A LUCILIUS PARABLE: A CARVING LESSON

October 20th, 2019

Lucilius arrived at the house with two packages, giftwrapped in brown paper, and bow-tied with black twine.  It was the day after his godson’s birthday, and Lucilius had purposely waited so that the allure of all the birthday gifts would have waned, the novelty spent.  Lucilius knew his gift was one that required quiet, and concentration, two things that rarely frequent the parties of young children.

His godson was overjoyed to see him, his eyes magnetized by the two packages Lucilius held.  The family welcomed Lucilius in, and Lucilius handed off the gifts, calling down the hall to his godson.

“Don’t open them without me, there are special instructions.”

He took off his coat, listening to an account of the wonderful day before, as they walked down the hall to join his godson.  The boy gently shook the larger heavy package.  It was shaped like a cube, and the other one was a small thin box.

“Open the other one first, but be careful,” Lucilius said.  The family gathered round watching the excited boy tear open the paper.  He opened the small box and pulled out a small hooked knife.

The mother sighed, “aw geez, you really know how to stress me out.”

“The boy’s gotta learn how to handle danger,” Lucilius said.  “And plus,” he added in a quieter tone, “it’s pretty dull.”

The boy investigated the knife carefully, putting the tip of his finger to the tip of the knife.  He poked himself gently and then looked at the pad of his finger.  Then he looked at the bigger package.

He put down the knife and untied the bow, tore the paper away and looked on a wooden box that had branded on the side the word SOAP.  The boy stared at it a moment and then tried to open the lid.

“Lift the box,” Lucilius said.  The boy followed and the box separated from its base, revealing a large cube of…. soap. 

The boy looked at it a moment, and then looked at his mother, before looking to Lucilius.

“Well, at least you’ll be clean,” the boy’s mother said.  Gently laughing.

“You have a puzzle before you. Bring it here.”

The boy lifted the cube of soap, remembering the knife and brought it to Lucilius.  The man hoisted the boy up on his lap.

“I made this cube of soap for you, but more importantly is what’s inside.”

The boy’s gaze quickly shifted from the soap to Lucilius.

“Inside there is a container, like a balloon, but shaped in a crazy way.  It is very delicate, and there might be many of them.  And because they are so delicate, they can easily be popped with a knife,” Lucilius said nodding to the curved blade the boy held.

“And you don’t want to pop any of these balloons because they are filled with a special liquid, and if that liquid spills out, it will disintegrate the paper I have wrapped around the balloons and you will loose the message I have written for you.”

“But what did you write?” the boy asked.

“The message gives you the location of a special gift that I have hidden for you.  And it will be waiting for you as long as it takes you to uncover the message. But be careful because it’s very easy to lose the whole message.  You need to carve away at the soap very carefully.”

Lucilius set the boy down, and the boy went to a coffee table that his mother had just covered with some newspaper.  The boy set about scratching at a corner of the cube with his knife, and the adults picked up their chatting. 

After some time, with a couple of the corners rounded and laced with scratches, the boy grew tired of the task and moved on to something else.

Years passed and as Lucilius made his visits he watched as the cube of soap was moved around and slowly, it disappeared.

Long after this, Lucilius found himself atop a mountain, spending the days simply, meditating for much of it and chipping away at a little project.  He was sitting with a warm cup of tea, watching the sun set over the ocean when a soft green light underneath the skin on the back of his hand warmed to a noticeable and gentle glow.

He uncloistered his mind and tapped back into the network.

“How are you godfather?”

Lucilius smiled.

“I’m well, and you my boy?  What are you getting up to these days?”

“I finally carved out the riddle you buried in that soap.”

Lucilius gently laughed.  “I forgot about that…..

and what did you end up finding?”

10 MINUTES

October 19th, 2019

Let’s see if this sounds familiar. 

You spend hours researching and planning.  Perhaps even you do this for multiple sessions.  And then at the very end, right when you think you’re done, one last contingency or detail comes into your mind.  You mull it over for a few seconds and decide that it’s already taken care of or you assume that it’ll work out.  And then that last little detail comes back to haunt you in a way that makes all your previous preparations useless. 

