Becoming Immediately More Effective

Created August 23, 2021

The aim of reading this article is that it will stimulate your own mind to the degree that you can sense something is happening to you inside, and it will accelerate your own metacognitive programs (the ones you discovered for yourself) to further develop faster.

If it doesn’t work, please let me know.

Probably the most distinguished developmental psychologist of our age, John H. Flavell coined the term “metacognition” to mean the mind considering itself (those were not his words, he said “thinking about thinking, or more formally, cognition about cognition”). He wrote that in 1976.

That same year my manual for metacognition MIND MAGIC came out.

The only thing is, I didn’t know it was a manual for that; I had used the term “Observer state” to describe metacognition in its most practiced and achieved state.

Now that I have belatedly caught up with Dr. Flavell (and blown away by the William James brilliance of his writing) I see how to inject my work into the science of psychology (my minor). Of course, that makes me very happy. Marketing science and data science (specializing in optimization) have been my official sciences and now I have an avenue to potentially funnel my work on consciousness, into psychology. I anticipate synergies with the work of many others, especially neuroscientists who have identified the agencies by which certain qualia (inner subjective experiences) appear in the consciousness, as my work has focused within the qualia, the use of introspection and concentration to come up with “mind tricks” that pragmatically work to improve social interaction, finding one’s passion work, and performing it.

I promised a pre-experience of what it is like to go through the manual.

Let’s start with the quest for peak experience. We all have had them, and some people have them all the time. They are self-evidently desirable states to have more often. That is the aim here. The ultimate purpose of my work.

A map is always helpful when one starts a journey. How do we map the levels of waking consciousness?

Maslow posited three states of waking consciousness, the first focused on deficiencies, the second focused on the release of one’s gifts, and a spiritual level he added toward the end of his life
Csikszentmihalyi coined the term Flow to characterize the state of perfect action
Flavell coined the term “metacognition” to mean the mind’s reflection upon its own behaviors and states
If we put this all together on one map, mixed in with my own speculations and empirical findings, it looks like this:

Looking at the righthand bar, metacognition appears to be a precondition of the Observer state, just as the Observer state is a precondition for the Flow state. For example, the program known as the Will within the qualia appears more strongly in the Observer state than in beginner’s level metacognition. The Will is what is required to overrule one’s prior thought. The Observer state is still metacognition, but it is fully developed, especially in terms of the Will.

Metacognition – the practice of thinking about one’s thought processes

Observer state – the temporary or permanent ability to objectively challenge one’s own prior thought or feeling

Flow state – automatic “perfect” performance

There are today many brilliant writers on the subject of metacognition and I hope to meet all of them. In their writings as well as in Dr. Flavell’s, the prefix “meta” is seen preceding other functions of mind as in metamemory, etc. In the table below you will see many of these “metas”.

Mind Magic chapters, now that I can look at them through the lens of metacognition, can be classified as follows (I suggest a glance down the righthand column, then skipping the table for later contemplation). In the table, the word “challenge” always means to challenge oneself, inside.

The journey goes something like this for the reader:

A – I must have been in some sense hypnotized to have allowed myself to assume it’s OK for me to be living this desperate life

B – Living in this racing age, it’s understandable that as a soft babe I was certain to be awed into going along with all this and have never woken up since

1 – Since I obviously have to take control of my own life now, there’s no going back, I need some hints as to how to navigate, and the first thing I have to do is to avoid jumping to conclusions too soon, I have to check myself constantly

2 – Why did I just do that? I hurt someone’s feelings and I feel like an ass. What makes me act that way, I must locate the program, and fix it so my programmed mind stops doing that to me

3 – I sound like a broken record. Why am I always playing tapes of old stories or whatnot? I must find the root of that behavior and fix it so I can act anew every moment, from where I am in the now, not imitating my own past behavior

4 – I can save time by just doing my best and learning from my mistakes without making it personal, it’s pathetic how I good boy bad boy myself what a waste of time and how ignobly embarrassing

5 – Yes but what do I really want out of life? Is that what I really want? Am I potentially very good at that? What is the evidence for that? Ahah! I have found my dream again

6 – Taking in what is going on, situational awareness, studying people, keeping mind open

7 – Staying focused through complexity by revolving attention, maintaining many streams of thought at once

