VIRTUOUS MISTAKE

April 3rd, 2019

The right mistake can produce a wonderful pressure to do the right thing.

Say for example we have a need to renew a passport or some form of identification.  Booking tickets for a trip suddenly becomes a huge motivation to go to the right offices to sort out the new identification.  This is not the intuitive or ideal order of operations, but the mistake of switching the steps makes the whole process move along much faster.

Saying the wrong thing at a business meeting might be a mistake that gets a person fired, but being freshly unemployed is a fantastic pressure to push someone towards a better circumstance.

Often such an occurrence is referred to as a ‘silver lining’, which is an effort to optimistically see the positive in a situation that is more easily categorized as negative.

But this simplifies the world far too much.  We can consciously initiate actions that may seem like mistakes in order to further benefit ourselves.

In fact, it might be better to blow past the ‘silver-lining’ idea and assume that all mistakes produce good results.  At the very least this will make a person far more likely to take action as opposed to perseverating over some static idea of what should be done or can’t be done.

It’s long been said that there are lessons in failure.  If this is the case than nearly all action outside the realms of violence is progress as long as we have the awareness to capture the fruit of a success and see the lesson in a mistake.

This episode references Episode 352: Order of Operations

ORDER OF OPERATIONS

April 2nd, 2019

The order in which we should do things is incredibly obvious in some cases and nearly invisible in other cases.  For example, putting on a shoe has a fairly straight forward set of ordered operations.  It would be counter-productive to tie the shoe before putting it on.

But the order of operations for solving algebra problems is not so obvious or intuitive.  The discovery of such order certainly must have taken some testing through trial and error.

If we extrapolate an attention to order to much larger operations in life, we can find very important questions that in many cases, don’t even get asked, let alone pondered.

For example, having the ability to reliably pay one’s rent with plenty money left over, would be good to figure out before having a child.  And yet surely there are many people who don’t compare the two and fail to see a relation between the two things. 

The virtue of asking such questions comes from the fact that if operations are well ordered, each achieved operation makes the next operation that much more easy.   Or in the case of tying a shoe, we can see that an operation might be fundamentally necessary in order to achieve the next.  This is certainly true in algebra, and it’s a safer bet to assume that it’s true in all cases.

We can see how an inability to follow or even ponder an order of operations spells failure in many cases.  The inexperienced gentleman who meets a lady with crass and vulgar proposals is near certainly guaranteed to have a short interaction.  But it’s commonplace to realize that such playful proposals exist positively in long established relationships.  In such cases, the order of operations was taken with a bit more of a mindful approach.

Just as we have an order of operations with regards to our social dynamics, our health and wealth does also.

Someone who wishes to bench press 200lbs should forget about such if 80lbs is still a struggle.  In weightlifting, the order of operations is more obvious, akin to tying a shoe, but with wealth, the order may not be as intuitive as we think, nor what is broadcasted.  Often our idea of wealth centers around our ability to display and showcase such wealth, as with a big and expensive house, or a fancy car, or luxurious trips to exotic places.  Such displays of wealth actually eat wealth and thereby make one less wealthy.  This negative feedback loop might not apply to the ultra rich, as there’s clearly an escape velocity for such a thing, but for the vast majority of people, this competition of wealth signaling is a counter-productive strategy.

Meanwhile, someone who is willing to cut all extraneous costs that make up the game of wealth signaling are inevitably going to actually have that wealth instead of owning symbols of a time when one was able to acquire such symbols.

An important metric for sussing out an order to one’s operations is utility.  We can highlight this by asking: is a Ferrari useful?  Perhaps it is useful in altering the opinions of people who see such an item, but this is a poor use of utility as a metric.  The average used Honda Civic is more likely to handle a wider variety or terrain over a longer time line and greater distance with a relative minimum cost of repairs when compared to a supercar which quite literally demands high maintenance. 

The gentleman looking for the fruits of some sort of relationship would do best to start with a comment that merely rises the probability that the conversation will continue.  Such a tweak in strategy increases utility.

And with health, the weightlifter might ask: what can I do today that will initiate reactions in my body that make me more capable tomorrow?  All questions of fitness essentially boil down to such a useful, if difficult to answer question, but thoughtfully answering it in the most narrow way possible allows a person to figure out an order of operations more quickly than someone who already has a set plan that they imagine will work.

The most perplexing aspect of such orders is that many things we undertake can be accomplished with different orders or operations.  The point is not to apply such questions about orders of operation to everything, but to filter everything with a question about order to see if it’s an important aspect to consider before beginning.

This episode references Episode 285: Plan on no Plans.

TRIGGERED

April 1st, 2019

Good songs can quickly gain a sour edge when a relationship dissolves that was associated with the discovery of such a good song.  When once the song functioned like a kind of anthem for good times, the reminder of such good times can evoke a barrage of sadness and perhaps anger.  Music in this case is perhaps the easiest and most ubiquitous example of this phenomenon, but in recent years, more and more people seem to be similarly triggered by far less than the melodies and lyrics of a bygone phase of life.

