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Five Bullet Wednesday - Strangers, The Environment & Japan
🕑 Added 2020-01-15 09:41:35 +0000 UTCBook I'm reading---
·Talking to Strangers by Malcolm Gladwell
Half way through and it's a great book so far. So far it doesn't look like this book will help you better talk to strangers. In fact, it's about why we are naturally quite bad at making judgements of people based on our impressions. Gladwell tells several interesting stories (most of them quite famous) while linking them together with different interesting phenomenon. For example, it's our default setting as humans to assume others are telling the truth.
Tweet I enjoyed---
Michael E Mann's July 16, 2018 Tweet
"That’s a myth. Meat eating is a modest slice of the carbon emissions pie. The lions share of carbon emissions comes from fossil fuel burning for energy and transpiration. Covered in our book #DirePredictions"
(See attached picture)
Lecture I enjoyed recently---
Frédéric Leroy: meat's become a scapegoat for vegans, politicians & the media because of bad science
Great talk - title says it all.
・Around 26:00 he explains that by adopting a flexitarian, vegetarian or vegan diet, the reduction in your personal carbon footprint will be at best, 6%. (And that's generous, 3% is a more realistic maximum possible reduction.) - See attached picture
・Around 36:20 he quotes a study titled Energy and nutrient density of foods in relation to their carbon footprint: "Analyses of nutrient density and GHGEs for a large number of foods and beverages revealed that many foods with low GHGEs also had relatively low nutritional values. In particular, some of the lowest GHGE values were observed not for processed fruit and vegetables, but for sugar and sweets. By contrast, higher GHGEs associated with meat and dairy products were linked to their higher nutrient density. ...One question is whether the higher GHGE cost of some foods can be offset by their higher nutritional value."
Quote I'm pondering---
"The question is: what is interesting? That's the question that has to drive writing. Any kind of creative act- what do people find interesting? What does the writer find interesting?" - Malcolm Gladwell on his Masterclass
This is obvious but I still like the quote because it's what I feel like I'm constantly struggling with. I'm always reading about food's effect on health, on the environment, vitamin interactions, odd diseases that reveal how our cells work, how our bodies work - whatever it might be, those kinds of biology/physiology things are interesting for me. But, how do I make it interesting for everyone else? For example, now, I'm wrestling with this script about red meat's effects and supposed effects on the body. I'm looking at a bunch of specific compounds like heme iron, TMAO, Arachidonic acid,etc. but a list consisting of "Here's this compound, here's why it's thought to be bad. Here's why that's not the full picture. Here's this next compound..." is boring. So, I feel the need to keep digging, find more stories that reinforce the points while making it more relevant and more interesting.
Topic I'm interested lately--- The Psychology of Japanese people.
My friend is writing a book about non-Japanese people (Gaikokujin) who managed to make a living in Japan - this is what got me thinking about this. It's a fun topic that has me reflecting on my 9 years in Japan, but also how different factors in my own life had me develop my own personality, value structures and so on. Obviously people from any culture are going to be very complex in their own way, but it's interesting to make some educated guesses about how a culture affects a person's value structure.
For example, from the American perspective, Japanese people really seem to love rules. Take a look at the picture I attached of red stamps. On the far left is the stamp of the CEO of the company, Mr. Hayashi, who obviously outranks the other four: Sakaki, Suzuki, Yamamoto and Sakaguchi. Do you notice anything odd about the lower ranked people's stamps? Hayashi's is straight up, while the other four's are slanted to the left. This is to make it look like the characters are bowing to the CEO on the document. That's right, there's a rule to how you place your stamp to make sure you are showing respect.
Then again, there's a whole mode of speaking called keigo to show respect. Keigo includes nouns and verbs that are slightly different, verb endings that are very different. Young people entering the workforce out of college often worry about their keigo skills while preparing for job interviews. Imagine speaking one way most of your life then suddenly being told "In formal dinners, you can't say 'eat,' you have to say 'summon to mouth' as in 'What would you like to summon to your mouth, sir?' " Long story short, there are various rules with the purpose of denoting respect and these will change depending on who you're interfacing with - this is a pretty basic concept, but interesting that it's baked into the language.
Not having lived in America for 9 years I fear I'm losing touch with the culture, but I think it's safe to say that in general, there are not too many rules on how to show respect in American interactions. There are many ways to achieve the goal. Of course there are unwritten "rules" like address the person by "Mr. + Last Name" if the person is much older than you, or sit up straight, don't chew gum etc. However there are much fewer rules, less expectations and each person's way of showing respect will be generally different and left to interpretation. (Similarly basic concept.)
However, if I had to make a theme out of this, I would say it is form/rule vs. function/goal. That is, there is a prescribed form/rule (keigo) to follow, which has a function/goal (show respect). -The form is usually more valued in Japanese culture. (Not to say it's more important than the function- obviously it's expected that the form/rule will lead to the satisfaction of function/goal.)
-Then, the American mindset is to worry less about the form (most of the time there isn't a prescribed one anyways) and value the function/goal.
This narrative requires a lot of caveats like... not all Japanese people value form before function, not all Americans set their sights on function without thinking of form and of course neither approach is "better" than the other - each has their benefits. And of course, just because there are "Japanese" rules, not all Japanese people agree with the rules or would consider these societal rules to have a significant impact on their character. I explained the bowing stamps thing to my girlfriend and she laughed and said "kimo〜i!" (How creepy!)
I think this form vs. function explains a couple things. While there are many examples where the form focus has substantial benefits, one example of the opposite is the puzzlingly poor English ability of the average Japanese person. Most start studying English in middle school (some as early as kindergarten) and continue into college. Yet, Japan ranked 53rd in English skills in an annual worldwide survey.
Quizzes and lessons are apparently set up so a "correct" answer can be learned, i.e. students are being taught that there is a theoretical form to English, and if you perfect your understanding of the form then it will function as a tool to communicate with others. However this approach of valuing the form doesn't work out for language, because language is very fluid. (...This would also explain why my Spanish is and always has been crap even after 4 years studying it in High School.)
This form vs. function concept has surely been discussed before, but it's an interesting avenue for me. Bought two books on the subject, one in English another in Japanese - will update if there's more interesting points to share. (The one in English is pretty lame so far)
Comments
That's funny, I just got this book "The Japanese Mind" by Roger Davis - he said something similar, though left out the Pac Man Defender analogy. It would be interesting to look at Korean history as well since the languages are so similar.
Mark Simonson
I read an article once, back in the early eighties I think, that compared Japanese and American culture. They argued that the differences were related to each country's history. The idea (if I recall correctly) was that Japan's history was as a densely populated island, cut off from outside influence, and survival (social and otherwise) depended on getting along with one another, hence its elaborate social rules. The history of US was as a frontier, where people survived by their wits. To illustrate, they compared two video games, Pac Man from Japan and Defender from the US. In Pac Man, every time you played the game, the enemies followed the same patterns, depending on your moves, so the key to getting a high score was finding the "golden path". In Defender, the player is placed in the midst of random chaos, different every time you played, and the way to get the highest score was to learn to deal with whatever was thrown at you. Regarding the difference between Japanese and English: English is essentially a pigeon language, made from many other languages thrown together by historical circumstance. I don't know what the history of Japanese is, but I bet it's quite different.
