El libro que me hizo pensar como un pulpo y otras 9 recomendaciones para CPSers
Biblioteca CPS #8
Aquí van las 10 recomendaciones de esta semana:
1. Other Minds: The Octopus and the Evolution of Intelligent Life
Peter Godfrey-Smith
Ok, esto puede ser un poco enrevesado al comienzo, pero bear with me porque es un libro muy valioso para CPSers…
El filósofo Thomas Nagel publicó en 1974 lo que se convertiría con los años en uno de los artículos más influyentes en el campo de la filosofía de la mente: “¿Cómo es ser un murciélago?"
Según Nagel, "un organismo tiene estados mentales conscientes si y solo si hay algo que es ‘cómo ser ese organismo’, algo que es ‘cómo es ser para ese organismo’."
Si una bacteria podría llegar a tener un ‘cómo es ser para sí’ (solo habría que descubrirlo), un pulpo definitivamente lo tiene, y el autor de este libro, un filósofo de la biología especializado en cefalópodos (¿hay una profesión más cool y nicho que esa?) nos lleva a hacer una visita guiada a esta conciencia casi alienígena.
Para encontrar el último ancestro que tenemos en común con los cefalópodos tendríamos que ir unos 600 millones de años atrás.
De allí surgieron dos grandes ramas, invertebrados y vertebrados.
Dentro del grupo de vertebrados, nosotros, aka el animal humano, evolucionamos una inteligencia única e inesperada.
Dentro del grupo de los invertebrados, los cefalópodos fueron ese outlier que evolucionó un sistema nervioso mucho más grande y unas maneras de comportarse únicas e inesperadas.
Cómo ha evolucionado esa inteligencia en paralelo con la nuestra y cuáles son sus características, de eso va el libro.
Como dice el autor, los cefalópodos son una isla de complejidad mental en el mar de los animales invertebrados: pueden jugar, interactuar con objetos por el simple hecho de hacerlo o aprender conductas tan complejas como apagar las luces de un acuario lanzando chorros de agua a las bombillas y provocando un cortocircuito cuando nadie les está vigilando.
En tiempos de especulaciones sobre inteligencias artificiales generales, es muy refrescante poder visitar otras inteligencias muy diferentes de la nuestra, pero que extrañamente nos hermana como si hubiéramos sido separados al nacer.
"When comparing cephalopods with mammals, the difficulties are acute. Octopuses and other cephalopods have exceptionally good eyes, and these are eyes built on the same general design as ours. Two experiments in the evolution of large nervous systems landed on similar ways of seeing. But the nervous systems beneath those eyes are organized very differently.
When biologists look at a bird, a mammal, even a fish, they are able to map many parts of one animal's brain onto another's. Vertebrate brains all have a common architecture. When vertebrate brains are compared to octopus brains, all bets –all rather, all mappings—are off. There is no part-by-part correspondence between the parts of their brains and ours. Indeed, octopuses have not even collected the majority of their neurons inside their brains; most of the neurons are found in their arms. Given all this, the way to work out how smart octopuses are is to look at what they can do. And here we quickly encounter puzzles."
2. Consciousness: An Introduction
Susan Blackmore, Emily T. Troscianko
Este libro es una de esas joyas del catálogo de la editorial Routledge.
Las autoras, investigadoras y pioneras de las humanidades cognitivas, nos introducen a los problemas centrales que enfrenta la ciencia de la conciencia.
Es un libro didáctico pero atrapante: cada problema es presentado con varias preguntas y ejercicios de introspección que las autoras proponen al ingenuo lector antes de exponerle a las wild ideas y procaces teorías de los más diversos pensadores que han intentado plantarle cara al problema.
Al contrastar las muy diferentes teorías y ángulos de ataque, podemos ir comprendiendo por qué las preguntas que nos hemos hecho podrían ser una trampa, y que lo que hay fuera de esa trampa podría resultar aun más inquietante.
La peculiaridad de la ciencia de la conciencia es que permite prácticas y experimentos en primera persona, y a este reapecto las autoras han experimentado con toda clase de estados alterados de conciencia, en ocasiones con resultados esclarecedores.
Como dicen las propias autoras:
"We cannot hope to understand consciousness in general unless we are familiar with our own personal version of it."
