ENEMY ECHOES

May 19th, 2020

This episode is dedicated to Scott Adams, who recently described an instance when he employed the skills of an excellent communicator with a disagreeing friend.  You can find this description on Twitter here.  And to be sure, this episode was written before discovering Scott Adam’s thread on the topic and Tinkered Thinking makes no claim on the topic upon which he was conversing. 

Our skill as communicators is shown bare when we speak with enemies.  The level of our communication does not rise to the level of those who agree with our message, it falls to the depths of those who disagree.  To simply shrug one’s shoulders and claim that some people just aren’t going to agree misses the point.  Our goal as a communicator engaged with an enemy is not to gain assent, it’s to create respect.

Enemy is perhaps a harsh word that should be clarified.  An enemy harks of a relationship that is irredeemable, one that can only be approached with force and fear.  But the category of ‘enemy’ as a concept says everything about the person who claims to have an enemy.  As a word, it does not communicate anything reliable about the person or the people it claims to identify.  Anyone claiming to have enemies should immediately be regarded with suspicion because of what it implies about the psychology of the person using such a word.  The simplest and most practical reason is because that category could expand and suddenly be levelled to include you.

The point is perhaps better highlighted by a different phrasing:

Who would you rather have as an ally? 

Someone who can identify their enemy? 

or

Someone who finds the idea of an ‘enemy’ too limiting, someone who looks at the wide expanse of human affairs as a dynamic playground that exists outside of such definitions.

Now what exactly does that second option look like?  Do we heed the words of a sandal-clad hippie from a few years ago and look upon everyone as a friend and turn the other cheek when an adversary wishes to land a strike?

Perhaps.  However, a couple thousand years have surely revealed the impracticality of such a perspective.

It is possible to develop a personal level of stoicism that imbues a person with the ability to take an infinite amount of blows and even laugh in the face of death.  And while this philosophy is exceptionally useful, it need not be the only tool on our cognitive Swiss-army knife.  We need to entertain, explore and incorporate a variety of options, in the same way that the friend/enemy dichotomy is too limiting.

The alternative that exists between submitting to an enemy and raising arms against the enemy is a more difficult middle path, one that hinges on our ability to communicate.

Recent technologies have highlighted the default way that disagreeing people communicate.  We seem convinced that if only we shout our point of view loud enough and forcefully enough that it will be convincing.  We somehow also seem aware that this absolutely does not work when employed by the other side, but then we suffer a true instance of cognitive dissonance and fail to see the glaring contradiction in our own method.

Speaking with friends is perhaps too easy.  When we see nods and murmurs of agreement while we describe a point, is it evidence that our description is strong and convincing?  Or do we grow weak in our abilities to communicate by preaching only to the choir? An impressive communicator makes an adversary pause to think.  An impressive communicator helps another consider a different perspective, and this is almost never achieved by some description of a personal opinion.

The best way to achieve this is to first listen, and then ask questions about what you hear.  And to clarify, the sort of question we are talking about is not a cheeky repackaging of our own opinion, like “Have you considered this…?”  The questions that crack open the wall that stands in the way of good communication actually breach that wall and curiously explore the view point of another.

A confident communicator takes this route because the seed for unravelling a poor perspective is already buried within that poor perspective.  This seed is often a small discrepancy in the thinking of our adversary or companion in dialogue.  A discrepancy that they are unaware of, one that often hinges on two contexts that they have never considered together but which are actually related. 

The task of a good communicator is to find that seed by exploring the mind of the adversary with questions, and then once that seed is found, to then nurture it, again with questions, by asking that adversary to resolve the discrepancy in their own thinking.

If we only describe our own opinion, with our own perspective, then we wallpaper the space between people, and in doing so we close them in and close ourselves in.  We build echo chambers, both for ourselves and the people we so desperately wish to convince.  We have to ask: are we helping our enemies build their echo chambers?

Or are we willing to do the more difficult task of finding the right questions that can thread through the enemy’s defenses and burrow deep into the echo chamber in order to let in a little light?

REALMS OF PLAY

May 18th, 2020

This episode is dedicated to Cory Williams who you can connect with on Twitter with the handle @Williamscoryr

Everyone claims to love learning, but this simply isn’t true.  The default state of learning is confusion, and very few people have figured out how to enjoy the dance with this uneasy state.  Once we have actually figured something out, once we’ve actually learned the thing, we are no longer learning.  But it’s this end state, this sense of having some new ability, an increase in agency that everyone thinks of when we claim to love learning.  We do not love the process, and in fact we actively try to avoid it most of the time.  If this weren’t true then no one would watch reruns and we’d all be loaded with a dump truck’s worth of extraneous talents, abilities and skills.  Truth is, we’d all love to have them, but we don’t actually enjoy the process that’s required to acquire them, namely, learning.

