ANALYSIS PARALYSIS

December 19th, 2019

This episode is dedicated to Clay Nichols.  You can connect with Clay on Twitter @ClayNichols

Balance is an overrated concept, and this is only because it is misunderstood.  It’s propped up in our hectic culture as some ethereal ideal, but it’s shoved into our frameworks for understanding in a broken way.

A useful way to see how balance is used in a broken way is to think about walking.  Yes, walking.

Walking is not an expression of balance.  Standing in one place without falling is an expression of balance.  While standing, the virtue of your body’s posture as placed against the ground is in balance with the force of gravity that is pulling your body to the ground.

If you think about walking carefully, you realize that

the only way to move forward is to throw yourself off balance.

Think about it: if you’re standing in one place, what is the very first thing you do in order to take a step forward? You lean forward.  But at this point in your life, your reaction to this destabilizing action is such an automaticity that you don’t realize that each and every step is actually an act of catching yourself before you fall flat on your face.

The physics of walking is quite literally the act of throwing yourself off balance and then catching yourself, over and over and over.  Do this enough and it seems like a new type of ‘balance’ emerges, one that seems more pronounced when we run at a fast clip.  But balance is probably not the best word.  Something like the word ‘flow’ might be a better fit.

The structure of walking and it’s relation to the concept of balance can act as a useful framework for other areas where we hope to make progress.

And walking might be more fitting as analogy for progress than we might at first realize.

After all, the definition of progress is: forward or onward movement toward a destination, or  advancement toward a better, more complete, or more modern condition.

The primary definition of ‘progress’ might as well be the definition of ‘walking’.

To use the word progress in a more contemporary sense, we can wonder: how does this rhythm of balance and off-balance apply to things that are less literal in their movement towards a place?

or rather:

How does balance make sense in the context of progress towards a goal?

This particular question might evoke similarly problematic flavors of speech and phrasing that are all too familiar, like: are we on track to achieve our goal?

The two together can be cobbled together into an image of a train that is properly balanced on it’s tracks and headed towards a specific destination.  This is a dangerous way to think about progress for one simple reason:  if we are trying to achieve a novel goal, then it’s something that hasn’t necessarily ever been done before, and a train track is proof of a destination that has been reached before.

If you are trying to achieve something new, then you have to blaze a trail.  There are no tracks or roads or paths nor trails to the place that has never been visited.

If the place we wish to achieve is not physical, then what does our rhythmic process of balance and off balance look like?

These two states boil down into two of our most basic options as conscious beings.

There is thinking

and there is doing.

We cannot achieve something through pure thinking alone, even if some brilliant realization comes along, that realization needs some sort of expression in order to be meaningful, and such expression is the doing part.

Likewise, if we only do things, then the effectiveness of our action is left to the whims of fate.  Luck favors action asymmetrically in this case because pure thought has almost no visible impact on the world.  But, simply doing things without some sort of thoughtful pause and analysis runs the risk of doing the same dumb thing over and over.

Given any point in time, if we just stop and think about things, our thoughts have a high likelihood of settling into a fairly repetitive pattern.  Perhaps, we could call this balance, in that our understanding of reality has reached some sort of stability based on what we know, but this doesn’t mean it’s comfortable, nor does it mean we are making progress.  It doesn’t take much time standing in one place to grow uncomfortable.

As with standing in one place, so too with thinking: we must throw ourselves off balance.  In the literal framework of walking, this instantly gives us a new perspective.  With progress, in order to gain a new perspective on reality, we have to poke it.  We have to do something in order to get a response from reality, and this response carries new information, which ideally updates what we understand about reality which further develops our perspective in the way that movement does in a literal way.

Think for a moment about hiking in the back country.  It’s necessary to stop in order to get your bearings and figure out which way to go next.  You stop to look around and get a sense of where things are and where you are in relation to them.  Then you move on.  And this process repeats.

The same repetition is necessary for thinking and doing.  The trick to thinking in order to stay fresh and keep from falling into analysis paralysis is to ask an effective question.  The question ideally poses a curiosity about reality that we currently have little to no information about.  If the question we ask simply spins our thinking off into a different circular pattern, then it is not an effective question.