8 – Not rushing in prematurely but waiting for the foreseen to happen in the dance, nor hesitating past the right moment

9 – Dis-identifying with the contents of one’s own mind so as to be able to re-decide whether or not one wants to continue to wear each of those particular attitudes/beliefs

10 – I can actually look more closely at my thoughts arising, first there is a fleeting image or memory of some sort, followed by a feeling either good or bad, and then snatches of words I am saying to myself

11 – Why must I entertain negative feelings? Isn’t that like purposely wounding myself? I must creatively transmute negative feelings into positive action, without hesitation as soon as I sense negative feelings, stop knifing myself as soon as possible

12 – If I identify with all I perceive, I wind up nurturing other people and myself into the bargain, what an improvement over the selfish way I lived until now, not taking responsibility for others

Outroduction – A vicarious sample of what it feels like to be in the state exhorted by this manual

If you put this article into practice without needing the manual, I shall be extremely pleased. Reading more examples of these general principles helps when you are trying to embody new behaviors, which is why I wrote MIND MAGIC, feel free to go either way, please just get to be in the Observer state for as much of the time as possible, and into Flow as often as possible.

The present world situation requires it of all of us to be at our highest performing best. It might be the only way out, and the gift to us from the Universe, that She, Nature, is forcing us to find, by threatening to collapse our world around us, and we did it to ourselves by not using our heads.

In this case the end gift of higher mind may actually justify the scary means.

Best to all,

Bill

Metacognition Versus Public Disenchantment with Science

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“I do not like that man: I must get to know him better.”

–Abraham Lincoln

How is it, one wonders, that tens of millions of Americans can believe and echo absurd fantasies, while showing signs of disbelieving in science?

It clearly has something to do with hatred.

For most of my life, I would have associated disbelief in science with throwback cultures, as contrasted with one of the most advanced places on the planet.

To see it happening here is a shock.

Some of it has been accurately explained as confirmation bias, the insular lives many of us live, in which we only read, listen to and watch sources that tell us what we want to believe.

People whose lives have fallen short of aspirations naturally have fear and anger over that. Some of them who are white fall prey to white supremacy thinking because they fear that non-whites are gradually taking away their livelihoods. Many would simply rather believe that, than take responsibility for the consequences of their own actions.

Thus, racism could start from a shifting of blame – from blaming oneself to blaming others.

How ironic, in that there isn’t any value in playing the blame game in the first place! One shouldn’t have to shunt it outside, a metacognitive mind will see in advance where something leads and can stop the degenerative process far sooner. And reverse degeneration, by adjusting future predispositions consciously. That transmutes blame into better preparation.

Every event is a product of multivariate causes, so the blame has to be allocated, and having done so, one decides how to adjust one’s future action and moves on without the overt act of blame or even the covert clinging inside to the feeling of blame. This becomes clear to a person in a state of metacognition or Observer/Flow states.

One could blame it all on the money system itself, which historically creates a disadvantaged segment who can see the way the advantaged segment lives, producing a potential disequilibrium, which will come to be potentiated in one cranky way or another. And in a way, Marx did that, conceptualizing a radical new system to replace capitalism which was to never work as it was supposed to in the real world. It just made things worse.

Fear of communism and socialism naturally struck hard at American values of rags to riches by hard work, independence and small business, property rights, individualism, liberty, ideologies at the time being peddled via the violence of revolution. When I was growing up the whole environment taught me as an American patriot to loathe those systems.

That still exists today, and that fear instilled in all of us for so many decades is still being used by politicians today, even though our potential enemies abroad are no longer practicing communism except symbolically, everyone is doing capitalism this year.

No reason to make such a big deal about socialism anymore. Authoritarianism is still a valid cause for concern, not to mention the environment, the need for massive new clean energy resources, the mutating virus, mounting levels of violence, inflation, American schism… we have enough prime challenges today and cannot let ourselves be distracted by last century’s woes.

We ourselves are good people. My hunch/hypothesis (estimate of the situation, rather than article of faith) is that all human beings – all beings – are innately good. Hume called this universal instinct “sympatico”. The reason that is my hunch is that, like Will Rogers and similar to Abe Lincoln, I have never met a person I didn’t like, at least sometimes.

Fear causes anger and anger causes the world we now live in.

