SPECIES OF SOLVING

January 6th, 2023

I’m writing this as a productive form of procrastination and in part out of guilt because I didn’t get a post up yesterday. So it’s a win-win. Right?

The reason for the procrastination is because I have a tedious problem in front of me regarding the work I should be doing. It’s a very solvable problem, and I’ve solved it before, it just always requires a finicky process. You basically just take pot-shots at it until it works using a known pallet of ammo.

That type of problem just requires effort, and the more you pour in the faster it gets solved. Otherwise it just lingers and creates space for more and more procrastination.

Many problems in life are like this. In fact, it seems most jobs are like this. Very few people get to work a job that has interesting problems that require thoughtful consideration and a flexible, dynamic imagination. 

Those sorts of problems require an inverse strategy when stuck. Spending hours and hours chipping away at a novel problem with no progress usually doesn’t benefit from more of the same. Getting some sleep, or going for a walk is often far more effective. Thomas Edison even had this down to a practical science. Whenever he was “stuck” he would sit in his chair and hold a big metal ball bearing in one hand with that arm hanging toward the floor. Then he would let himself fall asleep. The ball bearing was his alarm clock - so to speak. The moment he fell asleep he would drop the ball bearing, it would hit the floor and he would wake up from the crash. This micro-sleep was just enough to completely reorient the brain. If I remember correctly, this pre-sleep phase is when the brain is dominated by so called K-Waves. Edison would often snap back to full attention with a new potential solution to his problem.

Personally, I’ve put this to effect many times. Though not with a ball bearing. What I’ve done - and it was before I heard this about Edison, is that when I am drifting off to sleep, I would simply and deliberately ask my brain to work on the problem that I was stuck on. This has worked particularly well for design problems that are of a visual nature. I let the elements float around in that anti-gravity space that seems to dominate the threshold to sleep. Often right as I’m passing that threshold and becoming truly unconscious, the elements suddenly snap into a completely new arrangement in  a way that solves the problem. I’d wake up the next morning with the new arrangement still there, fresh in my mind.

This happened a few times by accident and then I started deliberately employing it. Now when I find myself exhausted, and at the tail end of a solid number of hours trying to find the best way through a tricky problem, I will call it quits earlier than I usually would and hit the hey with the deliberate plan of solving my problem there. And it has been a remarkably robust strategy of problem solving.

So problems fall into two general categories: there’s the problems that have known solutions and those that have unknown solutions. 

Both require an initial amount of grind, or time and effort. But if they persist as obstacles the strategies for each are inverses of the other.

Known solutions that persist require more grind.

Unknown solutions that persist require a total halt in effort.

It makes one wonder if there’s something about the contraction of attention that permits or excludes certain types of flexible thinking. Grinding away at a problem involves a rather constricted sense of focus. The mind is zoomed-in to the exclusion of all other details and concerns.

But think about that for a second. When you are zoomed-in to a high degree, then by definition, you can’t notice what’s around you. And if you’re looking for something new, then what better place to look than all the places to which you are currently blind? Maybe this is why a problem that requires a novel solution requires a break from the grind. Attention needs to be expanded in order to include a larger set of possible elements to incorporate in potential combinations to hit upon a solution.

Searching for the known? 

Grind to the bone.

Searching for the unknown? 

Go be alone..

STAY ALIVE

January 5th, 2023

Charlie Munger has pointed out that it’s not greed that drives the world but envy. It’s the old trope of grass looking greener on the other side of every fence. Instagram is the ultimate envy machine as people post the very best moments of their lives. And often these are completely fabricated. The envy-impulse is so strong that it even supersedes the actual pleasure of having a “better” life. Renting a fake private plane just to take photos in it, for example - telegraphing a status that doesn’t actually reflect reality. Is there really any pleasure in this exercise, or is the pleasure garnered from the pile of likes and “OMG” comments that stream in from strangers who want what you seem to have.

We have another way of phrasing envy: FOMO, or fear of missing out. Is envy simply a form of fear? Is envy an actual desire for someone else’s situation or is it more a fear that your life is not as good as someone else’s and that you might be missing out? If only you were living someone else’s life…

Perhaps envy is the child of both desire and fear. Envy is a fearful wanting, a claustrophobic desire.

What effect does this have on people? Does it motivate people to work harder to get what they actually want? Or does it have adverse effects that seem similar? Always hedging bets, always going for optionality, instead of taking the risk, going all-in and welcoming a potential mistake into life?

Everyone is trying to live a life that will have felt worth the time and the effort. But this is a hard cooking to chomp on depending on which direction you look. Looking back, retrospect can make things look like a complete waste of time that felt totally justified in the moment. Smoking pot for the 200th day in a row and playing video games, for example. In the moment this can feel like a great idea. But looking back five years later? It can seem like a waste of time. 

