THE SELF-ASSEMBLING NATURE OF SUCCESS

September 10th, 2019

When you start speaking a sentence, do you know exactly how it will end?  Are your words all pre-decided, pre-arranged? 

No, not at all.

We begin to speak due to some kind of emotional urge.  That emotional urge has a kind of conceptual shape, and the words that we assemble seek to trace that shape, but it’s like tracing the lane lines while driving in the fog.

And just as we take a winding road one turn at a time, we place each word after the last in accordance to the emerging shape of that conceptual emotion. 

Notice how no one is afraid to start a sentence, even though almost no one has any clue exactly where and how the sentence will unfold.  Of course we have an ‘idea’.

But what exactly does that mean?

When we say we have an idea of what we’ll say?

That idea is certainly nothing like a script.  It’s that conceptual emotion.

It’s more accurate to say: I have a feeling that I will speak.

That’s about all we can grant the situation.  The moment we actually start describing the idea, or the feeling, we are building in real-time and that conceptual emotion is being converted into words.  And we continue to build by speaking until the feeling is resolved, and we feel a sense of relief.

But examine how elusive this experience is: it cannot be planned.  It simply happens and in some respect we simply listen to what we say. 

The same exact thing happens while writing.  Each piece of writing assembles itself as it moves forward.  The great difference, however, is that while speech vanishes as fast as it is spoken, the written word is stamped onto reality in a way that permits editing.  We can go back, and change, delete or start over.  But on the whole, the same core elusiveness exists as it does with speech.  We only ever have a feeling as to what we will write, just as we speak. 

In the process, of course, we often end up stumbling across things we never dreamed of.

This experience can be scaled-up to larger efforts that we might undertake, and this is where we run into a strange disconnect.

Fear of failure often stops us in our tracks before we even begin work on some dream or goal.  But why does this same fear fail to over come us at the beginning of each and every sentence that we speak?

Surely none of us would claim that each and every sentence we have uttered was a total success.  The history of speech for every individual is undeniably riddled with tons of failure.  Things that weren’t worded well, things we regret saying, things that just didn’t make sense.

But when it comes to that business we think about starting, or that book we want to write, or that adventure that fills our dreams, we hesitate.

Now, question:

Does this hesitation come from fear or from lack of practice trying?

Young children who are developing the ability to speak are constantly confronting false starts and inaccurately constructed sentences.

For example, let’s compare a child pointing at a ball and saying ‘ball’

and a slightly older version of the same child saying ‘I want ball’

and then a fully grown adult saying “Would you mind passing me the ball?’

All three of these utterances can reasonably describe the same conceptual emotion.  But they represent possible iterations that are successively effective.

Fact is, we are so practiced with trying to speak that the possibility of failing to put together a complete sentence does not even phase us, even though it happens from time to time.

Everyone who speaks or writes has ultimately already taught themselves one of the most important lessons that we can import to all other parts of our life:  keep trying and steamroll your own failure until you’ve built that thing you imagine, that business, that app, that movement, that book, that verbal description…

As we trudge into the unknown, we can take heed in the fact that things have a way of emerging and assembling themselves as we make progress.   Just like the sentences we speak.

The key is to start and to keep moving.

This episode references Episode 63: The Etymology of Fear

FAITH

September 9th, 2019

Faith has a hazy cloud of meaning. 

“I have faith in that person.” 

“I have faith in this belief.”

But what is this word?  And what is really meant when it is used?

“I have no faith in myself. . .”

It clearly has something to do with trust and belief.   Perhaps faith is where belief and trust overlap?

But trust and belief are not the same thing.   As it is often said, trust is earned.  Reliability must be proved.  Or at the very least, when it proves otherwise trust becomes broken.

What about belief?

Is belief earned?  Does a belief earn our credulity or does it gain it’s footing in our minds via some other conduit?

Credibility, is the quality that indicates that something can be trusted. .

Credit, to have good credit, to be credible, means that we can be trusted and believed.

A credible source provides information we can trust and therefore believe.

Credit itself is also how we refer to money.

And money is perhaps the best example of fungible trust.  If someone has ‘good credit’ we have reassurance that they will pay their debts.

