MONKEYS & TYPEWRITERS

April 11th, 2019

In the realm of probability, it’s often been mentioned that if monkeys were left to bang away at typewriters, they would eventually produce the complete works of Shakespeare verbatim.

Indeed, the evolutionarily informed thinker might look at our long biological history and see that’s exactly what happened.

A different thought experiment might sub-out the typewriter for something else.  Say a pencil and paper.

Both the paper-pencil combo and the typewriter are equally capable in producing a reproduction of Shakespeare’s works, and yet there’s an obvious and fundamental difference.

Not only is a typewriter faster, but it’s usage is also far more narrow.  It only produces letters, numbers and punctuation, whereas a pencil and paper can produce an infinitely larger set of graphical combinations.

In this way the pencil-and-paper combo might seem superior, but if we remember our thought experiment about the Monkey’s producing Shakespeare, it’s clear that given the pencil-and-paper, there are far more actions and combinations of actions that the Monkeys could undertake, and therefore in all likelihood it would take far longer for Shakespeare to materialize on the page than if actions were limited to the keys of a typewriter.

The two concepts at play here are Constraints and Speed.  The typewriter has far more constraints, but given the task we are testing for, it is far faster, not just in the production of each iteration but overall, whereas the pencil-and-paper combo lacks constraints and speed. 

The typewriter in this thought experiment may function as an allegory for our habits and discipline.  What we do routinely, within the constraints of habit inevitably aim towards a narrow set of eventual outcomes.  By narrowing the variety of actions we take in these realms there may be a higher set of these actions that actually hit the button – so to speak – regarding our progress towards a goal.  Habits and discipline, if mindfully designed and carried out can have a compounding effect.  Poor habits likewise have a compounding effect that can sink us on a slope that gets steeper and steeper as we go.

But unlike the Monkeys of our thought experiments who are either relegated towards fast and narrow iteration with the typewriter, or slow and open iteration with the pencil-and-paper, we humans get to have our cake and eat it too.

Not only can we initiate and entrench good habits that continually give back to us, but we can make a habit of pausing, to zoom out from our own circumstance to try and look at that circumstance in a larger context where the narrowness of habits dissolve for an important moment. 

From such a standpoint we can imagine forward and wonder if our discipline and habits are aimed in useful directions, and if not, we can creatively change up our habits, like switching tools, in order to hone in on a more interesting future.

This episode references Episode 23: Pause and Episode 54: The Well-Oiled Zoom.

HOURGLASS

April 10th, 2019

More so than all human conventions, the two things that exert a tremendous non-negotiable force upon our lives are gravity and time.

It’s perhaps fitting that one of our first inventions to measure one was done so by harnessing the other: namely gravity is used in the hourglass to measure time.

While the extrapolations of advanced physics seem to indicate that these forces are perhaps pliable in extreme circumstances, either through speed or proximity to mass, as time and gravity relate to the average person here on earth, they are reliable and unapologetic constants.

Beyond any god or creed, faith in gravity and the passage of time is so innate to our experience that we do not even question our relation to such forces through something as counter-intuitive as ‘faith’.

And yet, even advanced physics struggles to provide a satisfying description as to exactly how and why time and gravity function as they do.  These forces are incredibly reliable without giving up their secrets.  Through this puzzling lens, such forces almost sound supernatural, and yet they comprise two of the most fundamental aspects of what is natural.

Regardless of what mechanics reside within these black boxes, it is their reliability and juggernaut consistency that we must keep front and center while negotiating what we do in life.  Time pushes us forward, no matter how much we kick and scream, no matter how paralyzed we feel, no matter how nostalgic we are for the past nor how much we dread the future.

Memory and imagination, no matter how flawed they be are the only weapons we have against this interminable march.

One linking us to times now past and the other a cloud of what might be.

We are essentially force fed with memories of our ability or inability to make the best of the moment.