When I was younger, I spent a summer asking people in the later decades of their life what they regretted. They all had the same exact response: Sure, shit happens, many things you can’t control and those are things you have to deal with, but looking back? They all regretted not trying more things, not taking more risks.

One older gentleman even said: I have all this money now! But look at me? Look at my body! I can’t do anything! All that money is worthless now!

The terrifying reality is that as things stand right now: we are all going to fucking die. There’s currently no degree of optionality that can change that fact. And it seems as people get closer to the consequences of this horrifying fact, a few things flip in the mind and feelings of a person. The fear that stops people from taking more risks, more chances, and trying new things begins to seem silly. What’s there really to fear when we all have to deal with the same exact exit from life?

So when it comes to taking risks, what is the most fundamental aspect of assessing that risk?

Stay alive.

Virtually everything else accompanying earthly risks is open to edit. It’s possible to lose everything short of one’s life and still bounce back. 

What’s astonishing is that we live in a world where we have ideologies that compel people to actually die for some earthly change, be it someone who engages in military combat, or the most extreme version: a suicide bomber. And yet, within the comfy confines of modern society, most people tip-toe through their lives, far away from any unknown and potentially risky territory. 

When the stress of taking some chance or risk is at the door, the only real question is: does this have a chance of actually killing me?

If the answer is ‘no’, then everything else is gravy, and hardship in retrospect will either seem like triumphant under-dogging, or a failure that can be mined for insight. This is how we naturally build the story of our lives as we look back on them. 

So go all-in, burn the boats, take the risk, shoot for the moon, ricochet off the goal and cast yourself lost among unknown stars. But just stay alive.

Stay alive.

AGENCY IN THE ZONE

January 4th, 2023

I might just write about initiating derangement (see the last post) until I’ve done it. Today I got a lot more done than yesterday. And most importantly I actually did some meaty, schleppy stuff - meaning, stuff that needs to get done but which the homunculus in me has been whining and pouting about.

This is a coding project, and for the first time I’m using chatGPT and GitHub’s CoPilot AI’s to help me in the process. What an incredible difference it is when those two tools are available.

I’ve worked with GPT-3 before. The Tinkered Thinking post called “What is GPT-3” which attempts to explain GPT-3 in layman’s terms made it to the front page of Hacker News back in the day. I wrote and recorded a few posts that were collaborative writing exercises with GPT-3, including one fictional story, and I even built a GPT-3 app called The Tinkered Question, which did a remarkably good job of generating questions based on user input. The project couldn’t be monetized so it was sunset.

Now GPT is back in this shockingly quick chatGPT form and it’s knowledge.. at least when applied to coding is shocking and refreshing. 

There’s the saying in the tech world that a full stack developer is always a little rusty on… everything. For the layman, what this means is - if a coder knows how to build a complete project from start to finish, including all the stuff a user sees and how that stuff works all the way back to the design of the database and how to host the whole monstrosity on a server - that is a full stack developer. And it requires facility in a number of coding languages and how they communicate with one another.  And the original point is that since they are a jack of all trades, their lack of mastery means that they likely can’t remember how to do something when the task comes up even though they’ve done something like it before. Traditionally this means googling and going “ohhh yea.” But googling is a pain. A coder often opens a bunch of links on google and then quickly scans each one until something familiar or promising sticks out. 

ChatGPT really changes this whole work structure. Instead of googling what a Django/Python database model needs to look like, or hell, just looking at some that I’ve already written, I simply asked chatGPT:

Can you write me a custom Django model that has all of these attributes? And then I listed those attributes and clicked enter.

Boom, It spit out exactly what I needed in no time. This I legit just copy and pasted into my own code base and it works. But the use of this sucker is better than that. When I wasn’t sure how an aspect of Django worked in terms of structure I just asked chatGPT and it gave me a very easy to understand answer.

CoPilot is the other AI tool. And it’s a lot like autocomplete on steroids. It tries to guess what you are going to code and if it’s correct, tap the tab button and boom. For example I might start writing a function called calculateTimeBetweenDates and given that this sort of function is fairly common and easy to understand, CoPilot can instantly fill in exactly what the function is supposed to look like.

It’s difficult to describe just how.. smooth the work went today. It was as if all the most uninteresting sticking points of the work have been lifted. Being able to actually work faster makes everything else less distracting. Which is a strange point to realize. Is it in the lulls of work that we get distracted? When we get stuck and we’re not entirely sure what to do, or we know what to do, but it’s just going to require something tedious and boring?

One has to wonder: what’s the relationship between level of agency and distraction?

If you have a low-level of agency, meaning: you don’t know what to do, or you don’t know how to do it… are you more likely to get distracted? This sort of circumstance isn’t just boring, it’s aggravating, and confusing.

