A LUCILIUS PARABLE: DOUBLE SIP

April 19th, 2020

The spirit was cold from the condenser but it was hot, the hottest there was in the state.  Lucilius brought the metal pannikin to his lips and tasted the sweet fields of corn, the bubbled air of bread and the oatmeal and hazelnut of a mash now simmering in the belly of his still.  Lucilius smiled and handed the tin cup off to his new employer. 

The man in the pinstriped suit swigged the liquid fast, and his eyes went wide having expected a dull whiskied wine.  The man barely managed to swallow.  He pushed his black fedora back on his head, exposing his forehead.  He looked deeply into the little tin cup, glancing quickly at Lucilius with a new found respect.  He tasted the liquid again, this time slower.

“Well damn boy,”  he said, nodding.  The suit turned to his henchmen, “whatever he needs, no matter the cost, get it for him.   Whatever hands he needs.  However he sees this operation fit.  No questions asked, and while I’m not here, which will be all the time, he-” the man said, now pointing at back Lucilius “is boss.”    

A side of Lucilius’ smile curled up.

Within a month he had ten new fractioning columns operating.  They were turning out a gallon of high proof every four minutes, and they had a separate barn for the mashes and a third for the boiling.  Lucilius now had a team of ten men working near round the clock and oh lord how the money flowed in.

Devil drink, as abolitionists had come to call it was prohibited throughout the land.  Lucilius was a bootlegger, and within short time his brew that he’d been spilling out of a shanty up north had brought the attention of his new employer, who had driven clear up the whole country to taste for himself the rumor that had grapevine it’s way down into the south through a lucky channel.

Lucilius had sailed with half the local police when he started and they were quick to keep everything quit in the small town, granted that Lucilius kept their bottles wet.

But the offer up from the south was too good to pass up.  It wasn’t just the money for Lucilius.  On his last run across the Atlantic, he’d decided to stay on the continent a while and rummage around.  It had been a while since he’d puttered about the old states and he found an interesting upstart in Sweden that was pumping out vodkas that burned brighter than any star to steer by.  Lucilius took on a sort of apprenticeship, learning the alchemy of it all.  And now here he was in the south, commanding the biggest operation in the state, drawing in the biggest money, and soon they would be the biggest operation in the country.  But it was for the tinkering it afforded Lucilius.  The design of the still was what he was most interested in.  He’d lured the boss’s men north with a pretty short column, but now with that pinstriped blessing, he had constructed ten different stills of different shapes and sizes and heights.  All to draw his thinking in to the most efficient method of distillation.

He’d be a rich man after all of this, but he didn’t care.  Now he was taking the razor of curiosity to the edge of both taste and yield.  How much, he wondered and wanted, could he increase his yield and keep that sweet taste of southern corn?

There was always the risk of being raided, by the police or the feds, but the locals were in the pocket of course.  Liquored up and padded well with cash to keep quiet and keep the operation safe.  The feds were the largest worry, but Lucilius had a lead on that problem too.

The local agent who was assigned to the uptick in illegal liquor in the state had been a brandy connoisseur before prohibition.  Lucilius had found out by luck more than anything when he’d stuck one of the operation’s men on the job of following the guy.  The guy’s wife was smuggling a little wine home from a friend’s house who was making the stuff in a basement. 

Lucilius whipped up a small barrel of brandy and had it sitting in the man’s living room when he came home one day.  The bribe worked, and soon Lucilius had a sideline of liquor feeding the feds.  Everyone was happy, and Lucilius was the spider at the center of it all.

He’d created an operation that could nearly run itself.  He’d taught his guys to work the whole outfit without him, and he’d marketed himself to the boss as the brains for further innovation to keep himself from being expendable.

On this night though, he needed a bit of a change, and decided to go on one of the late night supply runs to a neighboring county.  Lucilius liked to mingle with the people who enjoyed his product and he’d been cooped up in his barn of operations for a little too long.

They were bumping along in the trucks, the dim headlights barely making out the truck ahead when there was a screeching of brakes.  Lucilius could hear yelling, and click-clack of shotguns.

He scrambled out the side door and ran into the woods without being seen far back in the convoy as he was, and then he tracked up towards the front of the convoy.  There the head truck was surrounded by a semi-circle of feds, all with guns trained on the truck.

Lucilius breathed in deeply and calmed his nerves, and as he did, faces among the feds came into clear view.  He recognized the brandy connoisseur, and several colleagues he’d started supplying.

“Stand down!”  yelled one of the lead feds.

“Half you guys drink this stuff!” Lucilius shouted from the safety of the woods.  A couple guns pointed vaguely in his direction, and he saw some of the men shift uneasily.

“Why threaten the lives of others for something you do yourself?” Lucilius yelled.  But all the guns stayed trained on the first convoy truck.

At the back of the train of trucks, drivers started turning around, and when the feds realized, they opened fire.  Metal rained horizontal as customers of Lucilius and his coworkers were torn down, in the dirt street and in the trucks.  One gas tank exploded and by the end of it, the only sound was that of trickling liquor pouring out into the ground, from whence it came.

AUTHORITY & CURIOSITY

April 18th, 2020

Everyone has at least one area, or an instance when someone else sees them as the authority.  The go-to person, the one who knows how things work, what should be done, how it should go.  It’s the subject that causes us to perk up with delight when someone asks that first question:

Hey, how would you do this ?

The questions that follow reveal everything about the status of our knowledge.  Not just in terms of what we actually know, but also how we handle what we don’t know.

If further questions on the part of a student touch on details that we have no idea about, how do we react?

