THE REASON BEHIND A LIE

September 28th, 2019

Ever argue with yourself?

Sure.  We all do it.

Ever try to convince yourself something?

Sure.  Pretty much the same thing.

But.  Wait a minute.  What exactly does that mean?  Why would we ever be resistant to something we want to do? 

Surely there is the obvious case of something being socially unacceptable, like when someone cuts you off while you’re late to work and you suddenly wish you could prop up a grenade launcher on your shoulder, shove it out the window and send that senseless bonehead to hell.

We resist such impulses because the consequences are much worse than just dealing with it without doing anything.

(As an aside: it’s amazing how much easier life gets if a person can become genuinely comfortable with doing nothing as a response to life’s meaningless aggravations.)

But there remain other, more subtle circumstances when the consequences are not nearly so extreme nor so obvious. 

We might think of a relatively harmless example, like eating a bit too much.  Everyone who can, has done it, and most do it very often.  The consequences of getting just a tiny bit fatter or unhealthy are imperceptible.  And without such a clear signal it’s easy to just shrug off any little annoying thought about health.

Drink is another example.  When does it go from just having a few, to a few too many?

The difference is subtle, easy to miss and impossible to actually calculate.  Individual tolerance can certainly be calculated but, it’s also a moving target, and bad habits can form even within some sort of institutionally defined ‘limit’, like the limit defined in law for drinking and driving.

Whether it be eating, or drinking, or any other choice of drug, poison or pleasure, anything that lights up the Substantia Nigra in the brain to a greater degree than usual is going to start creating a slippery slope.

This slippery slope becomes a vicious cycle, because every instance of a behavior lays the foundation for the next time that behavior occurs.  And if that behavior lights up the pleasure response in our brain, the brain’s sensitivity to the experience re-regulates in order to create a desire for a greater dose and greater frequency.

Ok, that’s the grossly over-simplified neuroscience of it.

But more importantly is: what does it feel like?

Ever hear someone say that sounds reasonable…

Or ever hear yourself say it?

Doesn’t matter what it’s in response to.  The question is: what ‘reason’ is behind the sense that it’s reasonable.

Fact is: it’s not a reason at all.  At least not in the rational, logical sense.

The reason is a feeling. 

That sounds reasonable, is exactly the same as that sounds good.

We experience ‘good’ more as a pleasant sensation more than anything else.  We do not use logic to deduce some sort of best option with all possible consequences and externalities appropriately balanced.  We rely on an old system of heuristics that isn’t well calibrated for the modern world.  It tells us to eat to much, to be lazy, to drink, and when we get a touch of substances that are ultimately very bad for our health, we indulge a little more.

Why?  Because they feel good in the moment.

This feeling of ‘good’ becomes the underlying reason that gives birth to all sorts of other ridiculous reasons that form an emotional narrative about how we want to do something.  When habits get bad enough to effect our lives in meaningful ways, the maintenance of that emotional narrative often begins to require lying.

The thing is, the lie makes sense to the liar in the context of wanting or feeling a need to do something that the lie is covering for.

Such a lie, is of course first and foremost a self-deception.  But it doesn’t feel that way because it’s in the name of something that feels good.

Another way to think about it is with a story like Romeo and Juliet.  They’ve each got the hots for each other, but they know their families wouldn’t be happy with it.  That asymmetry is at the heart of all the conflict and tragedy for Romeo and Juliet. 

We can replace the the object of desire in a story like Romeo and Juliet with something else and see a similar result.  When we desire to do something that isn’t in our best interest as per our relationships, family, long-term well-being, we are dealing with the same sort of asymmetry.

That feeling of pleasure overwhelms us in the short term and it gives rise to a phenomenon more eloquently stated by Benjamin Franklin:

So convenient a thing it is to be a reasonable creature, since it enables one to find or make a reason for every thing one has a mind to do.

And this is at the heart of lying.

The reason for lying is that something feels good, and that prospect of feeling good is closer in time than the negative consequences that might follow. 

We are poor long-term thinkers, unless we’ve been lucky enough to develop a strong executive cortex that has strong over-riding connections to these other emotional centers of our brain.

But this shouldn’t be too surprising. 