En lo particular, lo que me ha traído a este libro es la búsqueda de más información sobre la relación problemática entre conciencia y atención, pero los problemas que plantea la ciencia de la conciencia son tantos, y tan relevantes para un CPSer, que probablemente te encuentres haciéndote preguntas que jamás sospechaste que te harías en tu actividad profesional y en tu día a día.
Además, el libro cuenta con una bibliografía estupenda que facilita mucho la apertura de nuevos caminos de indagación y aprendizaje.
"The German philosopher Thomas Metzinger claims that experience requires there to be unity in what is experienced: 'In order for a world to appear to us, it has to be one world first'.
He also says that unity can only ever be experienced as temporally present: 'One thing cannot be doubted from the first-person perspective: I always experience the wholeness of reality now.' The question is, how can such unity, experienced right now, arise from such diversity of non-instantaneous processing?We will tackle this question from a variety of perspectives, leaving for later the important questions about the unity of self. We will explore how the different features of objects are brought together to make a single object (the binding problem), and how the different senses are brought together to make a unified experienced world (multisensory integration). We will investigate how subjective and clock time are integrated with each other. Finally, we will consider what happens when consciousness is more or less unified as normal, using examples from synesthesia, split brains, amnesia, and neglect. These atypical cases may make us question what we assume about normal experience."
3. The Experience Machine: How Our Minds Predict and Shape Reality
Andy Clark
Para cerrar esta especie de trilogía sobre cómo un cerebro puede generar conciencia y experiencia, este libro del profesor de filosofía cognitiva Andrew Clark traza un mapa plausible de la experiencia humana.
La tesis central es que la experiencia humana está configurada por un flujo constante de predicciones. La experiencia solo puede ocurrir en la intersección de dos fuerzas: aquello que entra del mundo exterior y aquello que nuestro cerebro espera que entre.
Clark, junto con David Chalmers, fue quien propuso la teoría de la mente extendida, cuya idea central es que el ambiente que nos rodea puede funcionar como un proceso cognitivo más. Los objetos del mundo se vuelven una extensión de la mente, y así, mente y contexto externo configuran un sistema cognitivo completo.
Por supuesto, esta idea también es uno de los ejes centrales de este libro, y es interesante cómo se integra con el funcionamiento del modelo predictivo del cerebro en una economía de recursos casi espartana.
"Very soon after my arrival at Sussex two volumes appeared that had a major impact on my life and career.
They were the two volumes of the “connectionist bible” entitled Parallel Distributed Processing: Explorations in the Microstructure of Cognition. Published in 1986 by MIT Press, they were my first sustained introduction to work that would nowadays be called simply “artificial neural networks.”
I can see those two hardback volumes (one blue, one brown) right now on my shelf. They were a very expensive purchase for a young academic.
But they were worth every penny. One paper in the volumes stood out for me. The puzzle that the paper sought to tackle was just how our brains could manage to solve whole classes of puzzles that taxed—and perhaps even exceeded—their native capacities.
The solution was as obvious as it was neglected in the literature. At its core was the simple observation that we humans would often tackle such puzzles by recruiting external props and tools, in many cases reducing the more complex puzzles to sequences of simpler ones that our biological brains could more readily handle. For example, confronted by a long multiplication (such as 77777 times 99999) many of us, myself included, would in those days resort to pen and paper.
The reliable availability of such resources in our daily lives means that we can usually manage to solve complex problems simply by training our brains to solve much simpler ones, such as 7 x 9, and by creating a certain procedure for writing down the results in a way that allows repeated iterations of these simpler calculations to solve the puzzle.
Here, culturally transmitted practices change the problem space, so we can do more with less, easily solving an open-ended set of such multiplications many of which would defeat even the most skilled naked human brain.
The paper included, as a kind of throwaway aside, the observation that “On this view, the external environment becomes a key extension to our mind.”
It’s safe to say that I took this suggestion to heart. Much of my own subsequent work on the embodied and extended mind has been a sustained exploration of this simple but compelling idea.
One implication is that what goes on inside the head might often be simpler than we have imagined. It might also be simply different, in that much of the real work of the embodied brain now consists in learning the right strategies for interacting with the external world.
