THE NOVELTY OF NUANCE

September 5th, 2019

This sentence, and even each word in this sentence presents two radically different things depending on who you are.

If you have never visited nor heard of Tinkered Thinking, then this constitutes a complete novelty in your experience of the world and the media that we fill it with. 

However, if you know of Tinkered Thinking and you are coming back for more, than this episode, this post, this very sentence functions as a nuance of your experience with this platform.  This episode is a subtle shift and addition to all the other hundreds of concepts explored and developed.

Regardless of which camp you fall into, you might get bored and wander off to some other source of stimulation.  But if you are intrigued, you might delve in a littler further, stay in wonderland, and let me show you how deep this rabbit hole goes.

The tension between nuance and novelty pops up everywhere.  We get bored with jobs, with chores, even hobbies that we’ve maybe gained great proficiency in.  As Esther Perel explores, our compulsive search for novelty plagues the health of romantic relationships.  She has a fantastic question that encapsulates the issue:

“Can we want what we already have?”

However, such a question extends far beyond romantic relationships.  We can apply this question to the material life of consumerism, and even to our own selves, and the very thoughts that we have.

The default assumption is that there is something better out there.  Someone better to date, some item that we can buy, some state of mind that we can arrive at, if only all the other factors have been toggled just right to make us happy.

Of course, this sort of process constitutes a Bad Infinite Game, as explored in Episode 503.  These hop-the-fence-for-greener-pasture games can be played forever with no end, making them less than ideal, as opposed to Good Infinite Games that can continually grant us hard-earned satisfaction. 

As Marcel Proust once wrote: “The real voyage of discovery consists, not in seeking new landscapes, but in having new eyes.”

This means looking at the same thing, but with a slightly different perspective.  And how exactly can we change the way we see something?  This sounds like a question that could yield an untold number of answers, but let’s make it even more literal.  Let’s say you are looking at something through camera that is fixed in one place.  You can’t move the camera, but you can work it’s controls.   What could you do to make the image different?  We could sharpen the focus, brining it into a slightly higher resolution.  But there’s something even more drastic that we can do:

We can zoom in.

Zooming in blows the subject up, exaggerating everything, and allows us to study and learn the details. This zoomed-in state constitutes the ‘new eyes’ that Marcel is talking about.

Zooming-in is what experts do.

Angela Duckworth, the author of the book Grit offers a simple but deceptive description of how experts become experts, she writes “substituting nuance for novelty is what experts do, and that is why they are never bored.”

But Angela, along with Esther make once crucial oversight.  Both intuit and maybe consciously understand this oversight, but neither come out and say it explicitly:

That is…

Nuance is novel.

The caveat to this statement is that not all novelty is nuance.  Much of novelty is just hopping the fence for a different and presumably brighter shade of green as opposed to staying where you are, getting on your hands and knees and investigating the beauty of a single blade of grass.

The inability to delve into the novelty of nuance is the absence of a certain class of question that zooms our focus into the details of a subject.

New details that emerge due to a higher resolution of the subject is the novelty of nuance.  Such details were unknown, and effectively nonexistent while zoomed out. 

Zooming in makes the same thing new again.

Similarly, we can examine the situation when we merely lack motivation.  A lack of motivation is ultimately due to the absence of a question a person hasn’t asked themselves.  This question is almost always a variant of ‘what am I going to do about this?’

What is really going on in this  context?

and

What is possible in this context?

The inability to take advantage of nuance in this way is the inability to zoom into a subject, and ultimately, this inability stems from the lack of a good question that we have not yet asked ourselves.

Questions themselves often require this same exercise of nuance in order to be effectively activated.

For example, there’s the perennially useless question: what are you going to do with your life?

Perhaps a valid question, but it doesn’t really spur anyone to do anything.  It’s too big.  What’s needed is a nuanced version.

Let’s zoom in and effectively chop off a lot of the picture.

We can rephrase and ask: What are you going to do about your health?

This is a subset of the question: What are you going to do with your life?  It’s more nuanced and because of that higher resolution, it gets us closer to a space where an actionable plan can pop up in our imagination.

We can zoom in even further and ask: What are you going to do about your nutrition? or What are you going to do about the issue of exercise?

These are both further subsets which are further zoomed in and both begin to approach the high-resolution and granularity needed for a sensible plan to emerge in the imagination.