If only – you might find yourself saying – you’d only taken 10 more minutes to look up a few things.

It’s incredible the use to which 10 minutes can be put to.

Ruined projects aside, meditation is probably the best example.

Just 10 measly minutes a day of meditating can have staggeringly large effects after enough time.

And then when someone has passed away, we often find ourselves thinking about the huge amount we’d be willing to pay or sacrifice just to have another 10 minutes with that person.

Even just 10 minutes of exercise is enough to trigger the hormonal responses that account for the large majority of benefits that come from exercise.

If you sleep 8 hours a day, then that gives you 10 minutes during the day 96 times.

It’s going to run out anyhow, whether we like it or not.

Perhaps a few more of those 10 minute chunks could be devoted to better things.

FALSE ENCOURAGEMENT

October 18th, 2019

A friend shows you something they’ve been working on,

and it sucks.

Naturally it’s at this point they ask you what you think.

This is a tricky little corner of human affairs.  The reason is because we are in conflict but there seems to be a convenient way out.  The truth is we think their work sucks, but to say so potentially risks the nice emotional stability of our relationship.  And saying it’s great is a straight up lie.

Instead we take what we think is a high middle road.  We lend some encouragement.  And the reasoning for this lukewarm solution is that while the work isn’t good, it might improve and the current cultural prescription for helping someone is to give positive encouragement.  Like giving a dog a treat when it flushes the toilet and washes it’s paws.

This positive, and false encouragement is pure bullshit.  The reason is because you can give truthful encouragement.  We can say what our honest reaction to the work is, lend an opinion about what our friend was trying to accomplish and perhaps point out one of the ways in which the two could be linked with an improvement. 

Instead of just saying… aw… it’s great! keep going!

Let’s look at the word encouragement.

It means from + courage.

What does a person need courage for if they think they’ve already succeeded?

True encouragement, real encouragement, is words designed to help a person face and overcome their failure.

In short it’s the ability to tactfully say: it sucks, but you can work hard and do much better and here are a few specific ways that I think will help you get there. 

This gives a person courage to forge on.

If you just tell someone their work is great, what is there to forge on ahead for?

It’s the equivalent of convincing a toddler they’ve won the Boston marathon after taking a couple of tentative first steps.    It just doesn’t make sense when we look at it in detail.

The reason why we do it makes sense emotionally.  We give false encouragement out of fear.

And it’s no wonder that we lack the ability to give someone else courage,

when we lack the courage to tell the truth in the first place.

TINKER'S RAZOR

October 17th, 2019

A philosophical razor is a principle or rule of thumb that allows one to shave off unlikely explanations for phenomenon

or

avoid unnecessary actions.

This second part about avoiding unnecessary actions is why Tinker’s Razor is not presented as a law.

Indeed, Tinker’s Razor pays great tribute and borrows its construction from Arthur C. Clarke’s Third Law.

Clarke’s Third Law from Profiles of the Future states:

“Any sufficiently advanced technology is indistinguishable from magic.”

Tinker’s Razor is a conditional form of Arthur’s Law and states:

Any sufficiently advanced stupidity is indistinguishable from evil.

Technology and Magic have positive implications in Clarke’s law, however, we can easily call to mind the image of the evil sorcerer who like the wise and benevolent wizard uses magic.

This is the colorful dichotomy of technology in myth: the good wizard and the evil wizard.  Both are privy to esoteric knowledge and presumably cutting edge technology and know how to wield it to great effect. 

Whether that effect is good or bad though depends on a few different things.  The temperament of the person, certainly, but also the nature of the technology.  For example, it’s far more likely to do evil with a gun than it is to do evil with a pair of headphones.

Here’s a historical example of someone being a bit of an evil wizard.

The lunar eclipse of 1504.  The year prior Columbus had landed in Jamaica and by spring of 1504 the indigenous people were tired of feeding Columbus and cut him off.  Columbus than noticed  the date of an upcoming lunar eclipse in an almanac he had.  He then told the indigenous people that God was angered by the way the indigenous people were treating Columbus and that God would send a sign.  Needless to say when the lunar eclipse occurred, Columbus once again found himself well fed.

