A LUCILIUS PARABLE: FUTURE MOVES

January 8th, 2023

 

The loading bar was nearly complete. Lucilius watched with rapt attention, curious if it would work. The last few percent clicked into place, and a black square in the center of the screen where Lucilius could see a dim and dark outline of his own face, lit up. He leaned forward into the bright screen, amazed at the sight of the faint triangle pointing to a side, floating in the center. He clicked play and the movie started.

 

Artificial Intelligence could now generate movies from merely written stories. Lucilius had a few that he’d knocked together over the years and he’d been delighted to see how well the machine worked. 

 

But, he’d been given access to a cutting edge version of the platform by a friend and he’d decided with the increased capability and diversity of settings and training he’d take it much much further - as far as it could go. To find it’s very limits. Just out of curiosity.

 

He’d scanned every single thing he’d ever written long hand. He collated every single text conversation, email, letter. Every photo and video of himself. Everything he had ever produced, he took 3D scans of sculptures, he uploaded all the books he’d ever read. Absolutely every single earthly trace of his existence, he’d poured into a digital format. He even had detailed scans of his brain and body uploaded for reference.

 

He trained a new model based on all of this personal and historical data. And now Lucilius was in a kind of trance he’d never experienced before: he was watching a generated movie of his early life. He was stunned as the story on the screen reflected his own real memories with unsettling accuracy.

 

Lucilius watched for days. Regenerating the same movie with longer and longer timelines, pushing the resolution, the detail. He realized he could even create movies of specific days where there was adequate data. Moments he’d written about, the known locations, the historical weather data, all of it seamlessly woven together. He could even move the camera around while the movie played, and it was as though he were spying on his old self with a resolution his memory could hardly ever hope to approach.

 

After a solid week of this. Lucilius needed a break. He went for a long walk to process this new found sense of his own life. The sun had set but the sky was still bright with the light of the fading day. So many memories that had been locked within him had reemerged, and it was as though he now had a fresh perspective on who he was. Who he’d been as a person, and how he got to where he was now, as he walked the darkening water’s edge.

 

He watched his feet push into the damp sand. Small waves folded and spread flat, washing against and around his feet. He looked out at the expanse, the gentle curve of the watery horizon hiding what lay beyond.

 

It occurred to him then, his mind seeming to touch the horizon, wondering what it looked beyond all that he could see. A deep realization flooded his body with a shiver that he could not feel as exciting or ominous. It was a curiosity that he had no stance on. But having now had the idea, he could not deny that deep drive of wonder. He turned from the water’s edge and ran home.

 

He brought up the platform and looked at the generative conditions for the movie of his life. He clicked on the date spread and typed in a future date.

 

And then he pressed play.

 

He saw himself, sitting at a computer, watching a screen that had the image of himself sitting at a computer, watching a screen that had the image of himself sitting at a computer.

 

With jittering synchronicity he and the image of himself leaned back, a bit startled.

 

The visions of himself laughed nervously with himself, and they all reached forward and scrubbed forward. The recursion collapsed and Lucilius saw himself walking the beach, the time now midday of the following day. He watched himself stop abruptly and then turn and run back home just as he’d done before.

 

He watched himself sit again at the computer, and toggled the view to zoom in. He watched himself change the parameters again, extending the timeline, but this time, he also edited the prompt for the movie. Lucilius squinted, confused, but as his image added more and more to the prompt, his eyes went wide and a cold shuddered through himself. He watched as that future image of himself wrote out a particular ending for the movie. The description was replete with all sorts of goals and experiences that Lucilius had long thought about and yearned for over the years.

 

He watched himself press play and scrub forward in random increments, as though taking quick readings of the course of his life in different leaps of days and months, weeks and years, until it all began to fall into place. The additional prompt elements began to materialize in Lucilius’ life, through his hard work, through seemingly random occurrences - things even outside of his control seemed to fall together like an explosion in reverse, the pieces condensing, like the colors of a Rubik’s cube hauling an emerging order from their chaotic movements.

 

Lucilius stood up in a rush and walked away from the computer.

 

Was he bound to walk the beach tomorrow? How could he have an idea tomorrow that he now already had? He looked back at the computer. There was no way it could be accurate. It was impossible. But, if it was, had he fast-forwarded his future by a day?

 

He walked back to the computer and pressed pause. He scrubbed back the movie’s time till it showed him walking on tomorrow’s beach again. He scrubbed forward until he could see the full prompt. He paused, wrote it down, and then opened up another instance of the platform. 

 

He put in tomorrow’s prompt and initiated generation.

 

Nervously he sat back, watching the loading bar. Unable to believe that it might work. But how could it work? He’d fundamentally changed his own future against the vision this machine had produced…

 

 

The movie loaded, and Lucilius started scrubbing. He tried to check in at similar points he’d seen his own self do. The intervening narrative was very similar, but the details seemed slightly different. The future prompt still materialized as it had in the other movie, it just all came together with just a tiny bit of a different flavor. 

