Tinkered Thinking

The Vasa was an enormous and beautiful Swedish warship that sailed about 4,200 feet, and then sank. Building a ship, especially in the 1600's before the Industrial Revolution is no small feat. It requires a staggering amount of elbow grease, from cutting the trees down, to shaping the wood, to making the rope to nailing everything in place - even the nails had to be made by hand.

Apparently the thing wasn't designed correctly, which means it was designed differently from older designs that have proved to stand against the test of time. This isn't by any means an indictment against the new, rather it's a critique on how we explore the new in relation to our connections to the past. Loads of resources can safely be poured into a proven design. This doesn't mean that new designs shouldn't be explored, only that the resources we allocate to new designs should be proportional to the degree to which they have proven their worth. Though, even this doesn't seem correct. Many radical new innovations required enormous amounts of tinkering in order to get right. Thomas Edison for example is famously known to have gone through 10,000 iterations before he finally got the lightbulb correct: that's an enormous amount of resources poured into something completely unproven. But, that being said, with each iteration he did not make the largest possible lightbulb. So, it's not simply all or nothing when it comes to resources, but a matter of which resources we allocate heavily with and which we are sparing with.

A full sized ship is an enormous amount of wood. But a radical new design can likely be tested with a much smaller model if the ratios and proportions are correctly calculated. The Vasa was unbelievably unstable, with most of its weight in the upper structure of the hull, making it top-heavy. When a wind stronger than a breeze completely toppled the ship, it sank. One could have figured this out with a tiny model of the ship, and yet.

Many art projects (novels) and even start-ups - companies, can suffer from Vasa Syndrome. When founders raise unimaginable gobs of money for a product that can be prototyped and tested with customers on an incredibly slim budget, the practice seems more akin to building a Vasa. Why amass so much money and dedicate so much time on something that might not work?

Let's compare the novel with Edison's lightbulb. Both take an enormous amount of time, ie, a huge amount of resources. But there's a crucial difference. Edison is getting feedback, the aspiring novelist is not. The naive novelist is much like the designer of the Vasa: imagining something radically new and envisioning it will be a triumph on the day it is finally launched into the world - only to find that no one wants to read the book and the few that do manage to crack it's pages find little to hold their attention. Edison is more like the short story writer, each iteration of the lightbulb a new little story. Each time he tries to turn on a given iteration of the lightbulb is like publishing a short story for all to see and read and give feedback on. Someone reads it and loves it and shares it? It's akin to the bulb flickering on briefly. A publisher reads a couple stories and offers a book contract? Well now that bulb is glowing brightly and steadily.

Oddly, the hockey stick of exponentials is prevalent here. Whether that exponential goes up or down is dependent on how we go about our projects. A short story writer, or an inventor of a light bulb and see small gains with consistent feedback, and it seems linear - much like exponentials look in the early stage of the curve. But then, seemingly overnight, the effectiveness of the writer or the honed design of the lightbulb, turns on and takes off.

Unlike the novelist who cloisters their effort from feedback or the founder who fails to acquire or interact with customers. The lack of feedback is creating a totally different kind of linear trend, one that leads to a total flop, and in the case of the Vasa, a literal flip - a sunk ship.

The moral of the Vasa Syndrome is to seek consistent feedback. Don't work on the idea until it's perfect, let reality have it's say about how the design should evolve.

LINGUISTIC PACIFIER

September 11th, 2024

What do we say when we don't know what to say?

There's a feckless panoply to pick from. Thought-Terminating Clichés reign supreme in this unproductive arena. It is what it is. That's life. So it goes. This too shall pass. It could be worse. Here we go again. It will all work out. There effect is emotive and mechanical. They give off an effect that something profound has been said. But the profundity is a ruse, an illusion created by a sense of being dumbfounded by an inability to respond. These sentences function mechanically like a punctuation, as in, a punctuation without a sentence. Even a question mark is impossible to respond to if there is no substance preceding the punctuation. Such linguistic implements are the equivalent of turning and walking away from a conversation. They not only fail to provide a means to further discussion, they emphatically kill the possibility.

Defenders might squawk about intentions: there's good intention behind saying such things. It's a comfort to be told "It will all work out."