We’re actually just animals.  And there aren’t any animals who engage in dynamic long term planning.  Everything in the animal kingdom that might look like long-term planning is actually rote instinct.  The alternative to long-term planning is this simpler function of just trying to get what’s good in the moment.

A grotesque historical example comes to mind.  Before the United States had been fully explored by European descendants, and when the buffalo still roamed free by the millions, the Lewis and Clarke expedition witnessed a great example of this short-term penchant in the animal kingdom.  As so happened, they came across a river that was flowing with dead bison.  Some strange and unknown incident had occurred upstream that killed all these buffalo, and when the expedition came across them, they also discovered wolves that had so completely gorged themselves on the buffalo buffet that they could not even stand.  It’s reported that members of the expedition could walk right up to the wolves and kill them without the wolves being able to defend themselves in any way.

It’s a great example of short term thinking: gorging yourself to such a degree that you become instantly helpless to an enemy you could easily outrun, if not just bite.

It’s fascinating to realize that no animal creates 5 and 10 year plans.  They just do what feels right in the moment.  And sometimes that looks like long term planning.  Like when the temperature goes cold, it suddenly feels right to a bird to take flight and head south.  The bird doesn’t decide ahead of time in the same way we decide which seaside village in the Cinque Terra we are going to vacation at next summer.

Most people, most of the time, are still driven by this short-term animal thinking.  We order a donut instead of a salad, because it feels right because we know it’ll feel better.  Be damned tomorrow, next week and five years from now.

It’s when this dumb autopilot comes into contact with a behavior or substance that will at some point down the slippery slope put us into conflict with our relationships that the lying arises.

The lie is a short term resolution to an unsolvable problem:  The lie maintains the status of the relationship that our behavior is in conflict with.

It’s a situation of wanting to eat your cake and have it too.  We don’t want to give up the behavior and we don’t want to give up the relationship.  The lie seems to solve it.

But in the long run, lies rot relationships at their core, and any semblance of things still looking normal is as superficial as it’s surface appearance. 

It’s either one or the other, or both with a lot of pain.  And what is the point of a relationship if it’s just a constant source of pain?

Hard to say, and of course relationships of all types can become a bit of a drug like anything else and cause problems in other relationships.

At the end of the day, life is utterly polluted with pleasurable experiences that can become bad habits that can then escalate to toxic behaviors and on and on.

What’s important to take away from that process is that it feels reasonable at each step, no matter how bad that step might seem to someone else.  The difference is that someone else hasn’t taken all those baby steps down to that point.  Without that subtle emotional slide, it looks like a huge obvious mistake to the outside observer.

The principle extends universally beyond any discussion of lies and toxic habits:

At every moment, the decision that each and every person is making seems reasonable to that person, simply because it feels right.

This is unavoidable, but we do have the ability to hijack it for good.  By thinking deeply and thoroughly, we can imagine a new course of action that makes sense from a logical standpoint and hitch a good feeling to it, usually by way of pride or better yet, curiosity.

It’s perhaps fitting to note that the etymology of curiosity comes from late Latin and derives from something akin to ‘care’, as in something you might care about.

And what does it feel like to care about something?

Generally, it’s a good feeling. 

MEDITATIVE

September 27th, 2019

The word ‘meditative’ does not refer to the practice of meditation. 

In today’s parlance, it means merely ‘relaxing’.  And for those who don’t meditate, this might seem confusing or nonsensical: Isn’t meditation relaxing?

Many will often say things like ‘making collages is my meditation’ or ‘going for a run is my meditation’.  Sure, these mindless activities might feel relaxing but it totally misses the point.

Let’s say we’ve got two people: Julia and Alanna and only Alanna knows how to ride a bike.  Julia hears Alanna talking about the benefits of riding a bike, and Julia pipes up and says, ‘oh, well I go swimming, that’s how I ride a bike.”

Clearly, Julia doesn’t have the faintest idea what she’s talking about.  Swimming doesn’t have anything to do with riding a bike.  Sure, both activities might be enjoyable, and they might have similar health benefits and both require the body. But, swimming is not riding a bike, swimming doesn’t give you the faintest clue how to ride a bike, and swimming definitely doesn’t give you any sense of what it’s like to actually ride a bike.