Best to Pause and use that present moment for an honest assessment about how that present moment is usually used.

Because unlike an hourglass that can be flipped and started over,

there is no flipping life and starting again.

BOTTLENECK

April 9th, 2019

Every individual has a limit to the resources available to them.  The two most notable resources that we near constantly feel the limits of are time, and money.

Our financial resource experiences a bottleneck when we ponder some exotic trip or some new wondrous toy and then simultaneously bills rain down through the mail.

Likewise with time, a bottleneck occurs when a child desires our time, but our work schedule doesn’t permit a chance to join that fieldtrip or see that jazz concert.

This extends to even the richest people on the planet, who are still only granted one lifetime, and no amount of money can be garnered that might redirect the whole world.

On a personal level and on an interpersonal level, our management of resources, whether they be time and money, or each other, experiences a web of bottlenecks.

For the individual, it may be possible to cut costs to free up available income, or design a new income altogether that might free up time while bringing in just as much money or more, allowing for that wondrous toy and time with children, spouses or friends.

We might even be able to see global bottlenecks as being composed of smaller bottlenecks of nation states, and from there we might see the bottlenecks that hinder a nation-state as the bottlenecks that hinder individuals.

And for the individual, we might wonder: where is the bottleneck that keeps a person from changing their life around?

More than money, time is the crucial component in this case.  If the resource of time is completely spoken for, than there is vanishingly little chance that a person will be able to ponder upon the design of their own life.  The racing rat has no time to think about the foundations of the wheel upon which it runs.

The ability to pause and zoom out on one’s own situation requires the time and space to do so.  Many people are so mindlessly inured of their own routine that no stock of their own life is regularly taken. Unexpected and traumatic events are often required to get a person to stop and look at what they’ve been doing and where they’ve been going.  But we need not wait for such unhappy circumstances to slow down and ponder about another way to go about this funny business we call living.

The daily meditator may seem to sacrifice 10 or 20 minutes a day in order to do nothing.  10 or 20 minutes that might seem wasted to another person, but the meditator gains back this time and far more by mindfully being present when others are too wrapped up in the swirl of their own daily drama.

It seems like a step backwards – to give up time in order to make other moments more useful, but it’s akin to the painter stepping back from their work to see how it looks from far away.

We might see another bottleneck cracking in a similarly counter-intuitive way.  Moving to a part-time job may severely hinder the cash flow and seem like a tighter bottleneck, but if that extra time can be spent thinking about other forms of income and other clever ways to drastically cut costs, the freedom of such a schedule also lends to more time with a family.

With the bottlenecks that seem to suffocate our resources, it’s often a tradition or entrenched behavior that keeps at bay the hack that can circumvent the clog on our potential. 

Conversely, there are all sorts of things in our lives that – if bottlenecked – would benefit us tremendously.  The easiest one is bad food.  If there were some sort of systemic bottleneck on the amount of junk food we could get our greasy paws on, there’s not a doubt we would get healthier.

Bottlenecks on social media, entertainment, and screen time in general would no doubt proffer huge benefits also. 

We might even glimpse how the placement of one bottleneck frees up another.  Severely limiting time in front of a television certainly frees up some time that might otherwise be spent on something more productive.

Inevitably, bottlenecks are good for two things: the first is -naturally- pouring a limited amount from a bottle, unlike jars, bottles were designed like this to limit how much we might swig.  This can very easily be a good thing, if this bottleneck were limiting a potentially bad thing in our life, like social media or alcohol- to be as literal as possible.   The second good that comes from bottlenecks is that they form a good handle, that can be gripped and swung, to break and release all the stopped up potential that might help you level-up.

This episode references Episode 42: Level-Up.

PROCESS

April 8th, 2019

This episode is dedicated to Warren, who you can follow on Twitter @thewarrenwelsh

Tinkered Thinking originally sprang out of a curiosity surrounding this question:  is it possible to write about a single topic everyday?  For Tinkered Thinking, that topic is a single sentence, for which every episode takes a different perspective, as though they all exist on a circle with this topic at the center.  Each episode makes this circle larger and adds one more perspective on the topic in the center.

