OBVIOUS NOVELTY

March 7th, 2019

Retrospect is 20/20, as they say.  Things always seem obvious after the fact.  For example when a friend comes over and casually suggests a solution to a problem we are banging are head on.  Perhaps we’ve been toiling for hours trying to get some gadget to work and a fresh pair of eyes alleviates and leapfrogs all our effort to a simple solution.  Of course it seems obvious after we’ve been shown.   Like the answer to a riddle.

Obvious comes from the latin ‘ob viam’, meaning ‘in the way’.

We might invert the use of the word obvious back to this original meaning and use it as a way to find problems to work on.  We are, all of us, beset constantly all day by annoying problems that are waiting to be solved.  From simple problems like a taking out the trash to find an over flowing dumpster, to the largest that beset our species, like climate change.  All of these problems provide ample field for novelty.  A field where riddles can be fitted with solutions.

Such obvious problems often get sifted into one of two categories: either they are too big for one person to take on, or they are so small that they are trivial and somehow uninteresting.  As Benjamin Franklin once said “so convenient a thing to be a reasonable creature, since it enables one to find or make a reason for every thing one has a mind to do.”  Or in this case, not do.

Whether a problem is interesting enough or not, or whether it is obvious, or if the solution is obvious – all of these are simply perspectives.  Mental configurations that handle and turn over some object of our consciousness.  Holding a problem a certain way in our minds, it can be boring, or simply annoying.  Holding it another way and suddenly the solution seems obvious.  None of these perspectives have anything to do with changes in the real world or changes in the problem.  These perspectives occur solely due to changes within ourselves.

We might wonder the next time we hear ourselves say I don’t feel like it, if perhaps we can think about things a bit differently and in so doing invoke a completely different feeling that suddenly impels us to get to work on the problem at hand.

A lack of motivation about any given thing is really the absence of a better question that we have not yet asked ourselves.

Suddenly we ourselves can be the most obvious problem standing in the way of progress.  Often the solution is to simply get started, and then progress seems to guide itself. 

The solution of just getting started suddenly seems as obvious in retrospect as the problem of not knowing how to start seemed like the big problem in the way of progress in the first place.  

It’s somewhat encouraging to think of the experience of a solution arising with a new perspective and  applying it to the future and wondering just how many novel solutions are staring us in the face right now, just waiting to be seen.

This episode references Episode 234: Chipping the Composite, Episode 323: Control.

FAILURES OF COOPERATION

March 6th, 2019

How many movies and real human dramas have this statement as their core conflict: give me my money.  A funny response - indeed, one likely to provoke anger might be: if it was your money, wouldn’t you have it?

The snap counter-argument here is to substitute money for an actual thing, like say, a guitar, and then it sounds like theft: give me my guitar implies that an actual thing was taken, but this analogical substitution is problematic because money is fungible and a guitar is not.  Which leads to the deeper question of: what exactly is money?

How can a one-hundred dollar bill be worth more than the paper it’s printed on?  We can’t really say that a guitar is worth more than the physical guitar that it actually is?  This illuminates the problematic part of our substitution.

The one exception here is if a person has actually taken physical money from another person and it was against their will at all points in time, like someone grabbing a purse and running with it.  At no point in time did the person with the purse willingly agree to the exchange.

The phrase give me my money - strangely enough - is most often used in other situations, when money was willingly transferred from one person to another and then due to a sour turnout of events, the giving party wants to somehow rewind the whole interaction and level the score, so to speak.

But the initial willingness to hand over money provides our hint to help peer into one of the core meanings within the concept of money.  At first there was a willingness to cooperate, the situation changes and the willingness to cooperate vanishes.  Give me my money is really expressing a regret about willing to cooperate.

Episode 311 of Tinkered Thinking entitled Fake Fortune delves more fully into this idea of cooperation being a core part of money.

Anger, if anything, is one way we emotionally react when we realize that our idea of the world and how it works has been incorrect.  Others might be more prone to be sad as opposed to angry, but the situational mechanism is the same.

We can compare two situations in order to see just how much the notion of cooperation is at the core of these things.

We have Amy and Bob in a romantic relationship and when Bob finds out that Amy has been pursuing a relationship with someone else, Bob gets sad and potentially angry because at base Bob has evidence that shows the world does not work how he thought it did.  Anger and Sadness are indications that our mental models have been flawed.

Or

We have Amy who starts a bakery with Julia, but then several months into the operation Julia runs off with a bunch of Amy’s money which was supposed to be spent on new equipment to help expand the capabilities of the bakery.  Amy gets sad and probably angry and yells into her phone at Julia “give me my money!”

Both of these stories are about cooperation falling apart.  But only in the second one do we have the illusion of a mathematical value that we can ascribe to the cooperation.

