DON'T MOVE ON

June 20th, 2019

When bad things happen in life, the perennial advice is: move on.

Life goes on, and so must we. 

Or so goes the common belief on such situations.

However, learning, is all about reflection.  Particularly when it comes to mistakes and misfortunes.  ‘Learning’ in this sense is in direct opposition to the common sense prescription to move on.

If anything, learning is all about knowing how to pause and dwell on the recent past in a productive manner.  The word ‘dwell’ often has a very negative connotation in this sense.  To dwell on the past is often referred to as a bad thing, like driving while staring exclusively in the rear-view mirror.

But to charge forward into the future without reflection is equally unwise.

To reflect on the past, particularly when someone has past, is to honor it, to learn from it, and to change the future in accordance to the magnitude of things past.

When someone we care about is gone, it’s a mistake to simply move on. 

And to merely dwell on the loss is equally unwise.

What we can do is to keep such people close in our minds. 

With each relation that we create, whether acquaintance, or long-time friend, we all create a sort of mental model of that person.  In our own mind we create a sort of working copy of how that other person reacts to the world. 

Such a model is bound to be incomplete and inevitably wildly inaccurate, but not so inaccurate that we cannot gain some sort of lasting benefit from the people who have graced our lives.

We can always ask: what would they have done in this situation.

We’re likely to surprise ourselves when an answer comes to mind that never would have occurred had we tried to navigate a problem with just our own opinion in mind.

To simply ‘move on’ is terrible advice.

We must move with the experiences of our friends and family, whether gone by distance or by some irrevocable circumstance of life.  We can carry these people, and their wisdom with us, and no matter how tightly clamped the past may be, we can continually grow from the wisdom of those who have honored us with their presence.

This episode references Episode 32: Rear-View

TASK EN PLACE

June 19th, 2019

In a kitchen, especially a successful restaurant kitchen, there is great emphasis placed on mise en place.  This is French for ‘everything in it’s place’.

The logic behind this kind of practice is obvious.  If you know where something is, then when it comes time to use it, there’s no time wasted trying to find it.  In a place like a kitchen, or a workshop of some kind, this can become so beneficial that it allows for a seamless workflow to emerge that is otherwise impossible.  When we are undistracted by disrupting and wandering tracks of thought like ‘where the hell is the spatula that I need,” our thinking is free to play around with novel and creative ideas that arise while more mundane tasks are efficiently executed through muscle memory.

The philosophy inherent in this kind of organization can be applied to things other than just tools that are arranged within arms reach.

Take for example anything on the perennial or hypothetical to-do list that is causing stress: something that we’ve been slacking on, or putting off just because it comes with a sense of dread.

All of us are subject to this odd form of self-torture and we are all aware of how much better we’d feel if we just get it over and done with.

But, perhaps one neglected aspect of this whole process is what might have happened in the absence of all that perseverating stress we experienced while procrastinating.  Our thoughts were consumed with the dread, the difficulty, the feelings of unwilling and unwanting.  What might have we thought about if there’d been no annoying task to dread and procrastinate on? 

The annoying task that we put off is like a lost spatula for the chef.  What creative idea might have arisen but never had the chance because the chef was busy looking for the lost spatula?

This brings us to a deeper reason why a to-do list, however simple, offers potential benefits that far outstrip the naivety of such simplicity.  The to-do list certainly helps us get things done, but more importantly, it frees up time and attention and emotions for more interesting work that is easily hampered .

Imagine for example someone who is sitting at a computer trying to write the next chapter of their novel, but can’t seem to concentrate because they are worried about their credit card statement.  We all waste innumerable valuable minutes everyday with this sort of inefficient division of attention.

We can wonder: if the writer took a few minutes to simply pay off what was possible in that moment, how much more free would the writer be to concentrate on the more gratifying task of working on their novel?

This isn’t so much having a to-do list, but more about an organization of that to-do list.