A default reaction for many is to grow a bit annoyed or frustrated.  The reasoning is, I’ve done this before, stop slowing it down by asking questions and just let me show you.  The brain has a remarkable ability to make up unrelated reasons for the things we do and the things we feel.  There are many lovely experiments regarding split-brain patients that show the truth of this.  We must ask if the annoyance and frustration with a student is really because it’s impeding the learning – which sounds patently ridiculous when phrased that way, or is it due to an insecurity?  Does it highlight the possibility that we may not be as much of an expert as we initially thought?

How best to react to such an idea?

Knowledge is static, but the way we generate or discover knowledge is dynamic.  It is a process, just as the act of teaching someone what we know is not a static exchange but a dynamic interplay. 

Weaknesses in our own domain knowledge is an opportunity, not just to learn more about our own domain, but more importantly to demonstrate the process of how we negotiate unknowns in our domain.  This meta-knowledge is perhaps more important than any fact we might share.  Behind all domain knowledge is a set of heuristics often specific to that domain that enable someone to negotiate unknowns.

For example, coders use debugging tools that are built into browsers in order to negotiate unknowns related to a website they are building.  People who don’t know a lick of code are often oblivious to this fact while using the very same browsers.  These debugging tools come with their own rule sets, and heuristics of use for figuring out an unknown.

An experienced woodworker, likewise, has learned or figured out an entire host of ‘tricks’ for speeding up the work while remaining precise and accurate.

Such heuristics and tools are often the product of curiosity burrowing into a domain.  Curiosity creates its own tools for advancement.

But what happens when we are confronted with the curiosity of someone totally new to the field?  What happens when they quickly ask a question we’ve never considered before?

Do we react with the first emotion that points at our own lack of perfection?

Or do we use the instance as an opportunity to share the true wealth of our authority on the subject? 

Are we willing to share the way we deal with vulnerability?

Do we let someone in on the personal development we’ve been on and reveal the ways we handle adventure into the unknown?

IATROGENIC GOAL

April 17th, 2020

We believe that setting a goal is a good thing.  It gives us something concrete to move towards, a scope to dissect, deconstruct and tackle in pieces.  At it’s most quaint, we might even be able to ascertain a progress bar for how close we are and how on track we are to finishing.

The trade off of such usual goal-setting is that it can cap possibility.  If goals are not somewhat ridiculous in measure of one’s current abilities, then the task is at risk of being tedious.  Furthermore, with goals set far above our abilities, we’re not only guaranteed to grow in order to reach for such goals, but such discoveries along the way allow for greater goals to be imagined. 

If, on your way to the top of the mountain, you find you have to slay a dragon who blocks your way, then far more than climbing mountains is in your purview if you make it all the way through. 

But even with undiscovered tools getting picked up on the way to audacious goals, such goals still ascribe a border, a limit.

Notice the difference between: ‘My goal is to make a million dollars’ and ‘I want to make as much money as possible.’

A million dollars is perhaps tiny compared to the second, and both are limited to the small scope of simply making money.

There is an asymmetrical tradeoff with specificity and achieving a goal.  The most specific a goal is, the more straight forward it is to tackle and accomplish.  But the more specific a goal is, the more likely we are to limit the scope of what we might realize is possible as we go about making that goal a reality, all the while failing to imagine a greater reality that could be drawn up.

Simply put:

Don’t let your dreams limit you, so don’t limit your dreams.

TRIANGULATE

April 16th, 2020

It’s one thing to see a teacher do something and then just repeat the exact same thing.  But this is just an instance of monkey see, monkey do.  It often requires no understanding to mimic.  It’s quite another to see a teacher do something and immediately apply it to a novel case.

The best teachers attack this lack of understanding in the student by demonstrating how something works in different contexts.  But even with this, a student might not understand, and merely have the ability to mimic three different things.

We only really learn by doing, and more importantly, we can’t prove to ourselves that we understand until we see that skill or technique or process applied anew.

Attempting to apply something in a new way is the fastest way to figure out just what you do and don’t understand about a topic. We test the mind’s talk by walking.

Again, however, getting something to work in a novel way might just be luck.  We’ve all had the experience say with some app, or program, or tool, or toy when it seems to work the first time, but then when we show it off to a friend or try to teach another, suddenly it doesn’t work in the same way.

Just as the good teacher tries to display the lesson in a few different ways, the good student fools around with the idea, flexing and stretching it like a new muscle to see if it responds correctly.

SENSE-TELLING

April 15th, 2020

If our original reason for moving forward does not fit into our narrative as we look back, we often forget how we got going in the first place.

We make sense of our current situation by means of stringing together altered memories in a way that makes a good story.  Many of us are often just reacting to present emotions, and our choices based on this somewhat haphazard direction is what guides are life – but no one looks back on their past with a lazy wave of the hand and admits that it was all kind of random and there wasn’t much thoughtful consideration about what to do.  Virtually no one is so honest with themselves on this point, and a person with that sort of awareness more likely makes a wiser choice in those moments than kowtowing to a petty and fleeting emotion.

Our mistake is that we conflate storytelling and sense-making.  Creating a story out of the raw material of memory does not necessarily mean that we’ve somehow gained any insight into who we are or how we might change.  The story of our past functions more as a salve against uncertainty.  We tell ourselves a story of who we are and how we got here as a means to give ourselves a sense of agency.

Real agency, however, resides in admitting the lack of coherence in our past decisions and reactions.  By seeing clearly how we differ from the story we like to tell ourselves about who we are, that is where real insight lies.

Sense-making exists between storytelling and reality.

Recognizing the discrepancy allows a person the chance to change, and therefore bend reality closer to the story, and likewise, by doing so, the story such a person now spins is also closer to reality.