And indeed, predicting the lunar eclipse must have seemed like magic to the indigenous people.  But he lied about the cause.  Had the indigenous people been aware of the mechanics of celestial bodies in the same way Columbus was, they certainly wouldn’t have believed his tall tale about God’s anger.

But that’s the thing about technology looking like magic.  If you don’t know the details of how it works, then ‘magic’ is the word we use to account for our unknowing.

In the case of Columbus, the almanac provides the advanced understanding, but Columbus uses the privilege of this advancement in a disingenuous, somewhat evil way.

Another example that might fit is Robert Oppenheimer.  After leading the Manhattan Project and successfully creating the first atomic weapon, he almost instantly regretted what he had done.  He had created the most advanced weapon that our planet had ever seen, and yet, it was as though he only realized after the fact that maybe it was stupid to build something powerful enough to destroy your own species. 

The bomb was developed to combat the Nazi’s, who had risen to power a decade earlier in large part because of the development of the radio.  When Goebbels’s became the minister of propaganda in 1933, he specifically targeted the radio as the means by which they would spread their message.

This technological ability to spread a message of course has modern day echoes.  Much controversy surrounds the use of social media to influence the outcome of political elections.

In all of these examples, it’s possible to take the perspective that a stupid or unwise agenda was hugely aided by some technological advancement.  And certainly in some instances it goes without controversy to say that evil ends up being the result, whether that be the rise of Nazi Germany or the far lesser evil of innumerable mental health problems that have sprung up as a result of photo sharing apps and all other manner of social media. ‘

Tinker’s Razor is a guideline to keep in mind while building things.  In other words:

Be careful what you tinker with. 

It might be stupid.

And if you do a great job.

The result might horrify you.

INFINITY CUBE: A THOUGHT EXPERIMENT

October 16th, 2019

The previous episode, entitled Shifting Symmetries laid out a thought experiment that attempts to capture the difficulties created by unique perspectives.  It deserves to be highlighted and expanded upon.

The thought-experiment goes as follows:

Imagine a square room.  At the midway point of each wall, a person is chained, and you are one of these four people.  No one can really move.  And in the center of this square room is an unreachable cube.  Neither the bottom nor the top can be seen, and it’s aligned with the room so each person can only see one side of the cube.  Let’s say all the cube faces are blank except the one you can see.  It’s got the number 8 on it.  And then from an unknown location, a speaker turns on and an ominous voice says “This room will fill with a deadly gas unless someone calls out the symbol on the box.”

In this simple hypothetical, you have the privileged perspective.  Everyone else is bound to their point of view and quite literally can’t see the side of the box that you can.  They see a blank face of the cube and nothing else.  Your unique perspective is the key to solving everyone’s predicament.

This hypothetical, while simple is a perfect analogy to the way we are all trapped in our own perspective, and simultaneously privileged by that perspective in that it’s accessible to no one else.

It also highlights the difficulty of trying to convey your perspective.  If we replace the simple number 8 with a beautiful painting, then suddenly it’s not so easy to communicate to everyone exactly what you see.

Now let’s change the thought experiment a little bit:

The speaker turns on, and asks for a single person to call out the symbol that is on the box.  Except in this version of the hypothetical, you see the number 8, and on the other sides of the cube are different symbols and words that you can’t see.  In addition to this, the cube appears to be transparent but this is an illusion that makes it look as though nothing is written on the other sides of the cube.  So each person sees something different written on the cube and believes that it’s the only thing that’s written on the cube.   

Now imagine the confusion and horror when everyone pipes up and yells out a different answer.  Everyone is trying to solve for the problem, but each person’s unique perspective not only makes them think they are right, but also primes them to think everyone else is wrong and that everyone else is acting out in some sort of bizarre kind of self-sabotage. 

Are they crazy?

No, it’s just how they see the situation.

The roll of the loudspeaker in this case plays the roll of a subtle assumption that is at work every day of our lives:  We speak and we listen about the world as though we are all experiencing the same world.  But of course we are not.

The world we experience is more like the cube, and instead of just having four sides with four people, it has billions of sides, and

not a single one shows the same thing.

This is why listening can be so powerful. 

It’s the only way we can get a different view of the world.