QUALITY OF QUANTITY

May 31st, 2019

So goes the old saying: Quantity has a quality all its own.

This concept can manifest in a number of different ways.  Whether it be Ulysses S. Grant pushing towards victory with a higher quantity of soldiers, or a photographer who takes millions of pictures, quantity produces certain qualities that cannot be achieved reliably through any other means.

For Grant, the quality of quantity is simply being able to throw more weight on one side of the equation and keep it that way until the Civil War ended in his favor.

The quality of quantity created by the photographer, on the other hand, is more interesting and important.

Take enough pictures and one is bound to come out well.  While this may at first seem like a slap in the face to the art and practice of photography, it is nonetheless correct.  Given a random distribution of results from a varying application of an action, some of these results are bound to be good if not spectacular given a large enough pool of results to sample. 

Write a million words and there’s bound to be a few sentences that sparkle.  But the point here is that

it’s more likely there will be sparkling sentences in a million words as opposed to just a few thousand words.  The quantity that we produce as creators dictates how much imaginative territory we cover and this furthermore dictates how many chances and opportunities we have to come across real gems of creativity.

This is part of the logic behind Tinkered Thinking’s daily episodes.  While it’s silly think that all episodes would be great, it’s reasonable to operate with the assumption that more good episodes will inevitably arise in the process.

While a creator can toil away, trying to raise the quality of less work, the creator who invokes quantity before quality inevitably – with enough time - gets both, whereas the former creator who concentrates solely on quality without understanding the benefit of quantity is not even guaranteed one these two.

This concentration on quantity also helps when starting things.  Part of understanding the benefits of quantity is that much of it is going to be subpar, like sifting for gold, much of the material moved is just useless slag.  Understanding this decreases any pestering notions of perfection and quickly strips away any fantasies about achieving the ideal result right off the bat.  A creator who knows that a great deal of content is going to be produced can simply get to work instead of perseverating over the perfect way to start.

SHAVE THE DOG

May 30th, 2019

All decisions have a cascade of consequences that arise through time.  The so called ‘first-order consequence’ is the initial effect that our decision or action produces.    A second-order consequence is something that arises from this initial effect, or rather the first-order consequence of our actions then cause second-order consequences to occur, regardless of whether such an effect was intentioned by our initial action.

An example helps illuminates this:  biting the donut creates a first-order consequence of pleasure and elevated blood-sugar levels.

The actual experience of pleasure in this instance actually has a small down-regulating effect on the brain that makes a person less sensitive to that pleasure the next time it comes around.  This down-regulatory effect would be a second-order consequence that’s caused by the tasty pleasure of the donut – the tasty pleasure being the first-order consequence. 

Another second-order consequence is an accumulation of fat as a result of blood over-saturated with sugar.

A potential third-order consequence could be a higher likelihood that we will grab a second donut next time because one donut is no longer satisfying because of the down-regulatory effects that occur as the second-order consequence of eating donuts.

Another example highlights the polar nature of consequences even better.

Hangovers.

Anyone who has had too much to drink can grapple this concept in a sickeningly visceral way.

Alcohol provokes a spike of pleasure that is similar to sugar.  Perhaps unlike sugar, however, as more alcohol is consumed, the desire for even more alcohol rises, this is pretty much always a bad idea, and it’s painfully obvious just how bad of an idea it is to act on this increasing desire. 

The more we act in the short term and drink more alcohol, the worse the hangover is going to be in the morning.

The exact opposite is –thankfully- also true:  the more we abstain from alcohol, the less of a hangover we will experience in the morning.

Hangovers are a second-order consequence.  A first-order consequence of having a drink is that we experience a rise in both pleasure and desire.  Not only do we experience the illusion of artificial happiness, but we crave more via more booze.

But here’s the kicker: what’s the famous cure to a hangover? 

The Hair of the Dog.

More alcohol.  Which then reinitiates the entire cascade of consequences.

The hair of the dog is a basic and potent example of how a vicious cycle simultaneously completes it’s first full cycle and begins it’s next. 

While a good hangover can be an effective reminder of just how fast short term benefit flips into a bad situation once that short term benefit passes, it’s imperative to keep the process from replicating.  Like a virus replicating in the blood stream, a bad pattern repeated can become a habit and bad habits pull us away from more fulfilling goals faster and faster.

Best to never even entertain the hair of the dog, and simply endure.  Preferably with a healthy laugh at one’s own dumb decisions.

This episode references Episode 386: White Diamond, which is all about vicious and virtuous cycles, it’s an episode that is centrally important to the topics of Tinkered Thinking, so if you haven’t checked it out yet, queue that one up.

