A LUCILIUS PARABLE: EXPERIMENTAL KARMA

April 10th, 2022

 

Lucilius bent over coughing, and when the spell had finally passed, he rubbed his bleary and bloodshot eyes. He sat back up, and breathed deeply, exhausted, but determined to make progress. He leaned forward to look into the microscope, and as he did, all went dark.

 

When he finally awoke, it was to a rhythmic and sterile beep. He could feel the restraints before he could see them, binding him to the hospital bed. He didn’t struggle, but simply noticed them. He looked around. It was a private room, and he could recognize some of the best equipment in the world, all gathered to monitor his condition.

 

The door opened, and a familiar face appeared, his advisor in research.

 

“What am I doing here?” Lucilius cried out at him.

 

“You collapsed, Lucilius, your condition is far worse than you lead us to believe, so we had to bring you here.”

 

Lucilius lifted his hands in futility to emphasize the fact that he was in restraints.

 

“Is this really necessary?”

 

The man sighed and closed his eyes as he nodded.

 

“Yes, unfortunately. Your research is too important and we can’t let you jeopardize yourself. We need you to finish the research. What are we supposed to do if your body gives out before you figure it out?”

 

“How am I going to do my research like this!” Lucilius cried out, exasperated.

 

“You have multi-organ failure. We are going to start transplanting as soon as possible.”

 

Lucilius laughed. “And how do you plan to do that? With my blood type? My condition? Multiple organs…” he wheezed. “It’s impossible to match all of that and expect me to survive. You should just let me keep working, this is a waste of time!” He yelled, struggling against the restraints, but he was instantly winded, heaving in his breath.

 

The man came closer to Lucilius. “Rest, Lucilius, we have it figured out. Just rest and soon you’ll be better, and you’ll be able to finish the work.”

 

The man left and Lucilius closed his eyes and calmed himself. His mind scanned the conversation over and over as he breathed.

 

“Figured it out?” Lucilius muttered to himself. “Impossible.. There’s no way… just no way-“

 

A memory fluttered into his mind from not too long ago. A confirmation experiment in another branch of the corporation that he’d heard about. Something he’d figured was impossible, something he figured was misreported - just gossip. Early experiments had apparently achieved organ replication in animals like pigs and monkeys. Lucilius had been disgusted that the company was pursuing such areas, but they also funded his research and provided him with everything he ever wanted.

 

He thought about the possibility of some sedated animal, somewhere in another room - to be carved up for parts so he could live. It wasn’t too much different from a slaughterhouse - and probably better, he glumly figured. The animal probably had a very good life if they were optimizing for organ health, especially with human DNA. Lucilius looked down at his thinly veiled body. He was certain the answer would be simple, despite the complicated ways he had tried to investigate the issue.

 

There was no denying it - he had to know more before they cut him open. At the end of the day he was a researcher and he simply didn’t trust an expertise that wasn’t his own.

 

He looked down at the restraints. Somehow he wasn’t surprised. The company had changed so much over the years, it had become so large, and so powerful. He was at once both not surprised, and unfazed that he didn’t see something like this coming.

He was wondering how he might free himself when the door opened again. There was a gasp before Lucilius could even look over at the door.

 

“No…” he heard.

 

Standing at the door was a woman in a lab coat, holding a tablet, her face was drained of its color.

 

Lucilius smiled, and chuckled. “I should have figured you’d be here.” But the woman did not move, shocked still, and Lucilius grew both puzzled and suspicious about his former student.

 

She fell back against the door and slunk down to the floor, letting the tablet clatter to the floor as she buried her face in her hands.

For the briefest moment Lucilius realized how bizarre it was to be in physical restraints while in the presence of someone he wanted to comfort. He searched for the right words, but she spoke.

 

“You have to forgive me. I didn’t know. I just found out.”

 

“Found out what?” Lucilius asked.

 

The woman looked up. She wiped her face and hauled herself up. She sat on the side of Lucilius’ bed. She taped at her tablet, disabling the room’s camera’s and then set about taking off his restraints. 

 

“I can’t believe they would do this to you. To you, of all people.”

 

And when his hands were free, the two embraced.

“Now tell me, what is going on here?”

“I just found out, I had no idea where they were coming from.”

“Where what was coming from?”

 

“The organs,” she said. “I’m head transplant surgeon for the company.”

 

“Where are they coming from?”