 

Lucilius stood up and paced the room for a few tense minutes and then he raced back to the computer. He changed the future prompt and watched the new movie, seeing a different life path, leading to that desired outcome.

 

Then he changed it again. He wrote up a bad ending for his life, generated the movie and scrubbed into it. Very quickly he was so horrified by how the narrative was unfolding that he stopped it. Deleted the movie and sat back again.

 

Over the next few days and weeks Lucilius made the unconscious decision to study the movie that lead to his dream outcome. He took cues from his future self, and even generated metrics for all the days: how many hours he worked on which project for all given days. Who he saw and met with. Who he talked with. He studied and recorded all of it and then took this as his plan of action, trying as best he could to enact the movie he’d seen, and daily he would go back to the movie and watch the day at 100 times the speed, slowing it for key moments and noting how he needed to progress.

 

Without realizing it, Lucilius had caged himself within a track to his dreams. But their lure was so great that he simply didn’t think about it - the trade off seemed well worth it.

 

Then one day, his phone buzzed. It was a message from the friend who’d given him advanced access to the generative movie platform. His friend wanted to know what he thought, and if he could come over and chat about it. He had something particular about the platform he wanted to show Lucilius.

 

Lucilius looked at his notes for the day. There was nothing scheduled with his friend. Lucilius looked back at his friend’s message, assuming he was supposed to ignore the request.

 

He put down the phone, his heart twisting at the unexpected conflict. The phone buzzed again. 

 

“I promise it’s a detail you’ll like.”

 

For someone who held curiosity as the core engine of his life’s compass, he was suddenly confused about how he’d gotten into such a constricted rhythm. It seemed worth it, he thought. Still seems worth it, he thought, thinking about the way his life would end up.

 

But curiosity wove it’s tease up through Lucilius and he picked up his phone and responded. 

 

He scrapped the rest of his day, figuring he could regenerate the movie from this new point and still get there, and went and got groceries and cooked a dinner for his friend’s arrival.

 

He opened the door and Lucilius felt a strange relief and freedom to see his friend. They embraced and Lucilius’ friend laughed a bit.

 

“Soo, how’s life?”

 

“Uh..” Lucilius realized he hadn’t shared his experiment with anyone: It was never in the plan.

 

“It’s been.. interesting,” he admitted.

 

His friend laughed. “Yea, I bet.”

 

The two sat down to eat and the food and the wine was so good that for a few beautiful minutes they simply couldn’t talk.

 

“So good,” his friend finally said, leaning back. “So..” He said looking at Lucilius..

 

“Was this in the movie today?”

 

“What?”

 

“Movie of your life.”

 

“How did you…?”

 

His friend shrugged. “Guess.”

 

Lucilius was taken aback. He glanced at his computer. “Have you been able to see what I’ve been doing with the platform?”

 

“No - well.” His friend laughed. “Sort of… I guess.”

 

“What’s that mean?”

 

“Think about it.”

 

Lucilius was confused. He looked at the deep red wine as he swirled the glass. He took a sip and as he did, he momentarily imagined what it looked like from his friend’s point of view. He nearly choked and put the glass down.

 

“Was this dinner in your movie?”

 

His friend gently nodded.

 

“Whoah…”

 

“So, does life feel a little… constricted Lucy?”

 

Lucilius let out a sigh and was flooded with a sad relief that he didn’t realize he’d been feeling and he nodded.

 

“I said there’s something I need to show you…”

 

“Ok?”

 

His friend picked up his own glass of wine and walked over to Lucilius’ computer. He pulled up the platform and clicked into Lucilius’ future prompt.

 

“A bunch of guys working on this got into the same sort of trap. It got a little weird. But we figured out what to do.”

 

He spliced Lucilius’ future prompt and then added:

 

rand_intervening_structure[time_param: present - future_prompt_emerg, structure_variance: 100, entertainment_level: 85, interest_capture: 99, absurd_delta: 15]

 

“You want to balance you absurd delta and your entertainment level, that’s the sweet spot that we’ve found.”

 

He hit generate and soon Lucilius was watching a far different future of his own life, picking up from the very moment he was leaning in to watch his friend add to the movie prompt.

 

“Whoah, what the…”

 

His friend paused the movie, and turned to look at him.

 

“Cool huh?”

 

“Yea…” Lucilius barely said, still trying to process.

 

“But here’s what you missed Lucy. Watch this..”

 

He watched as his friend clicked generate again and the future movie they’d been watching vanished and within seconds a new one appeared. He started scrubbing through it and Lucilius’ jaw dropped. He was watching an absurdly different life, and many minutes later as he was lost in a smiling trance as he watched how much he was laughing with someone he’d never seen before, the movie froze. His friend had paused it. And Lucilius shook himself from the reverie.

