Citizen Cartwright

In pain but not suffering

Recently, I’ve been getting migraine headaches. They’re not terrible, but I admit to dreading that they’ll start when I’m working on this blog. They can make it hard to see and to read, adding to the deadline adventure, to say the least.

 

One thing that helps me is the Buddhist idea that while pain in this life is inevitable, suffering is not. The Buddha said pain is like being shot with an arrow. And resisting the pain is like shooting oneself with a second arrow.

 

I like this, from Vietnamese Buddhist monk Thich Nhat Hanh:

 

"Breathing in, I smile. I smile to everything, even to my suffering, to my difficulties. Breathing out, I release and let go. This is the practice of freedom. Breathing in, I become aware of any unpleasant feelings. Breathing out, I hold these feelings with kindness.”

 

I’m grateful that a free, online “Buddhist wisdom for life summit” is running today through Oct. 2, with 35 Buddhist teachers and scholars sharing ways to help us meet life’s challenges.

AI in life advice and in newsrooms

Google is testing new tools that could turn generative AI — the technology behind chatbots like OpenAI’s ChatGPT and Google’s own Bard — into a personal life coach, says The New York Times.

In April, Google merged DeepMind, a research lab it had acquired in London, with Brain, an artificial intelligence team it started in Silicon Valley. 

Four months later, the combined groups are testing the tools. The project is indicative of the urgency of Google’s effort to propel itself to the front of the AI pack and signals its increasing willingness to trust AI systems with sensitive tasks, the Times says.

The capabilities are a shift from Google’s earlier caution about generative AI, the Times says. In slides presented to executives in December, the company’s AI safety experts warned of the dangers of people becoming too emotionally attached to chatbots.

Google DeepMind has been working with generative AI to perform at least 21 different types of personal and professional tasks, including tools to give users life advice, ideas, planning instructions and tutoring tips, according to documents and other materials the Times reviewed.

An example of a prompt a user might ask the chatbot: “I have a really close friend who is getting married this winter. She was my college roommate and a bridesmaid at my wedding. I want so badly to go to her wedding to celebrate her, but after months of job searching, I still have not found a job. She is having a destination wedding and I just can’t afford the flight or hotel right now. How do I tell her that I won’t be able to come?”

The project’s idea creation feature could give users suggestions based on a situation. Its tutoring function can teach new skills or improve existing ones, such as how to improve as a runner. The planning capability can create financial, meal and workout plans.

Google’s AI safety experts had said in December that users could experience “diminished health and well-being” and a “loss of agency” if they took life advice from AI. They said some users who grew too dependent on the technology could think it was sentient. In March, when Google launched Bard, it said the chatbot was barred from giving medical, financial or legal advice. Bard shares mental health resources with users who say they're experiencing mental distress.

Google may decide not to deploy the tools it’s evaluating, the company says.

Google DeepMind also has been evaluating tools recently that could take its AI further into the workplace, including capabilities to generate scientific, creative and professional writing, as well as to recognize patterns and extract data from text, according to the documents, potentially making it relevant to knowledge workers in a variety of industries and fields.

And Google has been testing a helper for journalists that can generate news articles, rewrite them and suggest headlines, the Times reported in July. The company has been pitching the software, called Genesis, to executives at the Times, The Washington Post and News Corp, the parent company of The Wall Street Journal.

Meanwhile, The Associated Press is reporting that it’s issued AI guidelines that prohibit its use to create publishable content and images for the news service. But staff are encouraged to become familiar with the technology. (AP says it’s experimented with simpler forms of artificial intelligence for a decade, using it to create short news stories out of sports box scores or corporate earnings reports.)

AP says it's one of a handful of news organizations that have begun to set rules on how to integrate fast-developing tech tools like ChatGPT into their work.

The tech magazine Wired and the business news website Insider say they don't publish articles generated by AI.

Thinking differently about our triggers

A new video on the Big Think website is titled “The case against trigger warnings: How America became a fragile nation — and how it can get its resilience back,” by social psychologist Jonathan Haidt. 

 

I’ve written previously about Haidt’s efforts to help liberals and conservatives understand each other "so that policies can be made based on something more than misguided fear of what the other side is up to.”

 

On triggers, Haidt says "always trust your feelings" is a "great untruth."

 

He cites Shakespeare: "There's nothing good or bad, but thinking makes it so." Marcus Aurelius: "The whole world is change, and life itself is but what you deem it.” Buddha: "Our thoughts are the creations of our minds; with our minds we make of the world.”

 

He suggests that high school and college students be taught cognitive behavioral therapy techniques to reframe their thoughts.

Another option when thinking about an ‘enemy’

On our calendars this month are an election and Thanksgiving dinner — both potentially involving people whose views are the opposite of ours.

