WISDOM DIVISION

February 20th, 2021

Everyone on the planet can be asked for their opinion about whether a business idea is a good one or not, and likely each will have an opinion but no one can say with absolute certainty how well it will work.  For that the idea must be implemented.  That entrepreneurial leap must be taken, and then a different wisdom of the crowds begins to take over.

The brain is divided up in a similar way.  The left brain is responsible for all the at we say.  It formulates sentences, has the intimate understanding what each word actually means and it’s highly attuned to detail.  The left hemisphere, in this sense is like the individual who we can ask about whether our business idea will work or not.

Unfortunately, this left hemisphere is rather narrow in it’s focus, and it will give a plausible sounding answer even if it most certainly doesn’t have that answer.  Strangely, a person can do fairly well without this hemisphere, if say it is lost due to a stroke.  The right side of the brain is strangely capable to take over in such a way that a person can pretty much live a normal life.  

If however, the case is reversed, if the right side of the brain takes the hit and it completely taken off line, then people change quite a bit.  Such people cease to understand humour, they take everything extremely literally, and while they can speak just fine, they have a tremendous amount of trouble with the rest of their life.  The missing hemisphere in this case is the one that is attuned to the larger picture, the context in which fits all the details catalogued by the left.  Without the big picture, we are lost with no understanding of location or direction in that bigger picture.

Our brain seems designed to hold at once two different contexts simultaneously.  The narrow detailed one, and the expansive and pervasive one.

The evolutionary cause seems fairly robust.  That left brain - the narrow detailed one, is good for food.  It focusing the prey, zooming in, and moves towards it with little consideration for anything else.  While the right brain, focused on the larger context is suited to the issue of predators, not just because a predator can be anywhere, and therefore arises the need to be aware of that larger environment, but also to keep on hands possible avenues of escape.

The functional dichotomy within the skull seems at work on a larger scale regarding the market.  Each person can give a detailed and perhaps logical opinion, but only the overall group can give the answer, silently through the forces of the market.

MEDIOCRE PLATEAUS

February 19th, 2021

How is it that we don’t all become masters of walking?  We all walk around plenty, and yet we stub toes, trip, and sprain ankles, despite decades of practices.  You’d think after that much time we’d be as deft and light footed as a panther stalking prey.  And yet we seem to rise to a mediocre plateau on a range of common skills and simply coast at that level of ability.

Another simple example is making the bed.  There is certainly a skill to launching the sheet out over the bed and having it settle perfectly square, and yet, this is remarkably difficult since that pillow of air beneath often makes the sheet slide to a side.  Like walking, we can try for years to get this stupid little trick just right without much improvement.

Every skill, no matter the level has these sorts of plateaus, and not just one.  As we strive for continued improvement, we are constantly beset by a new plateau of ability until some new detail reveals itself that can be exploited, hacked for benefit and incorporated.  Inevitably, though, we just his another plateau.

The odd thing is that many tasks and skills common to nearly everyone have small hacks that people occasionally figure out, but for whatever reason such knowledge doesn’t seem to ignite widespread adoption.

Folding clothes for example.  Most people have to do this, and many are even aware there are faster more efficient ways of doing it, and yet, we stick with what we know, despite that knowledge resting on a mediocre plateau.

The trick for making the bed is similar to the folded shirt.  The key is to fold the sheet in half, so the foot and the head of the sheet are held in hand.  The same sort of maneuver to wave it out over the bed is next, but the key is to let go of the head of the sheet just before the height of this movement while keeping hold of the foot all the while.  A few tries and it’s quite an elegant piece of dexterous magic to watch the head of the sheet launch out perfectly over the bed and settle.  

CONVENIENT OPINION

February 18th, 2021

Upton Sinclair once said that It is difficult to get a man to understand something when his salary depends on his not understanding it.  Sinclair is right, but the point goes even deeper than money and salaries, it’s about incentives, and how our beliefs are aligned with those incentives.

A ubiquitous example is fitness, and the laughable excuses that pop up in an effort to justify avoiding some hard won sweat and exhaustion.  “It doesn’t work for me,” is probably the quintessential example, perhaps because it shows such blatantly lazy thinking.  

Aside from all the counter arguments, like have you tried for very long?  What exactly were you doing? Did you try different things for long enough to see if there was an effect?…..