Though Bob probably contributed to the romantic relationship in a financial way, an angry response of give me my money is not as fitting as it is with Julia and the bakery.  If we were to try and come up with an equivalent statement, Bob might yell give me back my wasted time and effort!  But this is of course a silly thing to demand. 

What is most important about these situations is how our own perspective entraps us.

Being in a position where we say ‘give me my money’ is a terrible one to be in.  It’s a position that feels entitled but is simultaneously powerless, which is a subtle contradiction and therefore gives rise to pain.  Recognizing the powerless part can help disable the unhelpful sense of entitlement.  We can illuminate this contradiction more easily with a physical example.

Someone who feels entitled to bench press 300lbs cannot do so unless they can actually generate the physical power to get under a 300lb bar and push it up.  Someone who feels entitled to do so but does not actually have the strength to do so is literally going to hurt themselves due to this mistake.

In the examples of cooperation falling apart, this mistake leads instead to an emotional pain, especially when money is involved.  It’s perfectly fair and just to say that Julia does actually owe Amy money because it was not used in the intended way, but this statement does not actually change Amy’s situation unless some higher force can rectify the situation.

What is more helpful for Amy is to realize that she took a chance, she took a risk and decided to cooperate with another person in the hopes that it would generate a result that enriched both of them more than they could do separately.  But as with any chance or risk, we have to keep in mind that we cannot predict the future, and some cooperative situations fall apart due to no obvious or intended fault of the parties involved.

Emotional restitution resides solely in creating a new mental model of the world that takes into account these uncertainties.

And this new mental model, which takes into account people’s very limited ability to predict the future, even their future selves, may help enable us to forgive in a way that helps put to rest our failures of cooperation.

It is perhaps fitting that the word ‘forgive’, arises from an etymology that means to completely give or to give away.

This episode references Episode 311: Fake Fortune

NUDGE

March 5th, 2019

Culturally and psychologically, we operate with an illusion of self-control.  It’s not entirely an illusion but the word or phrase self-control carries none of the nuance and gradation required to be a useful or realistic concept.  We do talk about this gradation from time to time when we observe that someone has a lot of self-control or that we wish we ourselves could muster more self-control.  This is a somewhat healthier use of the concept but it does not fully address what is occurring without total self-control.  We are constantly negotiating our affect on reality as a tug of war between what self-control we can muster and all the other forces that take the wheel in the relative absence of our own personal control.

The majority of these forces are counter to our conscious wishes and in many cases seem to be undoing the actions we undertake when we are exhibiting agency with self-control.  The simplest example of this is mindlessly eating some dessert knowing that we will go to the gym in the morning.  Many people poorly rationalize that one cancels out the other, but regardless of equivalence, these behaviors are ultimately in opposition of one another. One is solely undertaken for immediate short-term pleasure and the other is often undertaken with a vision of the future that for many is only a sort of fantasy.  Even though it is possible, few people achieve full transformations, and it’s for a simple reason:

We cannot access a visceral emotional experience of the what this transformation will be like

Whereas

The emotional and pleasurable experience of short term decisions are accessed as soon as they’re undertaken.

The first requires a heavy consistent conceptual understanding of possibilities.  One must constantly remind one’s self of the goal which feels unrealistic – for the plain and obvious reason that there’ never been a real experience of such a state.  Essentially it requires a kind of faith in a process that we do not yet feel will work.  Whereas most of our detrimental acts require the absence of this kind of thinking.  Basic urges take over and form a kind of autopilot for self-destruction.

These polar states can feel as extreme as some epic battle between good and evil, where victory can only be achieved with some massive and unrealistic mental effort of total domination over our less beneficial selves.

This, however, is not necessarily the truth:  we can slowly nudge our way to victory.  In fact this is the only way that we can make substantial long-term changes.  We cannot wake up the next morning with a total different program of behavior.  But we can slowly form and nurture habits that will put us on a new autopilot aimed at a better life. 

That consistent mental effort is still needed, at least in the beginning while a habit is forming, but once the brain has reorganized its own physical structures to reflect this habit, the new behavior begins to gain it’s own momentum, carrying us along with less and less mindful effort in order for such a thing to be carried out. 

Meditation is a good example:  Aside from any potentially positive reaction to merely sitting in a quiet calm place for a few minutes due to its novelty, the first handful of sessions has a negligible effect on who we are, how we feel and how we operate.  Brain scans show that it takes at least three to four months before changes in brain structure occur due to the practice.  This is a somewhat steep entry fee.  We must put in a lot of time with little to show for our efforts.  This is in accord with our idiotic cultural definition of insanity: doing something over and over and expecting a different result.  But this is exactly what happens given behaviors that are geared towards long-term benefit:  For quite a while it seems like nothing is happening, but eventually, such new habitual behavior begins to yield results. In such cases doing the same thing over and over does produce a different result.