 

“You can hit generate as many times as you want, whenever you want, and you’ll get something totally new each time, but it’ll still lead you to the future-prompt you’ve written.”

 

Lucilius finally sat down  and picked up his glass of wine. But he couldn’t take a sip. He started laughing, amazed at what had transpired.

 

“Is this for real? Does this actually work? Like will it really lead to these futures we’re writing for ourselves?”

 

His friend smiled, took a sip of his own wine, and then shrugged.

 

“I guess we’ll see.”

SEEING THE FUTURE

January 7th, 2023

 

The practice of visualizing a goal apparently has enough validity behind it that the idea survives. But then again there’s plenty of patently ridiculous, fairy-tale-like ideas and practices that have perpetuated for centuries and even millennia. So mere survival is not necessarily a great metric for assessing the utility and ultimate efficacy of an idea or practice. But for the sake of exploration here, let’s simply take it as a correct assumption that visualizing the future creates a self-fullfilling prophecy and it does have a meaningful and directive effect on how the future actually turns out.

 

This assumption is definitely correct on a hyper-local level: We feel hungry, and we visualize going to the kitchen and making a sandwich, we imagine the particulars of the sandwich, and even have feedback loops while visualizing the future. Will that combo taste good? Nah, swap this ingredient for that, add this. Ah, perfect. And then with the perfect sandwich envisioned, we get to work.

 

Does this same exact thing exist on a much larger scale?

 

A fair question, but that’s actually not the best question to ask about this topic. A more interesting question is: given that we don’t know whether it’s a correct assumption or not, how do we hedge our bets?

 

Is it safer to assume that it’s true?

 

Well there’s two possible cases here. If we assume it’s not true and we are careless with the way we envision the future, and imagine a bad one, and it turns out our assumption is wrong, then we end up with a bad future.

 

The other case is if we assume it is true, and given the obvious incentives here, imagine a great future. If the assumption is correct we end up with a great future. If the assumption is wrong, then it’s a crap shoot whether the future turns out good or bad, which still leaves us open to the upside of potentially having a good future because it’s still in the cards.

 

So even if we can’t verify whether visualizing the future has a causal impact, we can still be pretty sure that the best course of action is to assume that our consistent visions of the future are the more likely outcomes.

 

Now let’s consider all the dystopian movies and stories we have coursing through the cultural bloodstream of this planet. The Terminator movies, the Matrix, the Black Mirror series… Putting aside the fact that we are really good at imagining horrible outcomes, what does this thick dystopian thread in our collective imagination mean for our collective future?

 

Just the other day I came across a post where someone pointed out the fact that all our dystopian movies seemed to becoming true.

 

Is this just correlation? Or is causation perhaps also at work here?

 

Again, given that we can’t determine for certain if causation exists or not, which is the safer assumption to make?

 

Sam McRoberts, a friend of mine, has a great way to phrase what I see as our current predicament. It’s a kind of mantra that resonates with me the more I think about it, and the more I write.

 

Change the stories, change the world.

 

If we started producing interesting utopian visions of the future that celebrated what we can and might do as a species, would our collective direction change?

 

Again, what’s the safer assumption in this case?

 

Also, what’s the harm in trying?

 

It’s a pet-ponderance of mine whether the task of producing a positive story comes across as somehow, cheesy or unrealistic. Authentic artists are generally imagined as tortured souls, and what kind of tortured soul produces an interesting utopian vision of the future? It’s somewhat a contradiction in terms, is it not?

 

S.I. Hayakawa thought about this topic and pinned advertising as the reason why artists who wish to be seen as “authentic” started avoiding the cheerier subjects of life. Before the rise of advertising we had sonnets that celebrated the best of life. Now we seem left only with cheery jingles to goad us into spending money. The irony of that dystopian shift certainly isn’t lost here..

 

The Lucilius Parables that appear on Tinkered Thinking are a consistent attempt to package a quick and pleasant experience that hopefully gets someone to think a bit differently. To consider the world in a new way. And often the effort is very deliberately an attempt to imagine a positive utopian version of the future.

 

Change the stories, change the world.

 

There’s enough negativity. We aren’t untalented at imagining the worse because in some very real ways we’re probably hardwired to look for the negative. Avoiding the dangers of the natural world is evolutionarily baked into the way our brains are set up.

 

But: the chief innovation that evolution has also given us is the ability to mindfully reflect and choose otherwise. We can self-train in imaginative and novel ways that seem unusual to the natural world of animals.

 

We can shift specializations in ways that a bee can’t even dream about.

 

Change the stories, change the world.

 

The other double-edged innovation evolution has given us is that we are creatures that operate on stories. Our human OS is not at all like a computer, nor are we like animals despite our fundamental roots in their kingdom. We run on stories, and the question is again: are we running on a good story or a bad story?

 

What story is culture telling you?

 

What story are you offering to our collective culture?

 

What story do you tell yourself?

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.