Space in between - By Anton Andreev

 

Evening - By Jayant Be Joshi

 

A photograph by the Brazilian Photographer - Sebastião Salgado

 

'The Most Important Parenting Question You’ve Never Been Asked' - By Amanda Stern

From the very thoughtful blog -  https://www.thehowtolivenewsletter.org/p/alicemiller  

Such click-baity article-titles very rarely deliver - but this one comes close - definitely makes you take a deep pause and think ! Worth a read ...

If there is anything that we wish to change in the child, we should first examine it and see whether it is not something that could better be changed in ourselves - Carl Jung

Years ago, I took a friend's child to the library. One table over was a young mother with her son, around four years old. The librarian was helping them, and the mother was practically levitating with pride because her child was already reading.

As the librarian handed them the book they'd wanted, the mother opened it and said, "Show her how you can read!"

But the child didn’t want to, and shook his head no.

"Come on, show this nice lady how smart you are!" The mother looked at the librarian. "He really can read," she insisted.

The librarian bent down to the child and said, “It’s okay. You don't have to read out loud if you don't want to."

"No, he really can. I promise!” Then she sort of hissed at the boy, “Show the lady you can read.”

The boy looked terrified.

When the mother realized other people were watching, she doubled down instead of dropping it, announcing to the entire floor that her son could read.

Most likely, she thought she was praising her child. What she was actually doing was apologizing for her child being exactly who he was.

 For a person without children, I’m asked for parenting advice more often than you’d think.

 By way of advice, I ask one question:

Are you raising the child you have, or the child you want?

To answer that, you first need to answer another question: Were you raised as the child you were, or as the child your parents wanted?

We don't always realize the hundreds of small ways we overlook our children. We ask them to prove themselves—often because their accomplishments reflect well on us. The demands we make send a message: What's valuable about them is what we think is valuable. What gets overlooked is what our child values.

Adults assume we know more than children, so we don't take them as seriously as we should. But just because kids don't have the language to articulate what we know doesn't mean they don't know. Because they’re still developing language skills, they're closer to their emotions than we are.

Kids know when they are being overlooked or dismissed. They feel it in their bodies.

In her seminal book, The Drama of the Gifted Child, psychoanalyst Alice Miller describes how children develop a "false self” a version of themselves designed to meet their parents' needs. The child learns to hide their true feelings and present only what is expected. While this helps a child survive their childhood, it comes at a debilitating cost: they lose access to their own truth.

Let's say your anxious child is fixated on death—your death, in particular.

Your impulse is to tell them they don't need to worry; you're not going to die for a very long time.

But when you tell a worried child not to worry, you deny them their reality and replace it with a reality you wish were true. When you discount their real concerns, you teach them to second-guess their feelings.

Imagine confiding to your partner that you're unhappy in your marriage. They respond: "Oh, you don't need to feel unhappy. I don't feel unhappy."

It’s annihilating, right?

I am always amazed at the pride people take in announcing they are parenting their children how they wished THEY'D been parented—as though this were a good thing When we raise our kids in opposition to how we were parented, we're not raising the child we have. We're raising the overlooked version of our childhood self. That’s an imaginary child.

If you were overlooked as a child, you might rush to tend to every need of your child. You might be overcompensating for what you were denied, instead of assessing whether you’re rushing to fix things better left alone.

We rush to correct everything. We bend our children to fit into the existing structures and systems of the world, sending the message that how they are is wrong, and how the world works is correct. But what if we worked to widen the existing structures and systems to fit our unique children?

When we look at our children's struggles as deficits to fix, children often interpret those efforts—regardless of how good the intention—as a judgment on their existence.

Alice Miller observed that children will do anything to maintain their parents' love—including abandoning their true selves. In becoming the “perfect" child of their parents' dreams, they lose access to who they actually are.

Sometimes what eases our children's pain is simply being present and attuned. When we're busy looking for fixes, we're less available to mirror back that we accept the nuances of our child’s kaleidoscopic self.

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Why read ? - By Jerry Davis

 ( This article by Davis appeared in Administrative Science Quarterly' (ASQ) . ASQ is one of the most respected journals in the field of organizational studies. Jerry Davis is a Professor of Sociology at University of Michigan and was an editor at ASQ) 

Why Read?