There's two problems with such buffoonery. Specifically regarding "It will all work out" the simple truth is that it certainly does not all work out. Every time someone says this to me, I point out that it did not work out for the malaria ridden child who just died of starvation in sub-Saharan Africa. This of course is, quite negative, and comes off as offensive because it's a backhand to the good intentions behind the person sputtering clichés. But perhaps a backhand is deserved in the now memed old-school-batman-comic slap way. Why? Because these linguistic pacifiers are a searing indication of cognitive laziness, which highlights the other problem with such buffoonery:

Good intentions only matter so much. If good intentions consistently do not match actual outcomes, then good intentions become increasingly meaningless. If the disconnect between intentions and outcomes remains unchanged, then it's a sign that either this person is incapable of changing in response to the feedback from reality that they are not having the desired effect, or they simply do not care enough to dedicate the time and attention required to observe, understand, learn and change in adequate measure to resolve the insidious inequity. In short: a person is either too stupid or just doesn't care. Or worse: both. However, chances are it's only the later. Unproductive discussions about intelligence aside it's a robust fact of life that if someone cares about something, it generates a nearly inexhaustible well of energy to draw from in order to learn and understand: even the stupidest person can change when their heartstrings are sufficiently plucked by some unintended consequence.

It's likely that the majority of language we employ is the result of habit. One need only wonder and ask: how can someone with many many decades behind them be such a bad communicator? Doesn't so much history force practice? Unfortunately the answer is no. The years require only a habitual way of communicating in order to get through all that time. Improvement only comes from conscientious practice, and most habit is unconscious automata. Most communication is a set of automatic linguistic patterns. After years of lukewarm communication, the rails of expression are more like ruts of habit. The consistent disparity between intention and outcome is not resolved, but it's manageable, at least in an emotional sense - the consequences are not so bad and they fail to bother heartstrings. Even the emotional fallout of poor communication can become just another part of the habitual pattern. Here we go again. And in these ways whole populations can spend many thousands of hours practicing without ever advancing beyond the s of a simple novice.

The question at the beginning should now carry with it an appropriate amount of horror: What do we say when we don't know what to say? The consequences of how we each individually answer this question have tremendous and far reaching impact. The answer to this simple question may readily define the health of all our relationships. And if at this point, you, dear reader find yourself grasping in frustration: Well what are you supposed to say! If you don't know what to say, and nothing comes to mind and you have good intentions and you want to provide some comfort, what do you say!

There's one root issue weaving between, around and underneath this whole topic. It's silence. It makes us uncomfortable. I'll always remember asking my grandmother: why do you always have the T.V. on? Her answer was so candid I don't think she registered the magnitude of what it meant. She said something to the effect of "When Harry was dying I didn't want to think about anything, so I put the T.V. on so I didn't have to think about it, and then after he was gone, it was just comforting to have the sound."

Sound. That's it. Why is it quiet in libraries? Because people are trying to think. Sound, particularly human voices, hijacks thought. All these linguistic pacifiers merely fill the space drawing a compromise between communicating in a way that really doesn't help (and may even truly hurt) our relationships and staving off the horror of silence.

As Blaise Pascal once said "All of man's problems arise from his inability to sit quietly in a room alone."

I'd take it one step further and say many of man's shit relationships arise from his inability to think quietly in the presence of a loved one until something better to say comes to mind.

The answer to that question: what to say when you don't know what to say, is to not speak, but sit with the issue. Allow your mind to explore the topic in a deeper and broader way.

Often in conversation we are tailoring our own mind to try and see the point of the other - which is a good thing, one of the very best things. And so when a distressed loved one comes to the fraught terminus of their concern, we arrive with them at a confusing injunction.

But a good listener doesn't just follow the trail of their companion in conversation. A great listener understands that healthy conversation benefits most from a dynamic set of perspectives.

I see where they are coming from. But what can I see that perhaps they haven't considered.

We've all had the experience of offering one or two points to consider and being immediately shot down. Again, it's the emotive aspect that is the problem. We feel shut down instead of realizing: gee, I'm talking to a relatively intelligent person who has clearly spent a LOT more time thinking about this than I have, should it really be a butt-hurt surprise that they've already considered the points I bring up?

Again, the answer is to use silence as a tool. It creates a surprising amount of space. Neil Gaiman, when questioned about how he thinks up all his ideas for stories has said: I just allow myself to be bored. After a while the mind begins producing ideas to entertain itself, and I just write them down.

Sit with silence, sit with the issue, and, if you care, new ideas will arrive. But it's important to realize that they never arrive with the same alacrity as we expect. We've been habituated by linguistic patterns that responses are supposed to come at a quick interval, like a volley of tennis. Silence in tennis means the game is over. But the problem is that conversation, despite it's usual similarity to the back-and-forth of tennis is not tennis.

