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Golem Effect vs. Pygmalion Effect
Came across these two effects today, on dealing with someone whose performance is not up to expectations.
Managers who contribute to the Golem effect believe that certain employees lack the skills, potential or willingness to succeed. This leads to a change in leadership style, where managers may:
- Set more explicit targets and deadlines
- Assign more routine tasks
- Monitor employees on a regular basis
- Emphasize operational concerns instead of strategic ones Whether explicitly communicated or not (often these beliefs aren’t), managers make it clear to their subordinates that their trust in them is limited. When faced with this reality, employees do, in fact, become less motivated and less likely to achieve, thus completing a self-fulfilling prophecy.
Upon reflection, I realise that I have done this myself. Instead I should do the opposite - understand their motivations, set high expectations and clear outcomes, and help them achieve it in their own way.
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Full Days and the Long Walk
Insightful piece, as usual, by Craig Mod.
It sounded crazy to me when I first read his rules for the solo walks. I’m fully onboard with no news, no social media. I wasn’t prepared for no music, no books, minimal to no talking. When I go for a run, I have to pop my earbuds in. When I drive, I have a podcast, audiobook, or music playing. And they end up not giving me time with my own thoughts. All these are habits which I have built myself though, precisely to give my mind something to be occupied with. What we make, we can break. I’ll start to introduce stretches of time everyday where I just think for myself or pay attention to the moment.
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One monkey mind's 10 days of silence
Every time I read someone’s account of Vipassana, I feel a longing to enrol myself. One day…
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Time Under Tension
I recently learnt about the concept of Time Under Tension. When working out, how long you draw out the movements matters. The longer you draw them out, the better the muscle activation and hence the muscle growth. It had never occurred to me before. I used to think that if I’m lifting the weights, that’s all that matters. If someone is doing it slowly, I thought it’s just because that’s the safer way.
I see a parallel to learning here. For many non-fiction books, people argue that you can read a short synopsis and you get the message. But they are missing something important. They get the idea, but it doesn’t take root unless you read the whole book. When you read the book, you go through the journey and understand the nuances. The long time spent reading helps in gaining a deeper understanding, and increases the likelihood of getting value out of it.
Perhaps the same applies to our LLM usage. If we use LLMs to answer all our questions, are we taking a shortcut and not giving ourselves a chance for deeper understanding and growth? Prior to LLMs, whenever we did a web search, we would read through multiple pages and piece together a fuller picture. This journey gave us more insight than what we were looking for. One trick could be to include in our LLM prompt an instruction that it should include more related information than what we asked for. It might not lead to as much serendipity and exploration as before, but could just be enough or close to being enough.
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