Kingdom

At first glance, the novel Transcendent Kingdom by Yaa Gyasi seems to be about animal optogenetics study carried out by Gifty, who is a gifted researcher with two papers in Nature and one in Cell.

As I go through the chapters, arranged in a back-and-forth structure, the story turns out to be more than a neural circuit experiment for the reward-seeking behaviour of mice. Gifty is one of three black PhD candidates in the entire American medical school, and one of five women in a laboratory of twenty-eight. Unsurprisingly, she has a hard time to overcome the stigma and self-doubt as a black immigrant from Ghana. 

And that's why I think the word Kingdom comes to appear in the novel's title. Her family are the only black people at the church. Gifty can't figure out why her kindergarten classmate says black people can't be princess, why black women were four times more likely to die from childbirth, and whether black people are biologically more given to drugs or crime. 

Gifty is puzzled – so much so that she has to check if the God of America is the same as the God of Ghana.

Positions

Finding common ground, even between the most divided Americans, according to the filmmaker Steven Spielberg, is not only possible, but necessary.

I have also learned this mediation skill from a good friend of mine. Spielberg mentioned recently that America hasn't been this divided since the Civil War. And yet, even before Abraham Lincoln's presidency and Civil War, Lincohn wrote, "Discourgage litigation. Persuade your neighbors to compromise whenever you can. Point out to them how the nominal winner is often a real loser – in fees, expenses, and waste of time."   

If you've ever heard about what neuroscientists call dichotomous thinking, you'll know how human beings are wired to all-or-nothing or black-and-white thinking. We see this in our everyday lives, often in toxic ways: believing one training doctor is either a good guy or a villain. When pressed, we push toward the extremes and refuse to budge. Although we hate to admit it, the fear of nuance in opinion often pushes us to join one extreme camp or another. 

That is a trap we should keep telling ourselves not to fall into. Occasionally, there is the realm of reasonableness, somewhere between two extremes, as taught by Steven Collis.   

Metacognition

So many of us crack jokes, even though some are bad. Be warned, dad jokes are known for inviting eye-rolls rather than big laughs. 

First, a confession. My daughter would be the first to verify the last statement.

Which is to say: the gap of rating for jokes can be huge. I have heard about Dunning-Kruger effect for quite some time. Not until I read The Psychology of Effective Studying did I realise the seminal works of Kruger and Dunning come from a series of jokes. 

In their first experiment, they asked psychology undergraduates to review 30 different jokes that had been pre-rated for humour by a panel of professional comedians. The undergraduates' task was to rate how funny they thought the jokes were. Next, they were to predict how well they thought they could gauge the quality o the jokes in relation to their peers.

When it came to rating performance, there skill varied quite a lot. There was nothing peculiar about that. The oddity is that individuals with the least competence at rating the quality of the jokes turned out to overestimate their ability. The truth is, the more incompetent participants were, the more deluded they were about their competence. 

The findings of Kruger and Dunning were persistent, and were not confined to joke quality rating. Not once. Not twice. But repeatedly. The same pattern of results was shown for tests of logical and grammatical ability in several subsequent experiments.

The key takeaway for me is to try my best not to tell dad jokes on the coming Father's Day. 

Dunning and Kruger

"A little learning is a dang'rous thing; drink deep or taste not."

Those were the words from the eighteenth-century English poet Alexander Pope. Steven Collis, a law professor at the University of Texas, could never forget them after he walked through a large wooden door with those words etched in stone in the frieze. He saw those words, day after day, week after week, month after month, when he studied law at school.

Don't get me wrong. We aren't talking about drinking booze. Alexander Pope referred to drinking from the Pierian Springs, a fountain source of knowledge in Greek mythology. It may sound a little nutty, but isn't it true that learning a small amount about a subject tends to surge to a "beginner's bubble" of overconfidence?

In the very beginning, we might have started out with a level of humility and caution. That's when we are completely naive. But then, quickly after we learn a small amount about a subject, we become novices who tend to overestimate our ability or knowledge. 

