Conversation Agent - Valeria Maltoni

Converging Two Narratives of Empathy

In a conversation at The Edge, Jamil Zaki traces the two narratives about empathy through culture. He says: 1.“one narrative is that empathy is automatic” — it's a compelling hypothesis, backed by lots of evidence But if you believe that empathy always occurs automatically, you run into a freight train of evidence to the contrary. 2. which is that empathy “diminishes and expands with features of your situation” As many of us know, there are lots of instances in which people could feel empathy, but don't. The prototype case here is intergroup settings. “How can we square these two accounts?”... Read more →

Grit is a Predictor of Success

A few years ago, Angela Lee Duckworth left a a high-flying job in consulting for a more demanding role -- teaching math to seventh graders in a New York public school. He desire to find out more about how to predict success with learning led her to becoming a psychologist. Through field research she found that: In all those very different contexts, one characteristic emerged as a significant predictor of success. And it wasn't social intelligence. It wasn't good looks, physical health, and it wasn't IQ. It was grit. Grit is passion and perseverance for very long-term goals. Grit is... Read more →

Why Read the Classics?

“However vast any person's basic reading may be, there still remain an enormous number of fundamental works that she has not read.” [Italo Calvino] When we talk about reading a classic book in some cases we are doing it for the first time, but we say we're re-reading. This happens says Italo Calvino in an essay published after his passing by The New York Review of Books in 1986: among those who consider themselves “very well read.” [...] The reiterative prefix before the verb “read” may be a small hypocrisy on the part of people ashamed to admit they have... Read more →

How Does Attention Play in Tech & Media?

Discovery and engagement are the two of the problems technology can helps us solve in the world of media. The framework above is a couple of years old, but still delivers on the basic premise that a good digital infrastructure gives us the opportunity to close the gap in understanding how what we say connects with what we do. How does real time compound over time? With big data, we can now put in place a system to gain visibility into how internal and external data sets look, and where we fall off in terms of connecting intention with actual... Read more →

The Power of Reframing Things

A small change of posture can make a big difference. The circumstances of our lives may matter less than how we see them, says adman Rory Sutherland. There is also a cultural dimension to how we feel about our circumstances. Says Sutherland: Why, for example, are pensioners much happier than the young unemployed? Both of them, after all, are in exactly the same stage of life. You both have too much time on your hands and not much money. But pensioners are reportedly very, very happy, whereas the unemployed are extraordinarily unhappy and depressed. The reason, I think, is that... Read more →

Becoming Whole Thinkers

Reading on a variety of topics helps us expand our thinking while it contributes to our ability to discover patterns across different disciplines. It's a process that supports our value as individuals and contributes to the strength of a group. In Learning Habit weekly, I share what I'm reading along with a curated list of articles and resources for making sense of things, making do with what is at hand, and examples of making it we can learn from. Topics range from business, technology, culture, creativity, philosophy, psychology, and more. It is an exploration of the connections between the arts... Read more →

Danni DeVito on Women, Fame, Luck, and Focusing on Right Now

In a profile of the actor, The Guardian interviews Danny DeVito on life and work -- what he thinks about women, fame, and luck says a lot about his attitude on life. Including what matters the most. Is Hollywood unfair to women? DeVito says: “I don't think it's only Hollywood, I think it's just generally speaking. Most men somewhere in their psyche are still dragging women around by their hair. It's terrible. I have two daughters, but even before my kids were born I always thought that it was terrible.” In his opinion, feminism has made some men even more... Read more →

How Our Behaviors and Activities Control the Growth of New Cells

Sandrine Thuret studies the way adult brains create new nerve cells in the hippocampus — a brain area involved in memory and mood. Her work is focused on answering two big questions: How can we help our healthy brains create new nerve cells throughout our lives, through diet and behavior changes? How can we study the effects of diseases such as depression and Alzheimer's on our brains' ability to grow? We can grow new nerve cells as adults. This is a fairly recent field of research, but early answers are encouraging and they can have broad impact. Thuret says a... Read more →

The Difference Between Innovation and Strategy

Learning to differentiate concepts starts with defining the terms we use to describe them. Take for example, innovation and strategy: Innovation is anything that breaks a constraint. Strategy is about the constraints you embrace. As we often do, we try to solve too many different types of problems with one solution (or worse, a meeting), when a structure based on sequential conversations would net us a clearer process and support better decisions. A few thoughts on breaking and embracing constraints. Breaking constraints When we look to innovate, we are working with new ideas. Some of these ideas might even be... Read more →

Simple, Complicated, and Complex Problems

In a paper about health services reform, Dr. Sholom Glouberman and Dr. Brenda Zimmerman address the differences between complicated and complex systems. To illustrate the differences, they “present a detailed account of complex adaptive systems using health care examples to indicate the explanatory power of the approach.” They begin by illustrating an example of the distinction between simple, complicated, and complex problems (table above): Simple problems are ones like baking a cake from a mix. Success comes from following the recipe. Complicated problems are ones like sending a rocket to the moon. Sometimes we can break them down into a... Read more →