The default state of this process, confusion, is uncomfortable because it puts us in direct contact with the things we like the least: uncertainty and the unknown.  We prefer roadmaps, and plans that offer a reliable prediction of what we should expect, but when it comes to raw learning, we have to speak about a place that everyone must go that has no road map.  Certainly teachers and professors plan their lessons, but this is done with faith that the mind of each student will be able to make the leap from concept to concept.  What such lesson plans really do is create a dedicated space for the mind to mingle with something new and confusing.

The mind will find the way if it’s pushed in that direction.  But it can take a little time, along with all the usual accoutrement of questions and investigation, of tinkering and listening to explanations.  These hallmarks of the learning process are but methods that the mind uses to shape itself.  One can nearly imagine neurons in the brain sending out desperate signals in a chaotic new way, trying to strike upon some pattern that will close the loop and finally make sense of the situation.  Regardless of how its achieved on a neuronal level, the mind does eventually shape shift until it’s created a working model of the confusion at hand, and when that model can work and produce predictable outcomes, then the confusion dissolves, and that satisfying sense of agency and ability that we like to associate with learning floods the system.

Though, the important caveat here is that the mind won’t bother to figure it out unless there’s a push to do so.  Without a great enough need we resolve to a degrading homeostasis, content to atrophy in rhythm to studio laughter.

Reality is plump with puzzles and problems that deserve our attention – issues that would most certainly fall in defeat to the gaze of the human mind, but for too many of us, it often requires some crisis to galvanize the mind into a new direction.  This of course extends beyond the lone individual and applies aptly to groups of any size.

It’s worthy to wonder if our discomfort with the unknown is itself learned.  There is of course the well studied phenomenon of learned helplessness, where individuals and even animals can be conditioned to behave powerless, even in situations where they can take action.  Children certainly don’t seem encumbered by much of a need for plans and predictability, as long as they are safe, and much of the time, they make learning look fun.  Or rather, a learning child can be so immersed in the process that it seems as though they shed the sort of identity that would be offended by confusion and frustration, as is the perennial case with adults.

For all of us, it’s possible to look back on our own learning and see that there has always been some worthy treasure beyond the gulf of confusion.  And regardless of how we’ve grown such an easily disturbed sense of comfort, it’s clear that the arduous journey of learning leads to one of life’s few truly fulfilling experiences.

Think back for a moment to those playground days.  What’s the one thing that all kids talk about? 

What they’re going to do when they’re older.

And why is this a topic of discussion?  Because kids are looking at their future as a continuation and expansion of the playground.  We talk about things we’ll do when we’re older because as children such things seem like fun, and chances are, as kids, we were right.

But ability and opportunity does not simply arise with time.  Learning widely and deeply opens up the realms of play.  In ways that we only dreamed of as children.  But of course to traverse from the mundane living of an adult to that expansive playground of life dreamed of as children, the mind must first be pushed in that direction.

A LUCILIUS PARABLE: LIGHT & DUST

May 17th, 2020

Lucilius was walking along the water’s edge.  In the darkness the surf was glowing slow pulses of blue as the rhythm of the water excited a colony of algae.  The color ran in strips along the beach as the surf flattened and spread along the sand.  Lucilius kneeled down to look at the tiny glowing creatures but they grew dark.  He imagined them like stars in the water, and so looked up at the speckled sky.

The sky was vibrant, with distant stars, constellations and now pins of light that slowly moved, crisscrossing the vast black canvas.  Lucilius remembered seeing the first space station, bright as a planet hurtling across the sky, and how silent everyone had been.  He thought back to the very first satellite, and how everyone had been silent for a different reason.  He smiled, remembering when his marveling was interrupted.

“Damn satellites.”

Lucilius looked over to see a man bent over a telescope that had a camera affixed to it’s viewfinder.

“Dust getting in the way of your light?”

The man looked from his telescope to see Lucilius.

“What?” the man said.

“Dust.  Stardust, getting in the way of your view.”

“It’s not dust, it’s giant hunks of metal.”

“And where’d that metal come from?”

“Well down here, of course, where it’s supposed to be.”

“And where was it before it was here?”

Even in the darkness, Lucilius could see the man’s quizzical look, as though he were speaking nonsense.

“All of this,” Lucilius said, looking around, motioning to the world.  “was once part of a star, you, me, all of it. And now just a tiny bit of it is up there, in orbit.”

“Yea, and they’re getting in my way.”

“A bit ironic, wouldn’t you say?”

“How so?”

“The things that are getting in the way of your view are a direct result of the sort of stars you are trying to see.”

BUILDING ROADS

May 16th, 2020

Hofstadter’s Law states that everything takes longer than anticipated, even when Hofstadter’s Law is accounted for.  Despite the delightful humor of this recursive law, it is excruciatingly on point, as anyone who has ever tried to accomplish anything will know.