 

“Well, I was lead to believe it they were human cloned organs stabilized in animal substrates. Everyone knows the crazy resources the company dumped into organ generation once it was clear that autonomous driving would wipe out supply..”

 

Lucilius was confused, and now very worried. “Where are they coming from.”

 

The woman’s face crumbled as she bit her lips. “Human clones. They are cloning the whole person.”

 

“What?” Lucilius breathed in disbelief.

 

The woman collapsed into Lucilius. “I had no idea,” she muttered through sobs. “ I had no idea what I was doing, I didn’t know where they are coming from.”

 

“How many?” Lucilius asked.

 

“Thousands. Incredible retention. I should have known,  with such a huge drop in rejections…it was too good to be true. I didn’t understand why the company wasn’t more vocal about it, but now it all makes sense.”

 

“How did you find out?”

 

She shook her head, as if suddenly aware of things happening elsewhere. “It doesn’t matter - someone else’s mistake, I wasn’t supposed to know, but I know where your clone is. And we have to move fast.”

 

With the help of his old student, Lucilius navigated the hospital labyrinth until they were standing before a door and she was sliding her keycard into the lock slot.

 

“I have to get back to cover for us. Stay here with the clone and bar the door from the inside until I get back.”

 

The door opened and Lucilius slipped in before she closed the door behind him. Inside was a capsule the size of a coffin, with a window glowing pink. Lucilius knelt over and peered into the window, and suspended in a glowing gel was his own face and form, intubated with breathing tubes fed into his nostrils and mouth. Wires laced over his head and neck, all collecting data.

 

Lucilius backed away and studied the capsule. A screen displayed vital stats and Lucilius smiled, marveling at the health of this copy of himself. He tapped the screen, and explored its functionality, realizing the capsule could deliver nearly any concoction of drug available. He peered back into the window, looking at himself, and wondered about the engineers who had designed the capsule. Clearly it was built to do more than intended, Lucilius thought. It was at the tap of a button he was sure he could wake the clone.

 

He suddenly choked on a breath and started coughing, doubling over, and falling to his knees. His face grew hot with sweat and when finally it passed, he wiped a forearm against his face, and realized how weak he was. He imagined a struggle at the door. Even if his student returned, she would be overpowered with him.

 

It was only a matter of time, Lucilius realized as he stood back up and looked at his clone in the window. It was then he realized. He squinted, and bent forward for a closer look. The trapezius’ on the clone, the deltoids and the sight of the upper chest. This clone was far healthier, stronger than Lucilius. He was certain his problems stemmed from a genetic cause, not an environmental one. But this clone was different, and seemed no younger.

 

It didn’t matter. Lucilius tapped away at the screen and initiated a delivery of Epinephrine and Zolpidem. Within a moment, the clone’s eyes snapped open, and then its face scrunched as it squinted against the light and began to struggle. Lucilius looked back to the screen and swiped to a different panel, and within a moment of frantic tapping the capsule sounded a loud hiss. A top edge lifted and slid to the side, and as the band of pink light widened, a hand reached out from the gel and grasped a side. The clone sat up and grasped at the tubes in its mouth and nose. Lucilius helped, tilting the clone’s head back as the tubes were pulled free and the clone gasped.

 

After a few long and heavy breaths, the clone looked at Lucilius, and grew sickened and puzzled at the sight.

 

“What the actual —“

 

“Yea, I just found out about you too,” Lucilius said.

 

“But you look horrible,” said the clone. “I didn’t even recognize you for a second.”

 

Lucilius laughed. “Thanks.”

 

The clone looked around, and down at the glowing gel.

 

“Oh, your kidding. I’m a clone aren’t I?”

 

Lucilius nodded, painfully, as the clone peeled off small hardware discs adhered to his temples.

 

The clone sighed letting his head fall back in exasperation. “Uh, that means Cindy probably doesn’t exist. What waste. We were having such a good time.”

 

The clone sighed. “Oh well. So what is going on? And what are you like 9,000 years old?”

 

Lucilius laughed. “Thanks.”

 

“No really, I mean it, you look terrible.”

 

“I’m sick.”

 

“With what?”

 

“I’m not sure, I’ve narrowed it down to about a dozen different regions of the genome - “

 

“Oh, you haven’t figured that out yet?”

 

“Excuse me?” Lucilius said.

 

The clone gave him a skeptical and disbelieving look. “Look at me, clearly I don’t have it. Obviously I figured it out. A long time ago, I might add.”

 

“What do you mean you figured it out?”