It is here that the predictive brain excels.As it does so, these problem-solving loops (in which the brain leans upon external props and resources) become more and more part of our daily routines. Our minds, actions, and worlds meanwhile become more and more closely entwined. Understanding this process reveals the human mind as a “leaky system”—a system apt to lean on the surrounding world in heavy and sometimes unexpected ways."
4. Moral Tribes: Emotion, Reason and the Gap Between Us and Them
Joshua Greene
Greene es un filósofo y neurocientífico dedicado al estudio de cuestiones éticas y metaéticas.
En este libro se mete con un problema curioso: la psicología evolucionista nos dice que el ser humano viene con un instinto moral de fábrica que ha sido moldeado por la evolución para tratar con el problema básico de supervivencia, a saber, qué debe hacer el "yo" en relación con el "nosotros", es decir qué recursos tiene el individuo para funcionar en el grupo.
Pero en tiempos modernos ha ocurrido un fenómeno que no había ocurrido nunca antes: la íntima convivencia en la misma sociedad de grupos con morales diferentes.
El problema se transforma entonces en qué debe hacer "nuestro grupo" en relación con "otros grupos". Y para eso no tenemos una solución diseñada por la evolución.
Vivimos una diversidad moral que nos obliga a tirar de heurísticos, a inventarnos razonamientos que nos permitan establecer reglas para generalizar a una moral universal, o a algo que se le parezca.
Un terreno pantanoso, cuanto menos.
Greene nos propone numerosos dilemas morales que nos ponen en situaciones extremas y nos obligan a cambiar al modo manual, como él diría, y mirar estos nuevos problemas a la cara. El resultado es un libro que te hace pensar y mucho.
El psiquiatra y divulgador Pablo Malo es un experto en estas cuestiones y tiene una cuenta de X muy activa y thought-provoking.
Aquí te dejo su substack para que le eches un vistazo:
"When my son was four years old, we read, over and over, a book called Everything Bug: What Kid Really Want To Know About Insects and Spiders. It explains:
'Young spiders even know how to make perfect webs. They act by instinct, which is behavior they are born with. The good thing about instinct is that it's reliable. It always makes an animal to act a certain way. The bad thing about instinct is that it doesn't let the animal act any other way. So, young insects and spiders do fine as long as their environment remains pretty much the same. But if they face a new situation, they can't think their way through it. They must keep doing what their instincts tell them to do'
This account of arachnoid cognition suggests an answer to our question 'Why have a dual-process brain?'
This answer is one of the central ideas in this book, and one of the most important ideas to emerge from the behavioral sciences in the past few decades.
The idea is summarized by this analogy:
The human brain is like a dual-mode camera with both automatic settings and a manual mode.
A camera's automatic settings are optimized for typical photographic situations (portrait, action, landscape). The user hits a single button and the camera automatically configures the ISO, aperture, exposure, et cetera —point and shoot.
A dual-mode camera also has a manual mode that allows the user to adjust all of the camera's settings by hand.
A camera with both automatic settings and a manual mode exemplifies an elegant solution to a ubiquitous design problem, namely the trade-off between efficiency and flexibility.
(...) Spiders, unlike humans, have only automatic settings, and this serves them well, so long as they remain in their element. We humans, in contrast, lead much more complicated lives, which is why we need a manual mode.
We routinely encounter and master unfamiliar problems, both as individuals and as groups.
Our species consist of a single breeding population, and yet we inhabit nearly every terrestrial environment on earth —a testament to our cognitive flexibility.
Put a jungle spider in the Artic and you'll have a cold, dead spider.
But an Amazonian baby can, with the right guidance, survive in the frozen North.
Human behavioral flexibility feeds on itself: When we invent something new, such as boats, we create opportunities for new inventions, such as outriggers to stabilize our boats, and sails to propel them.
The more flexibly we behave, the more our environments change, and the more our environments change, the more opportunities we have to succeed by behaving flexibly.
Thus, we reign as the earth's undisputed champions of flexible behavior. Give us a tree and we can climb it, burn it, sculpt it, sell it, hug it, or determine its age by counting its rings.
The choices we make depend on the specific opportunities and challenges we face, and our choices need not closely resemble the actions that we, or others, have chosen in the past."
5. Geopolitics, Geography and Strategic History
Geoffrey Sloan
La geopolítica se trata de recursos: dónde están esos recursos, las ideas y narrativas que rodean a esos recursos y el poder que se mueve alrededor de dichos recursos.