The digital media and even some traditional media have amplified our fear and our anger. So has the replacement of jingoism for journalism. The decline of journalism is also connected to the rise of digital media through the agency of money: as newspapers were largely replaced, so was a lot of journalism, thank God still not totally extinct and hopeful of a full comeback once we all come to our senses.

What makes me think we can ever come to our senses?

Metacognition.

What is metacognition? The term literally means “Above cognition”.

It’s a term coined by distinguished American developmental psychologist John H. Flavell in his 1976 article “Metacognitive Aspects of Problem Solving” – the same year my manual on how to achieve metacognition and the two states above it, MIND MAGIC came out.

Flavell defined “Metacognition” as “Cognition about cognition, or, more informally, thinking about thinking.” If we pay attention to our own mental/emotional processes (metacognition) we become practiced at it (Observer state) and eventually begin to have experiences of Flow state (what athletes call the Zone) – intuitive effective performance.

It’s my hypothesis that we can as homo sapiens “come to our senses” and overcome the present unstable state of global civilization, by accelerating the widespread education of practices proven to increase metacognition – and two even higher states of consciousness that metacognition is a precursor for, Observer state and Flow state. That automatically includes pragmatically being open to new evidence, and having the skills to weigh evidence logically and dispassionately.

QAnon zombies and extremists of all stripes can be cured by their achieving metacognition and Observer state. People who today believe things for the wrong reasons can untie the knots in their mind by the ability to weigh evidence dispassionately.

Metacognition and Observer state also enable detachment from long-accepted precepts. Metacognition is exactly what is missing from the present culture. It is not being taught in any public schools that I know of.

In order for the science of psychology to have its maximum positive social effect, people must be able to translate and apply findings to their own lives.

Today’s possibly most valuable psychology remains largely focused on the detailed mechanics of how the brain works, without relating such findings to the mind and the experience of the individual (qualia), the fancy name for our subjective inner experiences).

Tying scientific findings to a person’s experience would be valuable because it enables teaching and learning. The individual would have a map for dealing with his/her qualia, able to achieve metacognition/self-observe something by the use of operational methodologies taught in history by sages, and today condensed into my manual.

If science stops translating its findings for greater understanding among the people – which understanding has tangible positive effects – science remains valuable for its own purposes of knowing, but science’s disconnect from most people’s lives leaves a dangerous vacuum which is presently being filled with baseless argumentation of science versus fantasy, to no good end.

Hypothesis: An increase in the public’s ability to maintain a state of metacognition will cause a decrease in anger, hatred, class warfare, depression, mental illness in general, addiction, crime, war, terrorism, partisanship, misinformation, and other negative phenomena.

This is a hypothesis worth testing. My manual is one way to test it on yourself and on your employees. The U.S. Army and Navy have tested it and then requested/received workshops for high-ranking officers, as have some large corporations, and 34 universities. Thousands of readers of MIND MAGIC have written positively about its effects.

In the next post I’ll give you a pre-experience of what the manual teaches. That will be a special edition on Monday.

Best to all,

Bill

What’s Bothering Me?

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Created August 13, 2021

Have you noticed that sometimes when you are feeling down, you don’t even know what’s doing that to you?

Isn’t that interesting? Some part of me knows that something is wrong. But my conscious mind doesn’t know what it is.

That could mean my bad feeling is for a stupid reason, and if I could only realize what it is that is putting me off, maybe the bad mood would evaporate, perhaps even evoking a laugh if the cause was ridiculous enough.

On the other hand, my hunch machine is sometimes quite right, and this could be one of those cases.

I must find out which of these is true, whether the bad feeling is something to ignore, or pay attention to.

Where to begin?

I write down the symptoms. That’s my go-to first diagnostic troubleshooting step when I lack joy.

Low energy

Not looking forward to anything today

That often leads to thoughts and usually then, the moving pen begins to write as if by itself (sometimes via keyboard).

When you discover what the stimulus is that is evoking negativity in you, you can decide what to do about it. That sometimes makes you feel better. The situation is usually something that comes from you in the first place, not from someone you know, and the solution usually involves your having to grow up a bit more to change your own attitudes.

So, this whole process is a good thing. It gets you back into a positive frame of mind, and makes you better too.

