Infectious Generosity - by Chris J. Anderson

Published:

Infectious Generosity - by Chris J. Anderson

Read: 2024-08-10

Recommend: 3/10

I appreciate Chris’ practical perspective on generosity.

Notes

Here are some text that I highlighted in the book:

  1. With all due apologies to Kant, I think it’s time to let go of this confusing restriction. It’s okay for people to have multiple reasons or good feelings behind their acts of giving. This sets us free to focus more on the effectiveness of giving than the nuances of the motivation behind it. If the giving results in lives being saved or improved, I don’t mind that the giver also gets joy out of it. Or that the giver is secretly hoping the act will help her long-term reputation. In fact, I think those motivations can be celebrated. Because they open the door to persuading more people to be generous.

  2. I think we should welcome a world where generosity can be thought of as a conscious strategy motivated by multiple factors. Yes, I want to address someone else’s need. Yes, I want to do the right thing and feel good about myself. Yes, I want to give in a way that could trigger others to respond in kind. Yes, I’m excited that all this could ultimately help my reputation. Once we collectively accept that all this is okay, it will remove so much of the nitpicking and hypocrisy that conversations about generosity often entail.

  3. If we let go of our instinct to view generosity through a perfection filter, we could find a healthier, more productive dialogue. We could give one another, rich and poor, the benefit of the doubt and see if we can work on this together. Our goal isn’t to exhibit perfect virtue. It’s to try to make things better. And that will happen one step at a time, with all of us acknowledging one another’s efforts, and encouraging each other to find even better ways to give.

  4. SIX WAYS TO GIVE THAT AREN’T ABOUT MONEY: Attention. Bridging. Knowledge. Connection. Hospitality. Enchantment.

  5. We spend much of our time lost in our own worlds. We’re often reluctant to focus on the issues that others are dealing with. They will only complicate our lives. So we put up shields. And that means that many of the people who could really use our attention never feel seen. The generosity of attention is therefore the generosity of being willing to be a little uncomfortable, to take down those shields, to give up a little time, to risk coming to care about someone else.

  6. There are plenty of resources out there—including a short TED Talk by Jeffrey Walker—on how to host these effectively. For us, the key is to encourage people to open up, to move away from opinion and toward feeling. Questions that can engage a dozen people for an entire evening include:

    • What have you seen recently that gives you hope?
    • What is something you’re worried about right now that few other people are worried about? How might we respond to it?
    • What is something or someone that you feel gratitude for that we couldn’t have guessed?
    • What are you dreaming about: for yourself, for your family, for this community, or for the world at large?
    • What is something you long to see better supported?

  7. The fundamental problem underlying the destruction of trust we’ve witnessed is that social media platforms were designed around a dangerously naïve understanding of human nature. It was the belief that in order to create something people like, all we needed to do was optimize for “user preferences.” The problem is that the impact of our preferences depends radically on which part of us is activated. Remember the distinction I drew in chapter 4 between our reflective selves and our instinctive selves (what I sometimes call our “lizard brains”)? Here’s the problem in a nutshell: Social media platforms elevate our instinctive selves over our reflective selves.

  8. A shocking report in the UK in 2022 estimated that an average social media user was scrolling through more than five thousand smartphone screens’ worth of content every day—that’s three times the height of the Eiffel Tower!

  9. A hopeful moment during Elon Musk’s chaotic takeover of Twitter (now called X) was when he posted this: “New Twitter will strive to optimize unregretted user-minutes.” This matters, because regret is a function of our reflective minds, not our lizard brains.

  10. As Jonathan Haidt and others have demonstrated, people are at their worst when they’re allowed to lob jabs at others behind a shield of anonymity. When their real-world reputations are at risk, they may take more care.

  11. Bringing back this social dynamic, by requiring users to prove who they are, is perhaps the biggest single step big tech can make toward fostering a genuinely social media environment. There are definitely cases where people living under repressive regimes need ways to use the Internet anonymously. But the mainstream usage of social media should not.

  12. The great science fiction writer Isaac Asimov created three laws of robotics designed to prevent robots from ever harming humans. As AI is developed, we may well need consensus on a new set of rules. I vote for one that says: In learning human values, an AI may not draw conclusions just from observing human behavior but must tap into humans’ reflective choices. In other words, we can’t give it our values by asking it to observe what we do. What we do is often ugly. We must do it by asking it to ask us to reflect first.

  13. What is the most generous version of everything I do?

  14. My mother, Gwendy Anderson, has spent the last two decades in a nursing home, her beautiful mind destroyed by a stroke. I’ll never be able to tell her this now, but her determined insistence on never judging someone without truly knowing their story is the reason I placed “generosity mindset” at the heart of this book.