THE ILLUSION OF HINDSIGHT

December 9th, 2019

Looking back, we all have things that we’d do differently.  As they say

Hindsight is 20/20.

Like many aphorisms, this is said so often and it’s so widely accepted, and the explanation feels so intuitive that it seems like a no-brainer.  Our confidence in this apparent truth is similar to the over confidence we have when we make a plan for the future. 

When we design the path to a goal, people generally shy away from discussing contingencies that imply that the plan might not work.  It’s hard not to imagine that this is because there is some kind of insecurity that’s being touched regarding how good the original plan is.  Doubt creeps in and then suddenly everyone involved wonders why go through with it at all if we don’t think it’s going to work?

In an environment where a single commercial can make the value of a company tank by millions it seems as though this binary emotional coin seems to spin at the heart of many financial markets.

We are emotional creatures and having confidence about what our next step forward is very important for the vast majority who have forgotten how to relax and have fun with the possibilities. 

Our ramped up emotional environment turns our perspective into an either/or machine.  We cease to see the gray space between the staggeringly few options we imagine.  This inability to dance with the present into the future blocks a sense of what’s possible.

With the concept of hindsight we apply the same binary thinking to the past as we erroneously do with the future.

Looking back it seems so clear what would go different if we’d made this or that different action.

But we are again making the mistake that we do with the future.

The fact is we can’t be sure what would happen if we’d made a different choice or action.  In all probability there exist other variables that would react to our other set of actions and choices leading to an entirely unknown set of outcomes.

Is this the 20/20 hindsight that is so often referred to?

While it might feel like the past is far more determined than the future, what we are in fact talking about when we think about making different choices in the past is a different future. 

Any future is uncertain, no matter which point in the past we try to branch off from.

A LUCILIUS PARABLE: THE STUFF OF DREAMS

December 8th, 2019

A strange sensation shot up into Lucilius’ mind.  Like a shock of electricity it was as though all his senses bristled.  He froze, realizing that he recognized the moment.  The people in the café, at just that exact angle, the car horns muffled by the closing door.  The draft from the cold outside evaporating in the warmth of the coffee shop.  He’d been prompted by the loud open door to look back, and he knew that when he faced forward again, the girl at the cash register would make a mistake.

“Whoops,” the girl said.  “Pressed the wrong button.  Hold on just a sec,” she mumbled.

The feeling lingered but it felt as though it was fading, as though the memory were melting back into the moment, fleeting like a dream.

Had it been a dream?   He now thought.  Did he remember the moment because he’d dreamt this very scene, this very configuration of light and color, of sound and temperature, these people, this girl’s half smile at her mistake.

It had been a long time since he’d experienced that kind of déjà vu, but never before had he wondered whether it was on account of some sort of prophetic dream.  If you actually happened to dream of the future, then how would it not feel familiar when you finally get there?  The distinction overwhelmed him, filling his mind.

“Vente, Dark and biter.  Hello?”

Lucilius snapped out of it and smiled at the young woman holding the coffee out for him.  He took the coffee, thanking her and instead of heading straight to his lab, he sat down, pulled out a notebook and began to write about the idea.  This connection between dreams and déjà vu.

When he finally got to his lab he called his team together and announced that they were going to put their current project on hold and detour into the curiosity that had struck him.  First they had to find the neurocorrelates of pure recognition.  Was it an emotion, a thought, and did it have some kind of signature across all things that are recognized.  And further more, could it be induced.

After a month of testing with Advanced FMRI scanning, they found their signature, and almost overnight one of Lucilius’ graduate students had devised a way of inducing it in people using transcranial DC stimulation.  With a fairly simple DC helmet, they were able to induce a sense of recognition with the right programming and therefore create déjà vu.  Everyone in the lab tried it to eerie success.  It seemed as though they had cracked the code for the strange mental phenomenon.  There wasn’t an obvious application for the discovery but it would still be a paper that the team would be able to publish, and though it had detoured their other research, it had been worth it.

