HOLLOW THREAT

May 25th, 2021

There’s a specific little seaside down in the north east of the United State of America that employed a clever strategy during the revolutionary war with Britain.  The British naval fleet was no force to scoff at and it was a critical danger to the United States forces, especially those little sea side town.  But luckily, the scrappy fishermen devised a clever solution when they saw a British frigate on the horizon, approaching from Boston.  When the British frigate got close enough, they saw the local fort and realized that it was heavily harmed with dozens of canons.  From the British point of view, it would be suicide to get any closer, and so they turned and left.  The rather amusing bit of this story is that the fort actually had only a couple of cannons.  The rest were logs the fisherman had painted and mounted to look like canons. 

Just as a threat can be hollow, so too can be an effective defence.  It’s a bluff, like going all in during a poker game in an attempt to psych out your opponent.  Take this image for example.  Let’s say your an entrepreneur of little resources and someone with a bit more resources sues you.  That can be tough, emotionally, and it can potentially end one’s efforts.  But let’s say you don’t back down.  You can manage to hire one lawyer who can navigate the initial proceedings of a courtroom, but in addition to this, you hire (or goad several friends) to pose as additional assistance of the legal team.  They dress up in formal attire, don very somber and serious expressions and show up to court and sit with you and your own lawyer.  Think about the visual this creates.  Your bitter opponent assumes that perhaps they’ve over estimated your resources and realizes that they might be actually be pounding on a cement wall with a de-clawed cat paw.

In chess, the phrasing for this is that a good defence is also a good offence.  Of course it also extends beyond chess.  Often when some unexpected life event throws us on our back foot we think solely in terms of defence and fail to think of that defence in terms of a counter-offence.  By being on the defensive we seem to automatically assume we are somehow weaker or less resourceful than if we were trying to mount an offence, but the difference is merely one of perspective, and shifting perspective while on that back foot to one of an offence is likely far more effective for devising an effective response, even if the threat is a hollow one.

TOO BUSY TO GOSSIP

May 24th, 2021

What sort of person gossips, and why do they do it?  Surely everyone has engaged in a little gossip, even if just once to try it out.  In a perverse sort of way, providing a little gossip feels useful.  It often creates a heightened sense of interest and delight in the person listening.  It bears a mask of entertainment and utility.  The utility being that it can be rather useful to know the secret workings and events of other people’s lives who you are connected to.  This is the most unfortunate communication system that seems to be foundational to politics.  There’s absolutely a larger statement to be made about politics as it stems from these notions surrounding gossip.

To be a successful gossip, there needs to be a constant source of input, of news.  This requires looking out for it, or slyly digging for it.  Here the perspective is all outward and parasitic.  It’s like the lumber industry magnate who gets excited about the discovery of a new old growth forest and sees only dollar signs which the forest can be converted to.  The gossip likewise treats their relationships like resources to be ruthlessly mined.  It’s no surprise that a gossip is often a bit of a social butterfly, having many friends, but also having a large turnover in that pool of relationships.  The lumber or oil magnate is similar.  They look for as many different instances of resource as possible, because when those resources get used, they get used up.  

The plain truth about the gossip is that such people often don’t have anything else going on in their life.  Productive people are often just too busy to engage in gossip.  There are more important things at hand.  The focus is not so much inward as it is focused on the highly personal process of creation.

It says a lot about politics that gossip seems to be such a fundamental part of it’s communication system.  Perhaps the field of politics attracts such people because despite the enormous amount of work that could be done by governments, the norm is to do quite the opposite.

A LUCILIUS PARABLE: OLD REMIX

May 23rd, 2021

The stage lights were obnoxiously bright, making Lucilius squint as he repositioned the microphone hitched to his ear.  The interviewer, and the audience patiently awaited his answer.  He preferred the serenity of his lab, and he was restless to get back to work.  He closed his eyes for just a brief moment and recalled the cool air he enjoyed during his walks outside of the lab, among his giants, and he was curious to hear about the results of the latest experiments his colleagues were running.