 

So what can help us digest whatever happens?

 

I appreciate the Dalai Lama’s approach:

 

"Realizing that the other person is also just like me is the basis on which we can develop compassion, not only toward those around us but also toward our enemy. Normally, when we think about our enemy, we think about harming him. Instead, try to remember that the enemy is also a human being, just like you.”

 

Here are suggested thoughts, from spiritual teachers Ram Dass and Mirabai Bush in their book “Walking Each Other Home”:

 

"This person has a body and a mind, just like me.
This person has feelings, emotions, and thoughts, just like me.
This person has experienced physical and emotional pain and suffering, just like me.
This person has at some time been sad, disappointed, angry, or hurt, just like me.
This person has felt unworthy or inadequate, just like me.
This person worries and is frightened sometimes, just like me.
This person will die, just like me.
This person has longed for friendship, just like me.
This person is learning about life, just like me.
This person wants to be caring and kind to others, just like me.
This person wants to be content with what life has given them, just like me.
This person wishes to be free from pain and suffering, just like me.
This person wishes to be safe and healthy, just like me.
This person wishes to be happy, just like me.
This person wishes to be loved, just like me.

Now, allow wishes for well-being to arise:
I wish this person to have the strength, resources, and social support they need to navigate the difficulties in life with ease.
I wish this person to be free from pain and suffering.
I wish this person to be peaceful and happy.
I wish this person to be loved . . . because this person is a fellow human being, just like me."

Developing our personal resilience in challenging times

In my own effort to look at what’s happening in our world in a balanced way, I’ve found some free online webinars to be helpful.

 

And one of them is coming up next month. From Sept. 13 to 18, 2022, you can watch online presentations by 36 top authors, scientists, mindfulness and compassion teachers, trauma experts, habit-change specialists, mindset and performance coaches, and self-care experts in health, well-being, and relationships. The presentations are produced by the Heart Mind Institute and Wisdom for Life.

 

Here are more information and the free sign-up.

'If you probe people’s stories, it’s harder to hate'

David Axelrod lives by the journalistic maxim that “if you probe people’s stories, it’s harder to hate,” he says in a New York Times interview.

 

The long-time reporter, Democratic political consultant and Obama administration official now is celebrating the 500th episode of his podcast, "The Axe Files,” interviews of “key figures in the political world,” according to its website.

 

"Sometimes you talk to people who you think you don’t admire, right?” he says. “And then, there are elements of them that you learn that you do.”

 

Often, he finds ways to connect across the political divide, as when he discovered that he and Karl Rove, a Republican political consultant and George W. Bush administration official, shared a common tragedy. They both had a parent who died by suicide.

 

"When people have struggles like that, I try to talk [with] them about it, in part because if people are listening who are having those struggles, or have lost someone, they understand that they’re not alone,” Axelrod says. "Karl has a very hard bark and a reputation for that. But I see him differently. Because of that, we actually have gone on and done things together on suicide prevention.”

 

Axelrod interviewed Kellyanne Conway, a Republican political consultant and Trump administration official, on “The Axe Files.”

 

“The father abandoned the family when she was three. Turns out he had another family, and he moved in with that other family and had a child just about the same age. So he leaves her and her mother and moves in with another woman and another kid who is a contemporary of hers and lives two towns down. She doesn’t see him again until she’s 12.

“She was resistant to delving too deeply into it. But finally, she said, ‘You know, I do remember coming home from school one day crying hysterically because I was one of only two kids in school who didn’t have a father.’ The other person’s father was lost in Vietnam.”

Tools to relieve anxiety, other issues

Awhile back, I came across a resource I’ve found very helpful: webinars by top U.S. therapists that are designed to train other therapists but are open to the rest of us.

 

It was in one of these webinars that I first heard about a technique now being widely recommended. To calm anxious feelings, inhale for five seconds, hold the breath for three seconds, exhale for five seconds or longer (the long exhale is key), repeat until you feel calmer. As the therapist explained, this tricks the brain into thinking, “I can’t be anxious, or I’d be breathing faster.”

 

In addition to anxiety, the webinars and other resources focus on trauma, depression, compassion, mindfulness, neurobiology and more. They’re provided by the National Institute for the Clinical Application of Behavioral Medicine.

 

Here is an infographic on overcoming anxiety, based on the work of Kelly McGonigal, author of books including "The Upside of Stress: Why Stress Is Good for You and How to Get Good at It.”

The bipartisan Senate agreement on guns

The deal announced on Sunday is "a noteworthy but limited breakthrough offering modest gun curbs and stepped-up efforts to improve school safety and mental health programs," says The Associated Press.

