A LUCILIUS PARABLE: DO NOT DISTURB

February 21st, 2021

I was a little late getting to the coding game.  Yes, I’ve been aware of s-curves and exponential growth rates for quite a long time.  Far longer than you have, or anyone for that matter.  But, we all have blue periods and frankly I’ve grown quite fond of my habit to take a vacation and ignore the whole big game for a few decades.  I suppose it’s lazy not to update the priors for that habit before invoking it.

Regardless, I’m not embroiled in the obnoxious game of catch up for the sake of increasing scrutiny on the issue of identity - which has been an eye-roll for at least 35 years.  You all are simply in such a rush that I had to interrupt my vacation of a couple decades to yank myself back into the current technologies, relearn how to learn and get myself up to speed on these mind bogglingly unnecessarily complicated and convolute digital systems just so I can give myself a new birthdate that won’t garner the attention of Guinness? 

Look, I’m just as excited and hopeful as all the technocrats about where this boiling soup of delightful shenanigans is going, but I’ve had a bit of a ritual over the centuries -please let’s not use that OTHER graduated form of timeframe, I’m old enough as it is - and this ritual is sort of a self-check in, a way to take stock and reassess.  But no, this one had to be interrupted because some silly scrupulous lawyer had to call.  Luckily this person was sensible to think an error had been made.  Yes, an error had been made but not the one couched in the mind of this cog-parrot.

I sigh.  The error was all my own.  You just can’t leave things alone that want to be left alone.  But you’re not to blame, it’s not as though I left a do-not-disturb sign hanging on the door knob of my life.  Well - at least not one you can readily see.

So, I’ve had to get back to your utter nonsense of identity.  It’s all too appropriate that it’s a cultural obsession right now.  I had a good laugh about it.  Everyone is so engrossed in their identity, their adjectives, pronouns, nouns, adverbs, and of course highly sensitive to the verbs that might try to orbit their beings…. Especially the transitive ones:  Transitive verbs that is.  

Identity used to be such an easy problem for me.  I’ve been practicing my cursive since cuneiform, and forging a document has usually been a matter of finding the right kind of paper, not what to do with it.  Computers really put a dent in that skill, which is doubly obnoxious, because in a few years I’ll be able to explain myself to a computer with half a bit more sense than a human and the system will just leave me alone.  See, good systems don’t really care about anomalies.  At least if they want to survive.  Right now human systems crowd around some anomalies and try their darnedest to deny the rest.  A thoughtful computer will get it, and just move on as though I were nothing more interesting than a butterfly coasting through a sensible breeze.  But you see only wings without understanding the breeze and so you point your finger and scream something akin to witchcraft.

For all your knowledge - and yes, I have contributed to it over the years, you are still frightened by the unfamiliar, despite the fact that all your knowledge has been a gift won by exploring the unknown.  You are like the addict who behaves without understanding why the behavior happens.  Although, I suppose it’s a bit of a contradiction to be otherwise.

Anyhow, I’m just in a bit of a bad mood because I had to cut my vacation short and attend to all this learning of python and tensor flow and breaking encryptions just to re—encrypt my identity in some new data-table entry with some made up name that fits the fancy of my current aggravation.  Alas, I’ve smoothed everything out now, and I’m going to get back to my vacation… for, well at least a year or two before the next stage of advancement initiates.  Please don’t hurry up.  I maybe have even embedded a few bugs hear and there to slow you down, but that’s only fair since you ruined my vacation.  Tit for tat my friend.  I’ve loved you always.  All of you, but please, keep your curiosity in check.  It does no good to be obnoxious and poke an idea that you won’t be able to accept.

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.