Whereas, consider the reverse: if you know what to do and how to do it, and you are very well versed in the task at hand, are you more or less likely to get distracted? 

Being In the Zone is perhaps a function of agency more than anything else. It’s somewhat.. impossible to be in the zone while learning something new. That’s probably fair to say. Low agency because it’s new, means no chance of being in the zone.

But what about learning as the task? Is it possible to be in the zone of learning?

First instinct here is that it’s all about having high agency when it comes to emotional regulation. Can confusion and aggravation be redirected to fuel curiosity? High agency in this meta-task might just make it possible to be in the zone while learning. 

Interesting tangent aside, this is what those AI tools seemed to do: it was far easier to get in the zone. These tools increased agency by addressing two important issues: hazy memory as applied to how to do something or how something should look, and syntax.  The first is just that jack-of-all-trades full stack developer problem. The syntax problem is just a subset. CoPilot is like Grammerly but a Grammerly that can also write your essay for you once it figures out what you’re talking about.

Regardless, it seems, and certainly feels like I’m one step closer to a proper and productive derangement.

INITIATE DERANGEMENT

January 3rd, 2023

One concept explored on this blog is the idea of Rivalnyms. These are words or word pairs that in short seem like synonyms from one perspective and antonyms from another. A few examples are stubborn vs. determined, or Influence vs. Manipulation, or Loneliness vs Solitude. Both words in effect are two sides of the same coin, or concept. Their main difference is that one is connotatively positive and one is negative. We have these word choices for single concepts in order to flavor it with our emotion or opinion. If you approve of someone’s efforts you call them determined. If you disapprove, you might call them stubborn. It’s not an exact science, but that’s the thing with language: it’s a shifting ground of nuance. So the idea of a Rivalnym is more to point out the emotive way we conjugate our meaning when we say things or categorize them.

This sort of double-edge is present everywhere and culture is plastered with it. It’s perhaps controversial to say but much mental illness may have been beneficial in past cultural circumstances. Reading any ancient religious text with a secular mindset, for example, might make a person wonder if a schizophrenic may have been hailed as a prophet back in those times. Either the divine acts that people saw back then cease to occur today, or perhaps we just label the people who still see them a bit differently… This is the dark side of the double-edge I’m trying to point at.

A more positive version might be everyone’s obsession with “flow state”. This is the hallowed state of productivity that everyone is constantly trying to induce, experience, leverage and bask in. But a flow state is a little nutty. I have experienced the flow state many times, with many projects and endeavors, and on a very practical level I have to say: it’s absolutely horrible for your sleep. Countless times I’ve worked single-mindedly straight through the night only to be annoyingly distracted by a weird and unexpected brightness coming through the window. It’s only then that I realize I’ve accidentally pulled an all-nighter. 

There’s something…downright manic about a flow state. At least in my experience the normal person I am seems to get swallowed whole by this completely other state of being. Tiredness, hunger… it’s as though these things cower in the corner of my being, afraid to disturb the raging beast hellbent at the controls of my person, charging towards that single point of success distantly imagined. The best part about it is that this single point of success is often something I’ve never actually done before. It’s an imagined point of success. And the hypnotism that characterizes this state is fueled by a conviction that is more like faith than anything else. It’s a faith that this completely imagined point of success actually exists. A faith that I can navigate the swirling fog of confusion and unknown in order to hurl a harpoon into that elusive creature and haul it into the light of now.

When a project is in full swing, these manic states of productivity can be nearly all consuming. Collapsing to sleep, waking up with next steps already lined up in the brain, as though it never stopped and being awake is just a matter of tuning back into the conversation. 

These periods of life are - wonderful. There are few things better than them. So much seems to happen, even though it feels as though it takes too long, and achievement - actually getting something substantial and novel finished and shipped - it feels as though the precious life used up during that time was not wasted. 

The tricky thing is that inducing such periods of manic productivity.. isn’t necessarily a matter of flipping a switch. I’m currently facing a looming need to cast myself wholesale back into such a frenzy of productivity and I find it not unlike the days and hours before taking a very strong psychedelic compound. There’s a foreboding, and a resistance from my body. The same that you feel as a child when approaching the top of a very tall slide or roller coaster. But unlike a psychedelic compound which is simply ingested and guarantees the ride will commence, a flurry of productivity can be tricky to activate if there’s no boss breathing down your neck. It’s a necessity of the imagination. The results might have very real implications for one’s real world life, but if it’s a novel project, it certainly still exists as a figment of imagination. Perhaps at that point it’s a matter of faith more than anything. Can that novel idea actually exist? It all depends on whether you can pull it off.

My suspicion is that it’s like anything else and it’s a matter of momentum. Just start, and do a little bit today. Do a little more tomorrow. And keep that up until sleep is the day’s only bookends, bursting with that project bloating those waking hours. 