On the night when it was clear they had succeeded, Lucilius was walking home.  He was reminiscing over the celebration the team had enjoyed after work.  But Lucilius’ slight smile faltered.  He stopped walking. 

Even if the mechanism for recognition had been cracked, that it could be artificial and therefore it was possible that the brain incorrectly paired the phenomenon of recognition with novel events, it didn’t disprove the use of recognition when something was truly being recognized. 

While they could now manufacture déjà vu, they still had not technically invalidated the possibility that someone had seen the future. 

Standing under the orange light of a streetlamp on the cold sidewalk, Lucilius fished his notebook out of a back pocket and flipped to the page he’d written while in the coffee shop.  It could still be a dream.  Certainly it might be possible to dream something mundane that is similar to some probable circumstance in life and therefore seem prophetic.  But would it happen as often as people experienced déjà vu?

They had to explore deeper.  Lucilius stayed up late into the night, trying to figure out how they might be able to answer the question, and his thirst for the answer again drove his lab away from their work and into another rabbit hole.  Over the course of the next year they designed and built a new way to monitor brain activity.  Sensors had to be imbedded into key points in the skull where the resolution of neural activity was improved to the point where a supercomputer could deduce the structure of the brain down to the neuron based solely on the activity of that brain structure.  With this they began to record the experience of life, of consciousness itself and most importantly to their cause, they recorded the stuff of dreams.

The thinking was that if the pattern of brain activity during a dream ever correlated later on with the stuff of waking life, and if that experience of waking life was accompanied by a sense of recognition, then it would show that a person had somehow managed to imagine the future in a dream.

This was the thinking, but Lucilius and the team simply didn’t anticipate what would happen.  Once word got out that they had cracked the vault and that dreams could be recorded, the call for commercial application exploded.  Before long people were buying into a simple procedure to record their dreams.

Lucilius founded a company to handle the commercial product, and he did so with the grave worry that they’d have access to people’s dreams.  To circumvent the security risk, they simply collected the data in encrypted form and kept it stored that way, and while the customer had access to review their dreams, no one associated with Lucilius’ Dream company had access.  They designed the system so that it only looked for matches between dream states and waking states.  The company instantly started bringing in money and huge amounts of data.  Lucilius was certain they would discover the truth behind déjà vu, and the possibility of dreaming prophecy.

Lucilius was sitting at the computer with his team huddled around as they reviewed the data from the first batch.  No correlations found.

“Well, the dataset is still small,” Lucilius announced as the team eased away from the computer and some began to walk back to their own workstations.  The computer continued to process as more data registered, and the correlation count stayed at zero.  The team got on with their daily work and all grew accustomed to the occasional register of more data.

Later that evening, just as Lucilius was falling asleep, his phone rang.  He answered and an ecstatic grad student was babbling.

“Slow down, what’s going on?”

“Correlation.  The correlation count is 2.”

Lucilius sat up in bed.  “Error?” he asked.

“I looked at the data myself.  Nearly identical.”

Within a week it was clear that the number of correlations between dreams and reality was accelerating. 

After much research involving thousands of interviews, Lucilius’ team discovered that a high percentage of early adopters had spontaneously developed the ability to lucid dream, that is, they could realize they were dreaming while still in a dream, and with this realization came the ability to control their dreams.    It was the productivity community that had discovered the value of recording dreams.  Instructions about inducing lucid dreaming had spread across social media platforms across the users, and this community interested in productivity hacking had wondered together and began to experiment with simulating the next day’s events to increase their effectiveness.  Just as top athletes will often use visualization techniques and attempt to see themselves physically achieving their goals, these productivity hackers had begun crafting their lucid dreams like the next day’s board meeting, the next day’s sales pitch, the next romantic date, the next work out, and even rough drafts for the next day’s writing. 