Seth Godin’s blog was most certainly a significant facet of this curiosity.  He has been writing and posting everyday for many years.  After visiting that blog everyday for almost a year, a very good and useful thought popped up.  If he can do it, than most likely, anyone else can too, including you.

Then pops up all sorts of lizard brain objections- as Seth would probably put it – all of which surround, justify and uphold the phrase: but I can’t.

If curiosity or sheer drive can get a person through all such self-generated and self-defeating bullshit, then the actual blank page presents a new terror rife with ammunition for the lizard brain to once again bolster up an argument around it’s holy tenant: but I can’t.

Much of Tinkered Thinking is devoted to this point in the process: those moments that surround the beginning of something.  Simply because, these are the precious and few moments where our lives can actually change.  If these changes are thoughtful enough and mindfully directed, the results can be staggering in the long run.

It’s repeated nearly ad nauseam:  change is possible. And yet there doesn’t seem to be much effective discourse about the tenuous moments when change is being grasped, though the huge literature of self-help is attempting to do this, and Tinkered Thinking makes no claim to be any better, as we’ll explore in a moment.

Tinkered Thinking, in many ways is a search for how change and the moments surrounding such function, and more importantly, it’s a platform dedicated to generating the questions that can spur people in better directions.  As has been mentioned before on Tinkered Thinking, a lack of motivation is almost always the absence of a question one needs to ask.  Either to one’s self or about the topic at hand.  Tinkered Thinking is far less concerned about mapping out a framework for reality in the form of statements, as much as it is hoping to create a whirlpool booby-trapped with questions, that once sprung, propel the mind into more interesting and unexplored directions.

Much curiosity surrounds ‘process’. It’s a casual theory of this platform that anything a particular creator says about their own personal process is most likely incidental and idiosyncratic and probably offers little help for those who wish to emulate such productivity.

As is so often undertaken on Tinkered Thinking, it’s worth taking a closer look at the actual word we are using: Process.  To a disturbing degree we are not using words as straightforwardly as we probably should.  The way we use words often suffers from a double remove from the actual object.  Words as symbols naturally present a first remove.  The writing or utterance of the word boat is not an actual vessel that floats or sinks: it is a sound or a set of graphical marks, as discussed in Episode 250 of Tinkered Thinking entitled Language.  But we add an additional remove.  For example with the word Process, we are failing to stay close to the roots of the word, and instead we are outlining some bizarre space around it, as though we want a formula that will shortcut the whole…process. 

Process comes from Old French proces meaning “a journey; continuation, or development,” which comes directly from the Latin processus meaning “a going forward, an advance, or progress,” from the past participle stem of procedere meaning, again to “go forward”.  Inevitably we can think of the word Proceed. Which literally just means to just start.

Nearly all self-help literature boils down to the slogan for Nike: just do it.

The idea that there is some magic formula to process probably originates from legalese.  The word process also has roots in the 14^th century that refer to legal proceedings where process perhaps describes a course of action of a suit at law. 

These two roots may be in conflict but instead of perseverating over the potentially interesting details of this word history, we can ask a better question:  which aspect of the etymology is more useful for our purposes?

Shall we try to predict some kind of structure and formula for our activity and productive action, and then proceed according to what we think will work for ourselves?

Or should we just proceed anyways?

The gift of process is that once we proceed it constructs itself as needed, like a self-organizing system, it takes what is necessary for the process and discards what hinders it.

We return once more to the Nike slogan: just do it.  Or rather, a more sensitive rephrasing of that slogan in this context would be: just start.

And in the specific context of the word in question, we might be best to just say to ourselves with full capitalization: PROCEED.