Physical exercise and nutrition is an easier and more visible example.  We do not wake up on day 2 of our new efforts with a new body and mind.  We have to nurture a kind of fantasy about a possible future and keep toiling away in the faith that such a fantasy will eventually materialize.

Such faithful efforts are better viewed as gently nudging our personalities and bodies in new directions. 

We generally expect drastic changes to have drastic results, but when a drastic day of novel exercise and healthy eating does not produce a corresponding drastic result, it’s easy to lose faith.

But if we think of nudging our selves towards a new life with consistent little nudges of new behavior, consistency is the most important part of this recipe.

Just as water can slowly shape and sculpt stone, we too can move the monoliths or our more stubborn selves by nudging it in new directions.

This episode references Episode 323: Control and Episode 78: Infernal Parking Meter

CONTROL

March 4th, 2019

It’s often observed and suggested that we cannot control others, only ourselves.  As a comparison, this makes relative sense, but this notion is highly problematic and inevitably: misleading.  Indeed we cannot imagine and implement some kind of dictatorial program for another person and have them follow it to the letter: though it ought to be noted that the hierarchy of labour in the workforce does a fairly incredible job at piercing this idea that other people cannot be controlled.  The incessant and accurate behavior of millions to wake up at specified times and arrive at work locations relatively on time and then perform particular integrated tasks for the majority of the day would seem to indicate otherwise.  Much of this activity is also done while inhibiting natural drives, for more sleep, for food, and curiosity for more interesting uses of time.  But this is only one problem with the adage that we cannot control others.  The larger problem with this notion of control is that we can control ourselves as fully as the word implies.   

Not a single human is unfamiliar with the experience of acting in a way that is counter-productive to our own benefit.  Whether this is shirking responsibilities, or mindlessly grabbing a tub of ice cream or failing to listen to someone we truly care about, all of us can only maintain a degree of control over what we do and how we do it.  Arguments about free will aside, there are straight-forward examples in experience that illuminate this point.  Staying up late to watch just one more episode for example, leaves us groggy and less able to perform the next day, and there are limits to what it seems we can control. 

The very prevalence of statements that start with I wish I hadn’t or I don’t feel like it, point directly at this lack of control, not to mention any kind of general dissatisfaction or disappointment when looking in the mirror or at a financial statement or thinking about one’s past accomplishments – or lack thereof.

Control clearly exists on a spectrum.  Some can maintain an almost robotic drive and productivity, while others wile away decades of life without ever really doing anything.  It’s incredibly short sighted and unrealistic to simply slap such people with a label of lazy and call it a day.  Surely the causes here are more intricate than such snap judgments imply. 

For example, the neuroendocrinologist Robert Sapolsky has written in depth about how the chronic stress of a life in poverty heavily influences people on the level of brain chemistry to make decisions based on short-term outcomes as opposed to long-term benefit.

A blunt and ultimately inaccurate way of translating this finding into a real world image would be like forcing a top CEO of a major company to take shots of vodka perpetually through the day.  Would it really be confusing if the company started to suffer from decisions being made at the top while under the influence?  This seems like a no brainer.  We have strict laws against what a person is allowed to do while under such influence, and yet the poor are often criticized for their bad decisions.  Meanwhile such bad decisions compound and add to the sort of stress that makes such bad decisions more likely.  The neuro-chemical influences here are far less obvious than a CEO who is knocking back alcohol at an alarming rate, and so, without the visibility, such people are often labeled as lazy.  We might wonder what label would be more understanding when confronted with a more intricate picture of what is going on.

Regardless of problems of category or empathy, what is overwhelmingly obvious is that control is far more elusive in practice than it is straight-forward in definition.

Long lasting changes are not likely to happen all of a sudden in the manner we might imagine some kind of miraculous religious conversion occurring.  Though, such a kind of miracle is very appealing and tempting: perhaps particularly so for those whose mode of short-term thinking is already geared towards quick results.  We might wonder –controversially- about a connection between poverty and religious belief, one of which broadcasts a salvation from the stress of the other?  Regardless of the sanctity of any particular belief, we might simply wonder about the statistical probability:  is a religious person more likely to be financially well-off and totally unaccustomed to financial stress, or is such a person more likely to have had encounters with such chronic financial stress?  We might further wonder about such institutions that urge their constituents to contribute in a way that adds financial burden thereby potentially increasing the emotional need for such religious beliefs, as opposed to looking for funding solely from sources that risk no such financial stress.  This starts to sound very much like a system with an insidious and invisible feedback loop.

Shall we blame the piston head for going down if it is perpetually being pushed into a sparkplug that ignites fuel in an iron cage?

Control is less about some imagined ability of ironclad will that we can call up within ourselves like a magical genie.