When this finally became clear, Lucilius knew that he was ready to change the course of is lab’s research.  But he wasn’t done dreaming. He wiped the slate of his mind’s eye clear of plans about recording devices and the neurocorrlates of recognition.  All of that would come and as it felt, he still had an hour’s worth of dreaming before he had to start his day.  It was time to have a little fun.

He looked up in the now blank dreamscape to see a space craft descending.  Stabilizing thrusters hissed and sputtered, keeping the craft steady as huge landing gear emerged from compartments in the belly of the metal ship.  The hydraulic suspension eased and bounced gently as the starship came to rest before Lucilius.  A door opened and a landing ramp extended down to the blank white ground.  Lucilius walked towards his spacecraft and as he hiked up the ramp with the intention to explore a particularly strange planet on the outer rim of his imagination, he wondered how it would all go when he woke up.  After enough times running the simulation over the last few weeks it was clear he was on to something with all this thought about déjà vu and recognition.  He smiled, wondering if there really would be a new girl training at the coffee shop, and if she’d make her mistake on the computer just as his waking self would remember what he’d just lived now in the lucid realm.  The hatch to the starship slid shut and the engines began to glow.  The blank dreamscape began to melt away as a sandy scene rippled to life from the distance.  A clear blue sky with two moons filled in the arching view overhead and the starship’s engine’s began to glow.  Lucilius’ space ship lifted off the sandy ground, and then angled for a distant point in the wide sky before glowing engines brightened to a blinding pitch and then Lucilius was gone, off to explore the infinite recesses of his own mind.

TOY OR TOOL?

December 7th, 2019

 One way to define ‘growing up’ is the ability to acquire and play with a level of toy.

As children we start off with blocks and balls, Lego and actions figures.

Then we move on to bikes and phones, video games, clothes and cars.

Some of us stop.  We get hung up on the delicious distraction of one particular type of toy and it just suits our fancy.  Sometimes this “toy” can become a passion, as when someone finds they enjoy writing, language becomes a sort of infinity toy that can continually produce novelty.

There exists, however, a subtle shift between some things that we might call toys of pure distraction and pleasure and others that border on another category.

That is tools.  Language is our most powerful and versatile tool which can also be leveraged for fun.  But some do not stop there.  Tooling around on a computer like a kid might tinker with a toy can turn into a skill that can leverage a person’s effectiveness in ways that a toy of purely distraction quality can never do. 

There’s an easy distinction that can be drawn between toys that are merely for distraction and those that can be tools.  We need only ask: is the creation going in as consumption or is it coming out as a sort of gift to the world?

With a computer a person can waste time browsing endless websites, or the same person can build a useful app that can be used by millions.

The same versatility does not apply to videogames.  Such games are more like browsing than they are an act of creation.  And with this distinction of consuming or producing we can categorize absolutely everything we might purchase.  Does it enable more consumption or does it enable more creation?

The distinction can even go a little deeper: is it possible to be passive or does it require us to be active?

Are you buying toys to distract yourself more fully?

or are you buying tools to leverage your dreams even more?

SIMPLE ELABORATION

December 6th, 2019

This episode is dedicated to Brandon who you can connect with on Twitter at @brandonbydesign

Clear and simple expression is prized because it communicates ideas efficiently.  This plain and clear phrasing has a leverage that often evaporates as word count rises.

These virtues, however, might have embedded within them the traces of a malicious little vice.  In order to find this vice, we have to turn our attention to the subject of attention itself.

Our current discussion of attention follows an inverse argument to that of clear and pithy language.  In our modern age of distraction, no one seems to have much of an attention span.  Everyone claims it’s a bad thing that we have such short attention spans so is it any surprise that we prize the simple pithy communication over the plump verbose elaboration?

Think of the insightful quote or tweet. 

These require very little attention and if effective they create a little blip of pleasure before we move on.  Good quotes are like jokes in this way.  They light up a pathway in our brain that had never before been lit up in exactly that way.