It does well to remember what a question really is, as Tinkered Thinking explores in episode 128.

A good question propels us into action for an answer that lies only in the folds of reality.

Once we’ve taken some action that mines an answer from reality, we can again pause and think about the implications, as we integrate this new knowledge and check our bearings on where we are in relation to the place we imagine might exist.

Repeat this over and over, and the sky’s the limit.

This episode builds off of Episode 133: The Right Track, Episode 128: Question and most importantly Episode 269: Blazing Tracks, and . . .

Make sure to subscribe at TinkeredThinking.com.  Subscriber-only content is in the works. . .

GET BEHIND YOURSELF AND PUSH

December 18th, 2019

Doesn’t matter why you don’t feel good.  Doesn’t matter what happened during the day.  Doesn’t matter how much you don’t want to do it. 

It simply doesn’t matter what you are feeling if those feelings stand in the way of what you need to do, what you could do, and what would lead to a better life.

Sometimes, you just need to get behind yourself and push.

As with this episode.

MANY MASKS

December 17th, 2019

This episode is dedicated to Paul Graham and Deeyah Kahn.

In an essay entitled “Keep Your Identity Small”, Paul Graham strings his bow and fires an arrow of insight straight through the countless hollow faces of identity. 

The favorite line often pulled from this essay seems to be the last one: The more labels you have for yourself, the dumber they make you.

And in order for it to make proper sense it’s vital to understand the context Graham builds about the difference between knowledge and conviction.  Identity is rooted in belief, conviction, and feeling – not knowledge.

Identity is associated with strong feelings, so any discussion involving the topic of this identity is bound to trigger a person.

One of the most useful observations that Graham makes in his essay is that people are partisan by default when it comes to any discussion that involves their identity.  This is a subtle point that is easy to miss, but once seen it acts like a highlighter.  Opinions that we hear ourselves share begin emerging with an underscore etched by our own bias.

For the contemplative individual this can turn into an exploration about why these emotions and biases pop up, what sort of experience has produced them, and ultimately how useful such an emotional perspective is. 

Graham’s advice is to eschew the stamps of identity, and for the individual who can understand this and integrate it with their emotional web, this can work.  But where does this leave us when we confront others who can’t pull off this intellectual hacking of our emotion-fueled identities?

Deeyah Kahn is a filmmaker who has explored this difficult quandary in some of the most extreme ways possible.  Born to Muslim parents, she incurred criticism at an early age from her own religious community and has gone on to make documentaries where she explores the intricacy of extreme views, interviewing white nationalists and exploring Muslim extremism.  In so doing, she uncovered similarities that exist in both extremist groups.  As one might piece together with the discussion of Graham’s essay, these extreme identities are adopted because of circumstances that provoke extreme emotions.

The most impressive aspect of Kahn’s work is not the insights she has uncovered, but the method she uses to engage her subject.  Kahn’s style of interview is more akin to that of a curious acquaintance, and to place this stance, we can ask:

Does curiosity carry with it any serious commitment of identity?

No, not at all.  And the effect of Kahn’s outlook is that she ends up creating the seeds of friendship between herself and the people she speaks with.  Such conversations taken from a stance of genuine curiosity register with compassion, and through such interactions, the extremist positions of the people she speaks with begin to relax as emotions counter to their identity begin to influence their thinking.

Just about anyone who might read or listen to this can probably recall an experience when someone in their life was so emotional that the person was simply unreachable.  The words ‘calm down’ in such situations, while practically-intended, only function like fuel on a fire.  The point being is that Graham’s essay, while brilliant, most likely requires a mind with a fairly high degree of emotional regulation and introspection in order to have a behavioral impact on the people who read it, but this is a guess.  It would certainly be a very interesting experiment to see what Jihadists and White Nationalists would think about Graham’s essay.

Kahn’s work, on the other hand reveals that in order for people to soften their attachment to  strongly held identities, an experience is most effective, one that evokes new emotions that turn out to be in conflict with this identity.

 The rationalizations follow the emotion, and only in those who already have a high degree of emotional regulation can it be the other way around.