En este libro Sloan se propone volver a poner en el centro de la estrategia geopolítica a la geografía, la gran olvidada durante las últimas décadas de los estudios académicos sobre el tema.
Para eso vuelve su mirada sobre dos clásicos de la materia, el británico Mackinder y el americano Spykman, y propone analizar cinco casos paradigmáticos, poniendo el énfasis en la importancia de ciertos patrones geográficos en la historia política y llamando nuestra atención sobre dos fuerzas que modulan el cambio geopolítico, y que Mackinder ha descrito como irresistibles y rectoras:
"The course of politics is the product of two sets of forces, compelling and guiding.
The impetus is from the past in the history embedded in a people's character and tradition.
The present guides the movement by economic wants and geographical opportunities.
Statesmen and diplomats succeed and fail pretty much as they recognize the irresistible power of those forces."
El primer caso que presenta el libro es fascinante porque nos encontramos al propio Mackinder en persona, embarcado en una misión diplomática al sur de Rusia en plena revolución bolchevique.
Es el teórico enfrentado a la resolución práctica del tipo de problemas sobre los que ha teorizado toda su vida.
(Con resultados no del todo felices, aunque sí muy interesantes.)
En el último de los casos de estudio, Sloan salta a la actualidad y se mete con la estrategia china.
La manera única que tiene China de focalizar la realpolitik y la estrategia es descrita de esta manera:
"A turbulent history has taught Chinese leaders that not every problem has a solution and that too great an emphasis on total mastery over specific events could upset the harmony of the universe.
Rarely did Chinese statesmen risk the outcome of a conflict on an all-or-nothing clash; elaborate multiyear manoeuvres were closer to their style."
Y también:
"The real challenge posed by China today lies not in what it is doing, but in what it will not do. Specifically, it will not pursue wholesale Westernization, and it will not accept, in their entirety, the existing, Western-derived 'rules of the game'.
But it is absurd to assume that the Chinese will establish a new 'model' to replace the Western one."
Cada caso presentado intenta mostrar cómo eventos conocidos pueden ser vistos bajo una luz diferente y redefinidos de maneras novedosas y útiles. Solo se necesita un ojo estratégico que pueda conectar puntos aparentemente distantes y reorganizar perspectivas.
En conclusión, un excelente libro para repasar los clásicos de la geopolítica, ajustar la perspectiva a una visión panorámica sobre cuestiones geopolíticas actuales, y reconsiderar el papel que juega la geografía en la estrategia política.
"An important methodology of classical geopolitics has been elucidated by one of Mackinder's biographers:
He would have explained his gifts as a capacity for 'outlook':
An ability to interpret the past, to visualize the present, and to imagine the future.
'Outlook' —backwards, forwards, and all around— made it difficult for him to separate history and geography into subjects.It was synthetic in nature and his ability to cross the artificial boundaries of disciplinary knowledge enabled him to address policy problems.
A key assumption of Mackinder's was that geography and history together constituted what he described as the 'outlook' subjects:
'The historian uses Geography in order to interpret the past, whereas the geographer uses History in order to interpret the present'.
Taken together they constituted what he described as 'a mental foundation for judgment in action'.
It constituted both a method of analysis and an explanatory theory.
Parker summed up the former function in the following way:
'What statesmen required was the foresight and judgment that came of accurate imagination or vision based on reality."
6. The Natural Navigator: The Rediscovered Art of Letting Nature Be Your Guide
Tristan Gooley
De niño leí el El nombre de la rosa, de Umberto Eco, y todo lo que recuerdo es el primer capítulo en que el fray Guillermo de Baskerville llega a una abadía donde se ha extraviado el caballo preferido del abad y el fray, sin haberlo visto jamás, da las indicaciones precisas para dar con su paradero.
Explicando sus observaciones y su razonamiento deductivo como un Sherlock Holmes del Medioevo, el fray podía leer pistas en la naturaleza que nadie más parecía ser capaz de ver.
De inmediato quise ser como él.
Desde entonces nunca me abandonó la fascinación por leer las señales en el ruido.
Leer señales y transformarlas en conocimiento es uno de esos raros skills de utilidad transversal, pero que suele aprenderse mejor en un contexto específico.