Where the chef as mise en place, we can think of task en place.

Is our to-do list in a thoughtful order?

If we leave all of the least desirable tasks till the very end, not only are they more likely to spill over into the next day when we fail to get them done, but anything we might try to do in the mean time is tainted with the dark cloud of such a future task hanging over us.

This episode references Episode 375: Two-Do

FIRST PRINCIPLES - PART II: LANGUAGE

June 18th, 2019

Be sure to check out Part I of First Principles

Language is a tool with many edges, all of them growing dull or sharp, sticky or slick.  It shifts, drifts, morphs and bloats against our will and often fails to change as we might hope and wish.  S.I. Hayakawa went so far as to say that no word ever means the same thing, ever.  And he meant this with regards to every single use of a given word.

This is simultaneously mind-boggling in that it doesn’t make sense but also brilliant because it invokes the inherent uniqueness of every perspective at every given instance.  When two people are looking at the same tree and they both point at the tree and indicate it by saying out loud the word “tree!”, they are not necessarily using the word in the exact same way.  Each person is seeing a slightly different tree because they are viewing the tree from slightly different angles.  Though our circumspection of such a situation is fast to gloss over this detail and garner what productiveness we can extract from the idea that these two people are talking about the same tree, it’s impossible to deny that each person is actually seeing something different.

This infinite malleability of language is both the key to it’s massive utility which has enabled us to build societies, and this malleability is also the core of danger that the use of language presents on a near constant basis.

When words begin to mean other things, it sends ripples of disruption that resonate throughout all levels of our human system.  A substantial rift in the meaning of a word can quite literally put a rift in our system.  This is most easily seen with words that have less concrete definitions.  The number 5 as a word and a concept luckily has very little tendency to mean 8 or 72 or ‘unicorn’.  Whereas the words ‘democrat’ and ‘republican’ refer to such a hazy  and complex set of meanings that it’s unsurprising and quite funny that the parties represented by such words have swapped labels over the years.  We can humorously wonder why exactly this has happened and if it has something to do with a greater similarity than we might first believe, but humorous wonderment aside, if we were to suddenly swap the concept of the number 5 with the number 8, all sorts of systems that rely on the order and quantity that each number represents would break, and financial systems, transportation systems, healthcare systems would all incur catastrophic problems.

In this respect, words and the concepts they represent exist on a kind of spectrum of specificity.  The number and word ‘five’ is far more specific in it’s meaning than the word ‘republican’.

Part I of this topic ended with the question: What does first principles thinking mean when we think about language?

It’s certainly understandable for thinking on this point to lead towards the world of numbers.  Mathematics presents a series of cognitive models that is often extremely useful for dividing the world down into it’s base parts.

But.  Another way to rephrase the question about first principles and language is to take any given message and ask: what is this message actually communicating? With all the emotional, verbal and linguistic fat distilled, what is the core of the message? In essence we must constantly have one particular question form a filter for everything that we hear and read when it comes to words.  That question is:

What does this word really mean?

In a time when we are so eager to speed read and engulf whole sentences as though they were mere words and gloss over things as we skim in order to ‘get to the point’ as fast as possible, we perhaps miss all the individual points that make up language.

For example:

How many people have really reflected on what the word fear means? 

Have you?

And yet this word, and the emotions associated with it often dominate our actions or lack of action in very negative ways.  Is the word fear some sort of fundamental unit of meaning that cannot be further divided?  Or can it be further extrapolated?  And if so, can that be useful?

Episode 63 of Tinkered Thinking quickly unpacks the etymology of the word fear and unearths a deeper meaning that can paradoxically give a person more courage.  This is a strange discovery.  Just as it’s a strange discovery that a silver ring costing $100 could indicate that an artisan is operating at wage of 3.5 Million dollars an hour.

While we cannot stop the flow and expansion of language and it’s individual words, we can prevent ourselves from any risk of being swept away by any dangerous currents. 