Single words can trigger people.  While there are classic perennial examples of such words, mostly in the form of slurs, many individuals seem to have adopted a similar reaction to a greater variety of words.

A more approachable example of this exists in the Harry Potter books.  He-who-must-not-be-named is a euphemism for Voldemort, the name which the protagonist has no problem saying, and for good reason.

We alone as a species give words their power.  And because of this, we alone can take that power away.  If a word exists more in the imagination than in practical use, than it’s associations remain static.  It has no chance to evolve because it is not used, and because of this, powerful, rarely spoken words retain their power.  We can see this occurring on the level of society and on the level of the individual.

The only way to dismantle the power of such words is to reclaim them in new contexts. 

The paradox in doing so is that attempting to use such words in new contexts is bound to trigger people who are unaware of the effort.  It’s uncomfortable because strangers have no quick way of deducing the intentions of each other if actions and behavior are counter-intuitively matched to intentions.

Groups of friends, however, will adopt all manner of impolite speech for inside-jokes and bonding in general.  Such groups are exploring taboos in the same way children are always pushing the envelope: in order to find and know the true limits of a given situation.

When it comes to the good song soured, it’s fairly easy to simply listen to it, over and over, until it’s washed of any negative emotion.  In essence, by pulling the trigger on such emotional ammunition, we exhaust our store and in so doing, we reclaim what we’ve lost.

While civility is an endless gift to us against violence, words are not physical violence, and in the case of language, we might be a healthier people if we give our verbal taboos a little light and let linguistic civility slide a little.  By airing out such closeted skeletons, we can diffuse our general triggered nature.

A LUCILIUS PARABLE: ENTROPY SHARPENING

March 31st, 2019

One of the very faintest memories that Lucilius often wondered about -as perhaps a dream- was an image of his two hands, each with a rock, ramming one into the other at careful angles, cracking off flakes.  The finished piece was a crude edge, slowly inspected while a small scatter of rocky shards littered the forest ground.

He thought of this hazy image as he carefully ran a blade along a wet stone block.  He flipped the blade and brought it back towards him.  Slowly, the thin layer of water grew murky as he swept the water back and forth with the blade.  The whole knife used to be much bigger, but over the many years it has dulled and sharpened, by the stone and by the task it lost and found it’s edge, always by losing more and more of itself.

Lucilius could also remember a crude copper knife, and later on, iron.  Every blade he’d made and honed through the centuries had slowly ground down to nothing or snapped.  Each time he honed his skills at the forge, bending bright metal onto itself under great heat, pounding the softened metals, then grinding down edges.

As he sharpened the small blade he now had, he wondered: how many such tools had grown by the hands of man and withered under the same hand to stay sharp.

He flipped the blade and dragged it slowly against the smooth stone. 

His phone rang, but he did not hear it.

He flipped the blade once more.

The TV’s talking head droned on with new alarm, but Lucilius did not hear it.

He only concentrated, keeping the blade at the right angle.

Even the thoughts of past tools he had built and used, melted away as he concentrated more deeply.

He brought the blade to pass once more.

And once more.

And there was nothing in his mind save for the task at hand.

Soon this knife would be used up and gone too, but Lucilius did not think of it.

Both the past and all that might still happen were sheared from his mind.

He only moved the blade across the stone,

merely holding it at the perfect angle.

IN OTHER WORDS

March 30th, 2019

We love sound-bites, quotes, jokes, maxims, axioms and all manner of adage, for they simplify the world for us.  Beyond this, the brief, but thought-provoking phenomenon of such mimetic morsels is a pleasure.  Literally a pleasure.  Such statements do not evoke wise behavior in those who hear such Yoda-like statements.

Even a kid can pick out which of Yoda’s sentences are probably the wisest and most profound.

If this disconnect between recognizing a wise statement and being a wise person weren’t so profound, then there would be far wiser people walking and talking.  Alas, our ubiquitous balking, squawking and bad-faith finger-pointing indicates that we’re far from a more enlightened state as a species.

In other words, recognizing wisdom does not make a  person wise.

This is much like beauty.  We can recognize beauty, something that has been crafted with thoughtfulness and deft skill, but this does not mean that we can immediately do the same thing.

In the case of an artist, aesthetics of this sense is not just a matter of recognition, but a matter of practice.  The artist practices a skill and seeks to recognize beauty in the result.  A beauty that can uniformly be recognized by those who do not practice in the same way.

What practice of a skill does in this case is build a context.  Like the wide life that we experience, an artist’s cannon of work is a generative work that the artist not only creates but also experiences in much the same way a spectator would.  The artist functions in two ways whereas the spectator only functions in one.

With regards to wisdom, it does not take much observation of life to recognize a wise action or statement. Merely living in the world is the only prerequisite for gaining the context for statements that can be phrased more simply in other words.  But to evoke wise behavior within one’s self requires a practice much like the artist who develops a skill.

In other words, it’s not enough to recognize wisdom, one must experience it, and this takes practice.