Good conversation is chess. The main object of chess is to try and see something about the situation that your opponent hasn't realized. This is exactly what the object of conversation is when we don't know what to say. The answer is not to say the first innocuous thing that comes to mind. That would be like blundering a game of chess by moving any old piece just for the sake of hearing the sound of the piece hit the board when you place it on a new square. The answer is to sit with the conundrum in silence, to focus on it from many angles, to consider all of its parts and its possible directions. To work hard to try and find some aspect your companion in conversation has failed to see, something that might truly help that person you care deeply about.

MESSY

September 10th, 2024

"Cleanliness is next to Godliness"

- St. Thomas Aquinas

"A spotless home often has cluttered closets."

- Tinkered Thinking

A perennial debate rages between the tidy and the disheveled. Steve Jobs was apparently famous for demanding beauty on the inside of the products at apple - not just the outside. Order is valorized and we seek to use it to tame nature, either by perfectly manicured lawns, or immaculate rows of spotless corn, or even in our own homes that present with the veneer of a museum. Even programmers are infected with this debate, with the loudest worshipping "clean code", as opposed to the derogatorily termed "spaghetti code". It's exactly like it sounds like, code that is intertwined with itself in countless, innumerable, and untraceable ways. Well, almost untraceable.

There's a couple key distinctions that don't often enter the debate. One is that spaghetti code is worst when it's written by someone else. Clean code is necessary when working in teams. It's mostly about readability, and quick comprehension. In fact, clean code is a declaration that humans simply suck at understanding and following complexity. We don't have particularly powerful short term memories, and clean code is the answer to it - it's easier to understand so its quicker for someone new to the code to read it, understand it, and successfully make changes to it.

Perhaps the most important distinction that never enters the conversation about clean code vs spaghetti code is whether the computer cares or not. The computer absolutely does not give a flying fuck whether or not the code is "clean" or now. The computer doesn't care period. It simply injects electricity through circuits that are arranged by the code. That electricity either successfully makes it through the maze, or it gets hung up, and crashes. In theory, a certain arrangement of spaghetti code might be much more efficient than human-readable "clean" code. So, which is better?

Depends on one's priorities. If one's work reputation is on the line, then leaving behind code that is incredibly difficult to deal with is not exactly something to aspire to. Hence why so many valorize cleanliness. They have very clear incentives for such. They don't want to put up with more spaghetti code.

But what if you're working on your own? Well this is a totally different scenario, and while it's a common humorous meme to liken old code one has written to hieroglyphics, moving fast and making a mess has its benefits. Those who toss aside concerns about clean code have different priorities because they have different incentives. A solo hacker trying to build a small software business cares about one thing above all: does it work for the customer? The customer is a bit like the computer in this respect. The customer doesn't give a flying fuck how pretty the code is, the customer just cares if the product works or not, because, naturally, they're trying to use it for some specific useful end.

Looking at other solo creatives we often see something far different than the lifeless museum organization. Albert Einstein's desk when he died was famously a disaster. (Google and image of it.) Or, pull up a picture of the complete human circulatory system - to highlight the o.g. creator - and ask whether it looks like clean code. It literally looks like spaghetti molded into the shape of a human.

So what's the deal with this debate? Tidiness is mostly a form of communication to other people, and it's due to the fact that our oh-so-powerful brains are actually quite allergic to complexity. We interpret what we don't understand as chaos, so we seek to make the chaos orderly, and often, as a result we drain the magic that was once contained within. there is of course subtler forms of organization. Things like permaculture, for example, which seek to strike - not just a balance between the chaos of nature and the order we humans desire; but a true symbiosis that results in a greater result than can be achieved by either rampant "untamed" chaos and the deathly museum-like order. Such virtuous cycles require a different understanding, one that doesn't eschew chaos, but seeks to understand it without destroying it, and by doing so, glimpse untapped leverage hidden within reality.

ANTI ECHO CHAMBER

September 8th, 2024

An echo chamber occurs when all the inputs are equal or reinforcing to the internal belief system. Human psychology appears to have some hardwiring that impels most people to seek out and create echo chambers for themselves. It's a simple equation of seeking out what you like, and what you agree with generally accords with what you like. The echo chamber is an aspect - or perhaps the cheif mechanism - of tribal psychology. The group functions like its own cognitive organism, seeking to maintain its own harmony, which means keeping all of its constituents in general agreement. Belief grouping occurs, meaning that if someone from group A believes in belief #3 and group A also cherishes belief #4 then that same someone is almost certainly an adherent of belief #4. This is disturbing. A real life example might help: if someone is pro guns then you can guess with extremely high accuracy what their position on raising taxes will be. But the two topics aren't particularly related. Within the context of a larger group belief system they can be made to relate via an interpretation on government authoritarianism. Raising taxes and prohibiting guns smell of authoritarianism. So perhaps these two beliefs have some alignment. But if the modus operandi of such a group is limiting government control of citizen's lives, you'd expect that group to be very pro-choice. The reasoning is built into the name; you'd expect someone who wants to limit government control would want to give as much freedom of choice to the individual as possible. But this is not the case. Group belief systems (like individual belief systems) are rife with contradiction and hypocrisy.