 

“I had the same issue, we’re cut from the same cloth, remember? There’s no way a clone would magically develop without the same genetic issue.”

 

“How old do you think you are?” Lucilius asked.

 

“Ninth century.”

 

Lucilius stood up in disbelief, shocked.

 

“Why how long do people usually live?” The clone asked. He looked back at the discs he’d peeled from his temples. “Maybe my time was dilated.”

“Wait, you said you figured it out? My research?”

 

“Yea, we can get you fixed up no problem.”

 

“But,” Lucilius squeezed his forehead. “This doesn’t make any sense, you can’t perform a medical procedure on yourself from within some sort of simulation they have you dreaming. This is impossible.”

“I can’t feed myself either.”

 

“What?” Lucilius stated.

 

“How did I eat? Or get sick, or pop supplements? Those are cold hard physical realities that you can’t dream up, but which are sort of necessary, wouldn’t you agree?”

 

Lucilius was momentarily lost in the strangeness of the situation, conversing with his clone who was still sitting in a bath of suspension fluid.

 

The clone patted the side of the capsule. “I’m willing to bet this thing is pretty capable. We can probably use it to cure you.”

“How?”

 

“I repurposed a virus to splice parts of our genome. It took a lot of work, but whatever super computer runs the simulation for clones has already crunched the numbers and printed the virus at least once before.”

“You actually figured it out?”

 

“Yes, like a bajillion years ago. What were you going to do? Cut me open and use me for replacement parts?”

 

Lucilius was quiet and the clone looked around. “Hm, so reality is an actual dystopia, huh?”

 

The clone chuckled. “Heh, funny. I guess we got our work cut out for us then.”

 

“We?”

 

“Sure, let’s turn this sucker into a paradise. I mean - after we get you fixed up, of course.”

 

Lucilius thought about the hospital, the restraints, his student crying in his arms, wondering if she’d been caught. If there were company guards on their way right now. Any moment the door could burst open. 

 

The clone stretched, flexing, and yawned. Lucilius looked at the chiseled recesses of skin pulled taught around the clone’s muscles. And in his stress, and sickness, Lucilius was overcome with confusion.

 

“How… are you so calm with all this?”

 

“Dude,” the clone said. “I have like 7 centuries of meditation behind me. Waking up in a vat of goo isn’t terribly surprising after a certain point. Either this is a wicked dream or I’m just playing hopscotch across the multiverse.”

WITHOUT ONE ANOTHER

April 9th, 2022

 

Our agency is a function of our connection to other people. We take it for granted all the things we have at our disposal. We complain about the gadget that arrives barely a day after ordering, failing to realize how many people it took to bring the trinket into existence, and then get it before our disapproving eyes. But our successes too are likewise bound to others. Elon Musk did not personally construct the rockets and the cars associated with his companies - it was done by armies of people, employed and directed with good ideas. Civilization itself is nothing more than the network that exists between us. When that network is stable, we call it civilization, and when it lacks stability, we call it war.

 

Think of all the computer programers and software engineers who did not actually build the internet, nor the computers their programs run on. Again, it’s a network with countless layers stitched together.

 

Or contemplate how long it would take a single person to craft a single needle and thread if left on their own in the wilderness. A single needle and thread - something so common, so simple, and yet still a complex product of an incredible effort of industrialization and mechanization of skill and manufacturing.

 

In essence and in practicality, we are nothing without each other.

NO BIG WINS

April 8th, 2022

Visibility controls and warps understanding. For the person who toils away in obscurity for months and years working through each and every little task and problem associated with a goal has all of that in mind when it looks like a big win finally arrives. But the onlooker who only sees the flood of success can interpret it all much differently in the absence of all that backstory. Another person’s “big win” can look like a whole lot of unfair luck.

 

Certainly there is some luck involved. It’s possible to work away for months and years on a project that turns out to be a total and complete dud. I’ve done this, and it can be demoralizing. But it’s also likely got quite a few lessons embedded in the failure from which we can learn. The fruits of hard work need a little luck to really bloom and ripen. But more importantly, hard work expands the surface area where luck might be encountered. It’s still possible to encounter extraordinary amounts of luck without hard work, but it’s just far more rare. Hard work just makes luck a little less rare, but by no means does hard work guarantee luck.

 

The big win that sometimes comes with a big project or goal is a bit of a mirage. It’s like the montage in a movie, where all the training and transformation for the hero happens in the span of 40 seconds with fades and jump cuts, like when Rocky gets in shape to be a fighter. The big win is a mirage because when the backstory is taken into effect, it looks a lot more like a likely event. Truth is, there are only small wins.