By Jerry Davis (Former ASQ Editor)

ASQ celebrates itself as a reader’s journal. The quality of the writing has been central to the identity of the journal since Linda Johanson became managing editor and insisted on putting every accepted article through an exacting re-revision process. Clear writing is clear thinking, and Linda’s style rules rivaled those of The New Yorker: limited italics, no exclamation marks, few “In sum”s. Joan Friedman and Ashleigh Imus have carried on this tradition, and it helps explain why ASQ is vastly over-represented on doctoral syllabi around the world. If it’s in ASQ, it’s worth reading.

But what if reading were to just...stop? We are living through a shift from print culture to oral culture in which the spoken word regains dominance (as Marshall McLuhan foretold). Why read an article if NotebookLM can give you the five-minute podcast (or, no doubt soon, a TikTok video with an interpretive dance)? Does science even require reading anymore? And if not, is reading so compelling that we might do it without compulsion?

AI and other tools are forcing the issue on us. Here, I consider what the challenge is, what’s at stake, and why we might save reading from the ashbin of history.

Enter The Matrix

One of my favorite scenes in The Matrix is when Trinity and Neo need to escape a skyscraper and make their way to the roof, where a helicopter sits unattended. “Can you fly that thing?” asks Neo. “Not yet” says Trinity. “Tank, I need a pilot program for a B212 helicopter. Hurry!” And Tank downloads code into Trinity’s brain that makes her an expert pilot. It’s a fantasy that comports well with our tech overlords’ vision of efficient education.

Doctoral education, in contrast, is exceptionally inefficient because it revolves around reading and thinking. (I myself am a slow reader. And a slow thinker.) Imagine you’re a first-year doctoral student confronting seminars that include dozens of articles and books. Now imagine that you live in a futuristic world where NotebookLM makes it easy to upload PDFs of every article on the syllabus and provides summaries and smart critiques, writes one-page memos on each week’s readings, finds themes and tensions across the readings, notes historical developments, suggests novel paper topics -- and, if asked, will turn it all into a podcast you can listen to at the gym at 1.5X speed.

Reader, we are living in that simulation. It is not hard to foresee a time when all course materials, including transcripts extracted from seminar recordings, will be dumped into LLMs and distilled into conveniently accessible insights. “Tank, I need a scholar program for a Ph.D. in management. Hurry!”

Perhaps you have heard of Cluely. It’s an app created by Columbia students to help cheat on remote interviews. It runs in the background on one’s computer, listens to the interviewer’s questions, prompts AI for answers, and provides them in teleprompter format for the interviewee to read. Voila: You aced the interview, and now you’re going to medical school! After getting kicked out of Columbia, the founder expanded Cluely’s remit to “Cheating tool for literally everything,” and received venture funding from Andreessen Horowitz, the highly honorable VC behemoth. (This horrifying 90-second video is worth watching.) Wearing Meta’s AI glasses would allow users to make their way through life with answers for everything.

A scholar equipped with Meta glasses and Cluely trained on the corpus of an entire doctoral program would be a formidable interlocutor at a seminar or job talk or oral exam. Of course, they might have no idea what they were talking about as they read the scripted comments, but they would certainly look well-read -- even if the only reading they did was from a tiny teleprompter.

Reading Optional; Writing Required

Judging by the scenario above, soon it may be possible to enjoy a successful academic career without ever reading an article. But unless there is a sea change in our publish-or-perish incentive system, scholars are still required to write articles.

A doctoral student once confided that their faculty seemed to write more than they read. Which...seems accurate. We get measured and evaluated based on our publications, but nobody gets rewarded for reading (other than the intrinsic joy of reading about fixed effects and variance inflation factors). The prior literature can often seem like a convenience store to drop into for a few quick essentials. In the worst case, lit searches are driven by a confirmation bias: “Can somebody point me to an article to explain why this result makes sense?”