Control is about a sum of influences and their interaction with circumstance and situation.  A tub of ice cream sitting in the fridge makes it infinitely more likely that we will consume and regret huge dollops of sugar than if there were simply no ice cream in the house at all.  The mere presence of the temptation in our circumstance is exhibiting some kind of control.  If not on our actions in this moment, certainly on our thoughts, which is all an influence needs in order to have some degree of control.

We are better off to think about our selves, not as a free and independent agents that move through reality, but more as a sum of circumstantial influences.  The crucial point in this second image is that we can alter our circumstance, even if it’s just tiny portions of this circumstance, these changes will further have an affect on us and if that affect lands well, it may enable us to have the ability to make further changes in our circumstance that further have increasing effect on who we are. 

This is the incredibly difficult, counter-intuitive and rare task of cutting a feedback loop and feeding it into a new direction and better direction.

Two images can help to illustrate this concept in practical ways.

We can imagine the smoker who consciously decides to stop smoking by responding to the urge to smoke with a different behavior.  Instead of tapping out a cigarette, the smoker goes for a run.  This is incredibly difficult, literally counter-intuitive in the sense that it’s counter to our feelings on the subject, and it’s rare to pull this off because engaging the executive function like this with a high enough consistency for the habit to change is not an obvious process that we can feel our way through.  We literally can’t feel our way through this process because our feelings are geared towards the prior behavior.  We have to think our way through it and consciously decide that our feelings on the matter are incorrect and should not have as much influence on the situation. 

The second image is the person in a state of chronic poverty who decides to start meditating.  The stress of not being able to pay bills is ever present and the general feelings that arise are going to be in the vicinity of restlessness and agitation.  Such a person is likely to look at meditation as a waste of time that could be used to some benefit, however, this is a short-term mode of thinking that is driven by scarcity.  A thoughtful consideration of the situation might lead a poor person to realize that one of the contributing factors is the experience of stress itself.  Regardless of the causes, meditation, if maintained with enough consistency can become a partial antidote to the stress caused by poverty.  This reduction in the neural-chemical expression of stress opens up the brain to a slightly better ability to make good decisions.  These good decisions can slowly begin to improve the innately stressful situation in tiny ways that ideally compound and add up.  Again, like the smoker, this is counter-intuitive because the stressed person is not likely to think that meditation is a good use of time since it has no obvious and direct correlation with the causes of stress.

Both situations sever a feedback loop and introduce the influence of a seemingly unrelated factor.  With enough consistency, or enough nudges in these better directions, a virtuous cycle can being to form where before there was a vicious cycle. 

A LUCILIUS PARABLE: GOT THIS

March 3rd, 2019

Lucilius was sitting at a bar reading, when he was joined by one of the very best of friends.

“Sorry I’m late.”

“No sweat,” Lucilius said and smiled, turning to his friend.  The two embraced and sat for an evening together.

“So how goes it with the new job?”  Lucilius asked.

“Putting in extra hours everyday.”

“They pay you for that?”

“Nah, they can barely pay me regularly right now, but we’re working on something interesting that I think we’ll work.  I could make more somewhere else like at my last job, but I think this could work out more in the long-term.”

“That’s exciting.  Wine or what do you feel like?  Cocktail?”

Lucilius’ friend looked around at the bar.

“What do you recommend?”

When the barman came around to take their order, Lucilus inquired: “Can you make a Last word with a heavy dash of Absinthe and grapefruit, easy on the Maraschino?”

The barman nodded.  “Sure, sounds tasty.”

The two friends caught up while they waited and when the drinks arrived they both fell silent, tasting in communion. 

“Nice,” Lucilius’ friend commented.  Lucilius smiled and as they tasted again in silence, they overhead as two ladies paid up their bill next to them.

“Ok, so you’ll owe me 12.67 for next time, ok?”

“Sure, yea, sorry about that.”

Lucilius and company tried to take in the situation discretely.  The barman wore a strained expression as he processed the payment for the young lady and when the women had left he looked at the two guys and shrugged his shoulders.

Lucilius’ friend turned back and said, “reminds me: I know exactly the moment when I knew we would be good friends.”

“What was that?” Lucilius asked.

“One of the first times we hung out we went to a convenience store and when we were at the cashier, I pulled out my wallet and you just waved your hand and said ‘I got this’.”

“Really?  That’s interesting.”

“Yea, everyone around here keeps such weird tallies like those girls and it drives me nuts.”

Lucilius shrugged, “eh I never really thought about it.  What goes around comes around, I guess.”

“Ha, yea, I wonder what that girl’s got coming her way.”

“Apparently 12.67”

The two laughed and moved on to more interesting topics, talking late into the night.  As they were wrapping up, Lucilius’ friend excused himself to the bathroom and Lucilius took the chance to get the barman’s attention.

“You mind if I get the bill for the both of us?”

“Too slow McFly, your buddy already got it.”

Lucilius smiled. 

“Son of a bitch.”