“Yes, well, they are the original technology for this problem,” Lucilius said.  “Our planet used to be tremendously hot, and this is arguably one of the biggest factors that contributed to it’s cooling, and I’d argue, along with some prestigious company, it’s also what has plunged the planet into ice ages, which would be a far more manageable problem.”

“You mean trees are a technology?”

“Yes, that’s exactly what I mean.  We don’t need a big boxy machine to suck carbon out of the atmosphere, we already have a machine that takes care of itself, multiplies on it’s own, and sucks carbon out of the air.  Trees.  They just don’t do it fast enough, so my team is tweaking with tree DNA to give them a bit of a boost.”

The interviewer nodded, and Lucilius wondered if his point had even landed.  The interviewer looked down at a pad of paper, and started asking “You and your team entered the prestigious CarbonX Prize.  Your team did not win, nor was your idea even part of the finalists.  Are you disappointed with the result and what do you think this says about the perception of your idea and if people think it’ll work?”

Lucilius resisted the urge to roll his eyes and sighed a little.  “Disappointed for not winning a contest we entered?  Yea, sure, wouldn’t anyone be?  As for what it says, I think it goes back to my point that everyone thinks the solution requires something complex and overly manmade.  There’s this fallacy that surrounds innovation.  It’s like a fog of mystery and magic that people imagine, but when really, innovation is about combining pre-existing parts in new ways.  So when it comes to climate change, and the carbon problem, the default thought of a solution is quite literally a black box.  Some sort of magic machine that will fix the problem.  I don’t think the solution my team is working towards won because it’s not flashy enough, it doesn’t have the optics of mind-bogglingly new technology the way a new Apple product has.  At first glance, our solution just seems old and tired - too common place.  But this is where I argue that the remix or the cover of a song is often far better than the original. Trees as they are currently  exist are adapted to a much different environment, and my team and I believe that we can tweak the programming of a tree to be perfectly adapted to this high-carbon environment.”

The interviewer nodded with false interest and understanding. “And how exactly do you think this is possible?”

Lucilius tilted his head from side to side deciding on the depth of answer he should give.  “Redwoods are the largest natural tree species that we have to work with, but they grow very slowly.  Paulownia or Empress Trees are the fastest growing hardwoods, they ingest carbon at a rate which is an order of magnitude above most other common trees.  But they only get so big.  The initial premise is, what if it were possible to create a hybrid tree that gets as big as a redwood and grows as fast as an Empress Tree?  Because the best place for a tree to store more carbon is up.  Just as cities grew taller with skyscrapers in order to host larger denser populations, carbon rich trees can store multiples of carbon if only they were taller.  After that our thoughts veer toward genetics that enable a tree to stand very arid conditions.  As you know, desert is the fastest growing landscape on the planet, and that is a very big problem.  We need to reverse the process of desertification, but that is a very slow process of succession.  Different species slowly invade at the edges of a desert and these species get replaced by other species which they can host by changing the environment, and eventually you can get an old growth forest.  But that process takes centuries and even millennia.  Whereas the process of desertification can occur in mere years.  So what we need is a tree that can skip as many of the successional stages as possible.  So for that we are also looking at cacti genes.”

The interviewer’s brow was furrowed in more feigned understanding.  “And have you made any progress with these giant trees?  On an island laboratory I believe?  Sounds rather secretive.”

Lucilius nodded.

“I understand you have something to show us?” The interviewer asked.

Lucilius nodded and looked back at the enormous screen which turned on and showed what appeared to be a still image.

“That is a patch of redwoods in California,” Lucilius said.  The framing showed several dozen trees with their full height visible at a distance.  “Two years ago, we planted one of our hybrid trees on the edge of this stand of redwood.  And without anyone noticing, we now have a new world record.” 