People who are die hard adherents to their "group" often surround themselves with reinforcing inputs. They listen to people they agree with. And there's something eerily satisfying about this. It pets the fragile animal of certainty that seeks to thrive in all of us. It's the reason why people rage when they hear positions they disagree with: it threatens the comfort of that fragile animal.

It's surprisingly productive to think of emotions and belief systems as their own organisms. They fight for their own survival, and seek to thrive by spreading, by mimetically replicating themselves in the minds of others by getting you to speak.

This mimetic survival impulse is very real, so real that it can have the most dire consequences imaginable. Here's a quote from Practicing Radical Honesty: After studying suicide notes left behind and examining all the stories and interviews with friends and families, they found a theme that seemed to apply in all cases. They concluded that every suicide can be explained as 'an attempt to maintain or enhance the self.' The mind is maintained at the expense of the life of the being. The mind survives by being right. The mind would rather be right and die than be wrong and live."

Suffice it to say, our ideas are so powerful they can kill us. There are far less depressing examples that are nonetheless just as tragic: sacrificing one's own life for the life of loved ones. Such an act is undertaken on the notion of what those other people mean to the person who is self-sacrificing. All this to say that we are little else other than our beliefs.

But that little else can make all the difference. What we have other than the beliefs we already have is the ability to decide what we will pay attention to, and what we pay attention to determines how our beliefs will continue to persist, or evolve or die off and be replaced by new beliefs. Echo chambers make it very hard to pay attention to anything other than what a person already believes in.

Enter the Anti-Echo Chamber.

"Years ago, I found that I listened to all sorts of people whose perspectives and beliefs I really liked and appreciated; now, I find I listen almost exclusively to people I disagree with."

If it were a joke, the speaker might reveal that they're still listening to all the same people. And for some this is the case. But let's examine the later practice a bit more.

Listening exclusively to people with whom one disagrees will cause some degree of rage in most people. But, if emotion can be well regulated, and snap reactions can be done away with, something interesting can happen. Like Michelangelo defining beauty by removing what shouldn't be there, the friction of disagreement can hone and clarify a person's beliefs. This is not likely to happen in an echo chamber. Presented with a sea of opinions a person mostly agrees with, how will they react to the opinions they don't necessarily agree with? Compared to someone who is not apart of such a belief-tribe, they will likely let those slide and not worry about being associated with something that is "pre-approved" by their tribe. Compare this to the inverse. In an anti-echo chamber where a person listens exclusively to people and positions they don't agree with - if emotional reactivity can be set aside - how will the mention of something they DO agree with strike? Likely it's a surprise. I say this because my diet of podcasts has evolved from an echo chamber to an anti-echo chamber. I now quite regularly listen to people I don't particularly like and who I think are lazy, poor thinkers. It might sound like an unpleasant experience, but natural selection rarely is. At least, natural selection is the ideal that rational thinkers would imaginably like to achieve when it comes to the robustness of their beliefs and ideas. One can easily argue that's exactly what's happening when it comes to global culture: whether it's this capitalism vs communism, or this religion vs that religion, all of them are merely belief systems that are vying for continued longevity... often at the expense of people's lives.

A cognitive trick that humans haven't yet figured out is how to be wary of ideas that are both seductive and dangerous. There are some belief systems that are old but still vigorous, meaning they are seductive and sticky and they mimetically replicate in new minds with efficient alacrity, but which also result in a lot of death and misery. Such belief systems are akin to the charming serial killer, who lures a victim into a false sense of security, of certainty, and, only when it's too late, the real danger of the situation becomes evident.

Death only really has three tools: disease, accidents, and bad ideas.

A LUCILIUS PARABLE: GO LIGHTLY

July 30th, 2023

Lucilius yawned and glanced up at the sun, squinting an eye to note the time. The cat next to him looked up into the sky with him, wondering. Lucilius placed a hand between the cat’s ears and rubbed the animal’s head.

“She should be back any moment,” Lucilius stated to the cat. The animal seemed content, as though it understood and nestled its head back between it’s paws, enjoying the massage with a full sense that it was deserved.