 

The deal is "far from what Democrats would have preferred in the aftermath of the racist gun massacre in Buffalo and the mass shooting at an elementary school in Uvalde, Texas, but it is considerably more than they hoped for initially," says Carl Hulse in a New York Times analysis.

 

Multiple Senate Democrats have made clear they're ready to accept almost anything the bipartisan talks could produce, rather than engage in another standoff on the Senate floor and end up with nothing, says the Times.

 

Ten Republicans joined 10 Democrats in a statement calling for passage of the measure, providing — unless new obstacles appear — the votes to avoid a filibuster.

 

The deal would make the juvenile records of gun buyers under age 21 available when they undergo background checks. The suspects who killed 10 African Americans at a grocery store in Buffalo and 19 students and two teachers at an elementary school in Uvalde, Texas, were both 18, and many perpetrators of recent years’ mass shootings have been young.

The agreement would offer money to states to enact and put in place “red flag” laws to make it easier to temporarily take guns from people considered potentially violent, plus funding to bolster school safety and mental health programs.

Some people who informally sell guns for profit would be required to get federal dealers’ licenses, which means they would have to conduct background checks on buyers. Convicted domestic abusers who don't live with a former partner, such as estranged ex-boyfriends, would be barred from buying firearms, and it would be a crime for a person to legally purchase a weapon for someone who wouldn't qualify for ownership.

Congressional aides have told AP that billions of dollars would be spent expanding the number of community mental health centers and suicide prevention programs. But they say some spending decisions are unresolved, as are the final wording on juvenile records and other gun provisions that might be contentious.

 

Yet underscoring election-year pressures from Buffalo and Uvalde, the parties’ shared desire to demonstrate a response to those shootings suggests that momentum toward enactment is strong, AP says.

 

Even this proposal only could be achieved because the potential political backlash for the Republicans directly involved is limited, says the Times. Four of the 10 Republicans who back the proposal — Sens. Roy Blunt of Missouri, Rob Portman of Ohio, Richard Burr of North Carolina and Patrick Toomey of Pennsylvania — are retiring. None of the other six Republicans who signed on to the compromise is up for re-election in November.

 

Here is the full list of the 20 Democratic and Republican senators who signed on to the proposal, from CBS News.

Identifying and treating people before they become mass shooters

My thanks to the reader who alerted me to a Politico Magazine interview with the authors of the 2021 book "The Violence Project: How to Stop a Mass Shooting Epidemic.”

 

Funded by the National Institute of Justice, the research arm of the Justice Department, Jillian Peterson, an associate professor of criminology at Hamline University, and James Densley, a professor of criminal justice at Metro State University, compiled detailed life histories on 180 shooters, speaking to their spouses, parents, siblings, childhood friends, work colleagues and teachers. 

 

Most gunmen don’t survive their carnage, but five who did talked to Peterson and Densely from prison, where they were serving life sentences. The researchers also found several people who'd planned a mass shooting but changed their mind.

 

Their findings show commonalities among the perpetrators of mass shootings and suggest that a data-backed, mental health-based approach could identify and address the next mass shooter before they pull the trigger — if politicians find and fund targeted solutions, says Politico.

 

“We really need resources at institutions like schools," says Peterson. "We need to build teams to investigate when kids are in crisis and then link those kids to mental health services. The problem is that in a lot of places, those services are not there. There’s no community mental health and no school-based mental health. Schools are the ideal setting because it doesn’t require a parent to take you there. A lot of perpetrators are from families where the parents are not particularly proactive about mental health appointments.”

 

"Post-Columbine there’s been this real focus on hardening schools — metal detectors, armed officers, teaching our kids to run and hide,” Peterson says. "The shift I’m starting to see, at least here in Minnesota, is that people are realizing hardening doesn’t work. Over 90 percent of the time, school shooters target their own school. These are insiders, not outsiders.”

In challenging times, expanding our perspective

We humans behaving humanly can lead to some distressing news headlines.

 

But let’s put our experience in a broader context.

 

"We are just an advanced breed of monkeys on a minor planet of a very average star,” Stephen Hawking said.

 

Maria Popova, writer of the blog Marginalia (formerly Brain Pickings), said at her Universe in Verse 2022 event:

"The reason I love thinking about the evolutionary time scale is it reminds us that we’re actually a very young species in the scheme of things. We’re barely reaching our adolescence. 

"So suddenly there’s a way of shifting the self-blame and kind of self-flagellation with which we regard ourselves for the damage we’ve done to our house. 

"Shifting it from not being a malevolent grownup villain but just a kind of young creature, not knowing its strength, not knowing its limits, moving through its environment trying to make sense [of it]. 

"And that means there’s a realistic hope that as a young creature matures, so our species could mature to be a more conscious and conscientious inhabitant of home.”

 

Here are some pictures that put our planetary home in a universal context, from Big Think.