But money is just a concept.  There is nothing inherently valuable about a piece of paper with a number on it. 

(unless you’re really cold and you have a lighter and desire about 5 seconds of fire.  So as kindling, money might have some inherent value.)

All the value that money realistically has is due to a commonly held belief in this money, which is built on a common trust that has been earned by continuous exercise of this system of money.  We sit down at a restaurant with full confidence – faith -  that the money in our wallet will be accepted because we have tested this hypothesis many many many times.  We have tested this belief so often and for so long that we do not even think to question it.

Much like gravity.

We still don’t know exactly how gravity works.  But all of us have supreme confidence that while we are close to the surface of the earth, things that we let go of will fall.  Gravity is something we trust because it has proved very reliable and credible through constant experimentation.  We do not even question gravity because of how consistently reliable it’s effects are.

If trust is earned through proven reliability.  Where does this leave belief?   Belief merely means ‘held dearly’.  So a belief is primarily and at it’s base, just an idea that we like to hold on to and feel warmly towards.

Is faith reserved for ideas we like that we can’t prove?

Is faith perhaps also reserved for ideas that we don’t want to test because we are frightened of the results we might find?

Could it be that we manufacture a false sense of trust in untested ideas and call it faith?  Merely because the idea is comforting.  This can easily create a false sense of comfort because our ideas are not in line with reality.

“I don’t have any faith in myself. . .”

Really? 

Well you were able to put that sentence together.  Do you have faith in your ability to transmit that idea? 

Faith is unneeded, there’s proof. 

And that tiny success, even if it’s negative, is proof of agency.  Build on that.  Expand on it.  Perhaps it’ll turn into an award-winning tragedy.

it’s important to remember while writing, reading, speaking or listening, that:

The meaning of words change over time. 

S.I. Hayakawa goes so far as to make the argument that words mean something different every single time they are used.

Is the word ‘faith’ useful today, or is it more likely to confuse and obfuscate?  Does it really address issues or does the bloated haziness of faith simply end the conversation by blotting out the question altogether?

Would it be better ascribed to things that we do not understand but have high reliability?  Like gravity?  Like money?  Things that are ‘provable’ in a reliably consistent way but not necessarily understood?  Ideas that we simply can’t help but to believe because they are so reliable?

I don’t know what step I must take next, but I have faith in myself because I’ve figured things out from an uncertain position before.  I’ve tested that situation. 

We all have.  Because once we were all screaming, squabbling, confused babies.

Faith is probably a good starting point.

But making the continuous effort to move from faith to trusted and reliable, durable ideas is far better.

Unfortunately, this is not the common choice of process for most people.

It seems that for many, faith is a label that we retreat to when we have an emotional connection…

to bad ideas.

A LUCILIUS PARABLE: THE PUPPETMASTER'S PAIN

September 8th, 2019

The crisp bread of a grilled cheese hummed with a smothered crackle just as Lucilius slid a spatula under it to flip.  The sandwich slapped down and crackled once more.  The giggle and talk of his two young Godsons rained in from down the hall.  And then the youngest screamed with real pain.  

Lucilius dropped the spatula and ran down the hall towards the suffocating hiccups of alarm that were ratcheting to a second scream of pain.

It was clear the eldest knew his act.

Lucilius scooped up the younger Godson and inspected the boy for any real damage.  He’d been pinched and the marks on his skin still showed perfect dents of fingernails, the blush of blood lighting up his whole arm.  The boy would be ok, but shock would keep him wailing for a while.  Lucilius held the boy and comforted him, sitting down on a couch to hold him closer and rock the boy.

He did not bother to look at the older one, now in a corner.  He didn’t want to split his attention and Lucilius knew, the older boy was building his own prison of torment by just watching, knowing, remembering.

The younger one finally came to his clearer senses, calmed and exhausted.  Lucilius lifted the boy and took him to his room where he quickly fell asleep.

Lucilius returned to the kitchen to find the grilled cheese smoking slightly on the low heat.  The hot side was a black crust.  Lucilius sighed and dumped the mess into a garbage can.  He took the one good sandwich and placed it on a plate.  After cutting it on a diagonal, he took it up and went to the room where the eldest still was.