It’s only by mindfully investigating the core meanings of words that people are using and noting any new difference that has arisen that we can then intelligently react.

We can think of the meaning of a word like the direction of the wind.  While sailing, if our sails are well trimmed, our boat is in balance with the wind in a way that propels us forward towards our destination.  But the winds never stay constant.  They shift, coming across our sails at different angles.  If we fail to understand the shift that has occurred, then we cannot re-trim our sails in a way that enables us to keep going in the direction we wish.  Even worse, our sails begin to luff, and with enough breeze they will rip and tear, rendering our boat totally incapable of getting anywhere.

Applying a kind of First Principles approach to language is not like having a perfect dictionary definition on hand for every word, but it is truly a practice – one that requires an acute awareness of current changes and their relation to what things used to mean.  Whether a word has remained stable in it’s meaning or not, the core root that we are after in any moment is:

what does this word mean in this instance?

If we can mindfully understand any difference that has arisen in a word’s meaning, we do not lose the previous meaning:

We add in the same way today adds to the history books. 

Often, when we see a shift in a word, we can understand the intentions of a person using such a word on a much deeper level.

The most famous recent example is captured by the phrase: alternative facts.

An understanding of the word fact makes it clear that the person who first used the phrase alternative fact, not only wanted to portray something that is not true, but that such a person also knew that it wasn’t true.

Any fact about a situation is unique.  We can have alternative perspectives on a situation, in the same way that two people looking at a tree have two different angles on the tree and so it therefore looks a little different to each person.  But, the tree is a fact about the situation that arises from the virtuous difference of perspectives that can be further verified by more perspectives.

When someone purposely mixes the meaning of a word like fact with a word like perspective, it’s either a sign of lazy understanding, and perhaps stupidity, or it’s a willful attempt to lead someone to a dangerous and flawed understanding of reality.  It’s the non-numerical equivalent of removing the number 5 from society with the aim of breaking a whole slew of systems that rely on the concept of 5.

Like a surfer who never surfs the same wave twice but somehow learns how to surf waves that are always novel, we must constantly expect that the words upon which we build our understanding are bound to shift.  And with those shifts, the way we communicate and understand things must also shift in accordance to deeper axioms in the same way gravity is a steady constant for the surfer.

The way we phrase and word these deeper axioms is bound to shift, and it’s a particularly insidious danger when someone appropriates the current language of such axioms for other means.  This is bound to happen, and it’s only with a calm and equanimous state of mind that we can be free of any emotional overwhelm that such words might cloud our judgment with and therefore sweep us away as a word changes meaning.  It’s that very emotional resonance that such an insidious actor is counting on in order for their strategy.  While we are distracted by our own emotion, such an actor can maneuver in practical ways that are ultimately counter to the words used.  Without recognizing the insidious shift in the meaning of the words used we are like a surfer who tries to surf a new wave as though it were exactly like the old wave: 

We are bound to fall.

Thinking about first principles and language is to investigate the irreducible core of what is being communicated.

In that respect, it’s

best to pay attention to what’s being said.

This episode references Episode 422: Bloat & Bust, Episode 425: Virtuous Difference, Episode 63: The Etymology of Fear, and of course Episode 428: First Principles – Part I: Ab Initio

This episode was also heavily influenced by both S.I. Hayakawa’s Language in Thought and Action, and George Orwell’s 1984, both of which you can find links to purchase on the Recommended Reading list and below.

FIRST PRINCIPLES - PART I: AB INITIO

June 17th, 2019

The concept, practice and framework of working up from first principles is becoming quite popular.

Although, that is perhaps, a bit too generous.  In fact, it definitely is.  It’s way too generous considering the way we operate.  Let’s redefine a little bit.

The concept of working from first principles is popular.  The popularity of this concept as an actual practice is a whole different story.  It’s akin to the innumerable people who say things like “I’m very rational.”