There is much to bemoan regarding the promises and ills of technology.  Every new update seems accompanied by some new break and bug in the system.  But these annoyances are mere details when we zoom out and look at trends on a long enough timeline.  Technology clearly has a tendency to create something new, and then double back on it’s own own progress to improve the process of that progress.  This results in a jerky forward and backward motion of progress.

Take for instance locomotion.  We started with just our own two feet.  And then we hopped on a horse and became quite a bit faster going anywhere.  Then of course we built the carriage and the wagon and our speed slowed and so did the scope of places we could go.  Four wooden wheels are quite limited compared to four hooves. 

Eventually we built the automobile, which is faster than any horse, but this development also required the building of roads.  It’s in the coupling of automobile and road that we see technology compounding with an interesting variation of speeds.  A car is faster than a horse, but a horse moves much faster than the construction of a road.  In many ways the road is the more important technology when paired with the car.  Every car is going to be far slower if it doesn’t have a road.  We ultimately saw the wisdom of slowing way down to build the road which would create a much faster infrastructure for cars.  The road isn’t an automation of a process but it’s similar.  It’s a smoothing of a crucial part of that allows for a huge enhancement later on down in the locomotive process.

What seems like an adjunct technology is actually essential.  After all, people spend their time ogling cars, not the beauty of the roads they ride upon.

This essential supplementation occurs all over the place.  With the written word, at first we painstakingly inscribed each letter.  Then we developed the press which enabled us to copy large portions of text quickly, then typewriters enabled for the fast production of custom print, and now with computers language can be captured, edited, copied and saved at speeds that are only limited by the flicker of fingers across keyboards.  Attempts are even now being made to remove the necessity of our hands while writing. Just imagine, composing text as fast as you can think.

This concept of greasing the rails, or smoothing the path of our technologies, can extend even into personal areas regarding how we function.  People engage in this sort of development all the time while building businesses.  But something like exercising or meditating can be regarded as having a similar effect on the mind.  20 minutes of meditation can, with time and practice, function like a smooth road for the mind to operate on.

One might see meal prep for the week in a similar light.  Instead of stopping and restarting the same process with food everyday or several times a day, it suddenly collapses to mere grab and go.

Each habit that we posses or wish to posses can benefit in similar ways.  We need only ask: where is the friction in my life?  And what would a road look like?

SPIRAL STAIRCASE

May 15th, 2020

This episode is dedicated to Kriste on twitter who goes by the handle @Garbo1614

A fairly intelligent person once pointed out that “we cannot solve our problems with the same thinking we used when we created them.”*

Sure sounds smart, and it seems to plug into the infamous marketing slogan from Apple,

Think Different.

Both seem obviously smart, a no brainer.  But how exactly do we make the shift?  How do we crack the old mold of thinking and stretch out into new territory?  Valid questions, but more importantly, what is the next step after such a question?  Do we jump from such a question straight to an answer, or do we need to a few more questions, like stepping stones in thinking, to leap away from the old and into the new?

If we have dug ourselves into a hole, the answer is not to keep digging down, and digging up is nonsensical.  But its exactly the sort of direction we need to go.  If the only direction for our effort is bound to make things worse, how is it possible to make progress in the opposite direction? 

In such a case, we are still not asking the right question.  The cognitive leap requires zooming out a little on the options available.  What about this question:  Are their any other directions available than just down and up?

Such a question expands the mind.  Our perspective zooms out, and this is where the old mold cracks.  Digging your own hole, the action of it, whether it be a real hole in the ground, or a dead end habit of binging tv, or bad nutritional choices, or calling up that same toxic person during weak moments.  In each, the decision always seems binary:  should I do it or not?  This is like being stuck in that hole.  It’s akin to asking: should I dig or not? 

When framed in this way, there doesn’t seem like much of a choice.  We are active living, restless, beings that want to make progress.  Given a choice between something and nothing, we’ll end up choosing that something, even if it’s ultimately bad.  The key is to wonder if there are more choices.  Is my only option to keep digging down?

As with many things, the answer is orthogonal.  We must not go forward or backward, we have to think laterally.  We need to ask if it’s possible to make progress going sideways.

If you’re stuck in the bottom of a hole, you can dig sideways and carve a spiral staircase into the round wall of the hole you find yourself in. 

Say for instance a person has decided to give up smoking.  The choice at first is binary: to smoke or not to smoke.  This is a terrible game, and for most people, it will wear down on the psychology until the only choice that is actually an action (aka smoking) will win.  But if additional options are added, something somewhat magical can happen.  If the choice expands to include going for a run, then the choice is do nothing, smoke, or go for a run.  That third option allows us to be proactive.  To move sideways and shift out of the old model of thinking.

Forming the right question is merely a way of reframing the perspective of the situation.  This is how questions can be so powerful and why it’s worth thinking about how we construct them and iterate them.  If a situation can be reframed correctly, suddenly a way out illuminates like an obvious path. And when we find ourselves finally headed in the right direction, we wonder how we could have been so blind.