This is precisely the error that people make when they claim some relaxing activity to be their form of meditation.  If there is one thing that meditation has in common with things like swimming, running or riding a bike, it’s that there’s a meaningful and unavoidable barrier to entry.

We are not born knowing how to swim, or how to run, or how to ride a bike.  Everyone who can do these things spent some time, usually in youth figuring out how to do these things, and we simply don’t remember the huge amount of effort it took to learn how to stand, then walk, then run, then swim or all those times we fell on the bike before we finally got it.

Here’s a question for people who think they are meditating while doing some other relaxing activity like filling in a coloring book.

If you think meditation is simply relaxing, then why don’t you do it?

It’s for the same reason that most people don’t wake up during a day off and sit down to figure out how to write python code with no prior knowledge.  It’s hard.  And it’s hard because there’s a learning curve, and it takes a little while to get your bearings and figure things out.

But unlike coding or swimming, riding a bike, or coloring in a coloring book, there’s something about meditation that elevates it to an entirely alien category of activity.

Meditation isn’t simply an experience that a person takes part in for 10 or 20 minutes a day, it’s an activity that changes all experiences.

An easy way to think about this is to imagine a kid who was born with blurry vision.  This kid is experiencing the exact same world that everyone else is, but the moment a discerning adult puts a pair of glasses on the kid, that kid’s experience of everything is now radically different.  Everything is brought into sharp focus.  It’s still the same world, the same set of experiences, but all of them are different now, better.

It’d be a bit silly, simple and inaccurate to say that meditation provides a pair of reading glasses for the mind, but the analogy with regards to changing experience is accurate.  Meditation, after some months, or years changes a person’s experience of everything, even the experience of what it’s like to have a thought.

RESULTS PART II: A GAME OF TENNIS

September 26th, 2019

For Part I check out Episode 528.

The word Result comes from classical Latin, meaning ‘to spring forward, or rebound”

This etymology can provide some help for thinking about plans and results in a healthier way.

If anything, when it comes to plans and results, our goal is for our plans to increasingly produce the results that we would like to emerge.

As explored in Part I, it’s better to move through this iterative process without disappointment, frustration and all the bullshit that surrounds failure.  It’s better because it’s more efficient: we lose less time.

Even if a plan completely fails to produce the desired effect, we have still learned something.  We’ve learned what doesn’t work.  This might seem like a limp victory because it’s easy to imagine that a nearly infinite variety of plans would also fail.  This is merely hyperbolic, because fact is, no one is going to be stupid enough to try all of the obvious variations that clearly aim in ineffective directions. 

They say a miss is as good as missing by a mile, but this is terrible logic, and simply not true.  If you miss by just a few millimeters, well then that’s definitely not a mile.  It’s a few millimeters, and if the preceding shot was a few centimeters, well then it’s a sign of progress that’s heading in a good direction.

We can induce some flexibility into our thinking about results by examining tennis.

We fire a shot over the net with the hope that it’ll thwart our opponent and gain us a point.  But our opponent fires a shot back.  Our shot essentially rebounds from our opponent and it springs forward towards us.  This evokes the etymology of Result.

We volley back and forth and with each return, or rebound from our opponent, we learn about them.  Oh, she’s slow to get to the right side of the court.  Oh, she’s most comfortable trying to score on the left side.  Oh wait, that was a trick because she just went hard for the right side.  Interesting. 

Each time we fire a shot over the net, it’s like a little hypothesis about what might work.  If the ball is returned, then we have a little more information about what works and what doesn’t.

A game like tennis in this case is quite helpful for contracting our plans to much smaller iterations.  The goal of the game is to win, but that can’t be achieved with one static plan.  It quite literally changes on the fly and we try a new plan that instantaneously manifests with each returned shot.  Each result or rebound updates our strategy and then our strategy spits out a new plan and we take another shot. 

This is more like how we should approach plans in the rest of our life.  Short-term plans and long-term goals.  We carry out plans to see what will work, and the shorter they are, the quicker we get feedback, and the more plans we can make and carry out.  By this method our strategy for achieving long term goals slowly updates.

We are essentially always playing tennis with reality.  We try something, and reality shoots back a result.

