ARTIST OF INCENTIVE

March 6th, 2021

Stated priorities rarely match behaviour.  If pressed, we’ll each assemble a very admirable list of things in life that are most important - but that list of priorities is in almost every case, is a fantasy, an ideal that is like a beautiful theory but does not work in practice.  And why?  Why is it that the most important things to us (or so we say) often neglected? Why don’t we spend more time with loved ones?  Why don’t we make more of an effort?  Why don’t we explore that dream?  Why aren’t we healthier, happier, and more fulfilled?

Making a list of priorities is an excellent way of distilling one’s own personal navigation system, and getting reacquainted with what true north is given our own internal compass.  True north, in the case of priorities is, the set of things we can pay attention to that likely leads to our most fulfilling life.

If pressed to explain the discrepancy between our list of priorities and what actually happens, the catchall excuse is not having enough time.  But note how much easier it is to say “I don’t have the time to hang out,” than it is to say “You are not a priority.”

Not having time makes it seem as though something else is in control of our time.  The phrasing is a way of displacing blame to somewhere else, but at the end of the day we are each solely responsible for how we spend out time, regardless of obligations.  Such obligations are often things we’ve chosen to take on as obligations, things we continue to choose as obligations.

Under all of this misaligned behavior resides the subtle and often overlooked issue of incentives.  Wherever there is a behavior, we can be sure there is an incentive, and incentives are clear, present and pressing - they are the reason we do most everything.  We say health is a priority but we are under the spell of a much stronger incentive to open the freezer and take out that tub of ice cream.  Where exactly is the ‘priority’ of health during those repeated moments, occurring far too often during the month, the week, and even the day?

Consider for a moment this thought experiment: let’s change the incentive structure around that tub of ice cream.  The incentive is clear: it tastes good, and the food comma it often provides is pleasant.  But let’s say that for every scoop of ice cream we eat, 100 dollars is automatically transferred from our bank account to an organization we find utterly despicable.  How much ice cream would get eaten?  

Probably very little.  And yet, now, with this strange and unlikely system, the behavior of eating or not eating ice cream is suddenly in line with the priority of health, simply because the incentive structure around the behavior has changed.  It’s an inconvenient fact of reality that priorities do not create incentives.  Priorities are too conceptual, too abstract.  Without some additional thought about incentives to bolster behavior around such priorities, they remain just good ideas.

Incentives on the other hand are far more real.  They manifest as desire and fear - they inspire the core ingredient for human behavior: they generate emotion.  Consumption of sugar begets a desire for more sugar, it form a kind of self-reinforcing incentive, which benefited us for many thousands of years before the advent of sugar now refined in industrial quantities.  Our incentive  was in line with our priority of health because we needed the energy during our time as hunter gatherers.  But now the hardwired incentive is misaligned with our long term goals, and the new challenge is become an engineer and artist of incentive, consciously and thoughtfully designing a life that incentivizes the right things - those priorities.

ANACHRONISTIC EMOTIONS

March 5th, 2021

Most emotions are bad reflexes.  They are rapid-fire suppositional programs for instant behavior.  Behavior that often satisfies some kind of short term threat or desire, but undermines long term cooperation and peace.

This seems strange.  Wouldn’t the evolutionary process hone the utility of emotions to ensure they are fine tuned to our needs and our survival?

Certainly, it’s without a doubt that emotions have been shaped by this process, but what’s important to note is whether or not our current situation resembles the situation in which those emotions were honed.  For the vast majority of time during which our bodies and minds were being shaped under evolutionary pressures we existed within small groups of hunter gatherers - hardly the situation we have today with billions squabbling and squaring on social media platforms.

Robin Dunbar is a British anthropologist who first found a correlation between primate brain size and the average social group size.  His research further gave rise to a proposed number known as “Dunbar’s number” which is the upper limit on the number of individuals that can exist within a stable, cohesive social group.  That number is proposed to be somewhere between 100 and 250.  Now we can certainly be aware of more than 250 people, but our ability to have inter-personal relationships with a number of people larger than 250 just isn’t possible for the vast majority of humans.

