning of the end of Ovitz’s career.
My interpretation of the piece and associated material is that Scientology is dying. Just as Eszterhas wasn’t afraid of Ovitz, quite a few people, the New Yorker piece reveals, are not afraid of what Scientologists might do to them. The New Yorker website has a great deal of fun-to-read source material, which provides a vivid picture of what you can expect if you decide to join. The famous people associated with the movement, such as Cruise and Travolta (and Greta Van Susteren) are getting old. Simple-minded celebrities will always be with us, sure. But any aspiring actor who considers joining Scientology now faces two hurdles not faced by Cruise and Travolta: (1) Fear of ridicule. The Xenu stuff, for example. They tried to keep that stuff secret for a reason. Anyone can now read endless damaging stuff about Scientology. (2) Fear of professional damage. After South Park ridiculed Scientology, Isaac Hayes, a Scientologist, quit the show. Was he forced to quit by his Scientology superiors? Well, one of his South Park bosses said, “He said he was under great pressure from Scientology, and if we didn’t stop poking at them, he’d have to leave.” Loss of that job must have really hurt him.
The first Quantified Self (QS) Meetup group met in Kevin Kelly’s house near San Francisco in 2008. I was there; so was Tim Ferriss. Now there are 19 QS groups, as distant as Sydney and Cape Town.
I believe this is the beginning of a movement that will greatly improve human health. I think QS participants will discover, as I did, that simple experiments can shed light on how to be healthy — experiments that mainstream researchers are unwilling or unable to do. Echoing Jane Jacobs, I’ve said farmers didn’t invent tractors. That’s not what farmers do, nor could they do it. Likewise, mainstream health researchers, such as medical school professors, are unable to greatly improve their research methods. That’s not what they do, nor could they do it. They have certain methodological skills; they apply them over and over. To understand the limitations of those methods would require a broad understanding of science that few health researchers seem to have. (For example, many health researchers dismiss correlations because “correlation does not equal causation.” In fact, correlations have been extremely important clues to causality.) Big improvements in health research will never come from people who make their living doing health research, just as big improvements in farming have never come from farmers. That’s where QS comes in.
The first QS conference is May 28-29. Tickets are still available.
Melody McLaren, whose giant greeting card I described a few days ago, told me another example of using humor to change behavior:
I was working at LA Incentives, a small promotional merchandise company in Barnes (southwest London). We (Liz Amies, the MD and I) were running a very small company in the midst of a recession (1987-1990). We were having difficulty getting our clients to pay us on time. Money was tight for everyone and the big companies were notoriously late at paying small suppliers, who had no resources to hire people to chase their debts.
So, being desperate, I tried the humor route once again (this was a couple of years after the ad agency incident). I drew cartoons that illustrated why clients might not be paying us – e.g. “You’re probably just trapped under something heavy” under a crude illustration of a guy pinned to the floor by a filing cabinet. Weird, whimsical stuff. I faxed the cartoons to the companies’ purchase ledger departments. Although this didn’t work with everyone, quite a few people paid up immediately. It was the power of surprise, I guess. No wars were stopped by this approach – but it did help us keep the company afloat for a while longer.
So effective you might think it would be obvious, but it isn’t. Although economists have a hard time using anything but incentives to explain economic behavior, notice that no incentives were changed.
My former student writes:
A lot of people here now are calling for a return to normalcy and peace! A fair number of people are beginning to blame the protestors for all the chaos and the fact that we can’t go out and we can’t go to work and Egypt is burning and we can’t order food from restaurants anymore! I think they are the same people who didn’t really support the protestors in the first place though- so we’re still safe- they’re not growing. Unfortunately many of my family members are among those- they just want to go back to work and they’re worried about money and they think we have gained enough concessions. They think the sacrifice is too big.
At the same time, there are maybe a hundred thousand or more protestors in the square right now, peacefully standing and holding signs for the president to step down. And more keep pouring in. My cousin Akram is getting ready to go meet my cousin Khaled and about 20 of his friends to go to the square. Aunt Magda is angry with Akram and telling him that he won’t set foot out of the house but actually he is tying his shoelaces now….. The Friday prayer ended about an hour ago so now is the time when most people will be arriving there or on their way. My cousin Karim actually went back to work at Vodafone today after 4 or so days off because of the revolt.
I have promised everyone that I wouldn’t go out today because of all the anti-foreign sentiment. There have been steady streams of emails about foreigners being detained, politely, and spoken to and then released after some time. But there are people calling the news stations in angry about Obama’s order for the president to step down. One woman asked, “Can any country accept an order for their president to step down?” There is a lot of hostility towards America right now and I don’t think the US can win no matter what they do. People criticizing the states for not making a strong enough statement requiring Mubarak’s departure, others angry that America would order the president of another country to step down, some angry about all of the past support, and others angry that America would meddle at all…
We haven’t seen any violence in the square so far today as there was on Wednesday and Thursday, just a massive sea of anti-mubarak protestors. We haven’t seen much of the pro-mubarak supporters today- it seems that they have been hugely overtaken. I really hope it stays peaceful but a lot of people are going out angry today because of the attacks on the peaceful anti-mubarak supporters of the last two days. Many see it as an obligation to go out now and defend those who have been attacked. I am really proud of all those people brave enough to go out…
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