IDEA TRAP

April 7th, 2020

This episode is dedicated to $Stun

It’s a funny fact of the human mind that we can remember having a good idea but completely fail to remember what that good idea actually is. 

If the priority our own mind applies to memories can be so out of whack, is it any wonder that our priorities are often out of order?

The individual who inspired this episode described a hack for this situation that has proved to be remarkably useful.

Whenever you have a good idea: text it to yourself.

Cell phones have become as ubiquitous and necessary as our own right hand.  It’s almost certain that we have it with us.

One might argue that a good idea can just be logged into an app for notes, but texting yourself is superior for a couple of reasons.

A text comes complete with a notification, and we get a preview of the text without opening it.  This allows us to keep the notification while simultaneously checking what we texted ourselves about.  Keeping the notification can be important if your day hasn’t unwound to the point where you can properly process that idea.

It’s also quicker.  There’s no need to create a new note, or scroll to the bottom of an existing note, or any of that.  And chances are, our use of texting is well – oiled in comparison to a notes app.  Our fingers, our hands, and our mind can most likely get the task done via a text which we are constantly doing all day, much faster as opposed to using a different app that is only seldom opened.  Plus, notes don’t have notifications and it’s easy to forget about the good idea logged.  Whereas a text with a pending alert somewhat ensures that it won’t be forgotten.

The best part of this is you don’t even need service for it to work.  Any hanging unsent texts to yourself are… still logged, as unsent messages.

Give it a try and see if it allows you to trap more ideas.

FUNNY FORCING FUNCTION

April 6th, 2020

Motivation is a catch-22.  You only start feeling it after you get going, but when you really need it is when you haven’t gotten going yet.  The literature, talk and discussion on this topic is simply endless, as large as the gulf between doing nothing and just doing it.

One way to get motivated is to leave yourself no choice – to design a forcing function that requires action and leaves will power out of the equation.

Such a funny forcing function recently occurred with Tinkered Thinking, though it wasn’t necessarily by design.

On April first, Tinkered Thinking released a little April Fool’s joke that resulted in a large number of people signing up to be subscribers.  This little prank went off quite a bit better than it’s haphazard design anticipated.  The problem?  The code for sending emails from Tinkered Thinking to new subscribers was broken.  It had been in need of a revamp for some time, but the huge influx of new subscribers finally forced the situation for this code to be dealt with.  In the mean time, individual emails were sent out one by one.  And frankly, not only did this take forever, and it’s an absolute palm to the face for any coder to hear of this gross inefficiency, but more importantly, the joke backfired in a wonderful way. 

Tinkered Thinking played a little prank in order to draw in some subscribers.  The joke, as it turns out, is that it worked.

But humor and stupidity aside, the event put a spotlight on the real problem which was that something needed to be fixed. 

It’s a good example that we should never let the good be the enemy of the perfect.  Was the code perfect?  Absolutely not.  Was it good?  Well, all those emails were captured, so at the end of the day, it did the most basic and important part of the job.  So yes, it was good.

However, the point here, is that if that innocent little prank had never been played because of an awareness about problems in the email code, then not only would the subscriber list be much much smaller right now, but chances are high that the broken code wouldn’t be fixed.

Sometimes, we can get ourselves going by making the problem we need to work on, bigger. 

A LUCILIUS PARABLE: GEARBOX OF TIME

April 5th, 2020

Lucilius was a boy staring up at the sky.  He was lost in thought, wondering how the sky was sometimes deep and rich with blue, and then other times it seemed to have a thin, nearly invisible film laid over it, as though the faintest brush stroke of white paint had been swept from horizon to horizon.  The boy shook himself from the reverie, realizing he had no idea why it was this blue or that blue, and that there must be so much about it that remained invisible.  He looked once more, squinting, just to check if there were some clue he was missing.  He looked around.  He’d forgotten that he was walking home, and his heart sunk, remembering, knowing the day was coming to an end.  It had passed so quickly.  He’d done so much with friends, and now, already it was all over.

He continued walking home, slowly mourning the good day now come to a close.

After dinner, he laid in bed nervous and worried.  Now he stared at the popcorn ceiling, a dimly speckled firmament, the texture traced by the weak nightlight on the other side of the room.  The boy was choking up with a nervousness as he concentrated on the moment, feeling how fast it was moving, even there, in the bedroom, while doing nothing but waiting for sleep.

In a flash Lucilius could see his entire life, over in an instant, as though the whole thing had slipped past him without notice.  The boy grew terrified.  No matter how hard he concentrated, the moment kept falling away, crumbling, leaving a fresh new moment there to again die off like the rest.

He turned over to face the wall, as though he might somehow turn away from the thought, as if he might some how forget how quickly time was leaving his young life.  He squeezed his eyes shut tightly as though to bring on sleep and hopefully forget this terrible realization.