VERY REAL

May 29th, 2019

Given all our different points of view, the perennial argument about how to be objective arises as a kind of paradox: how can we have an unbiased view of any situation and circumstance if we are bound to experience and view reality through a single, unique and isolated perspective? 

Like many big and much talked-about questions: this is potentially just a bad question.  The constraints seem quite obvious and total. 

We have enough trouble trying to understand a single other person’s perspective on the world, let alone trying to view the world without the bent of any perspective what-so-ever.

We might instead think about this topic on a kind of spectrum.  While true objectivity might be impossible, and frankly, it’s a topic that obnoxious enough and large enough that we’ll gladly admit that it’s beyond the scope of this episode, we can ponder something a little closer to home:

that is, times and instances when our own perspective has cracked, and spilled out into new territory.  When someone poses a question that reframes our thinking, or when someone’s story is so moving that we can’t help but empathize and secretly feel that we have somehow lived their story also, just by listening.  Some might say that this is the stuff of great art: to create bridges between our islands of perspective.

We need only think of comedy to call this kind of event into tight focus.  With a good comedian, all the perspectives of everyone in the audience is guided, and slid across the unexpected rails of lateral thinking to new slants on common subjects.  When an entire audience laughs at the same joke, part of the pleasure is the sense of community that everyone instantly recognizes when our own foibles and strange ways of living are put on blatant and humorous display.

Leaving objectivity to it’s own devices, comedy here shows how we can often willingly test the waters outside our own perspective, and much like a moving story we empathize with, we inhabit, or gain a piece of someone else’s perspective.

While we might not be able to be objective, it’s entirely possible that we have the ability to be less subjective.  This might seem like a complimentary paradox to the original sentiment about objectivity, but it’s much akin to the fact that no matter how good we get at something, we can always get a little bit better.

On the flip side, there’s an important red flag that is often willingly raised and waved around in today’s endless babble.

When a person remarks that something is ‘very real’ for them. 

What in name of catshit sandwiches is that supposed to mean?

To claim that something a person experiences is very real seems to invoke a greater, narrower and more intense flavor of subjectivity.

For anything in the experience of a conscious being to be more real than other things such a person might experience is to claim that other things are less real.

Think about this for a moment.  How can anyone have an experience of something that is less real?

Well mr. tinkered thinker, you might say: what the person is actually trying to say is that something that’s very real is simply of greater importance than other things.

But I call bullshit.  Not because this isn’t true, but because there’s great potential for more than meets the eye, or in this case, the ear.

It simply cannot be overestimated to what degree we influence ourselves by the things we say.

While not necessarily provable, it’s certainly safer to assume that everything we say is programming our idea of who we are, and subsequently dictating who we become and how we act.

Case and point: we all hear people who constantly say they can’t do a certain thing.  How often do they go back on their word and give it a big fat consistent effort anyhow?   For such people the idea that they have some kind of ironclad inability is very real.

Now, how can such a negative thing be so important?  That is if we fit it back into the casual idea that very real is really just a hyperbolic way of giving something importance?

There’s only one mechanism through which we can so bizarrely shoot ourselves in the foot:  that mechanism is identity.

Reflect for a moment on the connection between a person’s identity and their behavior.  Which is more likely to dictate the other?

And yet, identities are built and compiled from stuff that’s somewhat fictional: whether it be a nation state, or a sports team, or even if we talk about someone who identifies as a doormat, these are all things invented by the mind, they were not discovered in the same way water on Mars is discovered.  Water on mars is a fact about reality.  Nation states, sports teams, and many other forms of identity are ideas more than they are facts, but they nonetheless guide and dictate our behavior.  Such ideas are very real for the people who behave in accordance to such identities, and yet, we might do well to ask, how real are these ideas in the first place?

In addition to comedians, another profession that takes a slice of the cake here is teaching.

To be shown how to do something by another person is to step out of one’s own perspective and endeavor to look at the world through the eyes of our teacher.  If we succeed, it’s means we’ve learned something.  We can repeat this process forever and constantly crack our perspective and expand it to include the thoughts, ideas and perspectives that others are willing to share.  To do so is, inevitably, a potential assault to our own identity.  Some people certainly jump from one identity to another after being exposed to the ideas that compose such an identity, but this merely swaps one narrow subjectivity for another, and it often requires a dash of denial to keep the common existence of both identities from implying the obvious fact of an even larger perspective that takes into account both.