Now imagine wandering into some sort of fantasy sci-fi novel like The Hitchhiker’s Guide to the Galaxy and looking up the word ‘irrational’, or ‘naïve’ or ‘misguided’ in a dictionary of this universe.  It’s reasonable that you’d find a little cartoon of a human with a word bubble proclaiming “I’m rational’.

Self-serving humor aside, the concept of working from first principles is a very attractive one, because if a person can actually create a framework of thinking that even has a slightly higher fidelity to first principles than other people, success in any endeavor is far more likely. 

The idea of First Principles is lifted from the scientific field of Physics, but originally it gestates from Aristotelean philosophy.

The hope and gist of first principles thinking is that if we can boil down the facts of any situation down to their most essential and indivisible factors we can then reason up from those factors in a way that has a higher fidelity to the facts of reality.

It’s important that these factors cannot be reduced any further.  For example we can imagine for a moment wandering through an open-air market and finding a beautiful silver ring.   Say that the cost of a silver ring might be $100.  But then we weigh the ring to find out exactly how much raw silver is in the ring and compare that to the price of raw silver which is bound to be a tiny fraction of the cost we have initially encountered.  Then by subtracting the cost of raw material from the initial cost, we can see what the artisan charges for their labor, craftsmanship and artistic expression with regards to the finished ring.  We can then further investigate how much time the artisan spent turning the raw silver into the finished product, then divide the profit by the number of hours and find an hourly rate for this silver ring. 

Whereas one person who comes along in the market and finds interest in the ring might think that the $100 price tag is the irreducible factor regarding the ring, another person can employ some version of the logic above and find that the instance of the ring and it’s price tag can be boiled down and distilled into a few more indivisible factors. 

For example, if the price of silver is extremely low, say $1 for the quantity involved, and we somehow come to find out that the artisan has figured out a method to produce 10 rings a second, then $99 for less than a 1/10 of a second of work might seem like a bit of an unfair trade.  To translate this into an hourly rate, the artisan is paying themselves $3,564,000/hour.  This is of course assuming they can sell as many rings as it takes to make in one given hour of work.  Suddenly buying a ring that is so easy to make and which has such a cheap price regarding base materials seems like a huge rip-off.  Only fools and rich love-struck dummies would pay such an outrageous fee. 

And yet…

 $100 for an exceptionally beautiful silver ring in an exotic open-air market doesn’t actually sound half bad.

Hopefully this little example of the silver ring illuminates just how convoluted our thinking can be regarding our “reasoning”.

Reducing situations to first principles is difficult and often requires a lot of thoughtful follow-through on a cognitive level.  When we make a decision based on our emotional reaction to the situation, which is just about how all decisions are made, we are most definitely not employing the concept of first principles thinking.

This Part I about First Principles is merely to serve as a tiny and quick introduction so that Part II can have the right context.  Part II merely hopes to explore the ramifications of a question:  What does first principles thinking mean when we think about language?

A LUCILIUS PARABLE: REFLECT EFFECT

June 16th, 2019

Lucilius was meditating in his garden when a young friend, a pupil of sorts opened the gate and let it swing closed with a two step clack, as the young man tramped up along the garden’s stepping stones to the base of the big oak where Lucilius sat.  None of Lucilius’ friends, nor even acquaintances, nor strangers ever had any issue approaching him and talking to him while he sat in meditation.  This was the fruit of reflection on his part.  For many years early in his meditation practice an odd curiosity had pooled around the whole strangeness of interruptions.  It took years, but slowly he had begun to give into such interruptions, welcoming them, and found that more and more, such instances ceased to be interruptions.  He found that the very notion of an interruption, the word itself, the feelings he had associated with such a phenomenon, all of it, might not even exist.  Whether that was a realization or time in practice had finally enabled him to reach some indefinable point, he found that his practice continued through the interruption.  It was for this very same reason that he often meditated with his eyes open.  Not only was the difference trivial, but much of the time, people merely failed to notice that Lucilius was meditating at all.