His godson had retreated into a game on a tablet, still in the corner.  Lucilius sat on the opposite side of the room.  He lifted a triangle of the sandwich, brought it to his mouth and tore off a corner, staring at his Godson the whole time.  The boy glanced quickly at the sound of eating.

“Where’s mine?”  The boy said with blank eyes staring into his game.

“This one was supposed to be for your brother,” Lucilius said.  “Yours is in the trash.”

The boy looked at his Godfather.  Lucilius shrugged.  “It burned while I was with your brother.  You wouldn’t have eaten it anyway.”

The boy looked back to his game, scowling.  Lucilius put the oozing and ruined triangle of sandwich down next to the second untouched half .  He pushed the plate aside.

“Come here,” he announced.

The boy glanced at him.  He no longer tapped the screen, but sighed and slowly put down the tablet, the boy’s eyes rolling wide and white.

He trudged across the room and stood  with shoulders slumped in front of Lucilius.

“Well, what should I do?” Lucilius asked.

“He’ll be fine,” the boy said.

“And what about you?”

The boy’s eyes narrowed, suspicious.  “What do you mean?  I’m fine.”

“Are you?” Lucilius challenged.

The boy shrugged.  “Yea.”

Lucilius fished a marker out of his pocket.  “Give me your hands,” he said.

“Why?”

Lucilius looked at the boy, remembering the fear someone had put in him once many years ago, and that fear now came out in the boy’s face.  He slowly put out his hands.  On the back on one of the boy’s hands Lucilius wrote the boy’s name, and on the other hand he wrote the name of his brother.

The boy was confused, looking at the names.

“Now,” Lucilius said.  “Show me what you did.”

“What?”

Lucilius pointed at the boy’s hand that had his own name.  “That’s you, and that’s your brother,” he said pointing at the other hand. 

“Now, show me what you did.”

With a tentative look, the boy moved the hand with his own name and lightly pinched the back of his other hand.  Lucilius took the pinched hand and inspected it.

“I could see the mark of both fingernails on your brother,” he said, looking up from the pathetic reenactment.

“Fine!” the boy shouted, and he began to pinch his own hand with his brother’s name as hard as he could, instantly wincing at the pain.

“Whoah, whoah,” Lucilius took the boy’s hands in his own, separating them.  The boy was upset.

“It’s ok.”

A tear gathered at the side of the boy’s face as he held his Godfather’s gaze.

“I don’t want you to hurt yourself,” Lucilius said.

“But that’s what happens, every time you hurt someone else.  Every time you lie to someone else, you only deceive yourself.  Every time you lash out at someone, it’s you who is lashed.  Every time you get angry at someone, it’s you who suffers.”

Tears rolled down the boy’s face, and Lucilius pulled the boy into his arms and let the boy cry.  A long minute passed until the boy was settled. 

“You ok?” 

The boy nodded.

“We are all apart of this place kiddo.  No matter how big it seems or how different it looks we are from one another, we’re all here together and we a part of one another.  This space between you and me?  It’s a part of us too.” 

 Lucilius slide the boy next to himself and then reached for the plate with the sandwich.

“The only way we can take care of ourselves is to make sure we take care of each other.”

Lucilius took his mangled half and gave the plate a quick shuffle, sliding the other half to the edge, closer to the boy as Lucilius offered up the plate before him.

SENSIBLE NOISE

September 7th, 2019

Being informed is not the same as being knowledgeable.

Most information is noise.  And most people write off noise as nonsense.

But consider a different kind of noise for a moment:

You are in a quiet park full of trees.  A breeze comes along and the trees produce a noise, a sound of rustling.  It probably sounds enjoyable and relaxing.  Now two questions:

Do you write off that noise as meaningless and nonsensical?

Perhaps it’s meaningless, but it is not nonsensical, for one simple reason:

Do you understand why you are hearing the noise and what creates it?

Of course.  It’s fairly intuitive why a tree makes sound when a breeze sweeps through it.  It’s so intuitive, in fact, that we don’t think about it.  That noise and the reason why it happens is part of our mental model of the world.

