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.

IDENTITY INVERSE

February 15th, 2021

It’s always a bit of a knock to realize you’re wrong about something.  Some people even take it personally.  In fact, some people are so tied to these things that delusion and denial arise to fend off the notion of the world somehow being different than previously thought.

Identity is, in the face of a mysterious world, a rather fragile thing.  While knowledge and identity may not at first like the most correlated topics, the connection brightens when it’s pointed out that most identity is a function of how we categorize the world, and we do so in order to try and make sense of the way it works.  What better definition is knowledge than an understanding of the way things work?  The two major group identities of conservative and liberal are both perspectives about how we should run our big group experiment.  But both of these identities and their perspectives about how things should work, has embedded within it a presupposition about how the world currently does work on a subtler plane, one that the proposed way of doing things would be more inline with.

When reality sends a shock up through either of these identities, it is because our categories fail to describe the world accurately.  And we take it personally, because, well, that’s what an identity does.

Strangely, education, or rather raw learning, is a function of discovering weaknesses in our understanding.  Learning is literally figuring out exactly how you are wrong, and often it’s a surprise just how wrong we are.  In this sense knowledge is the inverse of identity.  The more tightly we hold on to a particular identity, the weaker our ability is to learn.

Perhaps this what we seem to be talking about when we say someone approaches things with a childlike spirit: such a person is open to something new because, like a child, identity isn’t much of an issue.