In organization studies, we spend a surprising amount of our energy on tips and tricks to entice our readers -- baiting the hook, springing the trap, highlighting the novelty of our findings. It is almost as if the point of our science was to bring delight to readers rather than to reveal the truths we have uncovered about the world. More pragmatically, we aim to get reviewers and an editor to accept the merit of our work so it will end up in print. This may fuel the idea that these are the readers that really count; any beyond this set are a happy bonus. To quote the most poetic line in volume 70, issue 1 of ASQ: “Like unworn articles of polyester clothing piling up by the acre in Chile’s Atacama desert, unread research articles pile up by the thousands in online open access journals.” Reading is not the point; publishing is.

Does Science Need Readers?

A skeptic might wonder why so much effort goes into the creative writing aspect of journal articles in organization studies. Crazy metaphors about polyester clothing seem like misplaced energy if the point is to convey important discoveries yielded by our research.

And there are alternatives. My experience publishing in a finance journal (owned by an unnamed Dutch conglomerate) suggests that some fields view the text of an article as mere adornment. The real science is conveyed in the results tables. All the editorial input is aimed at making sure the tables are sufficient to stand on their own. Readers in finance evidently head straight to the findings -- if they know what the variables are, they can impute the story behind them. The pages of words that came before are optional, aimed at slower-moving scholars who have not kept up with the literature.

An even harsher skeptic might ask why the public should be supporting work aimed primarily at pleasing the palate of fellow academics. We don’t fund sailing for pleasure; why should we fund prose-poetry about polyester? (Why indeed? The proof is left as an exercise for the reader.)

But suppose the finance journal is right and that science is mostly about the findings, not the gift wrapping of words around them. “Articles” in this world may be a vestige of an old-timey world gone by.

James Evans and Eamon Duede describe the emerging world of “science after science“ in which AI produces the truly frontier research, which may not be comprehensible to humans. Instead, human scientists end up being the interpreters of the work done by AI, which is off…folding proteins or something. They caution, “As AI comes to dominate all aspects of scientific practice, alternative approaches and methodologies can be squeezed out. Although some of this replacement represents genuine epistemic progress by superseding outdated models, creative destruction of this kind can also drive diversity collapse. This poses a unique challenge: Unlike traditional scientific progress, where new methods enhance disciplinary toolkits but disciplines remain distinct, AI’s efficiency could create a monoculture of research practices within and across fields.”

Keep Reading

Perhaps this is the function of reading: maintaining and expanding the diversity of science. Maybe science is not (just) about tables full of numbers, inscrutable to humans but transparent to AI. Maybe the interpretive element -- reading metaphors about polyester -- is essential too.

I spent this fall at Copenhagen Business School in a department named Business Humanities and Law. The group included philosophers, historians, legal scholars -- people for whom writing and reading are the essence of their scholarship. I had the privilege to attend their annual writing retreat near Elsinore (Hamlet’s castle), where we spent two days discussing each others’ work in small groups. Everyone had done the reading, and the conversations were intense and exhilarating. Drafts of pieces on corporate personhood, the ethics of hierarchy, tort law, AI and entrepreneurship, international taxation, soccer team ownership, and the weird popularity of the business model canvas created a diverse buffet. And every piece made me reflect on my own work in different ways.

Specific conversations, in a specific place, about specific pieces of writing, sparked insights, not just about findings but about how to think about them. We were a community of readers engaged in a common cause, centered on reading. (And for the record: Polyester is an excellent metaphor: it’s synthetic, slippery, unnatural, uncomfortable, and disposable, yet non-biodegradable, leaching microplastics into the environment for centuries. Really, polyester is the tofu of metaphors, readily absorbing the flavors around it.)

Perhaps humans and reading are superfluous in some realms of science. But I’m happy to be dialed into conversations where reading is fundamental. At its best, ASQ and other journals serve to convene these conversations, creating a community of careful readers (starting with editors and reviewers) and advancing our collective understanding about organizations. That community is worth preserving.

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In the Meantime - By Tom Hirons

Meanwhile, flowers still bloom.
The moon rises, and the sun.
Babies smile and somewhere,
Against all the odds,
Two people are falling in love.

Strangers share cigarettes and jokes.
Light plays on the surface of water.
Grace occurs on unlikely streets
And we hold each other fast
Against entropy, the fires and the flood.

Life leans towards living
And, while death claims all things at the end,
There were such precious times between,
In which everything was radiant
And we loved, again, this world.

Mataji ka raasta :)