Compare that to much of the noise of culture that we write off or purposely ignore because it’s somehow aggravating, or annoying or infuriating.  These emotional reactions are indications that we do not actually understand something that’s going on.  Can we be sure about this?  Well, let’s paint another situation that we’ve all experienced or seen.

You walk into a room and a friend or loved one is alert and looking around. 

“What’s going on?” you ask.

The friend looks at you tensely.  “Sssh,” they hiss at you.  “There’s this sound that keeps happening and it’s driving me crazy.  I’m trying to figure out what it is.”

As an analogy this has a fairly direct and straight forward fidelity to the entire news industry. 

Think about the sorts of questions that pop up when a discussion of news and current events is on the table:

Why do people do this?

Why did that happen?

Why are people so crazy?

I can’t believe this happened. . .

Are such questions not direct invocations of a lack of real understanding about how things work?  The most accessible and curable reason why understanding is so hard to come by has to do with the nature of institutions. 

The short prescription is:

Always be wary of the opinion of those who have a boss.  All of their thinking, opinion and analysis is skewed by their need to stay employed, which inevitably means saying things that will be approved and liked by one’s boss. 

This is perfectly human and understandable when we consider the individual in their situation, but that does not mean that it should be trusted.

Independent thinkers that have arranged their life so that their thoughts and the opinions they express are edited by no one, have the best material to investigate.  This is not a subjective opinion.  It is simply the condition that is most likely to produce clear thinking.  Not only are such people more likely to be honest from a straight forward point of view about what they think, but such people are free from any biases that are imposed via editing from a boss or self-imposed editing derived from their situation via the culture of the institution they work for….

much like the situation a salaried journalist is constrained by.

Case in point: the New York Times and The Wall Street Journal, and all other such establishments can be categorized and labelled on a spectrum of conservative, liberal, progressive and such and so forth.  The fact that, in general, their treatment of topics can be lumped into a category means that all of the information they come across and try to convey is filtered or arranged in accordance to this category.  If this weren’t true than such categorization would be impossible.

These categories are general frameworks for making sense of the noise of what’s going on.  The fact that there is so much discord, confusion, anger, rage and frustration should be taken as an indication that these frameworks don’t work very well.

It’s much like the problem that has befuddled the planet regarding one-god religions.  Which one’s right?  Each side thinks they are right and people have slaughtered each other over this topic since time immemorial.

Like political affiliations, religions too are frameworks for trying to understand reality.  They present a version, and again, if other people outside of this framework who affiliate with other ideas seem crazy to a frustrating and even infuriating degree, that should imply a problem with both the frameworks.

Only a wiser framework that can make sense of both such frameworks can give a person a sense of equanimity, but few seek out such expanded and nuanced understandings due mainly to constraints of time and the culture of an individual’s situation.

All the noise of media, news and the conflicts of the world are somewhat like the rustling of trees to someone with a framework that is nuanced enough to make sense of all of the sound.

This might sound like a hooty-tooty, holier-than-thou position that we feel inclined to call bullshit on, but consider this image:

A gardener plants a young tree.  A small breeze comes by and the leaves rustle.  The gardener understands the noise, and understands that nothing is wrong.  But say the breeze increases, and the sound of the rustling likewise increases.  The gardener gets nervous for the little tree because too much can damage the tree, and this is intuitively obvious because the gardener’s mental model of wind and the fragility of young trees conveys a dynamic understanding of what will happen given a certain threshold of wind.  Does the gardener simply sit placidly, listening to the increasing noise?  No, perhaps the gardener plants a larger tree next to the younger one to protect it.  Or perhaps the gardener wraps the young tree and secures it to the ground with ropes.

Much distinction is made between signal and noise, and Episode 396 attempts to link the two.  The distinction of signal and noise is not one of difference but one of perspective.  To a person who understands a situation, all noise constitutes signal, but not necessarily a signal that requires a course of action. 