As for Tinkered Thinking specifically, there is one additional thought that helped oil the first initial effort: actually doing it is more important than it being good, great or perfect. 

If considerations and obsessions over the final product can be erased, it can free up a bottleneck of energy to produce.

The only other factor is to remain consistent.  Engage with the unknown everyday, figure out how to phone the void, and just keep going.  That’s it, start, and keep going.  That’s process, literally, and etymologically.

As this creator can attest, things begin to emerge that cannot be predicted.  A whole new layer of Tinkered Thinking is going into production that will ship later this year and be available only to supporters of the platform.  So stay tuned as the process evolves.

PS.For those who find issue with how loose the writing is here on Tinkered Thinking, it’s worth it to note that episodes receive very little in the way of editing, aside from spelling and the most obvious grammatical mistakes, episodes remain true to the original meaning of the word Essay. They are attempts, they are merely trying to get down an idea, and here, consistency rightfully trumps accuracy, precision or any notion of fine-tuning.  For the ultra pedantic grammarian, it’s worth knowing that this platform believes grammar, while important, should be taken about as seriously as astrology.  And if that feels like a contradiction, it’s recommended that perhaps you should keep tinkering with your thinking.

This episode references Episode 342: Phoning the Void and Episode 250: Language

A LUCILIUS PARABLE: STEP ONE

April 7th, 2019

Lucilius sat staring at a blank screen, watching the cursor blink on and off, taunting him with a reminder of time passing.  Time unused, wasted and flitted away, as though with a pernicious cackle, escaping his ability to grasp quick that single resource and produce something for the assignment he had at hand.  He shut the computer and stood up just as his phone lit up with a message: did he have time to watch his godson for a while?

He wrote back and then readied to go out. He grabbed his keys and caught a glimpse of his computer.  He paused, hesitated, then grabbed the computer, placing it in a bag as he left.

He arrived as his young godson was waking from a nap and slowly comprehending that Lucilius was here and that his mother had to run some errands.  The boy perked up at the sound of Lucilius’ name and he ran to the godfather.  Lucilius picked up the delighted boy as the boy’s mother kissed her quick goodbyes and left. 

“What shall we do?” Lucilius asked.

“Legos!” the boy exclaimed.

“Alright, then let’s get to it.”

Lucilius let the boy down and followed him as he ran into a play room with scattered toys, toy-boxes and drawings affixed at funny angles low on the wall.  The boy dragged a duffle bag out from a corner and dumped a pile of Legos onto the floor.

“What shall we build?” Lucilius asked.

“I dunno.” the boy said as he picked up pieces and started clicking them together.

Lucilius watched for a few moments as the boy picked up random pieces and added them.  The boy tilted his head, looking at the creation and then exclaimed: Spaceship! He moved it through the air as though through deep space, and then stopped.

“It needs boosters.”

The two scoured the pile for matching pieces that could work as engines and together attached them to the growing starship.  They added a cockpit, and eventually a cargo hold and in no time the spaceship had doubled in size.  Lucilius fiddled with a detail, searching for a tiny matching piece as his godson zoomed the ship through the air.  Then the boy put the legoship down.

“I’m gonna draw now,” the boy decided.

“Ok,” Lucilius said, brushing pieces around, searching for a pair.  He looked up after moment once the boy had his giant pad of paper ready.  The boy went at the page with a colored pencil and Lucilius asked,

“Whatchya drawing?”

“I dunno, just drawing.”

Lucilius watched the boy’s drawing develop, forgetting his search for the small lego.  His godson hunted for a black colored pencil and then started scribbling between the orbs he’d drawn.

“What is it?”  Lucilius asked.

“It’s the planets where the spaceship is headed to explore.”

The two kept on long after the boy’s mother had returned and after dinner Lucilius finally went home.  There he sat on the couch, smiling at the day’s fun and then fished out his computer and flipped it open.  He didn’t notice the blank screen that met him, already he was too focused on the keys he was pressing.