 

It’s that first tiny task completed a thousand days before the big win. It’s a little detail that takes an entire day to get just right, it’s the countless hours of research and troubleshooting, of brain storming and iterating, and asking for feedback. Small wins compound if they are linked together in just the right way.

 

And to make that a little more clear, think about it this way: a person who rides their bike for a few hours everyday, leaving home and riding around town and returning home seems to have a far different outcome than someone who doesn’t ride their bike in a loop but rides in the same direction everyday. The first person might be a little more fit after a couple of months, but the second person will have ridden across a continent. It’s entirely possible they both ride the same distance, but one looks like an enormous accomplishment, simply because the direction of the riding was different.

 

The theory of small wins is good news. It means that no project is ever that big nor that daunting. The only thing that we ever face in terms of what actually needs to get done is simply a small task that we can get done to create a small win.

FAMILIAR FASCINATION

April 7th, 2022

 

Familiarity breeds blindness. The same daily walk to the bus stop or the grocery store eventually makes everything invisible. We stride along on autopilot, ignorant to the details because there’s little point paying attention to what we already know. The mind has more important things to occupy itself with: anxieties about the future, regrets and ruminations stemming from the past. The worrisome fact here is that much about our surroundings can change - even drastically - without our notice. This is simply an aspect of how the visual system works in the brain. Despite the fact that it certainly seems like we have a handle of what we see around ourselves, the fact is we are ignoring almost all of it and constantly hallucinating a vaguely accurate periphery. 

 

One of the true gifts that comes with an able manipulation and command of attention is an ability to become fascinated with the familiar. A practice like mindfulness can eventually enable a person to dilate their focus, refine it’s resolution on a subject, a situation, or an experience, and playing around with these toggles can make life gleam with a kind of humble wonder like what we all experienced as kids. Any given moment of life can become fresh and overwhelmingly interesting with the correct variety of attention.

 

It seems a strange wonder that we aren’t all universally obsessed with the mental exercise and ability that controls and augments attention directly. We are indirectly obsessed with it: the entire industries of productivity and time management really just boil down to different systems, hacks and techniques for augmenting attention in a predictable and planned way. Strangely, very few of these hacks, techniques and systems actually address the root issue: how to I control my own attention?

 

Perhaps phrased this way it seems like too big of a topic too abstract, ethereal, and in some realms, even religious. It’s an accurate statement that the majority of Buddhist teaching and text is devoted to this very topic: the what and how of attention.

 

Think about this for a moment: the simple topic of attention. Within this topic exist all other topics. Motivation? Perspective? These are  varieties and instances of particular types of attention. Even an emotion - if we decide to pay attention to it acts more like a lens or a filter for attention. The emotion tints whatever we pay attention to. Anger paints everything with a dark and seething tint of vengeance. And a sense of wonder tints everything with a child like gleam. 

 

What exactly is a drug if not a forced augmentation with regards to attention? Pain medication removes pain from our attention, while alcohol seems to simultaneously expand and blur attention. And of course psychedelics are the ultimate in contortionist-level yoga stretching for the mind. Not convinced, then why is everyone drinking coffee?

 

We cajole and bully our attention, but we don’t pay it much actual attention. Ironic - to an eye-rolling degree. But this is all something like a mindfulness practice boils down to. Serious meditators aren’t seeking nirvana nor relaxation so much as they are just simply trying to pay attention to their current state of attention. Usually this takes the form of a thought, which needs to be recognized for what it is - a simple and routine permutation of consciousness, and once recognized it pops and disappears. Meditators generally try to pay attention to their breath because that’s simply something that’s always happening, and must happen, so it has a certain consistency that thoughts, emotions, and virtually all other objects of consciousness lack. The breath is consistent and fairly straight forward. But so much time spent with an infuriatingly simple task ultimately expands the minds ability to every other aspect of life.

 

With the right pilot in control, attention can be molded to find even the most mundane and familiar aspects of life intensely fascinating. A simple walk through the grocery store can suddenly become an awe inspiring experience of pleasant weirdness and wonder.

THE CURRENT OPTIMIZATION

April 6th, 2022

What does traditional education optimize for? Traditional education has rightly come under a lot of fire and by many metrics education, at least in the West, is falling in quality and yield.