We can illicit the link with another image:  Imagine a sailor on an old-school sailing ship.  The ship has hundreds of lines and for someone unaccustomed to the environment, it might seem like a garble of noise as the ship moves and sails.  However, the well-accustomed sailor is listening to everything with a different ear.  All the creaks and strains might sound alarming to the visitor, but to the sailor they constitute the normal, like the rustling of leaves for the gardener.  Because the sailor is so accustomed to each and every little noise, the sailor can quickly pick out when something is wrong because the noise is different, much like the change in rustling when the wind starts picking up and the rustling of a young tree changes to a different pitch.

The sailing ship and the tree form a good analogy in this case because everyone intuits the rustling of the tree, but the sailing ship –for most people- can only be understood from a conceptual standpoint.  And yet the two situations are identical in terms of noise, signal and the response or non-response that people or differing levels of understanding will undertake.

A visitor to a sailing ship that is heeling under a heavy gale will probably get freaked out. 

It’s easy to imagine the smile of an old and salty sailor looking upon the alarm of the passenger. 

Unlike the disgruntled millions of political affiliations, religions and purveyors of news outlets. . .

the sailor smiles because the sailor understands what’s going on.

This episode references Episode 396: Sign & Signal

SO WHAT?

September 6th, 2019

Kids aren’t born with this capacity: the ability to look at something new and in jaded fashion and full of doubt, respond: so, what?

Kids quickly learn this of course, because the attitude and emotional sharpness that it conveys is a method for gaining clout among peers.  Responding with ‘so what?’ conveys that one either has a quickness of mind that can work through all the ramifications on the spot, or that the issue has already been mentally digested at some prior time.

Compare this to a younger child who hasn’t developed this particular variety of conceded pain-in-the-assery.

The youngest children have a sort of lantern consciousness, as Alison Gopnik has termed.  In comparison most people as they get older narrow their focus and become more like a spotlight.  But the child is hoovering up information from all directions in order to get a handle on reality and make a useful model of how it generally works.

The so what? attitude is antithetical to the intake of information.  It may even be one step removed from a bullshit detector.

In theory, both ‘bullshit’ and things we respond to with so what? constitute matters that we’ve deemed useless to be concerned with.  They are a waste of time.

This process is one that we increasingly engage in as childhood recedes from our experience.  Children can find almost anything interesting, but as we get older, we start applying filters and barriers of entry for certain things that we’ve assumed no longer need our attention.  Or rather, we block out things that we have deemed would do us little benefit if we were to grant more attention. 

This is inevitably necessary because time is a finite resource of unknown size and we do not want to squander our short breath of existence.  Not to mention the energy and attention required to fulfill the needs and obligations of just getting on in the world.  Money, food, shelter, family, etc.

So what? is like the chain on the door.  We open the door to see who is there, but hold in reserve this extra measure of security to keep our mind from being suddenly and totally occupied from something that might be a waste of time.

Imagine for a moment the complete opposite, if we had no ability to filter or block things out: if every little thing caught and completely took over your attention.  Presumably there are people who suffer from some kind of condition that sounds like this, and by all accounts it makes getting on in the world quite a bit more difficult.

However, for those who do not suffer from such aimless attention, it would do well to meditate on all the lost goods that potentially slip by our experience by writing things off too early with a quick and summary so what?

The great irony is that most people have not optimized their life around their most important resource: that of time.  Most people have the huge majority of their attention, and certainly the portion of the day when attention is most powerful, devoted to a job.  Often a job of little dynamic value that becomes routine after a short interval.  A person’s neural frameworks grow habituated and soon enough the whole behavior is self-perpetuating.  The reaction of so what? becomes, not a defense against potential bullshit, but a defense of habitual behavior patterns that are entrenched by years of routine. 

To actually be open to knew information constantly poses a threat to this habitual behavior, because if we take in new information, it may quite possibly change our model of the world and subsequently give rise to an important question, namely:

what are you going to do now because of this new information?

This question is a direct threat to routine behavior.

The idiom Set in their ways comes to mind.  There is a certain degree of ossification that occurs with people’s thought patterns and behavior, particularly if an individual has not created a personal directive to seek out destabilizing information -in the name of self-education.

So what? should constitute a phase in an individual’s development – an experiment with ways to filter information.  Unfortunately it too can become part of the ossification that occurs with people’s thought patterns.  So what? can become a default response…

 And in this way,

a person enters a prison of their own construction.