Unless you don’t believe you have the power to change. That’s sort of a show stopper.

If you don’t feel the power to change, discovering the reason for your bad mood doesn’t help. It might make you feel even worse.

Clearly, it is not a good thing to assume you have zero power to change.

If you didn’t feel you have the power to change, before reading this, start right now to allow yourself to open your mind to the possibility that you could rise to this occasion. That you do have the power to change. Now more than ever before. That is called The Will. Determination. Resoluteness. Dedicated to keep agreements with your Self. Not a pushover or a weenie.

Whenever you don’t feel on top of your game enjoying life and the moment, stop a second and Check For Joy. If joy is not present, what is bothering you?

Pay special attention to (a) your dreams (b) the way you feel when you wake up in the morning.

You’ll see that a bad dream can discolor the first part of a day. Or take you off your game for the whole day just as likely. Unless you’re on top of it.

If you can see yourself (“metacognition”) you can detect what kind of mood you’re in. Metacognition is the Observer State. My book Mind Magic is a manual to teach yourself the skills involved in metacognition – really seeing yourself. Able to look critically and objectively at your own last thought. A higher state of consciousness which was given the name “metacognition” by eminent developmental psychologist John Flavell. Now that I have discovered his work, I see that he calls “metacognition” what I call the Observer State. Funny that both of our books came out the same year, and that it’s taken me this long to see that other scientists have not altogether missed what I have been writing about for years. Interestingly, so far, I have seen a lot written about metacognition from the standpoint of studying the phenomenon, but other than Mind Magic I’ve not seen any manual teaching one to have the skills to achieve metacognition.

Net-net, I am pleased that science, specifically developmental psychology, has in effect validated my work by recognizing the existence of this better state of cognition.

Hopefully dear reader you are already metacognitive – after all you have been reading stuff for some time 😊 – and may have been metacognitive even before that. Most readers whom I have met, say they read my book in the first place because they were having these Observer State experiences on their own, but at a very slow rate, and they didn’t even know what it was and therefore couldn’t really tell anybody about it.

Once you have steadied on the gift of metacognition, exploit it fully by setting a mental trigger that will go off as soon as possible after detection of a downer. No longer tolerate downers for yourself. You deserve joy in every moment. It isn’t a farfetched impossibility. People who are self-actualized, doing their passion work, having peak experiences every day, are already doing what I say you can do too.

Bad dreams can set you off badly and the obvious imperative is to decode them before you get out of bed or as soon as practical.

Once you know the reason for the dream it will no longer hold any power over you.

I’ve been enjoying my life and my moments this Summer and was not surprised to wake up in a bad mood, because during the bad dreams which caused the mood, I already knew that these dreams were disturbing me and I couldn’t figure out why. Neither in the dream nor after waking out of it.

After some contemplation I realized what had caused the bad dream.

The cause of the bad dream was that I am enjoying my life and my work so much right now, some part of me had found time to worry about somehow losing it.

Attachment is a cause of bad dreams in general. Things you are afraid of losing. Try that as a first possible key when you next wake from a bad dream, which I hope you shall never have to do again.

Best to all,

Bill

Partners – We Need Each Other

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Created August 6, 2021

Good-natured rivalries are a constructive force for the betterment of all concerned. Unsportsmanlike vicious bitter feuds bring down all concerned.

The state of play at the moment between the two U.S. political parties is at the worst extreme observed in my lifetime. That can’t be a good thing. A house divided against itself, cannot stand. Who said that? Abraham Lincoln, one of the country’s first Republican party presidents, and one of the greatest of all of our presidents.

In this post I am setting out to document that the two political parties form a natural complementariness. That would not be the case with any two political parties. If, for an extreme example, our two parties happened to be Communism and Fascism, they would not complement one another nor work hand in glove together, because oil and water do not mix.

On the other hand, Republicans and Democrats names both mean almost the same thing: Res Publica in Latin means “public affair” and is usually taken to be a synonym for “commonwealth” (generally defined as “an independent community founded for the public good” and used as a synonym for “republic”); and Demokratia in Greek means “the people rule”.

However, Democracy specifies that the people call the shots, whereas a Republic exists for the public good but does not require that all the people together constitute the rulership.

This is not a fine point, it is the whole basis for the dynamic between the two parties.

