Rotateller Rotary Club of Owego, NY
Tuesday, April 01, 2008 Gary Williams, Editor

It is every man’s obligation to put back into the world at least the equivalent of what he takes out of it. Albert Einstein

VISITORS:

Alice Truman and Dorothy Arrington

HAPPY BIRTHDAY to Harry

MUSIC:

Carolyn led us in “Smile” and played excellently!

FINES:

Maria, Mati, and Joao fined each table with brain teasers. VERY CLEVER!

WATER PROJECT:

Orv told us briefly about the water project we sponsored with the Waverly Club. We hope to have the speaker at our Club next week.

LEADERSHIP:

Maria told us briefly about Leadership II which she attended with Laura

RYLA:

There will be interviews of six students next Tuesday to select three to attend RYLA this year

NOMINATIONS:

We will nominate members next week to run for the Board for a two-year term

DISTRICT ASSEMBLY:

This weekend at Chenango Valley High School. We have five members attending.

Joao enjoyed his role in the play and the trip to Albany, but (as Mati agreed) part of the tour of the State Capitol was boring. Mati reported that the guide told them about the ceiling in each room.

INDUCTION:

Alice Truman was inducted today. I sponsored Alice and am extremely pleased that she has become a member. Her father, Henry Quick, was a past president of our Club and my former partner. Alice is an educator who retired from as principal of the Spencer Elementary School. For those of you who remember Ed Reid, he attended that school when it was a high school.

PROGRAM:

I spoke on decision making, emphasizing that I am not an expert and do not claim to make decisions better than other people, but attempting to understand how we make decisions and what influences it is an interest of mine. I did share a sequence of readings which I was requested to list.

Descartes’ Error: Emotion, Reason, and the Human Brain Antonio Demasio – This book was written in 1994 which was “The Decade of the Brain”. Demasio was one of the first to state that we cannot study the brain without looking at emotions. Without emotions we would do nothing. It may complicate our understanding, but we are not the purely rational creatures that scientists had been purporting us to be. It is amazing that this is only 14 years ago!

The Emotional Brain: The Mysterious Underpinnings of Emotional Life Joseph LeDoux 1996. LeDoux explains how our emotions can kidnap our rational thinking. Part of this is due to the circuitry of our brain and how our emotions are stimulated prior to information getting to the cortex and it influences the decisions of the cortex.

Intuition: Its Powers and Perils David G. Myers 2002. Myers gives a balanced view of intuition.

Blink: The Power of Thinking Without Thinking Malcolm Gladwell 2005. Gladwell is more optimistic about intuition but also shows how it can lead us astray.

How Doctors Think Jerome Groopman 2007. The intent of this book is to help patients to receive better care through better communication. It is also useful to doctors, but more importantly, it is useful to anyone making decisions. While we need to have short-cuts, we need to be aware when they are not working.

Strangers to Ourselves: Discovering the Adaptive Unconscious Timothy D. Wilson 2002. I have this out of chronological sequence, but it is in the sequence in which I read it. It does provide a good overview of how most of our thinking is unconscious and gives hints as to how we may better get to understand why we do what we do and make the decisions we due while recognizing that the process is reasonably opaque.

The Black Swan: The Impact of the Highly Improbable Nassim Nicholas Taleb 2007. I am only ½ way through this book, but feel that it is well-written, challenging and important. I do not agree with a number of the things he says (so who am I?) For one thing, I think that we need to look at “objective, rational” decisions and “intuition” as on a continuum, not just two different processing styles. Since the author likes to play with the reader, it is hard to be sure when he has erred in logical presentation or his is playing with the reader. His main thesis, is as Yogi said, “Predictions are very difficult, particularly if they are about the future.” While it is not a course in philosophy or logic, he does present some arguments in logic which are easy to follow which show how we tend to deceive ourselves. Memory is not the tool to help us that we would like it to be.

I recommend all of the books other than the first two. There is some overlap (which helps me to understand and remember). After the first two, the books are definitely written for readers who have not read a lot in this area. Part of the appeal, as can happen in good fiction and in biographies, these books can give insight into ourselves – whether we like what we see or not.

Back to Meetings