But when he opened his eyes to the morning sun streaming in through his window, the worry was there waiting for him.  And now, with sleep, hours and hours had slipped away.  Time was an enemy to him now.  One bent on taking his life from him.  He pushed back the covers and sat up on the edge of the bed.  He stared blankly at the carpet, wondering what he might do to reign in this awful streaming terror.

After a few fruitless moments he felt the habitual urge to get up, to go brush his teeth, but he stopped, and simply watched the moment.  If he went to brush his teeth, and then went for breakfast and then went to play with his friends, the day would slip past him again, just like it had before so many times.  The idea filled him with horror – that time would steal from him while he was distracted with fun, and then the idea came to him. 

Lucilius decided that he would not do anything.  He would not brush his teeth, he would not go to breakfast, and most importantly, he would not go have fun with his friends.  Like anyone else, he knew how time dragged slowly along when things are boring, and he realized that was the key.  It wasn’t a total victory, but it was a way to make things difficult for time.  To make that ethereal riddle work for it’s thievery.  If he could have the most boring life possible, then he would get as much time out of it as possible.

So for the entire day, he sat in his room, doing absolutely nothing, stubbornly watching time steal from him in drips instead of the usual giant gulps.  But when the sun was finally finishing it’s arc, and Lucilius refused also dinner, Lucilius looked back on the day and saw that it too had passed so quickly.  The moments, as he’d witnessed them seemed slow enough.  Certainly slower than if he’d been outside having fun with his friends, but still now the day was done.  Panic rose up in his throat as he again felt trapped, shackled to this torturing movement of the moment.

Again he laid in bed worrying, wondering what he might do.  And again when he opened his eyes to another fresh day, the worry was there again.  He sat on the edge of his bed, deep in thought.

Boredom was not enough.  But what was worse than boredom?  What could he use to stretch the time out further?  If fun was the thing that sped it up, and boredom was not enough, then perhaps he could use the opposite of fun.

But what was the opposite of fun?

The young boy Lucilius looked up, realizing the answer.

Pain, he said softly to himself.  Pain more than boredom makes time last even longer.  So Lucilius refused breakfast again and decided to sit against a wall without a chair, holding himself in the precarious position to light up pain in his legs.

He sat there for minutes, feeling the lactic acid build up in the muscles.  He watched his hands tempt to place themselves on his knees to relieve the pressure, but pulled them back, and closed his eyes, trying to concentrate on the moment, to feel each tiny unit of time grind past slowly, so slow, he felt as though he might be able to some how reach out and grab it, and pull on it, as the past tried to swallow it.  The pain brought him back to the moment and he realized that he’d been busy thinking about time and that it had distracted him from the impossible task.  His muscles burned on until finally, the boy collapsed, slumping down against the wall, tears now streaming down his face, the pain in his legs throbbing.  But it was nothing compared to the pain he felt knowing that time would not stop for him, not heed his plea, even for a moment, but would pass him by as though pushing him forward, forcing him to leave something he felt he loved so much.

By the end of the day, Lucilius was exhausted, and sleep wove it’s way into his mind quickly and deeply.

When he awoke, he found dread waiting for him.  He thought back over the last two days.  Already they were over, gone, done and dead.  He’d done all he could to stretch out each and every little moment, but now looking back, the days seemed shorter than ever.  All the moments of each day were so much the same, that they seemed to collapse in his memory, making each day seem like just a moment unto themselves.

Then realization flooded him, and his eyes snapped up to the bright day streaming through the blinds.  He ran to the window and looked out.  He had to get out there.  He had to do as much as possible.  The trick, he realized, wasn’t to try and grab the moment and hold on to it, but to fill it, stuff it, and weigh it down so that when he looked back on it, each and every moment would be different.  None of them would be the same, and so they wouldn’t be able to collapse into each other.  It wasn’t so much catching and holding the moment, but doing everything he could to make sure that moment, and every moment, wasn’t like the rest, to keep them separated, to make the days literally full.

He ran into the bathroom, smiling, knowing what he had to do.  He squirted toothpaste onto the brush and after dousing it with water, he feverishly began brushing.  He had to have fun.  He had to have as much fun as possible.  This, he realized would fill the moments just right, making them stick around instead of disappearing into one another. 

Lucilius froze then, watching himself motionless in the mirror.  If he had to have as much fun as possible to outwit time, then it meant that each moment would pass by quicker, just as he’d realized in the beginning.  There was no way out.  If he made each moment drag on as long as possible, then the days seemed short afterwards, but if he had fun, and let each moment fly past, then the days seems full.

Lucilius contemplated this for a moment before looking at himself in the mirror again, as though to confirm the decision, the path he knew he had to take.