The Democratic party takes the position that people should be able to reach decisions together by majority voting. That The People can be trusted to reach the right decisions.

The Republican party takes the position that The People are not always wise, they can be swayed by persuasion to make horribly wrong decisions, and must be protected by wiser heads.

No one can deny that there is truth and value in both of these opposed positions.

Especially today, when social media exposes how rampant madness is.

And social media probably adds to the madness.

Quis custodiet ipsos custodes? Who will guard the guardians – the wiser heads – in the republic? That is the key to the success or failure of a republic – the people trusted to make the decisions. Solomon, Socrates, Ben Franklin, Abe Lincoln, FDR, Walter Cronkite… we’re probably all in good hands. Most human beings who come to mind are not quite as rock solid.

The Founders were aiming for something optimized by combining Democracy and Republic, checks and balances everywhere. The U.S. Constitution they created established the principle that the power to rule comes from the people who invest that power in their chosen representatives in the U.S. system, a representative democracy and a democratic republic.

The Constitution didn’t mention political parties, and George Washington quit 20 years down the pike when political parties erupted on their own in 1796.

Yet our two parties, balanced as they are around a question of responsibility – can the public be trusted to have total responsibility, and if not, what is the proper interaction between the public and government itself, to achieve the optimal results? – have spontaneously evolved and their respective ideologies are extremely similar. If we had to have parties, these two are the perfect ones, on the face of it.

And one is conservative (in most cases) while the other is more progressive (in most cases). The Republicans coming from a place of getting people to stand on their own two feet, where the Democrats sympathize more with those who have fallen off their feet. The balance between these opposing Goods is where the greatest Good lies.

We need a degree of conservatism more than we ever needed it before, simply because we have been printing money to the extent that many economists fear a hyperinflation that could lose the U.S. dollar’s status as the world’s reserve currency and have global economic effects possibly worse than the Great Depression.

Both parties have been taking advantage of the printing money alternative, and so we are under-representing the conservative ideal. It would be good to see us able to balance the budget and pay down debt. Both sides have good creative ideas and it’s a shame that filibuster prevents or delays debate which could lead to synthesis that is satisfying to both sides and to most citizens. At least let’s modify filibuster to require debate aimed at such synthesis, even if we retain the 60% supermajority requirement to pass a bill.

Let’s get back to using each other’s complementary skills and viewpoints to reach even better decisions and creative ideas than ever before.

The other party are not bogeymen. They are us, Americans, with very slight differences in point of view which are valuable, because they cause us to think, and the combination of two viewpoints causes a synthesis that is more perfect than either of the two original viewpoints.

Although the Founders did not visualize this taking place as two parties, they definitely foresaw that debate was going to be the modus operandi for the infant democratic republic. So let’s debate! The more we debate in a cooperative manner the quicker we shall unearth creative solutions for win/win. It makes no sense to delay debating, it is delaying the creative process the Founders invented.

We can carry on the work of America by simply ratcheting up the cooperation and winding down the rancor. Please give it a chance.

We can all act like children some of the time. Let’s not let ourselves do that all the time.

Two Sides to Every Story

To set us off on the right foot, let’s begin by acknowledging the good that has been done by the rival party. Here is a compilation of my subjective top ten accomplishments of Republican and Democratic presidents over the past 30 years. I left out many others worthy of inclusion in a longer article, and provided a bibliography for serious students. Because I set out to help bring us all together, please let’s not get into knocking any of my specific choices below, that wouldn’t do any good. The main reason I put these lists below together is simply to demonstrate that regardless of party, we have in general chosen well, that our recent presidents have all strived to do the best job they could, and that nothing irreparable has been done to damage the U.S.A. or to prove that our system is no longer functioning.

