Making Sense of Oct 7 and Post Oct 7 Realities and Responsibilities With a Cognitive Productivity Framework

Faced with a massacre we need process information carefully

(How) can the Cognitive Productivity framework, which is about Using Knowledge to Become Profoundly Effective, help us make sense of October 7 and the post-October 7 world? Cognitive Productivity is, amongst other things, an information literacy framework. It is based on an integrative design-oriented approach to understanding ourselves and each other. As such, the Cognitive Productivity framework can, (again) amongst other things,

1. help us find, assess, select and understand information resources;
2. contribute to one’s emotional intelligence in general, and emotional intelligence for dealing with the pain of the direct and indirect victims of October 7 — including especially surviving Jews who have been traumatized and re-traumatized.

One of the key components of the Cognitive Productivity framework is the concept of productive practice, which is based on several areas of psychology literature, including:

• distributed recall practice
• test-enhanced learning
• expertise generally and deliberate practice in particular
• memory testing effects

The inclination to revisit the events is adaptive. However, caution is advised because rehearsing the traumatic events can ingrain the trauma. Psychological techniques exist to relate to trauma in helpful manners. Chapter 15 of my first Cognitive Productivity book, entitled “15. Meta-effectiveness framework and clinical psychology” is relevant here. It deals with the acceptance and commitment therapy framework (not about accepting reality, but about accepting one’s emotions) and metacognitive therapy more generally.

Assessing information resources

The Cognitive Productivity framework advocates selecting and engaging with helpful information resources. It puts forth a CUP’A schema that is relevant to selecting information regarding Oct 7 and beyond.

• Caliber (higher is better)
• Utility (higher is better)
• Potency (higher is better)
• Appeal (beware of this; appealing resources are sometimes unhelpful)

CUP’A is a pragmatic framework. Hence it is framed primarily in terms of helpfulness, which includes but is more general than veracity. CUP’A is an alternative to naive philosophical and education frameworks for assessing information resources, such as the CRAAP test, narrow falsificationism, and Kuhn’s paradigm shift framework.

Some useful resources re Oct 7

Here are some podcast episodes that have helped me understand and relate to October 7 and our responsibilities in a post October 7 world.

1. Sam Harris | #339 — The Infernal Logic of Jihad
2. Sam Harris | #340 — The Bright Line Between Good and Evil
3. Sam Harris | #341 — Gaza & Global Order
4. On the Nose: Naomi Klein on Israel’s “Doppelganger Politics” on Apple Podcasts Nov 16, 2023
5. A Jew and a Muslim get honest about Israel and Gaza: The Gray Area with Sean Illing

The latter two resources were recommended to me by Rachel Horst. I am certain there are many more useful-resources. I am not an expert in this subject. I am mainly, like so many other people, trying to make sense of the situation and understand what my responsibilities are in a post Oct 7 world.

Humanist meeting

I will chair a Beacon Unitarian humanist meeting on the topic over Zoom on Sunday evening at 7:30PM.

The episodes above are recommended listening for the meeting. Participants will assess the information and propose other information resources, ideas, attitudes, norms and actions. The latter three are forms of value proffered by Ortony, Clore & Collins in their 1988 book, The cognitive structure of emotions, and used in by the Cognitive Productivity framework.