27 January 2015

Why Some Teams Are Smarter Than Others

http://mobile.nytimes.com/2015/01/18/opinion/sunday/why-some-teams-are-smarter-than-others.html

Interesting article, they key comments being:

...

"but teams with higher average I.Q.s didn’t score much higher on our collective intelligence tasks than did teams with lower average I.Q.s. Nor did teams with more extroverted people, or teams whose members reported feeling more motivated to contribute to their group’s success"

"Instead, the smartest teams were distinguished by three characteristics.

First, their members contributed more equally to the team’s discussions, rather than letting one or two people dominate the group.

Second, their members scored higher on a test called Reading the Mind in the Eyes, which measures how well people can read complex emotional states from images of faces with only the eyes visible.

Finally, teams with more women outperformed teams with more men. Indeed, it appeared that it was not “diversity” (having equal numbers of men and women) that mattered for a team’s intelligence, but simply having more women. This last effect, however, was partly explained by the fact that women, on average, were better at “mindreading” than men."

...
 
"This last finding was another surprise. Emotion-reading mattered just as much for the online teams whose members could not see one another as for the teams that worked face to face. What makes teams smart must be not just the ability to read facial expressions, but a more general ability, known as “Theory of Mind,” to consider and keep track of what other people feel, know and believe."

02 January 2015

A technologists approach to self-improvement

http://www.lifeoptimizer.org/2014/12/16/self-improvement-lessons/

1. Always work on a new version of yourself.

2. Add new “features” to yourself... new skills, new good habits, new experiences

3. Fix “bugs” in your life... work on reducing bad habits

4. Think about what “major upgrade” you could have. Most of the time, your improvements will be incremental. But every now and then, you should do a major upgrade of yourself. This usually involves a big change in your life.