A moment later the two heard a weak grunt of exertion. The cat looked up at the edge of the rocky precipice where the two sat. They looked out over a great expanse of forested mountains that cascaded out into several ripped and staggered green horizons.

The little grunts grew louder with their rhythm, until finally an exhausted young woman began to emerge from below. Sweat beaded every point on her face. A long thick braid laid over one of her shoulders and dangled as she was bent forward, a bar across her back with two heavy buckets swaying from either end of the bar.

She carefully stepped towards Lucilius under the weight, and then meticulously got on her knees in order to lower the buckets, mindful that they not spill. And when finally they were securely resting on the ground she wiggled herself out from under the bar and finally sat heaving breath.

After a minute she finally looked at Lucilius and waved a tired hand at the buckets as a show of display.

“Dare, de buckets ov vater you asked!” She was clearly annoyed, and Lucilius was watching her diligently.

He then got up, gingerly walked over to one of the buckets and peered into the water. He stared deeply into the empty color. The cat, watching him, stood up, stretched, and then meandered over to Lucilius and looked into the bucket. Seeing only water it looked up at Lucilius who then turned his attention to the other bucket of water. The cat followed and the two stared into the water. Lucilius shook his head and sighed.

The young woman, still heaving from the exertion, looked back and forth from Lucilius’ face to the water, confused.

“Vat?”

Finally, Lucilius brought one of his saddled feet to the rim of the bucket, and then pushed it over. The young woman stopped breathing, her eyes going wide. Lucilius quickly stepped to the first bucket and pushed it over too, spilling all the water back down the rocky hill.

“Vhy would you do zat!?” The young woman shouted. “You told me to carry water up da mountain, I carry vater all da vay up da mountain!” She gestured wildly back at the way from whence she came.

Lucilius calmly shook his head. “I told you there was something in the water you needed to bring, you did not bring it.”

The young woman’s eyes grew wide with disbelief. But Lucilius looked down at the cat.

“Pussik agrees, you did not bring what was asked.”

The self-satisfied cat looked at the young woman and then up at Lucilius before settling back down for another nap.

“Vat must I put into zi vater?”

“You will know when it is there. But for now you must try to bring it again in the water.”

“Vhy should I bring more vater if it does not have vhat it needs?”

“The only way to figure it out is to bring more water.”

The young woman rolled her eyes and got up. She looked down at the buckets and the bar with disgust before picking them back up and beginning her trek back down the mountain.

A week later, after the young woman had carried hundreds of buckets of water up the mountain and Lucilius had tipped each one over, she emerged again from the trek with more water. Exhausted she set it down.

Lucilius examined them once more and sighed.

“Well, we will have to move on to the next lesson, you have wasted enough time on this one,” he said and tipped the buckets over again, spilling the water.

“Vat? But I don’t understand. Vhy?”

Lucilius shrugged. “We only have so much time. And we cannot spend any more with this task.”

“But I did not succeed?”

Lucilius shook his head with a flat expression. “I’m sorry, no.”

“Vhat I do wrong?”

“It was too heavy for you. I overestimated you.”

“But I brought zi vater! Many times! How is it too Ehvy for me?”

“Each time it looked as though you were carrying the whole world, not two little buckets of water.”

“So? Vater still made it to za top! Every time!”

Lucilius smiled, quaintly.

“Why are you here?”

The woman thought for a moment and then threw up her hands in exasperation.

“Honestly, I do not know anymore.”

“You could be anywhere, doing anything.”

Lucilius waited a beat, letting the idea sink in. Wondering if she would respond.

“Whether you are off somewhere making money, or working hard, or enjoying the pleasure of others, or simply sitting atop a mountain waiting for someone to bring you water - it is not what you do, but how you do it.”

The woman was exasperated.

“How else you bring water up mountain!”

“Lightly my child. No matter how heavy the burden you carry, you must go lightly.”

Lucilius then picked up the rod and the empty buckets. He walked over to the young woman. She paused a moment before grabbing the bar and saddling her shoulders with it.

“Lightly?”

“All of this..” Lucilius said, motioning the expansive view. “It’s not out here.”

He tapped her forehead. “It’s in there, it weighs nothing. It weighs only as much as you imagine.”

“Zis is stupid. Of course it weighs something. You cannot lift za whole mountain!”

Lucilius smiled.

“Sure I can.”

The woman looked at him, disbelieving.

“It used to be over there,” Lucilius said, pointing.

“When I was young I did not carry water. I carried dirt and rock.”

The woman looked around at the entire area where they were standing, in disbelief.

“Vat? How!”

“Lightly my child, lightly.”

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