..it’s perhaps better to look at the incentives for such a laughable excuse.  Does any person determined to achieve a certain end ever say something like “It doesn’t work for me?”  If such people do say this, it is almost immediately followed by a fresh strategy and more effort to make it work.

There is really only one incentive for believing that such elemental activities can’t do someone good, and that’s laziness.  The incentive is really that simple.  Laziness incentivizes opinions that allows someone to remain being lazy.

Notice how it works in reverse for something like determination.  A determined individual trying to achieve a certain end is incentivized to keep trying in the face of failure because a feeling of determination incentivizes for this.  The comparison is almost laughably obvious.  So why are such incentives not obvious when it comes to other things, like Sinclair’s man who can’t understand something because it would put his salary at risk?

The unfortunate truth is that such incentives are only obvious if we are removed from them and see them in other places.  When we examine the incentives of others they reveal themselves without much effort.  But if the incentive is alive and strong within our own person, it’s effect on our own behavior is anything but obvious, much in the same way that it’s easy to see how tall a tree is when looking at it from afar, but when actually up in the tree, it’s perhaps not so easy without someone down below for scale.

A third person perspective is a privileged perspective.  This is one of the slippery tools of cancel culture.  It’s very easy to cast a stone at someone else’s misdeed, especially when it’s in the past and it’s well recorded.  Much harder to actually be that person in that moment.  The context could scarcely be farther apart, and yet we pass judgement as though they are the same.  

It’s a bit sad, though interesting to wonder how such cultural stone throwers might look in the future.  Do poor incentives right now drive convenient opinions that result in behavior this is less than honorable?

MAP VS. PLAN

February 17th, 2021

You can’t ruin something that never had a plan.  So many get paralyzed before even starting because of a neurotic requirement to try and somehow plan out every little move before taking the first.  The irony, of course is that when those first few steps are finally taken, the rest of the plan often has to get thrown out due to new information that arises because of those first few steps.

Compare the plan to the map.  Explorers could not really plan their expeditions into unknown territory precisely because there is never a map of that unknown territory.  In this regard, the map is the diametrical opposite of the plan.  Whereas the plan is something we try to project onto the future, a map is drawn up after the fact.

It’s perhaps a missed opportunity of modern life that we have the whole world mapped out, and therefore it seems as though we can plan our way forward to any real location with the precision and ease that comes with a tool like google maps.

There is, however, one area that is still shrouded in unknown territory, and that’s the future.  Perhaps we might take a cue from the old explorers and realize that a plan isn’t necessary, only an ability to navigate as we go, and perhaps a map of the way so far so we might find our way back.

IMPLICATION OF NUANCE

February 16th, 2021

Our tendency to categorize is driven by language.  It’s as old as the Bible where man’s first task was simply to make up names for things, and thereby atomize the universe, separating things from that until we’ve cleaved everything down to the tiniest parts, from solar systems to quarks.

The goal of such naming undermines itself.  By grouping things into a category like animal and plant, the world eventually fails to split neatly.  The green sea slug, for example is categorized as half animal, half plant.  The green sea slug, in this case is an example of nuance.  

Nuance inherently exists between categories.  Nuance is where the the seams and edges of life blur, where categories become useless.

The great value of nuance is that is comprises the path toward deep understanding.  And the great tragedy is that an over dependence on the use of categories eventually makes us blind to nuance.  A rigid adherence to the dogma of categories ultimately crumbles on itself.  We begin to take things literally when humour requires a larger context with a dynamic nuance that volleys between categories.

Contradictions emerge as categories constrain perspective narrowly, and blind perspective of a larger context that reveals conflicting details.

The implication of nuance is pervasive uniqueness.  There are many people, but it’s a terrible mistake to think that people can be identical.  No two people in all of history have ever had the same experience by dint of the fact that no two perspectives can occupy the exact same time and place.  Despite similarities, each of us is watching a completely unique movie of life.  Nuance contains a slide across the spectrum that cannot be partitioned, differentiated and marked with hard borders.

It’s the very thing we desperately need to recall to the ways we think.  Many of the hot topics filling current events and events of the last few years are riddled with the mistakes that come with a disregard and disused of nuance.  We are suddenly too quick to judge, condemn, and conclude with the neat bow of certainty, and in so doing we rob ourselves of a deeper understand of the situation, our fellow person, and most importantly the compassion that arises when we take the time to understand where each and every person involved is coming from.