To move in the direction of objectivity inevitably involves relaxing the constraints of any one identity, because identity is inherently narrow in focus.  Any identity requires this narrow focus in order to maintain a view of the world that will effectively hold together the logic of behavior that cascades from that identity.

It may seem by this argument that the only way to become less narrow is to give up cherished beliefs and ideas, but this is not necessarily the case.  The kernel here to chew on is the act of adding ideas, to genuinely entertain them.  And while old ideas might fall from a list of priorities, we need not let them fall into disuse, any old perspective should forever inform our current one, just as new ideas will tweak and clarify our idea of what is real.

This episode references Episode 100: Yet, a Way out of the Box and Episode 17: The Identity Danger

DESIRABLE FAITH

May 28th, 2019

In a previous episode of Tinkered Thinking, gravity was presented as a good example in order to explore the concept of faith.

Lift an object up and we all have faith that if dropped, the object will hit the floor.  This is an excellent example of faith because it describes our relationship to something that is both: highly reliable and totally unexplainable.

Granted we’ve figured out that there’s a connection between the mass of an object like the earth and the gravitational force that exists around and inside such mass, but we cannot yet explain exactly why and how this actually works. 

This inexplicability of faith is important because it’s often the lingering or missing ingredient when it comes to the goal we might dream of achieving. 

Most often our desires are at total odds with our goals, which, at first seems quite strange.  But we need merely think of the tension we feel between wanting a fit and good looking body and the desire we have to eat a donut that happens to be within arm’s reach.

The goal of getting fit is directly thwarted by the desires that pop up many times during the day.  Regardless of what our fitness has been like in the past, our ability to look forward and forge ahead towards a goal of fitness is dependent on a certain kind of faith in the goal: that it will actually be possible given the right tactics and that we will experience a higher level of satisfaction once that goal is achieved.  That higher level of satisfaction is of course, longer-lasting than the fleeting pleasure of a donut.

This framework applies to many kinds of goals.  Sitting on the couch and vegging out to some dumb show is like that donut when we think about projects that we should be working on instead.  Again, a faith that the project will come to fruition needs to be nurtured, and it’s perhaps this hazy ingredient that we must look for the most in order to defend ourselves from our own desires.

Unlike gravity, however, our notion of reliability is often supplied by an intellectual avenue.  We can look at other people who are fit and simply say that it’s not fair, or we can study their lifestyle, their diet and their exercise in order to come up with a strategy that has the potential to transform our own situation.  That whole process, however, is again an intellectual one, and the notion of reliability is almost completely divorced from the strong emotions that are often responsible for getting us to do things.  It’s intuitive to pick up a donut and eat it because the desire for doing such is a strong emotion.  On the other hand, it’s counter-intuitive to refrain from eating the donut because doing so is literally against our own feelings on the subject.

Upon reflecting, we can realize that having faith that a different life is possible -  a healthier, happier life that is filled with fulfilling accomplishments is a strictly counter-intuitive adventure.

At least in the beginning.  Once we actually get moving in the right direction with the right effort and the right tactics, results –however small- should begin to appear in some way, and it’s these tiny positive outcomes that we should take as signs that our faith in the process has reliability.  We can then slowly build a new intuition that uses these successes as reinforcing guideposts.  In so doing, our desire can slowly morph, and what was once painful becomes pleasurable, and what once held the promise of instant pleasure only reminds us of an old life filled with the perpetual and depressing pall of unrealized goals.

NEW PEOPLE OLD WORK

May 27th, 2019

There’s an important difference to be made between the work we currently do and the people we currently work with. 

If the current work is unsatisfying, one of the important limitations of changing the nature of the work we do is the network we have available.

It may seem that a wholesale change of both is always necessary in order to improve things, making that ‘huge leap’ into a different career path that much more difficult, but the components here can be teased apart in an easier, more virtuous way.

If for example we jump at an easier opportunity, that is doing the same work we’ve been doing, but for different people, we expand our network of people, making it more likely that someone we know has an important connection to a more interesting line of work.

Furthermore the familiar work can be used to demonstrate an ability to deliver.  We are far more likely to give a newbie a chance if they prove reliable in another field.  The things that everyone desires in other people are the same no matter what the work:  being able to deliver quality.  This applies to most all relationships, whether it be a work relationship or family, or even friends: most all our actions boil down to an important and honest judgment of following through on one’s word.  With this quality visibly in place, there’s no piece of paper or resume that will substitute.

And in the quest for more interesting, profitable or fulfilling work, the real task is often finding the people who need such work. 

In short, proving to new people an ability to deliver with old work can potentially lead to new work.