For an individual who seeks to escape the chance of being to tightly identified, a piece of advice emerges that seems totally opposite to Graham’s prescription at the end:

If you don’t want to be partisan, than it’s best to try on the mask of the enemy.  Or we can import the old aphorism: walk a mile in the shoes of the one you disagree with and then see how things look.

Instead of taking no labels, try them all with a supple grasp, one that always maintains a willingness to switch.  This is the mostly failed goal of the classic ‘liberal’ education, and while it’s beyond the scope of this episode, it seems that such liberal goals have succeeded only in collecting identities as opposed to expanding experience.  The point of Kahn’s work is that many of the extremists she engages don’t simply pick up an additional label or identity because of their interaction, it’s that they end up giving up their old destructive one.

In order to alter identity to a significant degree, a meaningful experience is required.  This is something that the medical industry is slowly discovering.  The generally poor and problematic results of anti-depressants, for example, is beginning to create a vacuum of necessity for the exploration of alternative answers, and one potential answer that is beginning to emerge is the use of psychedelics.

Among the many things that are possible with psychedelics and relevant here, one notable, but under mentioned benefit, is that a bad trip can generate a huge and lasting amount of compassion for the mentally ill.

While discussion of the ‘bad trip’ generally doesn’t bode well for the emerging field since it can be superficially pinned down as a reason not to investigate these substances, there is perhaps no greater example of bridging an understanding between two radically different perspectives.

The reason why a bad trip can generate compassion for the mentally ill is because a bad trip –in retrospect- looks and feels a lot like mental illness, and for a healthy person to visit this place is to perhaps quite literally walk in the shoes of those less fortunate.

So when we deal with others, it bodes well to keep in mind that the best way to bridge minds and build perspective is through a shared emotional experience.  For some, an intellectually stimulating essay can do just that, but for others another medium may be required, one that can reach deep into the emotional well.  We can tinker with our approach with a question:

What are we more likely to open up to?

An intellectual analysis complete with a potentially generous prescription?

or

Kindness, and curiosity?

While the first is probably what comes to mind in discussion, we would do well to pause and wonder whether the door for such a thing is open on the other side of the discussion.  If not, we can certainly see from Deeyah Kahn that kindness and curiosity is a great way to gently knock on that door.

This episode not only draws from Paul Graham’s essay and the documentaries of Deeyah Kahn, it also relies heavily on a couple earlier episodes of Tinkered Thinking, episode 17: The Identity Danger, and Episode 157: Conquer of Concur?

BETWEEN FRAMES

December 16th, 2019

If we pay attention to the moment, we can taste death.  That oddly taboo subject that destabilizes lives and sends us sprawling into inscrutable grief.  Inscrutable in that something or someone can seem so close and yet the most distant unseen star at the farthest edge of the universe is still closer to us in the moment then someone who is frozen in memory.

But we need not focus on this extreme experience, nor is it even necessary to understand the torture of this paradox.

We need only try to pin down the very moment -right now- as we experience it, to understand loss.  Whether you are reading these words or listening to them, the very moment you have spent with them is dying off, molting into an irretrievable form that you have somehow been pushed beyond.  Loss, is always with us.  We are constantly experiencing it by virtue of the fact that the moment is arising in the first place. 

The petals of the future unfurl as the moment curls back to die.

Whether we take the time to notice it, relish it, or let it pass while absorbed with some inane triviality, the moment in which we exist seems stable, maybe even solid, but this is an illusion in the same way a spinning propeller can look like a disk. 

The moment we experience is changing so rapidly, evolving into the next with such an unrelenting pace, with no discernible difference between now and the next that we mistake the consistency of change for a consistency of being.

The repetitive music of our own thoughts, behaviors and routines again makes it seem as though we are the same person persisting through time.  But we are constantly changing with the moment, though both are subtle enough in this never ending switch that we can’t quite land the arrow between the film frames.  The movie cannot be slowed, nor paused.

But with practice we can step back and take it all in, and genuinely make this communion by paying a little attention.