That's known as Dunning-Kruger effect. As Steven Collis details in his book Habits of a Peace Maker, we should all remind ourselves how little we know and how much we still can learn about a subject.

Glaswegian

Every time I fly, I try to select and bring at least one book to match the theme.

Scottish writing is so prolific that there're abundant choices for my Glasgow trip. Shuggie Bain, the debut Booker Prize-winning novel by Douglas Stuart, is my pick. 

This novel opens in the early 1990s with a teenager Shuggie Bain beginning his shift at a supermarket deli and daydreaming his going to the hairdressing college on the Southside of Glasgow. He got hired for the job because he was underaged, justifying a lower-than-full-adult wage. 

The next few chapters bring us back to 1981, at the city's low point during the Margaret Thatcher years. Shuggie Bain was a boy of ten at that time, barely thriving in a dysfunctional family. He had no toys because his severely alcoholic mother had spent all money on lager. Shuggie collected the empty cans from around the house as his toys.

Shuggie's mother was even more obsessed with the cans. Nobody else in the world is as attached or addicted to lager cans as an alcoholic. To calm her shakes, Shuggie's mother would shuffle around the couch looking for hidden quarter bottles or half-finished cans. On her knees, she pulled all the empty grocery bags out from underneath the kitchen sink till she was certain there were no more cans.

There are few things more terrifying than the unshakable urge to drink. No other known substance comes close to alcohol in damaging our health in recorded history. Shuggie Bain is a book that reminds us there is no safe level of drinking. Read that sentence again if you need to.

Credibility

Jessica Chen is the kind of person you read about accolades like Emmy Award winner. She is a globally recognised speaker on communication skills.

With Asian upbringing and traditional quiet culture, Jessica shared her childhood story of building a Lego set with her younger brother Eric. Picture two kids triumphantly drawn to the colourful bricks. The two of them were simply fascinated by the Christmas gift, but thirty minutes in, they hit trouble with the pieces. 

"I think this piece goes here, but Eric said it goes the other way. Mum, can you help us?"

Jessica's mum quickly answered, "I am not really sure, but Eric, listen to whatever your older sister says."

That's simply how hierarchy works. High power-distance culture describes the inclination for a junior person to follow higher-ranking person. For those of us who were raised with high power-distance culture, we may unconsciously fall victim to authority bias and think whoever is older is always right. Jessica's lighthearted story has stuck with me, because I happened to have had similar experience with my daughter when she was six-year-old. In fact, we were getting stuck with building the Lego set, like what Eric and Jessica were struggling then.   

Interesting as this was, I had hopes of getting the right way to sort out the pieces. And so I kept trying, here and there, to build the Lego.

Except, that isn’t the case. No luck.

My daughter shook her head. "I don't think this is the way. Let me go and find mum."

This, frankly, was a remarkable answer. The voice in my head was telling me that respect was not just something that happens because you're older. It is something that is earned from the things we do and show. My wife really deserves much more credit than me in solving difficult problems. The natural instinct for my daughter to find my wife is the proof of her credibility and reputation. And really, my wife deserves much more respect than me. In a nutshell, children know best.

Glasgow

Glasgow isn't that big and it's possible to get around on foot without sacrificing too much shoe leather. That's what I learned from Lonely Planet Scotland when I planned my accommodation for the conference in this city.

Put simply, Glasgow is the kind of place where we don't have to be picky for hotels very close to the conference venue. Although I have not much sightseeing time, I decided to find one at Glasgow's West End, just a quick subway from downtown. As in so many British cities, the western part – upwind of industrial pollution – was historically the most desirable. 

The key drawcard for the location of my hotel is its green spaces. The much-loved Botanic Gardens with series of stunning Victorian glasshouses are within walking distance. And so is Kelvingrove Park, right next to top-notch Kelvingrove Arty Gallery and Museum. These iconic sites close before five, but the Waterstones bookshop and public library on my doorstep won't close until eight in the evening.

What could be better location than that?