En este caso la navegación natural.
La navegación natural es el arte de orientarte en la naturaleza sin ayuda de instrumentos externos. El único instrumento con el que cuentas es tu capacidad de extraer e interpretar información del ambiente.
Este libro de Gooley, el primero que publicó y mi preferido, es un manual para aumentar tu conciencia situacional y, si extrapolas un poco, para aprender a pensar mejor, adquirir game awareness y hacer prospectiva.
Y si lo unes con las ideas de los dos primeros capitulos de Ethnographic Thinking (Jay Hasbrouck), por ejemplo, sobre cómo expandir tu curiosidad y conciencia, ya tienes un sistema para mirar el mundo de manera diferente al resto.
Una mirada más inventiva, más efectiva.
"Male moths are known to travel vast distances in pursuit of females. Some birds travel thousands of miles to breed.
Sex can be seen in the animal kingdom as a powerful motive for movement, overcoming the most imposing of natural barriers. We have seen this, too, in the human animal.
In the eighteenth century, explorers returned from the Pacific with extravagant tattoos and tales of a more liberated sexual culture in places like Tahiti. Tattoos quickly embedded themselves in naval custom, and recruitment for voyages to the Pacific blossomed.
Fletcher Christian’s mutiny on the Bounty and subsequent flight to set up a new colony on Pitcairn Island is a story about naval discipline on the surface and sex, and probably love, at every layer below that.
Migration represents the greatest of feats within the animal kingdom, but homing instincts are a powerful influence, too.
Coming home has always been an important part of the journey for animals and humans alike.
Some journeys defy explanation.
In an experiment designed to test the homing instinct, a Manx shear-water bird was flown in an aircraft from its home on the island of Skokholm off the Pembrokeshire Coast in Wales to Boston, Massachusetts. It found its way back home in twelve and a half days, covering a distance of 3,400 miles, which is not only very fast but also suggests that it was very confident of the direction in which it needed to travel.
Even when it is difficult to fully explain the abilities of animals they can act as an inspiration for what is possible. Many people can tell tales of animal feats that are intriguing and/or baffling. When I was a child my favorite pet, a miniature schnauzer dog called Muffles, jumped out of our car on the Isle of Wight. She was a small, scruffy gray dog, intelligent, but with poor eyesight and a terrible sense of smell—she could barely find a chocolate a yard from her nose. After three days of frantic searching, we started to fear the worst. The following day she turned up outside the house of my sister’s friend, a house she had never been to before, three miles from where we had lost her.
Animals can help us in two distinctly different ways. We can observe their behavior and make deductions from what we see, but we can also study their methods and try to emulate them.
No animal is entirely independent of the others that share its habitat, and whether we recognize it or not we are influenced by the behavior of each other.
It is worth monitoring the chain of animal reactions when moving across remote areas. Some animals are notoriously fast at reacting and the slightly slower animals use them as a cue—mammals such as deer and rabbits will take flight shortly after birds have taken to the air. This ripple effect is one of the defining features of temperate wilderness. People using animals to read human behavior is one of the oldest tricks in human conflict."
7. Zadig ou La Destinée
Voltaire
Más tarde descubrí que el capítulo inicial de El nombre de la rosa era un homenaje a un capítulo de una novela breve de Voltaire.
El capítulo se titula Le chien et le cheval y, si el tema te interesa, puedes leerlo en tandem con el primer capítulo del libro de Umberto Eco y con The Natural Navigator, ¿por qué no?
8. The Art of Everyday Assertiveness: Speak Up. Say No. Set Boundaries. Take Back Control
Patrick King
La asertividad es la disciplina de expresar tus opiniones y necesidades con firmeza, pero sin faltar el respeto a nadie.
A menudo se la asocia con la habilidad de decir no, y de saber poner límites a tiempo a personas que tienden a traspasarlos.
Me parece útil la imagen que da el autor de la asertividad como una burbuja que protege tus valores, tu disponibilidad, tu capacidad y tus necesidades.
Es una habilidad esencial al momento de negociar o gestionar situaciones potencialmente estresantes.
También me parece útil la distinción que hace Recuenco (en el hilo donde recomendó justamente este libro) entre el comportamiento agresivo y la asertividad.