A LUCILIUS PARABLE: COLD MOVE

December 15th, 2019

This parable is now published in the second volume of Lucilius Parables. Click on the book below to visit the store to consider purchasing.

 

 

 

 

“Mythology does not hold as its greatest hero the merely virtuous man.  virtue is but the pedagogical prelude to the culminating insight, which goes beyond all pairs of opposites.”

 

-Joseph Campbell, Hero of a Thousand Faces

 

 

 

 

 

Tiny piled flakes of snow collapsed, as though pushing into a cloud, but the shattering crystals of water beneath Lucilius’ boot gave way their intricate space in a cascade until the mess of ice and water grew packed into a layer that could support his weight.  He took another endless step along the white sheet of land, this time in the track of a friend who up ahead pulled a sled like the one Lucilius pulled.  Lucilius was not as well accustomed to the extreme cold of this polar piece of the world: the Antarctic. 

 

The two trundled on beneath the brilliant light of the sun - a white hole in a sheet of blue.  The infinite horizon held no cloud of trouble, and behind them Lucilius could still make out the outpost.  So concentrated on the effort was he that he nearly walked into his friend who had long stopped.  Lucilius stumbled at the surprise, the sled’s tiny inertia pressing his hands forward as it drew to a heavy stop. 

 

“Thanks for making the walk with me.”

 

“Aw man, you kidding?  How often does this kind of opportunity come around.” Lucilius said.

 

“Well, perhaps too often when it comes to my team mates.  Everyone wants to take a buggy, even when the weather is beautiful.”

 

“All novelty gives up it’s novelty by default, I guess.” Lucilius said.

 

The scientist laughed.  “yea, I guess so.”

 

 

The two got to work, unpacking the sleds, and within no time they had a drill set up on an enormous tripod.  Lucilius unpacked some lunch while the scientist calibrated the drill and logged the position.  He took the protein bar Lucilius handed him and initialized the drill.  A small cylinder above the snow began to spin and lowered almost soundlessly into the white ground.

 

“How deep can this thing go?”

 

“Not too deep, but deeper than we need.  We’re just getting a surface sample, and if the weather holds –“ the man said looking up and around at the sky “-we should have enough time to get a dozen along this fault.”

 

“Fault?” Lucilius prompted.

 

“More like the top of a crack.  I’ve been monitoring this shelf for a few years now, looking for weaknesses.  It wasn’t until we got the remote submersibles that I realized what the sea water was doing beneath.”

 

“What’s that?”  Lucilius asked further.

 

“Eating away at the ice.  Like a beaver at the bottom of a tree.  And ice bends, so I’ve been monitoring the top side for expansion, in order to get an idea of when this thing is going to part.”

 

“What do you mean?”

 

The scientist held one arm out in the direction of the outpost and swung his other arm in a giant arc in front of him until he was pointing at the far horizon.

 

“Everything in front of me will one day turn into an iceberg.”

 

Lucilius looked at the vast expanse of white land.  He looked back and forth between the horizons the scientist indicated.

 

“What?”

 

The scientist nodded with a numb expression.  “All of this is going to fall into the sea one day.  But probably by then we’ll already be suffering quite a few of the consequences of our cocktail climate.  But this will be like the cherry on top of the cupcake nightmare if you know what I mean.”

 

“Pretend I don’t,” Lucilius said.

 

“Well, this will raise sea levels by quite a lot all around the world within the course of a day or two, and we’ll already be struggling with a lot of other climate-induced issues.  This will just add to it by putting a lot of the world underwater, but probably by then it’ll be way too late to do anything.  Might even be too late now.”

 

“Is there any chance that this ice sheet won’t break off?”

 

The scientist sighed.  “If the world got it’s act together right now, then maybe?” the man said, scrunching up his face with doubt.  “Problem is, humans don’t do anything until the consequences are right smack in their face, and by the time this one comes, there’s no reversing it.”