The underlying problem with venerating simple, short and pithy ideas is that the process of being human is far more complex, and we cannot distill knowledge and wisdom down into say a few hundred pithy aphorisms.  We all experience a unique context, and the way we bridge our unique perspectives to one another is primarily through language.

Nuance is not achieved by the cute quote or the billboard statement.  In order to achieve nuance, we must establish a spectrum upon which subtlety can be demonstrated.  And any spectrum in this realm is going to be a context that must be built.

Rome was not built in a day, and no single sentence is claimed to be a masterpiece.  Only longer works gain the reputation of a masterpiece and this is because they create a context, through elaboration.

Not only this but we can reapply the observation about attention and tighten the argument.  Longer forms of communication, whether it be a poem, an essay, a novel, or an entire cannon – these require the sort of attention span that we currently bemoan the loss of.  The reason why is not just literal and practical.  Of course with a longer piece of writing, there is literally a longer time required to take in the material.  But beyond this, we can clearly state that any great piece of writing is evidence that the writer has paid close and sustained attention in order to come to the conclusions that they seek to convey in writing.  The invention of language and writing allows us to follow in their cognitive footsteps, to become aware of the context that makes a particular realization ripe, and then when the new idea is presented, it blooms in that nurturing environment, in the form of a nuanced context – the perspective of the writer.

Clear writing isn’t necessarily about getting the point across in as few words as possible.  Clear writing is achieved when we seek to add no more than necessary, while providing all that’s required for someone else to understand.

EFFORTLESS PROBLEMS

December 5th, 2019

When does something become effortless?

How does this differ from the expectation that certain things should be effortless?

Unfortunately a glaring contradiction exists between these two questions.  There are some very important things in life that we take for granted, and we do so by assuming that they should occur effortlessly.  Loving relationships are perhaps the best example of this assumption.  Many assume by indication of behavior that the meaning of love somehow contains a magic that should make interactions effortless.  The idea that work needs to be done in these circumstances somehow seems to contradict the high-ideal of love.  Whether this be a romantic situation or one between family members.  The nebulous and fluid concept of love becomes the glue for every assumption that things should somehow be effortless.

But as for that first question: when does something become effortless?  The answer is far more straight forward and obvious:

Generally, something becomes effortless after putting a ton of effort into the practice. 

There’s an anecdote attributed to Picasso that comes to mind:

He was sitting at a café doodling on a napkin and as he got up to go he crumpled up the napkin and put it into his pocket.  A woman sitting near by who knew who he was asked him if she could have the napkin.  Picasso responded that she could, for $40,000.  To which she replies “but it only took you 30 seconds.”  To which he ends the scene by saying “madam, it took me forty years.”

The woman’s observation that it took him only 30 seconds is a tribute to the effortless ease with which an artist creates after so many years of practice. 

It’s true with just about everything, and we’ve come to attribute a 10,000 hour rule to the mastery of any given skill or practice.

Now why is it that we readily admit the need for effort in order for something to become effortless in some fields but not others?

Why do we expect relationships to be effortless while other things require the grind of years, even when they are things we really enjoy, as we can assume with Picasso and painting, or some great athlete and their sport, or a musician and their music?

Often our relationships get only the dregs of our energy – what’s left over after a long and tired day. 

Or is it perhaps that we’ve simply gotten into a habit of laziness based on an assumption that something should be effortless?

It’s incredible how much a few extra minutes of effort can yield.  Going on a long drive with a family member?  Research a neat spot that’s on the way and make a little adventure of it.

Discover an acquaintance has a love of painting and no good brushes?  Pick one up. 

A friend is in need and has no way to repay?  Give for the sake of practicing how to give. 

With enough practice, anything can become effortless.

To assume otherwise – to believe that something should be effortless because maybe it’s fun or starts off well is to breed a future wake up call, and it might come when it’s too late to put in the effort, because the opportunity will have already passed by.