What the novelty of nuance teaches us is that we often fail to ask a better question about what’s in front of us and since no ready answer or plan or action emerges in response to large vague questions –or even no question at all -

we simply assume we want something different.

This episode references Episode 503: Infinite Games and Episode 54: The Well-Oiled Zoom

This episode was also greatly influenced by the work of Angela Duckworth, and Esther Perel whose books you can purchase through the links below.

IN QUESTION

September 4th, 2019

We know what it means when something is out of the Question.  Episode 478 examined that.  But what about the flip.

What does it mean when something is in question?

The most common place where we run across this phrase is in detective movies, when a suspect is in question.

According to the googles, the phrase in question is to indicate that something is being considered, discussed or in doubt.

Notice the lack of conclusion and certainty in this definition.  Consideration, discussion and doubt are all open-ended concepts. 

The definition of the word ‘question’ developed by Tinkered Thinking is very similar:

A question is an open-ended concept that creates forward momentum.

It is an exploration tool.  Discussion, consideration and doubt are also tools of exploration.  We use these to suss out possibilities in order to narrow in on some sort of truth or specific detail of reality.

If we bring in some other Tinkered developments about question, we can remember that simple shorthand for thinking about the concept of a question a little differently: just lop off the last three letters, what do you get?

quest.

That open-ended concept is a mental quest to gain some sort of treasure through a process of adventure and exploration through the unknown.

For something to be in question, is inevitably much like seeing a warning sign lit up on a door that says “session in progress”

Something dynamic and important is going on.  Some new territory is being explored.

Whether it be the rote-human training that has arisen from the industrial revolution or if it’s simply a fear of chaos, or some amalgam of the two, many people fear the kind of uncertainty, doubt and open-endedness that is at the core of adventure and the only tool we really have to navigate life: the question.

The question becomes: is your life planned to the ‘T’ out of fear, or do you constantly keep your own existence in question?

This episode extends Episode 478: Out of the Question and Episode 30: The Only Tool

TURN A BLIND EYE

September 3rd, 2019

This idiom arose when Haratio Nelson -who was blind in one eye- willfully pretended to look through a telescope with his blind eye to look for a signal from his superior.  The act itself is somewhat ridiculous unless it’s to underscore to those around him that ‘yes, he knows what he’s supposed to do, but that’s still not what he’s going to do.’

He was later promoted due to this irresponsibility and disregard of authority.  And this origin, if we take the story at face value, communicates a wonderfully inverted message:

Don’t blindly follow someone else when you have a better idea.

Nelson invoked his blindness as an excuse to follow a better path that only he could see.

This brings us to an even more nuanced point:  Nelson recognized an opportunity.  He saw something that his superior could not.

Recognition generates responsibility. 

Or rather, recognizing what’s going on generates an ability to respond.

Deconstructing this further, we can parse the word recognize.

It means -quite literally- to have cognizance about a phenomenon.. again.

Cognizance means simply awareness or knowledge, and the initial time we make sense of something, we can say that we have cognizance of it.  But to recognize something means that we are in familiar territory because we have seen something very similar before and understand it almost instantly through the blessing of memory and the time spent figuring out what was going on the first time when we were gaining cognizance. 

Nelson clearly recognized a combination of circumstantial factors during his sea battle that he had the ability to respond to.

Again, recognition generates responsibility.

Strangely enough, the idiom ‘turn a blind eye’ actually means quite the opposite in common speech today.

We turn a blind eye when we see something we should respond to, but don’t want to for fear of involvement.

It’s the opposite of the origin story.

While turning a blind eye today is more inline with a timid person who simply doesn’t want to get involved, what it originally meant was to follow your own vision of things.  To be a bit of a black sheep.  To go against the grain of authority in order to succeed and make things better.

What it really means is turn a blind eye to stupidity, mediocrity and the direction of cowards. 

It means go your own way, because you see a better way.

This episode references Episode 101: Responsibility

THE ENDLESS ARBITRAGE OF LANGUAGE

September 2nd, 2019

Arbitrage is the simultaneous buying and selling of securities, currency, or commodities in different markets or in derivative forms in order to take advantage of differing prices for the same asset.

So one smart neighborhood kid finds an unknown place where she can buy a special kind of marble for $1 and then she turns around and sells it to the other neighborhood kids for $5.  That’s arbitrage.

