THE ONLY METRIC

May 27th, 2021

Many ingredients are required to create the optimal conditions for good work.  Nutrition, exercise, low stress, and of course, a good night sleep.  A clear and focused mind is the ideal, right?  

What if it’s in fact the other way around?  What if the work has to be good enough to create optimal conditions for that work to be done?  

One of life’s truly great experiences is to be so immersed in some work, some project, some goal or mission that all those presumably necessary ingredients for good work become irrelevant.  Food?  A complete after thought.  Sleep?  A long lost fantasy.  Exercise? Ha, I have better things to do.  When the work is good, and the mission and it’s fruition are imminent, the work becomes our sustenance, if only for a short while.  Such stretches of sprinting are not sustainable, but they can persist for an impressive amount of time.

There is something so counter-intuitive about this phenomenon: it makes the rest of life and it’s offer of pleasures pale in comparison to the chance to…. Work more.  Humans are, for the overwhelming part, predisposed toward idle laziness.  In fact it’s probably accurate to say that all work and productivity is just a short break from our default activity of being lazy and just existing, something social media excels at aiding.  

So what’s the deal with that special type of work where we seem to get high on the challenge?  Such a phenomenon has many names: one’s calling, a passion, one’s mission, etc.  But the ting is we can experience this same frenzy of focus and productivity in multiple disparate domains of life.  The experience seems to be independent of the actual activity.  It’s a meta-mode of our cognition which can arguably take anything and maybe even everything as it’s object of work.

This is the primary insight of the autodidact who revels in the experience of moving from new skill to new skill looking for the common threads of learning and skill acquisition that lace through all human activities.  There is a kind of meta-cognition, a way of thinking that can handle a greater and greater variety of situations and problems more effectively.  This is, in essence, learning how to think, as opposed to learning how to do any one specific thing.  And the only metric for this process and goal of self-teaching is to hunt for that instance when the mind falls into it’s own rhythm of work on a new goal or skill.  The ability to concentrate on something totally foreign with single-minded, undistracted focus is the crown jewel of learning.  Often this happens when we are having fun, especially when playing a new game: we can fall into this state rather fast and the learning likewise occurs with increased speed.  This state, achieving it and being able to revel in it is really the one metric we need when it comes to any complex goal we seek to accomplish.

ENCOURAGING COMPETITORS

May 26th, 2021

What’s a greater signal of strength: attacking your competitors or actually encouraging them?  The default and perhaps natural response is to attack competitors.  They are a threat, are they not?  We all compete for the same resources do we not?  

Our hardwired logic seems to hold this notion of limited resources as an unalterable and golden rule.  Evolutionarily resources were limited and if you couldn’t win the battle you spread to a new location.  Many organisms function on this principle.  

However, there are symbiotic relationships, and this is where cooperation leads to a greater outcome for both parties.  Symbiosis has been around since the dawn of time.  Bees and flowering plants and trees have had a symbiotic relationship since pretty much forever.  At a certain point, one can’t live without the other given a symbiotic relationship.

There appears to be a stark divide: either you cooperate or compete.  But there is perhaps one more perspective that transcends this.  

In groups of tight friends, there is the occasional phenomenon that everyone in the group will be outrageously funny.  When one or two or three people from this tight group is in presence, they have the room in stitches with virtually every single sentence they utter.  Now why is this?  Does such a group of friends function on a kind of symbiosis?  Not really, they can hold their own independently.  So is it competition?  Sort of.  The real answer is that the words cooperation and competition both fail as a construct for labelling the situation.  In this instance competition is encouraged in order to create a better game and outcome for all involved.  This is a kind of symbiotic competition, which is a bit of a contradiction, but it’s a contradiction that works.

It’s similar to hormesis, which is when some kind of stressor - something normally seems as bad - actually makes something better if applied in the correct amount.  Working out, or lifting weights creates a hermetic response.  It stresses the body and in response the body gets stronger.  Something similar is happening in that group of funny friends.  Each joke and laugh is a challenge to the rest of the group to get better.  In the case of those friends, an instance of success is a beneficial threat to the rest of the group to get better.  Success encourages the competition, so why not do that actively and consciously instead of trying to squash the competition?

Any attempt to hold the competition back is ultimately a sign of weakness on the part of the party who sees the competition as a legitimate threat.

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.