 

The scientist thought for a moment.  “Think of cancer.  We don’t do anything about it until it shows up, and then we treat it, we cut it out.  People are far far less likely to live in a healthy way before hand that makes the cancer less likely.  But the thing about a giant ice sheet falling into the ocean and raising sea levels is that it’s not a tumor you can cut out and throw away.  It’s the sort of cancer that stays for good once it shows up.  And honestly the state of society will be so stressed that our ability to respond in anyway whatsoever…. well, I severely doubt it’ll be meaningful. ”

 

Lucilius watched the slowly spinning arm of the drill as it pushed farther into the ground.  He knew all of this, but each time he thought about it deeply, attempting to imagine the millions and billions of individual stories that would take such horrific turns in the coming years.  Each time it was as though he were realizing it for the first time.  He looked up at the bright blue sky, trying to see it as though there were in invisible growing layer of cancer up there.

 

The scientist continued on..

 

“If people could see –right now- what is coming, I bet they’d change.  I think we’d change overnight to be honest.  We’ve done it before: look at the U.S. when it entered WWII, or hell, the way technologies spring up and then overnight everyone is using it, and it’s changed the way we work…

 

Problem is this climate problem is all theoretical, it’s all intellectual.  And people are emotional animals.  Our emotions only get pushed around by what’s right in front of them, like when the Iphone is introduced and we want it, or when there’s this evil growing in Europe and the US economy is trash, the incentives are bright and clear and immediate, so we suddenly change because they speak to our emotions..  But our partnership between our intellect and our emotions is finicky and pretty unreliable most of the time.  Extrapolate that across millions and billions of people and you get a big organism that is going to ignore what it knows is going to happen.  And in this case ignore it until it’s absolutely too late.”

 

The drill stopped and the adjoining computer beeped.  The scientist shifted and narrowed his eyes on the screen.

 

“Yea, what I expected” he mumbled.

 

“What’s that?” Lucilius asked.

 

“It almost fits my worst-case scenario, but there’s variations that are too complex for me to render.  But I won’t be surprised if it gets there – to the worst-case trend that is.”

 

“What’s the worst case?”

 

“This thing becomes an iceberg in 14 years.”

 

“And what does it look like right now?”

 

“Well, we have to drill a few more sites, but right now it’s 14.2 years, just based off the data from this one.”

 

Lucilius merely blinked.

 

“Any chance it could be sooner?”

 

“Sure, there are so many new things that are starting to happen around the globe, there’s no way I can account for them all.  Thing is, from what I know, I’m pretty sure there’s already enough carbon in the atmosphere to make this thing break off, even if we stopped everything tomorrow, it just takes time for the full reaction to unfold.  The real problem is how much more we’ll put into the atmosphere between now and the time when this thing breaks, and what sort of place that will turn the world into.”

 

“So sea levels are going to rise no matter what.”

 

“Oh yea. Definitely.  This thing is a ticking time bomb.”

 

The two began packing up the drill to take it to the next site.  They managed to drill a dozen different places along the fault and all of showed similar results. 

 

“I admit it’s still a guess, but it’s based off of all the data from hundreds of other breaks I’ve studied down here.”

 

They were back at the outpost.  Lucilius watched his cup of tea fill as his friend topped it up.  The sun was setting.  The sky would remain bright as the sun only dipped below the horizon this time of year.  It would be back soon as the season for study was still strong.

 

“Can I see the fault line again?” Lucilius asked.

 

The scientist spun the laptop towards him.  On screen there was a map of their section, and a red dotted line zigzagged across the white land.

 

“Why is it doubled and tripled up in some spots?”

 

“Think of a river that splits and then rejoins itself.  Multiple places with equal probability of breaking,”

 

The scientist tapped a few buttons.  “Here check this out.  This is all probable lines of fracture.”

 

The red dotted line was suddenly joined by hundreds of adjoining lines in different colors that created a thick band across the land.

 

“Each color is a different probability of fracture based on ice thickness and a few other factors.  Obviously red is the highest probability.”

 

 

Lucilius’ mouth fell agape.  “It’s so uniform,” he said, surprised.

 

The scientist nodded.  “My guess is that it has to do with temperature change in specific currents that converge on this area, but I’m still collecting data to make the theory airtight.”

 

 

“But you said this will still take another decade, so even if this band is a weak spot, it’s still pretty strong for the time being, right?”