So. Here’s to getting a little bit more done. Tomorrow.

MEDITATION DRAFT SESSION 7: THE MIND'S MOVIE

January 2nd, 2023

On Monday Tinkered Thinking releases a draft of a lesson from the forthcoming meditation app, currently called The Tinkered Mind (If you can think of a better name, please reach out. I'm not crazy about the current one, but I'll be damned if I let an imperfect name keep me from developing a good idea.) The rationale here is simply to stave off project stagnation by taking a wish to work with words on a daily basis (Tinkered Thinking Posts) and combine it with adjacent projects. This also gives regular readers a chance to get a preview of what I'm cooking up and to get feedback before the app launches, which is a tactic that has proved extremely useful with other projects unrelated to Tinkered Thinking. 

One further introductory note: The goal of this meditation app is predominantly aimed at helping individuals build a robust daily habit by breaking that habit down and tackling it's consitituent parts one at a time and aiding the process with a new and innovative way of tracking progress, the likes of which has not been seen in other meditation apps or habit tracking apps.

Again, if you have any feedback, please reach out via Twitter  

Session 7: The Mind's Movie

Take a moment to sit and arrange your posture. Maintain a straight back with plenty of space for the abdomen to expand.

Once you’re ready begin breathing with deep exhales. We want a relatively quick inhale and a slow, longer exhale. I’ll count out a few 4 count inhales followed by exhales with a count of 8

Inhale till 4, starting on 

1 - 2 - 3 - 4

hold for a moment and then exhale  

8 - 7 - 6 - 5 - 4 - 3 - 2 -1

Then..

Inhale again till 4, starting on 

1 - 2 - 3 - 4

hold for a moment and then exhale  

8 - 7 - 6 - 5 - 4 - 3 - 2 -1

Continue this for a couple more breaths, and feel free to allow the exhales to be as long as you want. And once you are ready let your breathing transition to coherence breathing where inhales and exhales are the same length.

There’s a preconception surrounding meditation that with the practice we are trying to achieve a certain state, like a kind of trance, much like the flow state while engrossed in fulfilling work or perhaps while watching a good movie. While meditation is about cultivating states of mind, it’s much the opposite of this cultural notion of a trance or flow.

Most of normal waking life is far from this state of alert focus. Usually we are lost in thought, either engrossed with some aspect of the past, be it some embarrassment, mistake or replayed memory, or it’s the future we wonder and worry about. We play a near constant movie in our minds which is a never ending montage swirling both past and future together, and it’s only occasionally interrupted by the present for brief periods of time.

A mindfulness practice seeks to interrupt the mind’s movie and expand those moments when the present floods in.

It’s one thing to be fully present for some rare occasion in life, say for the birth of a child, or a child’s graduation, or the last moments of a loved one’s life. These are moments that are so stimulating that it can be difficult NOT to be fully aware of what’s going on in the present. But compare these super-stimulating moments to the boring ones: waiting in line at the bank, or sitting on a bus, or waiting to fall asleep while tossing and turning. During these parts of life we’re usually lost in thought, and the mind’s faucet can seem impossible to turn off. 

And now imagine being as acutely aware of the present and its myriad details during those boring moments of life as if they were as engrossing as the more spectacular moments. 

The quality of our experience has little to do with what is happening to us or around us. Rather, it’s all about how we perceive the present moment, whether we embrace it with the full faculty of our focus and attention or recede from it into memory and imagination.

The practice of mindfulness meditation develops a cognitive muscle to help reengage with the present moment. In a very real sense, it’s an exercise in simply not missing out on your own life.

For some this can maybe sound a little scary: to confront the mind without the comfort of some mindless entertainment or pleasure to drown it out. Some people claim: I have too many thoughts, and I just need to get away from them for a little while.

This kind of sentiment is totally understandable, but the stereotypical strategy for handling it doesn’t actually address the issue, it only pushes it to a side for a little while, which is more like treating the symptom instead of the cause. And in fact, the ability to recognize an overabundance of thought is in itself a first step of mindfulness, which we explored a little in the last session. It’s a recognition of what’s going on with the mind - that there’s a movie in the mind that seems like it won’t end.

But the mental training that comes with a mindfulness practice forms a kind of Pause Button which we can use to put the mind at ease and allow for the present moment to fill our experience.

Now, let’s transition from coherence breathing back to deep exhales, and try to notice any thoughts that pop up as we go through out counts.

Inhale till 4, starting on 

1 - 2 - 3 - 4

hold for a moment and then exhale  

8 - 7 - 6 - 5 - 4 - 3 - 2 -1

Then..

Inhale again till 4, starting on 

1 - 2 - 3 - 4

hold for a moment and then exhale  

8 - 7 - 6 - 5 - 4 - 3 - 2 -1

Continue like this for a few more moments while the session ends.