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.”

INFINITE GAMES

August 31st, 2019

An infinite game is an activity or competition that expands in time and in terms of resources required or generated the more that it is played.  These infinite games can be both good and bad.

Addiction is perhaps the most visceral example of a bad infinite game.  This is particularly poignant in the parlance surrounding heroin.  A user is continually seeking the intensity of experience that was experienced the first time, and this is why the dosage steadily goes up and up.

Competing with the Jones’, as Episode 502 examined, is also a bad infinite game because it’s play constantly results in feelings of dissatisfaction.  And this is why the game is played: to displace or temporarily quell feelings of dissatisfaction.

Writing, on the other hand, or any form of creation for that matter, is a positive infinite game because the imagination can always be further mined.  It can always yield more, and the consistent result can be one of satisfaction and fulfillment.

In this case, the reason for continued play is the inverse of the heroin addict.  The creator is always trying to create something better than before, to refine the message, the technique and the effect.

Note also how creators who are popularly recognized for an early work can end up somewhat haunted by this success and can often collapse into inactivity, convinced that they will never be able to top the effect of that first success.  This is somewhat like the heroin user who is chasing that first high.

But the creator who sees their work as a process that is continually growing is immune to this kind of stagnation. 

Both good and bad infinite games are self-reinforcing feedback loops.  Their effect magnifies and compounds as time passes and the game is played.

On a more individual level, habits are feedback loops and can be the basis for an infinite game that we play.  The question is, do these habits and games generate a fulfilling life, or does each iteration, and each move drill our existence farther down into a pit of misery and despair?

An easy litmus test to figure out if an infinite game is positive or negative is to ask: does this activity consume or contribute?

What infinite games are you playing?

PROBLEMS OF MISTAKEN IDENTITY

August 30th, 2019

Are you sure you’ve identified the problem?

Even if we’ve identified a legitimate problem that is part of the situation, it might not be the whole problem, and without uncovering all possible issues, a tangential issue might make the problem we’ve identified pop up again, requiring a solution again. 

This sort of trend is visible everywhere.

Take for instance the perennial challenge of competing with the Jones’.    This is where high-earners see their neighbor get a slightly better car, one more expensive.  So the natural inclination is to out-do the Jones’, the owners of this expensive car and go out and buy an even more expensive car.  Problem solved, right?

Well, as high-earners are often likely to do, given some time, an even better car will eventually appear in the driveway of the Jones’.  Apparently the problem wasn’t solved, but it feels like it can be solved again by shopping around for another pricey model to again out-do the Jones’. 

But this is an unwinnable race because the finish line recedes to infinity.  It’s simply impossible to win because the game expands with each action of play.  This is the worst kind of infinite game because it is being played with finite resources, most notably: time.

Such recurrent problems either require a systematic and automatic solution, or it is evidence of some other root cause is not being addressed.

For example, buying or procuring food is a recurrent problem.  You’ve simply got to eat.  So some amount of work needs to be done to ensure that food can be purchased or harvested.  This, however is not an infinite game in the way that competing with the Jones’ is.  There is a finite amount of food that each person will eat and it’s more than possible to create a system (like a farm) or make enough money to solve that problem completely all the way through to the end of one’s life.

But the problem of competing with the Jones’ cannot be solved in the same way.  In this case it’s a matter of misidentifying the problem, and failing to realize that one’s self is in the sway of a social game that is likely not worth playing. 

Much of social media is based on this exact framework.  Infinite scrolling is a negative infinite game because we are tempted with the lure of something better coming up with the next flick of the thumb.  Of course this never really happens and we are left just wasting time.  The problem isn’t finding something satisfying.  The problem is the act of trying to find something in such a framework.

This is compounded by the all-too-often experience of procrastinating on something important by scrolling through some social media.  The problem might seem like the need to find something interesting, but the problem is misidentified: the real problem is that we have something else we should be doing.

for example: 

If today is the ‘later’ when you said you’d do it,

what should you be doing?