"El comportamiento agresivo se basa en ganar. Haces lo que más te conviene sin tener en cuenta los derechos, necesidades, sentimientos o deseos de los demás. Es un poder egoísta.
En cambio cuando eres asertivo, estás seguro de ti mismo y sacas fuerzas de ello para hacer valer tu punto de vista con firmeza, justicia y empatía."
El libro está lleno de ejemplos de situaciones en las que alguien está siendo asertivo, cuándo está siendo borde, y cuándo está siendo tratado como un felpudo.
¿Que esto es de sentido común?
No lo creo.
Hay mucha gente que puede reconocer la diferencia en los demás, pero no en sí misma.
Es una práctica de higiene mental, en definitiva, como el hilo dental pero para tu carácter.
A algunos se les da bien naturalmente, otros necesitamos recursos como este para recordarnos que hay gente muy chunga en el mundo y que ponerte primero a ti mismo y tu salud es esencial para ser funcional en el mundo.
Occasionally wires get crossed in our personal relationships, and a situation arises where there’s discord between what someone says they’re going to do and what they actually do (or don’t do). This can be the result of a simple misunderstanding, unclear intentions, or simple lack of follow-through. You can use this ambiguity to your advantage. You shouldn’t assume the worst in these scenarios—it’s quite likely it’s not personal—but you have the right to get clarity on a person’s status when their actions don’t fit their words. In turn, you should seek to address the discrepancy in a decisive and forthright manner: “You said you were going to provide that letter of recommendation for me, but the hiring manager told me she hadn’t received it yet. I just wanted to make sure I didn’t misunderstand you.” “I thought we were meeting for coffee at noon. Was I mistaken?”
Again, there’s no need to ramp up the hostility or aggression in this situation, so project calm and concern as much as you possibly can. Approach it from a standpoint of trying to clear up something you might have misconstrued, rather than painting yourself as a victim of a hostile act. Give them the benefit of the doubt for as long as practical or reasonable.
But be assertive about ensuring that there’s a clear understanding between you and them, and you are taking the initiative to clarify.
Takeaways: How do you ask for what you want? Well, you already know how. But we don’t for various reasons, the first of which is that they should have known. They should have been able to read our minds and understand and anticipate our needs. Yes, in fairy tales, but not in reality.
We also wait for people to take action because of the symbolic value we assign to things. We believe other people’s symbolic value matches ours, which should inform their actions. But this is again projecting onto other people and depending on them to read our minds. We also can’t subtly try to condition people into feeling the same symbolic value as us.
Passive-aggressive behavior is concealed hostility masquerading as niceness, often with the goal of inducing some type of behavior. This happens when people are too angry to ask for what they want, typically.
There are better and worse ways of making requests and asking for what you want. In fact, there are seven elements that will help you the most:
Don't fill the silence after your ask.
Consider the other person's needs.
Make it easy and convenient.
Offer clear options.
Be direct and honest.
Be specific.
And don't you dare pout if you get turned down.
9. Nonviolent Communication - San Francisco Workshop
Marshal Rosenberg
Para reforzar el tema de la asertividad, se me ha ocurrido incluir este vídeo.
Es un taller de tres horas de duración donde Rosenberg, psicólogo, educador y creador del método, ofrece una forma de ver el lenguaje como una herramienta política, como un instrumento que nos permite gestionar relaciones personales y profesionales, y, además, como un antídoto contra la indefensión aprendida, o el cinismo, que podrían ser dos caras de la misma moneda.
10. Michael Jordan: The Life
Roland Lazenby
No voy a decir mucho sobre este libro, solo que es un must read para entender lo que conlleva gestionar el talento humano, el propio y el de los demás.
5 citas del libro:
1
Jordan soon discovered that Mann was studying media with a plan of working in the film industry in Hollywood. “Michael thought that was nuts,” Mann recalled, “and after that he would come up to me and say, ‘You know you ought to go speak to Dean Smith’s wife.’ Dean Smith’s wife was a psychiatrist and every time I would see Michael, he would say, ‘Have you seen Dean Smith’s wife yet? Have you talked to her?’