Now, the concept of ‘meaning’ and ‘worth’ are strangely similar.  If something means a lot to you, it’s identical to saying that it’s worth a lot to you.  Worth has more to do with the value that transcends the individual.  A dollar is worth a dollar to everyone.  But the sentimental value of individual items means something to only the individual.  A special rock picked up during a hike with a loved one might mean a lot to one person, but to someone without that sentimental experience, the rock means nothing.

What’s it worth to you?

Is the core question of arbitrage.

Now let’s rub away an illusion and reveal an invisible bridge.

What does the letter ‘M’ mean?

Well it doesn’t have any functional meaning on it’s own.  Sure, if we trace back through the history of the graphical mark, we can maybe say that M means ‘water’, at least if we are talking about Egyptian Hieroglyphics.  But absolutely no one means water when they use the letter M today.

Aside from letters that don’t also double as single-letter words (like the letter ‘a’ in ‘that’s’ a dog’), M, and all other letters mean nothing.

But combine them in ways that conform to a higher system of semantics -that of language- and suddenly these meaningless units wake up and radiate complex concepts.

As an aside, we might say the same thing about neurons in the brain.  Alone, a neuron doesn’t really mean anything.  In fact, a neuron quite literally doesn’t function without input from other neurons.  The functioning of a neuron is based solely on the presence and activity of other neurons around it. 

We need only replace the word ‘neuron’ to see how true this is, examine:

The functioning of a letter is based solely on the presence and activity of letters around it.

This interconnectedness is where the endless arbitrage of language arises.

Alone letters mean nothing and for the most part they are worthless.

This suddenly flips when we rearrange and combine letters in order to represent a novel idea.  Like the ideas in this episode.  The mere idea when you hear or read the words the endless arbitrage of language is an invocation of value instantly popping into existence through language creation.

If you meditate on that last sentence and let it roll around in your mind, you might begin to see that it has a recursive nature. It simultaneously identifies the process that occurs by virtue of it’s existence. It’s the language version of Descartes’ “I think therefore I am”.  But in the case of language it’d be something like “I combine therefore I mean something.”

The important caveat would be that it’s a sensical combination.  A random hodgepodge of letters doesn’t necessarily mean anything.

The arbitrage of language is the core of what is offered up by a blank page.

For artists, writers, and creators of all types, the blank page can be a haunting and masochistic tease because the endless abyss that a blank page communicates is a symmetrical indication of the infinite value that can be mined from it.

The moment a blank page ceases to be blank is the moment when we invoke the endless arbitrage of language.

This episode references Episode 93: The Generator

A LUCILIUS PARABLE: TRASH

September 1st, 2019

The brakes squealed as Lucilius brought the stinking truck to another stop.  He was working alone today, so the run was taking much longer. He stepped down from the cab and walked back to the hopper – a giant iron mouth of garbage.

He slapped a couple joysticks, toggling them and initiating a packing cycle.  A hydraulic whine rang out as an steel tongue lifted from the mouth’s bed, lapping garbage slowly back into the container’s throat.

A clatter of garage rustled to life and Lucilius looked to see a portly man hastily dressed in a bathrobe squat below the rising door and waddle out with a couple garbage bins in tow.  One of the man’s slippers slipped off as he hurried down the driveway and the man cursed.  He stopped hastily right in front of Lucilius, out of breath, and watched the hopper’s packing cycle come to an end, the clean silver hydraulic arms shrinking back into their dirty sheaths. 

The man looked at Lucilius.

“Just you today?”

“Yep,” Lucilius said.

“Usually there’s two of you.  One hanging off the back here.”

“Just me today,” Lucilius said.

“Well thank god.  You’re later than usual, and I would have missed you otherwise.”

Lucilius didn’t respond.  He just took one of the man’s garbage cans and emptied it into the hopper’s empty maw.  The man watched everything spill out.

“Why do I have all this shit?  I never wanted any of this.”  The man looked back at his suburban house.  “I mean I love my kids and all, but when I’m home I feel like I’m just swimming in junk . . .  This shit,” the man said flicking his hands in the direction of the hopper.

“My friend,” Lucilius said, “What fortune has made yours is not your own.”

The man’s face furrowed at the sentiment.  “What?”

“You are possessed by fortune.  Everyone thinks it’s the other way around.

And no matter how much you throw away…

more is coming for you.”