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.

THE FAST APPROACH OF NOW

April 5th, 2022

Yesterday Google released news of the most advanced language model to date.  Readers may remember that a few episodes of Tinkered Thinking were produced in concert with the language model known as GPT-3, an impressive tool that shocked a part of the tech world that was paying attention. But like many new shiny gadgets, the novelty of GPT-3 quickly wore off. It’s limits became apparent very quickly - it couldn’t reason properly, it made some weird mistakes, and soon it was all but forgotten. But progress does not stop.

We have to imagine the inveterate tinkerer - the person who toils away at an idea. They reach breakthroughs like stepping stones. The thing works! Sort of… and so the tinkerer goes back to work until the next breakthrough. Now this thing really works! . . . but it could be better, and so the cycle continues until innovation becomes so commonplace that it becomes an invisible protocol.

Think of email. There was a time not so long ago when email was a pretty radical concept. Instant mail? That doesn’t need to be written and types and folded up and sealed in an envelope and stamped and mailed? Just instant? Of course, today, email is so pervasive it’s become a protocol of life. What was once only a novelty is now so ubiquitous it’s become more of a nuisance. We become inured to novelty at a phenomenal rate.

And now the tinkerer of humanity has reached another milestone with Google’s new language model. This sucker is wild, and it displays it’s shocking coherence in a realm that I thought would take quite a lot longer to capture: humor. The examples that Google posted are excerpts of the language model explaining jokes. The joke is listed, and then the language model responds with a step by step description of how the joke functions. It’s shocking because this thing explains jokes better than I could, and it does this instantaneously. 

It does well to remember that Wilbur Wright told his brother that “Man will not fly for 50 years.” He said this in 1901.

In 1903 Wilbur Wright and his brother achieved flight. So even the world’s expert in potential flight who was trying to make it happen was wildly off when he tried to predict how long it would take to figure out.

Now imagine asking someone random in 1901 how long they thought it would be before man would fly? Someone that had no idea what the Wright brothers were up to. Chances are solid this random person would laugh and say “not in my lifetime!”

Technology today is developing in hundreds and thousands of pockets, all of which are brewing to the ignorance of almost everyone on the planet. How many people know about GPT-3? Let along Google’s latest language model? Perhaps it gets a spot on CNN, but it’s old news before the segment even finishes and rarely does anyone pause to think about the implications.

Tony Seba is long known for his predictions and analysis regarding disruption technologies. How they arise on S-curves, and then combine and piggy-back off one another, joining, like transformers to create something hitherto unimaginable. The iPhone is a great example: an icon + a cell phone + an internet browser. Bingo. Three separate but similar technologies joining together, all of which required similar underlying technologies to develop before, like the harnessing of electricity, the development of wifi, hypertext transfer protocol, mp3 formats….Modern cellphones represent a vast collection of much smaller incremental human inventions.

We generally see only the consumer facing side of technology, but there’s more going on with the peripheries of this growing realm of tech, and we can’t see it yet. We think these things are in the far future, but in some unsettling cases, the future is already here, it just hasn’t been evenly distributed yet.