 

The scientist thought about this for moment.  “Yes and no.”

 

“What do you mean ‘no’?”

The scientist bobbed his head to a side staring in the distance with imagination.  “Well, hey, if you just chucked a few pounds of C4 in the holes we drilled today and detonated them, it would probably create a chain reaction along these high probability lines and you could turn this whole thing into an iceberg tomorrow.”

 

He looked at Lucilius.  “When ice cracks, it cracks.”

 

Lucilius’ gaze fell to his cup of tea.  Steam curled up from the hot liquid and through the tiny sheen of mist he could see his own saddened eyes reflected.

 

“And you think if we somehow put all our energy into turning things around, we’d be able to stop all this from happening?”

 

The scientist shrugged.

 

 

“Yea, I think we could save it all right now, but we’d need a huge slap in the face to realize it. . .

 

 And I don’t think that slap is going to come until it’s the real thing, and by then it’s simply too late.”

 

Lucilius stared off at the purple horizon and closed his eyes, thinking of the billions of people around the world.  It was hard to imagine.  In fact it was impossible.  He realized he simply couldn’t imagine those people.  It was like the whole problem they’d been talking about.  It somehow exists, but not in a way that he could feel, as when he felt something when he thought of the people he actually knew and loved. 

 

The scientist went to pour himself more tea but the pot was empty.

 

“I’ll get some more,” Lucilius said.

 

“I think we’re out.”

 

“I have some in my room,” Lucilius said.

 

 

The two friends started a game of chess with the next pot of tea but the time grew late despite the bright purple sky.  The scientist stared at the chessboard. 

 

“I’ve got to call it quits.”

 

“Sounds good,” Lucilius said.

 

They left the chessboard as it was and cleaned up the table and the kitchen.  Then the two went off to bed just as the sun was beginning to rise again.

 

Many hours later the scientist slowly regained consciousness.  His head was filled with a thick pain as though he’d been drinking heavily and as his mind began to pierce through the pain in order to get a sense of reality, he realized something was tied around his face.  He’d been gagged with a pillowcase.  He tried to take it out but his hands were bound and he found that he was sitting tied to a chair.  Electric impulses of fear and alarm shot up through his body and mind as he tried to struggle, and then he realized what was before him.  He was sitting in the little mess hall and at the table Lucilius sat surrounded with equipment.  A tiny cloud of smoke rose from the tip of a soldiering iron as Lucilius pushed metal into a tiny silver dot.  The scientist watched Lucilius sit back and pick up a small circuit board.  Lucilius pressed a button and a dozen different red lights lit up across the table.  They blinked as Lucilius tested the button a few times in rapid succession.  The scientist then realized that each red light was paired with a small box.  Each box was labelled with a sticker that said ‘explosive’ and next to each was a brown lump like clay that had been molded into the shape of a rolling pin.  The scientist was still groggy from the sedative Lucilius had spiked his tea with, feeling as though he still wasn’t in control of his own body, struggling to even figure out how to stir his own voice.  Feeling slowly seeped back into his body to discover ach and pain as he watched Lucilius attach each circuit board to each torpedo of C4.  He watched Lucilius carefully arrange them on a small sled and then check the fault map on his own laptop before he folded it closed and packed it.  When Lucilius was done he got up to put on his coat and finally noticed the scientist.

 

“I’m sorry,” Lucilius said.  “But you said it yourself, humanity needs a slap in face, and I’m not going to stand by and let it come too late when there’s an answer right here, right now.”

 

The scientist tried feebly to struggle, but it was in vain as he watched Lucilius drag the sled out into the cold. The knots that bound him were solid and there was no way he’d be able to get out.  He watched Lucilius in the window slowly grow small with distance.  Then he could barely see him at all.  The drug was wearing off and all of it seemed so wildly surreal.  He thought of everything he’d told Lucilius, running over everything in his mind until he realized he was staring at the unfinished game of chess they’d played the day before.  It had been his move when they’d stopped, and now, staring at the board, hour after hopeless hour, he slowly realized that of all the moves he might have made to continue were hopeless, no matter his choice, Lucilius had one move to checkmate.