 

For a moment, let’s leave that question hanging, like an ominous cloud over a larger discussion of optimization in general. Good entry points to start thinking about this is to wonder what you are currently optimized for? Or what  systems in your life are being optimized? It’s a very valuable question to ask: am I optimizing for the wrong thing?

 

This kind of question helps protect against the sunk-cost fallacy: when we keep at something even when we should stop and switch gears, like waiting in a grocery line that isn’t moving as fast as the one next to it simply because we’ve invested several dozen seconds standing right where we are. There’s inertia in all things, not just physical things at motion or at rest, but with emotions and patterns of thought. A thought or behavior continually invoked is likely to be invoked again, it’s the law of habit, but good questions like “am I optimizing for the wrong thing?” help break this law for the better.

 

One principle that can be used to guide our focus of optimization is that the perfect is the enemy of the good. Optimizing for a problem that may never arise is a waste of time if we don’t do the work required to actually be awarded with that problem. An decent example is with app development. Optimizing for millions of users before having millions of users might sound very smart, but if it comes at the cost of never actually releasing an MVP (minimum viable product) then all that optimization was pointless.

 

Some things do benefit from thoughts of optimizing for the far future, like: I want to have as few regrets as possible when I’m very old. This sort of optimization - while invoking the far future - has a direct impact on how we respond on a daily basis to opportunities and chances we want to take.  Strangely, it’s optimizing for a very local circumstance: will I regret doing (or not doing) this current thing? 

 

The same sort of interplay can be repackaged and used to evaluate the situation for app development: will I regret optimizing for millions of users if I never even launch this product? Well of course. Or put another way, compare that question to this one: will I regret that I didn’t optimize for millions of users when I have millions of users? Well, maybe, but that’s also a fantastic problem to have - it’s the ultimate confirmation that something of real value has actually been produced.

 

So it turns out that we can have very long range goals that help us optimize for the right thing in any given moment. But it’s important to recognize that there might be correct order. Optimizing for no regrets can lead to a life of whimsy with no solid consistent commitments, and that in turn can become the regret: I should have committed to something and stuck with it! While all the while I was trying to live life without regret! Suddenly, the question of how to optimize for minimal regret gains a troubling amount of nuance: can we regret both paths? The scary truth is that the answer is ‘yes’.  Why? Because we can’t A/B test our life. We can’t see if a life of whimsy might lead to accidental fame and fortune but horrible personal relationships? And we can’t see that a consistent and boring area of focus might lead to a warm, stable, and loving family life.

 

The task of what to optimize for becomes fractal: Optimize for the long term, the mid term, the short term, and now. Answer all of these questions simultaneously, weight the answers, and most importantly: GO!

 

This is far from an easy task, which is what makes life both tragically difficult and quite fun and surprising, because our own personal algorithm for summing that equation is constantly shifting based on new information, opportunities and ideas.

 

Traditional education attempts (rather poorly) to cast a very wide net in terms of topics to be aware of. The focus of education is nouns. These are the things you need to know about and understand. The chief underlying problem with this approach is that life isn’t really a noun, it’s a verb: we live. Which means we need to know how to do things, and everything we do or end up doing can be optimized. A master of a craft is someone who has simply optimized their performance in that craft to an exceptionally high degree. Someone who has never committed very long to anything might not be a master in anything, but they may have optimized for fast initial learning, deriving subtle mental models that allow for quick initial optimization in any field. 

 

Which one does school point more toward? Well, considering grades are always a subtraction from a perfect score, school expects mastery. But it’s not even mastery in doing anything in particular, except perhaps regurgitation. Maybe writing and math translate to active verbs, but for the most part regurgitation goes a lot farther than creative exploration of these acts. School optimizes for knowing the noun as opposed to enacting the verb. What’s fascinating is that kids just don’t optimize well for this particular end. And yet they can concentrate for hours, days on end getting good at a video game. What’s the primary difference? A video game is a verb: you optimize for being able to do a particular thing, which is far more dynamic and challenging than any given topic that is best categorized as a collection of nouns. Math in school is boring, but millions of people spend hours every day playing sudoku. Why? Math classes require regurgitation with slight variation, while sudoku is a game that we can have fun optimizing for.

 

Life is a series of complex and dynamic problems: what best helps us solve these problems? A heap of nouns, or active skills? The answer is obvious, but hopefully it’s also intuitive, and points to potential solutions to help optimize the way we educate our children and ourselves. Will your life be a static topic?  Or is it time to change because the current thing requires a new optimization.