The young man heaved in some air and molded it into a particularly aggrieved and frustrated sigh as he took a seat on stone bench near Lucilius.  The conversational bait was plump, but Lucilius knew as well as the boy felt that such a signal was clear enough for them both.  Lucilius merely waited, as the boy’s thoughts and wish to connect bubbled up.

Some anger in memory twisted the boys face a little as he thought, until he blurted “just can’t seem to talk to her.”

Lucilius looked to the troubled boy, pausing.  “You can’t seem to talk to her?”  Lucilius queried.

The boy glanced at Lucilius.  “My mother I mean.  I just can’t talk to her.  No matter what I say, she just seems to hear something else.  She never understands.”

Lucilius reflected further.  “She never understands?”  he asked.

“Well,” the boy said, “maybe that’s a little unfair.  This isn’t the language she grew up with, and of course she understands, I mean, she speaks perfectly, but she can be so sensitive.  It’s like, she’s got it in her head that she’s not good with this language, but she’s as good as anyone else that grew up with it.  But with me, she just seems to find the one little way to totally miss what I’m trying to say.”

Lucilius picked up on something boy said.  “what you’re trying to say?”

“Yea,” the boy said. “She understands everyone else just fine even though she doesn’t think so, but it’s just with me that whatever I’m tying to get across just seems to curve right around her, and never hits home. I end up feeling like there’s something wrong with the way I’m talking, cause we just argue and argue and we get so angry even though I try so hard.”

“You try so hard?”  Lucilius parroted.

It seemed to land hard with the boy, and he looked away, thinking.  “I guess I could try harder,” the boy said, softer now.  “I guess,” he began, pausing to think back.  “I guess, I kind of just do the same thing over and over with her.  And the whole thing repeats.” 

The boy grew quiet, staring off at the grades of green among the plants.  The deep and shaded greens tucked away from the near-white glitter in the garden where the sun touched the bare leaves and petals.  The boy stood up and wandered a few paces away from the oak tree.  He turned Lucilius’ way without meeting his look and said “Thanks,” and then walked away, leaving the garden.

Lucilius continued to sit in meditation, finding no reason arising to arise himself, and so he sat in the garden through the rest of the day and into the evening, until the sky grew darkened and bright with stars.  He slept at the base of the oak and in the morning continued his meditation.  The new sun was just beginning to pick out the high bright points in the garden when the gate clacked again, and the same young man came walking up towards Lucilius.

“I figured something out!” he exclaimed as he neared and took a seat in front of Lucilius, crossing his legs as the boy did when he sought lessons in meditation from Lucilius.

“You figured something out?” Lucilius asked, curious.

“Yea, sort of by chance but what a difference.  My mother and I.  We got into a big argument last night after I went home.  And I got so angry with her.  I just didn’t know what to do, and she was so angry, and then randomly, I didn’t really plan it, I said a bad word.  But I said it in her language – My uncles, they stayed with us once and I learned all the bad words from them, and I’m not really good with her language, I can only say basic things and these bad words of course.  And last night I was so angry with her that I cursed, but in her language, and you know what happened?”

“What happened?” Lucilius said, with a hampered smile.

“She calmed down.  She went from being so angry with me, to just immediately being calm.  She even smiled and I don’t think she even realized it.  She’s never done anything like that while we’re upset and arguing, and I couldn’t believe it.  Obviously, it was just because she was hearing her language, like it was something familiar, and so I tried really hard to say my point in her language, and she helped me through it.  She corrected me, but in a good way, as though she actually really wanted to hear what I was saying instead of just being somehow dead-set against understanding me.  I just couldn’t believe it.  We actually had a really nice discussion, and I learned more of her language. 

But it’s crazy to think, if I’d said those same words, but not in her language, things would have gotten so much worse.  I mean… I was really angry.  But it calmed her down.  Just by hearing her own language.”