Dunbar’s research examines the mean group size of humans before the rise of modern civilization, and as one would expect, human groups have been around Dunbar’s number or far lower for most of the time modern humans have existed.  This means that our emotional hardware is not evolutionarily honed for social media and cities and population numbers that don’t even really register in the conceptual mind.  Our Palaeolithic minds and bodies are essentially living in an alien situation.  What worked for small groups of humans doesn’t seem to work terribly well for massive populations.

But, at least on an individual level, we can edit these default reactions.  Instead of acting upon every emotion that pops up in response to life, we can take the arguably unnatural action of simply not reacting and thereby allow some time for the emotion to subside in order to mindfully take stock of what the best course of action might actually be.

We might even go so far as to note that things like hiking and camping or simply being in the natural world are so conducive to good feelings because our feelings are calibrated for such circumstances.  But it goes beyond this.  The natural world often demands a robust ability to be present and vigilant.  As difficult as this can ordinarily be, in the natural world, it comes more naturally.  Something atavistic arises in the human psyche, and awareness feels far more in tune with surroundings.  This need for presence and our rapid-fire emotional behavior makes sense.  The quintessential example of a predator attacking, or a rival tribe attacking demands the ability to rouse highly motivated behaviour through emotions at a moment’s notice.  Compare this to present day life: many jobs do not require a high degree of presence and we are pressed more and more to think in terms of the future as opposed to reacting to the present.

Where the past calibrated us for the here and now, the present and the future presses us more and more to plan for a further future.

REINCARNATION

March 4th, 2021

Traditionally reincarnation is an unproved religious belief that something eternal within a person gets transferred after death to a new body and so goes on to live another life. While the jury is out with no evidence on this specific idea, we do experience one form of reincarnation - an inverted form, best captured by a question:

When a person changes their mind, do they become a different person?

The answer is not so straightforward. Certainly such a person remains in the same body, and in that physical way they are certainly the same person, but is a person defined more by the fact that they have a body and exist nowhere other than that body, or by the mind that exists as the conscious operating system of that body?

Getting a haircut is technically an alteration of one’s body. Does this mean that someone is a different person after a haircut? The question seems superficial only because the answer seems as though it’s a ‘no’, but technically speaking, the person is different, albeit just a little bit.

If someone changes their opinion of mayonnaise, do they become a different person? No not really, but technically, yes, a little bit.

These quaint examples bring up the issue of degree. How much needs to change in order to claim that someone is different? People undergo religious conversions, or lose religion all together, escape cults, painfully sever ties with family, and most importantly, learn vastly more than they once knew years ago. It’s likely that most people can look back at a younger self and feel as though they’ve grown and changed since that time. So where are the break points? Perhaps the shifts are slow or perhaps they can be clearly demarcated by specific points and events, but the more important point is that it happens at all. And all the while, the body persists.

The religious version of reincarnation has it backwards. During life we have the potential to reincarnate and live many lives, if only we nurture the ability to change our mind. A new idea can intoxicate and command a mind, and in so doing, a person can become quite different. Certainly much of the mind persists with the body but both can transform radically. Just as the overweight person can transform into a body builder, the violent religious fundamentalist can become a kind and loving person. This is not to say that it’s likely but only to examine that it is possible.

However, even with a radical transformation of the body, this sort of thing also requires a transformation of the mind. It’s a fair argument to say that the mind of an overweight person is different before and after the decision to commit to a very different way of living. The radical change of the body, in this case, is merely a reflection of a radically different mind.

We speak of mental breakdowns and depressions, hitting rock bottom and looking for a way out, but what if these are more like signs of the life cycle of the mind’s current state? All such mental experiences yearn for some kind of change. For things to get better, to make sense in a new way - some improvement is sought after. Suicide is the most extreme expression of a desire for such a change. The logic is brutally straightforward. A person wants something different, and at core what’s needed is a different state of mind, or a new mind altogether. Often people circling such a dark exit try to escape through all manner of intoxication. Of course it’s not the world such people are trying to escape, but themselves, and not their body so much as it’s their mind they are trying to get away from. The suicidal option, unfortunately, fails to take seriously the fact that the mind can undergo dramatic change, that it can almost literally kill itself off while the body sustains the mind’s reincarnation. It’s little surprise that so many people gravitate to the myth of the Phoenix or that the story was created in the first place. We all yearn for transformation into a greater more able version of the person we find ourselves to be, and nothing exemplifies this kind of adventure more than the underdog who has risen from a dark situation.

