Magister librorum: Reflections

Thursday, August 18, 2016

Mindset: think about it

Book review: Mindset: The New Psychology of Success

By Dr. Carol S. Dweck, New York: Ballantine Books, 2006

277 pages

This is one of those books that knocks a hole in your head and then fills it up with startling knowledge.

Dweck wrote this rather chatty book about a very serious subject: the mindset that influences much of your life, and can literally play a critical role in your success or failure at work, at school, among your friends and at home with your family.

Here’s a simplistic summary of her findings based on years of teaching and research:

There is a fixed mindset and a growth mindset. A mindset is a frame of mind that enables you to interpret what’s happening in the world around you, and to determine how you will feel about it, and how you will act and react.

I’ll take a stab at briefly defining the two mindsets in my own words.

Fixed mindset—you interpret most everything that happens to you in terms of whether it validates your static view of your own abilities and self-worth, in other words, you see the events and people in your life as confirming that you are talented and wonderful, or proving that you’re stupid and worthless. You can’t change, and you’ve got to grab what you deserve.

Growth mindset—you interpret most everything that happens to you in terms of feedback about your motivation and your performance, in other words, you see the events and people in your life as part of your continuous quest to learn and achieve your goals and enjoy your relationships with others. You can change, and you can learn to do better.

Of course, it’s possible to have different mindsets in different circumstances, and it’s possible to have some mix of the mindsets.

Dweck says you can learn to have a more effective growth mindset, and you can teach others, kids and adults, to embrace a more effective growth mindset.

We can always learn, we can always build up our talents, we can always get smarter, and we can help ourselves to have more enjoyable lives.

This all makes sense to me.

I don’t think I learned everything Dweck can teach me, so I’m going to read the book again.

"...somewhere hot..."

Book review: The Sea Runners

Here's one for your reading list

Book review: Waterloo

Book review: Orphan Train

Sunday, January 3, 2016

Book review: The Climate Casino

Book review: The Climate Casino: Risk, Uncertainty, and Economics for a Warming World

by William Nordhaus (b. 1941)

Yale University Press, New Haven, CT, 2013

378 pages

I think Prof. Nordhaus has given us a remarkable achievement: a solid, sobering, stimulating, scientific, scary book on human-caused global climate change, that leaves no room for doubt about the prospect that climate change deniers are going to sweat more, like the rest of us, in coming decades.

This is not a book about Apocalypse. If anything, the Sterling Professor of Economics at Yale University writes with an even temper and drily matter-of-fact language that is a teensy bit annoying, given the massively dangerous, initial impacts of climate change and global warming that are already unavoidable.

I think the principal value of The Climate Casino is that Nordhaus lays out the economic (cost/benefit) framework of policy considerations and possible remedial steps that the nations of the world, and mankind, can take to deal with the fact that we’re putting too much carbon dioxide into the atmosphere.

In simplest terms, he says there are many things we can do to mitigate global warming….some are more costly than others and some are very expensive….some folks and some companies and some countries will have to pay more of the costs than others.

I was surprised to read his conclusion that humans can likely survive the initial moderate impacts of global climate change/warming without substantial social and economic disruption, if we start seriously working on it now—there is a big pricetag, but we can tolerate it.

(I mention, for the record, that Nordhaus carefully discusses the unpredictable, and more than trivially possible, catastrophic “tipping points” in climate disruption that might occur regardless of what we do or don’t do—think Dennis Quaid and “The Day After Tomorrow”).

We’re going to have to stop using coal around the world, or figure out how to burn it cleanly. And more generally, we’re going to have to figure out how to require companies and individuals to pay the true cost of burning fossil fuels, that is, the present and future cost of the damage those fuels cause to our environment and to our grandchildren’s prospects for survival.

It was remotely heartening to read Nordhaus’ estimate that we have a reasonable chance of dealing with global warming if we get the ball rolling now, and make sure everyone pays the price.