He thought it was funny that somebody like me would want to move out to Los Angeles and have any sort of chance working in the movie business.” This teasing went on for a couple of weeks, with Jordan mocking Mann’s Hollywood plans every time he saw him. It was then that Mann learned what every person who survived Jordan would have to learn—you had to stand up to him. “Finally I told him, ‘Michael, I mean this is my dream. I’ve always wanted to work in movies. Didn’t you ever have a dream?’ And he said, ‘Yeah, I have a dream to play in the NBA.’ After that he never really bugged me about it anymore.”
2
“The day before the game the players were standing out in the hallway talking about the game, and they were scared to death,” David Mann recalled. “I mean people don’t realize how much Ralph Sampson was feared in those days. He was like Godzilla in the basketball world back then. Brad Daugherty was a freshman, and he didn’t want to have to go up against Sampson. So the guys are standing in the hall talking about what they’re going to do and how nervous they are. Michael’s sitting there and he’s not saying a word. And after a few minutes of this, all of a sudden he jumps up, about forty inches straight up, and slams his hand against the wall and screams out, ‘Fuck Sampson!’ ” Startled, his teammates went silent. “Everybody just sort of scattered after that,” Mann recalled with a laugh.
3
Within a five-minute span, the Wahoos had sliced the lead from 23 to 6 points. With two minutes remaining, and Carolina holding on, 96–90, Sampson rose up to the right of the lane for a short jumper. Jordan simultaneously leaped from the other side of the lane and ferociously smacked down the ball. The play drew gasps along press row. Standing on the sideline, Virginia coach Terry Holland caught himself applauding. “Michael and David Thompson,” Holland recalled, “are the only two players that have made plays against my own team that made me applaud in sheer amazement… before I realized that I was cheering against my own team. “I was also hollering at the referee that it ‘had to be goaltending’ at the same time,” Holland said. “I think the referees were as stunned and amazed as I was and could not figure out how he did it either. Technically, the block had to be goaltending—it had to be heading down since Ralph released it from above the rim. Looked like a Titan missile. Not sure why he would even think about going after it.”
“That was back in my young days,” Jordan said fifteen years later, admitting that he had no idea he could make the play. “I surprised myself. That was the beauty of my game, and it has propelled me to my career to some degree. No one could sit there and tell you what I could do. I couldn’t tell you what I couldn’t do and what I could. And that was the beauty of everything.”
4
Bulls employees who happened to witness these exchanges would cringe at Krause’s insistence on challenging Jordan. “If you’re gonna toss things out towards Michael, they better be true,” Tim Hallam explained. “Because he never forgets and he never lets go.” Ultimately, the new GM’s “needling” would ruin any chance he had at a cordial relationship with the star of the team he was managing. But Krause seemed driven by the disrespect he sensed in Jordan’s response to him. Jordan, meanwhile, pushed for the only thing he really trusted. He wanted the team to sign Buzz Peterson or to acquire Walter Davis, and he seemed generally in favor of anything related to North Carolina, which left Krause rolling his eyes. After a while Jordan simply decided to avoid the new GM at all costs.
5
A lot of times Phil would put Scottie with the best team and put Michael with the irregulars. The competition was fierce. Phil would seek to do this very quietly, not overtly. It would be a game to ten baskets, and the losers would have to do some silly thing like running a set of sprints or something. If it was only one game and Michael lost it, he might say, ‘Hey, Phil, we’re going another ten.’ We’d go ten more baskets. It was probably exactly what Phil wanted, but he was always like, ‘Well, let’s see.… I don’t know if we can.… Okay, if you want to throw it up, let’s go.’ ”
“The competitive angle was good,” Bach said in another interview, in 2004, his eyes sparkling at the memory. “Scottie learned at the hand of the king. I always said of Scottie, ‘Here’s the pretender to the throne, and of Michael, here’s the king sitting there.’ I think Scottie had to learn that way. Come every day, and play every day hard. And find that game that he did, of being on top of the floor, bringing the ball up the floor, and being just a physical tormenter on defense with those extended arms. He had like Michael a little bit of that joyous smile. He enjoyed what was going on.” The effort brought immediate returns, Bach recalled. “Pippen got better. Now, he had to play Michael every day. That would give you a headache. Practices were very intense in those days.” And not just for the team’s two stars. Rookie guard B. J. Armstrong from Iowa was pitched against veteran John Paxson. The competition triggered a dislike between the two that added to the intensity of practices. “That was one of Phil’s dictums,” Bach explained. “He wanted competition between them.”
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