COOPERATION & CONFLICT

March 3rd, 2021

Everything boils down to a game with the same premise. Religions, governmental systems, economic markets, personal relationships, corporations, everything is a different version of the same exact game that we are all playing. Each is a different lens for approaching the issue of cooperation.

Religions, like governments formulate rules for behavior, and by extension this behavior is almost always interpersonal, in that, besides the prohibitions against suicide, most all rules deal with how others are treated. Or in other words: how we can best cooperate.

A corporation is a more directed form of a government that seeks to organize people and their behavior not just for peace but also to produce a specific outcome. It’s not surprise that some corporations have structures similar to government or that some corporations can develop employees that embody a kind of religious zeal for their work and the company.

The corporation, then, is just one unit of the larger economic market, which is best described with a question regarding it’s connection to cooperation. All economic markets boil down to the issue of: who needs what?

Strangely, productive cooperation often requires a bit of conflict. This is even true on a neurological level. Much of the reason that the brain developed two hemispheres was so they could work together through a kind of conflict. Their primary mode of communicating with one another is through inhibition.

The Wright brothers who famously first achieved human flight were very close but would have magnificent fights about their work. The key to their progress was that neither took these fights personally. They both innately understood that they were both pushing each other so that the shared goal could succeed.

The only thing that we do which is not a form of cooperation is pure conflict. Certainly wars are a conflict between two cooperating bodies of people, but a pure conflict between say just two people is an admission that cooperation is simply not possible.

Interestingly, pure conflict may only be possible between individuals. Groups have enough variation built in that there is always potential for cooperation across group barriers.

HOW TO TINKER

March 2nd, 2021

Kids are natural at tinkering. Observe a kid quietly clicking legos together and you have a perfect image of what tinkering is all about. There’s some easy and valuable observations about tinkering that we can pull from simply imagining that kid with the legos.

First off, is the kid pressed for time?

Almost certainly not. A kid at play is a being in a timeless and eternal world. Play is something you’re always trying to get back to as a kid, and more and more as we grow up it gets harder and harder to return, and eventually it becomes a kind of fabled Neverland. We end up replacing play with pleasure and other feeble pursuits.

Second, is the kid tied to a specific outcome?

Perhaps. But not necessarily. Tinkering, especially in the case of a child is more about just exploring what something can do, what it can become rather than trying to force something into a particular configuration. Imagined configurations are often just casual tests to explore what is possible. Notice again how at odds this mode of exploration is with the adult world. We aren’t paid to explore what’s possible, we’re paid with a specific agreed upon end in mind - you get paid to make it happen.

Now the tinkering situation of the child and that of the adult seem at total odds with one another, but conflict rarely precludes cooperation of some kind. Kids rarely if ever achieve anything grand on their own because they aren’t capable of giving themselves constraints in the ways adults can. Constraints, like a deadline and a specific vision are ultimately what get things done.

The idea here is to eschew the world of either-or and think about how these conflicting states can be merged.

Instead of all the time in the world, plan on more time than needed. Instead of an ironclad vision, think of branching possibilities that all functionally achieve the same thing.

The way to incorporate the mindset of tinkering is to ultimately create the conditions necessary for curiosity to naturally arise. Chronic stress and a packed schedule probably create the most potent form of kryptonite for curiosity. Which means it requires the two most sought after things in the world: time and a relaxed state of mind. Fortunately, the time aspect can be scheduled but we just simply never think to schedule in time for curiosity or to tinker with something. Such considerations are usually relegated to the realm of pet hobbies which always get the short end of the stick when it comes to our most valuable resources: time and energy.

To tinker is, in some sense, to return to those absorbed moments of childhood. It’s how we learn, or at least, it’s how we used to learn before some adults got it in their head that we could be taught.