Maarten Bos and Amy Cuddy in “A Counter-Intuitive Approach to Making Complex Decisions,” approve sleeping on decisions. Sleeping on a decision relaxes your mind with a rest before developing a choice. Using Obama as an example, Bos described Obama’s decision to sleep before choosing what action to take against Osama bin Laden. Being the President is a busy position, and having to decide whether or not to kill a terrorist is a complex situation. However, Obama chose to sleep before his decision, to help collect his thoughts and develop the best choice. In a experiment Bos conducted with people and cars, he realized that those who slept on the information chose the better quality cars. Taking in all the information, sleeping on it, then checking the facts helps one’s mind process all the information. Processing a bulk of information is hard to do consciously, so distracting one’s mind with sleep, or even running, and listening to music can help analyze the information to result in the best decision.
That Daily Shower Can Be a Killer
Jared Diamond, a 75 year old man is now careful about everyday situations that are commonly overlooked. After realizing that the shower can cause a fatal fall, Diamond did some quick math. He’s seen his friends’ experiences with falls, and was told that falling in the shower was only at the risk of one in a thousand. However, when calculating how many daily showers he may take in his lifetime, Diamond realized how often he can face an accident, which may result fatally, in his unguaranteed future lifetime. Diamond first realized everyday situations being possibly fatal after a camping trip in New Guinea. His friends refused to camp under a tree for the possibility of the tree falling upon them. Just as most people would be, Diamond thought they were silly – until he realized how often trees fell in the forest followed by a quick risk calculation. Situations faced in everyday life can be dangerous, whether it’s the shower, an uneven sidewalk, or staircases. Because these situations are faced so often, the risk of accidents is actually very large and those who face such situations should be careful to minimize the risk below 1 in 1,000, to ensure a healthy long-lived life.
Dan Gilbert: The surprising science of happiness
Dan Gilbert in “The Surprising Science of Happiness,” tells us about the human brain’s creation of happiness. The frontal lobe of the brain, can “predict situations,” although the lobe constantly gets simulations wrong. In data comparing lottery winners and paraplegics, it is illustrated that in a year, they are both equally as happy. This occurs because the brain actually synthesizes happiness; it isn’t found. There are two types of happiness, natural and synthetic. Natural happiness occurs when one gets exactly what is wanted, and synthetic occurs when the brain alters thoughts to “synthesize,” or make, happiness. In another experiment, where a set of prints is given to people and they are instructed to order the prints from best to worst liked, the print that was freely given, which was not the best liked, was mentally liked more afterwards. The same experiment was conducted with amnesiacs, or patients with amnesia, and the result with the given print was still the same even though the patient could not remember the first meeting. The point emphasized is that one makes them self happy with what is gotten. Dan finishes his lecture by saying that everyone’s “longings and our worries are both, to some degree, overblown, because we have within us the capacity to manufacture the exact commodity we are constantly chasing, when we chose experience.”
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Counterintuitive Fall 2022 
Hey, Stephen. Thanks for posting early. I appreciate the chance to send feedback signals to your classmates who might read this while they’re doing their own assignment.
Sleeping on it
This is a fine example of a summary that primarily identifies the claims the authors made, Stephen. One sequence is not particularly clear. The section “Being the President . . . best choice.” Says the president is busy and his job is complex NEVERTHELESS sleeping on decisions is the right choice, logic which suggests that your readers would draw the opposite conclusion. Not until the second careful reading did I understand that you mean . . . he doesn’t have the time to sleep, NEVERTHELESS sleep is still the right choice. The rest of the argument I follow easily. Sleep (and other non-concentration activities) relax us, distract us, or, I assume, pass off the decision-making job to the unconscious where much of the work is done.
Deadly Shower
Before I finish reading this one, which is going along fine, I want some clarification on the math. Readers will always be distracted by details you put into their heads and don’t resolve, which means they—like me—won’t be concentrating on your argument as you want them to. Was Diamond told that people FALL in the shower one time per thousand showers? Or was he told they DIE of falling in the shower once in every thousand showers? We’d all be dead before we reached puberty if we showered every day. The first time you said fall, the second you said fatal accident. Which is it?
Now that I have that out of the way, let me reiterate you’re doing a very nice job of transmitting the argument to us, Stephen, directly and without any distancing language. Your last two sentences in particular do the very writerly job of drawing and communicating conclusions that might be Diamond’s, might be yours. That’s an excellent sign that you’re not “telling us what he was talking about.” Instead you’re telling us what you learned and how it applies to an argument: people should be careful.
Science of Happiness
As good as your work has been and is, Stephen, this is the second time I can help you eliminate some “talks about” language. You use different phrases, but they amount to the same thing.
1A. Back in Sleeping on it, you opened with, “Bos and Cuddy discuss sleeping on decisions,” another way to say they “talk about sleeping on decisions.”
2A. Here in Science of Happiness, you lead off with, “Gilbert analyzes the human brain.”
These are small, brief lapses, easy to correct. The trick is to skip over those generalities directly to the first or the most basic premise.
1B. “Bos and Cuddy argue that the best decisions are not the instantaneous, gut-level choices many of us depend on.”
2B. “Gilbert tells us that while we don’t always get what we like, we eventually like what we get.” This launches you neatly and directly to the heart of the matter.
(Please also notice, Stephen, that in both of those examples, I used the first person plural as my voice—many of us, tells us, we get—NEVER the second person you and never the disembodied one.
Finally, this third summary is the weak one of the three for its smaller success in focusing on a single argument with clear examples. Your opening about the size of the brain and its development seem irrelevant to your central argument that however it accomplishes the job, our brain produces satisfaction for us even in unsatisfactory situations (or something like that). Your illustration of the amnesiacs(?) and the prints makes very little sense to readers unfamiliar with the original. (You can revise this before Tuesday, of course.)
Overall a strong presentation, Stephen. I have more to say and grammar lessons to share, but I don’t want to pummel you when you’re doing good work. 🙂
Thanks for the feedback professor! I’ve tweeked the summaries here and there to try to make them that much better!
Sorry for such a late post, but I was away at TCNJ for the weekend. I had entered the HackTCNJ Hackathon.
I’m interested in doing the Daily Shower Can Be a Killer, but as my topic being that daily events are overlooked but when faced daily can be hazardous. I’m having trouble finding resources, especially a hard source. Help?
First of all, I’d say you shouldn’t have too much trouble finding statistics on injuries (small or fatal) from common activities. Insurance companies certainly track those numbers along with OSHA and other government agencies.
Don’t make the mistake of thinking you need to find sources that “prove” your thesis all by themselves, Stephen. In fact, if you did find a source that spelled out precisely what you’re looking for—the numbers that show how catastrophically high the odds of dying get from everyday activities repeated thousands of times—there’d be no reason for your paper. You’d just say: I found this source; it proves my point; go read it. You just need components of your argument from sources that don’t have an opinion at all about your thesis.
I understand what you mean. Thank you!