Slowly the camera panned to a side revealing a single tree that stood taller than all the rest.  The audience gasped at the enormity of the tree.  Lucilius took a laser pointer from his pocket and cast the red dot up on the screen and made it circle a pixel of orange at the base of the huge tree.

“That’s me,”  Lucilius said.

MUTUALLY EXCLUSIVE PERSPECTIVE

May 22nd, 2021

There is a variety of optical illusions which present two different images simultaneously, but which cannot be perceived simultaneously.  One of these is the drawing of an old woman’s face which is also a drawing of a young woman sitting.  The brain’s ability to comprehend the image flips back and forth between the old woman and the young woman, but it’s not possible to perceive both at the same time.

Another example is a drawing of a duck that slowly spins and suddenly the brain perceives a rabbit’s head.  Again, it’s not possible to see both the duck and the rabbit at the same time.  These are mutually exclusive perspectives that likely have to do with the involuntary activation of different sets of neurons in the visual cortex.

The incompatibility of such perspectives that seem to exist in such close proximity to one another forms a valuable analogy for other kinds of perspectives.  The ability to see opportunity, for example, or rather the inability to see opportunity.  There is, for each and every individual a set of actions perfectly possible within each person’s life circumstance that would drastically improve that person’s life.  Seeing the opportunity of those actions is the real trick, and a tricky one for most.

We are, for the most part, locked into a perspective that is biased against a great deal of these potential actions.  The simplest form of this is the person who fails to see a chance because they are too preoccupied with the idea that they never seem to get a chance.  The real opportunity that actually does arise is often completely invisible to the person who is convinced they never get opportunities.

Our perception and perspective filters reality into a simplified experience that is our life.  What this means is that our experience of life is completely and totally limited by the perspectives we can inhabit and look through.  Our perspective blacks out parts of reality and underscores others.  In some sense it's a bit of a luck of the draw for what combination of underscoring and black out you have.  But, just like the slowly rotating duck can suddenly seem like a rabbit, it’s certainly possible for all that black out and underscoring to snap into opposite functions.  Suddenly all the hidden opportunity is underscored and all the negative considerations get blacked out.  They are mutually exclusive perspectives, because it’s simply not possible to be simultaneously blind to an opportunity and take that chance.

INVOKE THE FOOL

May 21st, 2021

The topic of honor can breed an unhelpful sensitivity.  When a sense of honor over extends and spills into grounds where it’s not exactly useful, it begets a certain seriousness that is limiting.  As a means for protection, it cuts off an ability to take an entire variety of risks and chances because the risk is looking silly, stupid and getting embarrassed.  

This might actually be a sign that honor isn’t the thing at work here.  Perhaps it’s insecurity masquerading as honor, but the more valuable track is to explore the nature of the silly risk.  What actually is at stake when there’s a possibility of looking like a fool?  Even if the embarrassment actually occurs, there’s the further opportunity to demonstrate how one deals with that dreaded circumstance of being at the center of a dark circle of attention.  

How much more impressive is it to witness someone take a chance, embarrass themselves and then continue on, unfazed, and even enlivened by the experience?  This is freedom: to let that which truly does not matter, slide.

At the heart of it this is an ability to prioritize objects of attention.  A depressing and often depressed majority are holding their attention to a kind of fire, concentrating on unhelpful things in unhelpful ways: it’s not letting unimportant things slide.    The person who has taken a chance and looked like a fool but refuses to let their attention be captured by that aspect of the experience is simply choosing to actively pay attention to more worthy objects of attention - usually the present, which no longer contains that past embarrassing event.

The person who can muster this kind of control and freedom opens up a field of opportunity and more avenues to navigate that landscape.  Where others, over concerned with a sense of seriousness about their image in the perception of others, automatically fail to consider paths that might contain the heat of embarrassment.  The wisdom of the fool lies in the ability to travel the shorter rather, less travelled because of all the people on the sides, watching.