Bill Clinton (Democrat)

Presided over longest period of economic expansion in U.S. history
Unemployment dropped from 7% to 4%
Poverty rate dropped from 15.1% to 11.3%
Federal investment in education and training doubled, 3000% increase in educational technology funding, Internet-connected schools increased from 35% to 95%
Largest crime bill in U.S. history caused crime rates to decline for eight years in a row and in 2000 were at their lowest levels since 1973
Made approximately 300 free trade deals
Helped end the war in Bosnia
Helped negotiate the Oslo Accords between PLO and Israel
Reduced the deficit for the first time since Truman was president, and reduced inflation
Led the fight to pass GATT which lowered tariffs on manufactured goods by more than one third

George W. Bush (Republican)

Withdrew from Anti-Ballistic Missile Treaty, ending the Mutual Assured Destruction era
$1 trillion tax cut
Established Homeland Security
Targeted Osama Lin Laden for 9/11 and sent troops to Afghanistan breeding grounds for similar events in future
Took over Fannie Mae and Freddie Mac in order to prevent more than half of America’s mortgages from going under
Signed No Child Left Behind Act
Signed Strategic Arms Reduction Treaty with Russia
Instituted new penalties for corporate fraud while proposing other reforms to “demand corporate responsibility and integrity without stifling innovation and growth”
Department of Justice guideline prohibiting racial profiling in federal law enforcement
Energy Policy Act of 2005 includes tax credits for wind and other alternative energy, identified ocean energy as a renewable technology

Barack Obama (Democrat)

Signed into law the largest annual increase in research and development funding in America’s history
Ended the 2008 recession: his last three years in office saw annual average growth of 2.3% in U.S. Gross Domestic product (GDP)
International Climate Change Agreement
Modernized the auto industry, raised fuel efficiency standards, and lowered carbon emissions
Reformed health care
Regulated the big banks
Eliminated bin Laden threat and withdrew troops from Iraq
Put 10 million people back to work
Established a new cybersecurity office, appointed a cybersecurity czar, ordered first nationwide cybersecurity assessment
World’s largest free trade agreement, the Trans-Pacific Partnership

Donald Trump (Republican)

Abraham Accords: the 2020 Agreement among Israel, the United Arab Emirates and Bahrain encouraged similar pacts with Morocco and Sudan
Space Force: recognized that a new branch of the military is now a necessity
More efficiency in striking down terrorists: continued the use of missiles and drones to kill key terrorists without putting Americans in harm’s way
Historic peace deal with Taliban in Afghanistan
Degrees of improvement in relations with most difficult countries such as Russia and North Korea
Called out China’s currency manipulation, product dumping, industrial espionage, and lack of trade reciprocity
Contributed $483 million to the development of Moderna, $456 million to the development of the J&J vaccine, and up to $1.2 billion to the development of the AstraZeneca vaccine through Operation Warp Speed
His first three years in office (before pandemic) saw average U.S. GDP annual growth of 2.5%
Record highs in the Dow Jones Industrial Average
Prior to pandemic, achieved the lowest unemployment rate in 50 years

Joe Biden (Democrat)

Quadrupled the level of vaccinations per week
Most diverse Cabinet in U.S. history
Rejoined the World Health Organization
Rejoined Paris Climate Agreement
Bolstered U.S. manufacturing of semiconductors, pharmaceuticals, and other cutting-edge technologies
Provided a comprehensive plan for Covid relief and support
Proposed an Immigration bill that provides a path to citizenship and protects Dreamers
Brought troops home from Afghanistan
Restored relationships with allies
Gave fair warning to Russia and China regarding cybercrime and aggression

Interestingly, most of the Joe Biden accomplishments listed above were drawn from Fox News’ Leslie Marshall’s March 11, 2021 opinion column. The full bibliography of sources for this presidential review is included below.

We’re not as far apart as it seems. Sometimes we get good ideas from each other. Let’s stop the silly squabbling and “put the Beatles back together”.

Best to all,

Bill

Bibliography

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Bill_Clinton#:~:text=Clinton%20presided%20over%20the%20longest,for%20national%20health%20care%20reform.

https://clintonwhitehouse1.archives.gov/White_House/Accomplishments/html/accomp-plain.html

https://learnodo-newtonic.com/bill-clinton-accomplishments

https://georgewbush-whitehouse.archives.gov/infocus/achievement/index.html

https://www.presidency.ucsb.edu/documents/george-w-bush-event-timeline

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Presidency_of_Barack_Obama#:~:text=Obama’s%20first%2Dterm%20actions%20addressed,US%20military%20presence%20in%20Iraq.

https://www.whitehouse.gov/about-the-white-house/presidents/barack-obama/

https://washingtonmonthly.com/magazine/marchapril-2012/obamas-top-50-accomplishments/