The more results we can invoke by taking action on more and more plans, the quicker we learn just what is going on with reality, and by this way, we increase our agency because we have a better idea of what actually works.

RESULTS PART I: EXPECTATION

September 25th, 2019

Make a plan, but don’t plan the results.

It might be helpful to point out something about plans that doesn’t ever get mentioned: Plans are about learning.

Plans are experiments, they are based on hypotheses about reality.  If I do this than A might happen.

Compare it to something like gravity and suddenly the wishy-washy nature of plans comes into focus.  Nobody plans on being sucked towards the earth tomorrow.  We count on it.  We expect it.  So much so that we never think about it.  Only when it’s somehow mitigated by something like swimming or floating around in the International Space Station do we give gravity some thought.  Neither Plans nor their results deserve any of the reliable expectation that we ascribe to gravity.  And yet we often do this, and become as disappointed and upset as if we were to walk into a new room and suddenly fall to the ceiling and get stuck there with 10 times the force of regular gravity. 

Just imagine how aggravating that would be.  Lying there, on the ceiling, stuck, sighing, thinking “not again..”

We have this experience – at least emotionally – all the time.  Something doesn’t go our way, we roll our eyes, frustrated: not again….

Why do we pin expectation to our plans in this way?

It might have something to do with the unsettling nature of the future.  For the time being it’s fairly unpredictable, and the unknown makes us nervous and scared.  For good reason: the unknown can be physically dangerous.  We seem hardwired to default towards fear of the unknown.  And perhaps this was some sort of evolutionary adaptation that kept us safe in the past when things were more dangerous.

Regardless of the origin or cause, we’re gifted with an unproductive tendency to try and speak about the future in terms of certainty.

When we take this course of action, I expect this will be the outcome.

This is indicative of a terrible perspective because it sets itself up for disappointment, which is an entirely new problem that we’ll have to deal with.

Another reason that people use this language though, is because it sounds impressive.  It’s a social hack that some people use for short term gain, and it works because most people are petrified of the unknown, so someone who declares they can create the opposite, by making the future known, will gain a lot of short-term clout. 

Someone who can speak about the future in certain terms and be correct is going to be a very rare and a very valuable human being.  

But the reason this sort of person is going to be rare is because the way to develop an exceptionally robust model of the world – one that is strong enough to make accurate predictions – is going to come about that model through a strategy that requires the exact opposite:  fast, iterative experimentation with little to no emotional attachment to what the results might be. 

Such a person can carry out more experiments for at least one simple reason: with no emotional attachment to some sort of desired results, they get to skip the whole disappointment and frustration thing.  They fast-track straight to the next experiment, and while other people are busy being down in the dumps beating themselves up for failure, this person is busy learning more and gaining an upper hand on how the world works.

This episode relies on episode 514: Falsify

Part II of this episode, A Game of Tennis, is now available tomorrow.

LITTLE THEORIES

September 24th, 2019

Whether we know it or not, we are constantly constructing hypotheses and testing them.  Many of these are under the umbrella of a larger theory, a mental model of some aspect of the world that we have constructed throughout our life.

Examine the word a moment.  It’s hypo- plus –thesis.

Hypo- means literally under, or below.  It’s easy to grip this prefix when we think about the word hypothermia.  Our temperature is below what it should be.

We can think of the word hypothesis in similar terms.

Under the umbrella of our model of the world, we construct little theories that need testing.  Most likely, such little theories will not stand the scrutiny of testing, but if they do, then it rises to the level of a theory and becomes a robust part of our mental model.

The key is in the testing.  Either it works as a valid way of looking at the world or it doesn’t.  Fantasy and delusion enter the picture when we elevate a hypothesis to the level of theory without testing it, but merely on the validity of a warm fuzzy emotional connection.  This is an easy way to develop a dangerous mindset.  Dangerous not just to one’s self but potentially to other people.  And many beliefs fall into this category.

Failing to test beliefs or willfully ignoring the results creates stagnation, and while this might be less of an emotional hassle in the short term, in the long run it is self-defeating for one simple reason:  expanding our accurate understanding of reality increases our agency.

When we entertain beliefs that have little or no evidence of being an accurate depiction of reality, we are literally limiting ourselves as though we refuse to believe that there’s a bigger better playground to go to where we can make something happen.