It was final, there was no way around it: life simply had to be an amazing adventure.

SOCIETY OF ONE

April 4th, 2020

People generally squander their free time.  This isn’t due to some sort of intrinsic laziness, but more due to an unexercised muscle.  A physically weak person generally defers away from lifting the heavy object.  Likewise, a person who is used to having their schedule, routine and tasks dictated by someone or something else is unlikely to be well equipped to generate a structure for time when some of the free stuff comes around.  Free time for people who abide by schedules and tasks determined by others usually allocate all of their free time to relaxation and unwinding from those tasks and schedules.

Free time is, a little scary for most people.  It is the epitome of ambiguity, it is life staring you in the face asking: what are you going to do?  It’s your move.

We covet certainty, thinking there is safety in the predictable and so we eschew anything ambiguous.  Free time is stuffed with distraction in order to beat back the ambiguous challenge of free time.

When catastrophe strikes, a lot of structure vanishes, often overnight.  Modern society is a grand effort to tame ambiguity with routine, habit, and structure.  And when modern society takes a hit, we lose some of the comforting certainty of these routines, habits, and structures.

Individuals grow dependent on these operating systems, and flounder when they vanish.

The most important catastrophe skill is knowing how to handle ambiguity. 

A person can be a society of one, outfitted with their own operating system of structures and heuristics.  But like any skill, these need development and practice, which requires time and energy, two things that people enmeshed in the structures of society lack.  Free time is usually squandered not for a lack of responsibility but due to a lack of energy – that energy having already been spent on the tasks and schedules dictated by others.  With so much of our life devoted to the employment and designs of others, we are caught in a catch 22.  So few professions offer part time work in a manner that can sustain a decent life, let alone grow it. 

Catastrophe offers a difficult but huge opportunity, especially one like quarantine, which many of us are trying to navigate.  For those of us with far more free time than usual, we can begin to create a society of one.

THE ASYMMETRICAL WRITER

April 3rd, 2020

A writer, when faced with the blank page has the opportunity to compose any sentence.  The amount of potential upside for this situation is practically unlimited.  This makes writing asymmetrical, that is, there is usually a lot more potential upside than downside.  The only downside is potentially a bit of lost time, but considering what can be gained, even by composing the worst piece of writing, a writer almost certainly gains more than if that time had been wasted by watching another rerun.

The asymmetry of writing depends heavily on the initial incentive to sit down and write. A journalist who sits down to write something for work has far less potential upside than a random person sitting in a café looking at a blank sheet of paper.  The aim of the journalist is far more constrained, not just in terms of the task, but the perspective.  The writing of a journalist is automatically constrained, either consciously or unconsciously by the fact that a superior has to approve the piece of writing.  The writer is already warping their own attention to the task by the dictates of another.  And both the journalist and the boss are ultimately constrained by the financial incentives that bracket the entire endeavor.  The shift in journalism as clearly seen by the advent of click bait headlines demonstrates this shackle, which ultimately limits the upside of writing, and increases the downside, making the whole endeavor less asymmetrical.

On the other hand, the writer who composes words for no one in particular and perhaps no one at all grows the asymmetry.  Having no set audience means that the writing is not constrained by the need to cater to that audience.  It also means that the opportunity to generate an audience is also asymmetrical.  Anyone who doesn’t like the writing need not be a part of the audience and in the absence of incentives like financial leverage, a disagreeable reader has very little influence, and this leaves open the opportunity for an enthusiastic readership to form themselves into their own group.

This entire discussion of an audience, however, is ultimately irrelevant.  The business dictate that the customer is always right has somehow bled into the world of writing and reading in a way that is totally invalid. Remove the incentive-leverage mechanism of financials and this business dictate vanishes.  The writer is under no obligation to craft something that is agreeable, pleasing or in anyway oriented towards the reader. 

Readers might scoff at this, claiming that the writing is useless or ineffective, but such a reader does two things with this perspective.  At the very least they exclude themselves as part of the audience for that writer.  But more importantly, such a reader fails to see the original, and core upside of writing in the first place: exploration.

The writer ultimately sits down to explore their own mind.  This is the Arbitrage of Language.  There’s simply no telling what sort of useful idea or thought might crop up while we are recording with that old technology of the written word.  At the very least, a writer gets to know their own mind a little better, and how is that not also the greatest upside of this whole endeavor?  Understanding your own mind a little better, exploring how your own perspective navigates reality, this is in some sense what living is all about.  And the writer gets it for free.  Anything else that might occur, like when writing finds an enthusiastic audience, or wins some sort of award, or merely gets read by anyone else, these are all like icing on the cake.  The true value of writing occurs far before any readers get involved.

This episode references Episode 505: The Endless Arbitrage of Language.