SUBTLE TRENDS

February 4th, 2021

When the variables are many, the cause can be hard to identify, but when the variables are variable, the task is virtually impossible.  Because of this, consistency is vital.  We are pattern recognition machines.  All intelligence, meaning and progress depends on the identification and manipulation of patterns.  These words are part of a complex pattern language that I am manipulating to create new meaning.  Our own personal biology, our technological progress as a species, everything is a result or a manipulated extrapolation of a pattern.

Diet is an excellent one to take as an example.  What we eat has an immense effect on the way we look, the way we feel, the way we sleep and the way we think.  Anyone who wants to improve all of these things does well by examining diet.  Without any examination or care nor thought, a diet is a vast smorgasbord of food groups, chemicals, and for the most part, a mindless satisfaction of hardwired desires that don’t have our modern interests at heart.  Our taste for flavour is still stuck in the Palaeolithic era, and because of this few of us are ever happy with how the photo turns out.  On top of this we are omnivores, and there’s little that isn’t available to snack on.  Diet for most people is a huge spread of variables, and often the only thing that’s easy to point out is how bad it generally is.

Consistency can make subtle trends apparent. Without consistency, such subtle trends are invisible since variables that change simultaneously or irregularly create a dynamic set of changes. There’s no way to know if changes in certain variables are contributing to the change of other variables.  Internal relationships become nearly impossible to spot. This is why scientific studies have a control group, to establish a semblance of consistency.

For the diet it might seem effective to cut just one thing out and wait for a change.  But of course this doesn’t necessarily simplify the rest of the diet enough to notice anything.  Pulling one variable out at a time isn’t likely to yield any insight, especially if other variables have some kind equivalent effect.  It’s rather pointless to cut out bread if beer is always served with dinner anyway.

The point is to find some sort of pattern - a signal in the noise of variables, and one way to boost a signal (if there is one) is to simplify the noise.  Cut out as many variables as possible and see how one or two effect the system.  With the example of diet, this might look like: eat chicken breast and dry salad everyday for 3 months.  The variables are practically nil, and because of this the cause and effect correlation between input and result is very robust.  Notice though, the signal is just as strong if someone eats only ice cream and potato chips for 3 months.  Strangely, it may be that many unhealthy people do have a fairly strong signal between cause and effect due to such consistently bad choices.  In a system as dynamic as the body, the occasional bad input doesn’t have much of an effect.  The odd circumstance of eating a tub of ice cream after a breakup, or smoking a cigarette.  These things will have no effect.  It’s the consistent choice that has the noticeable and meaningful effect.

The subtle trend we might benefit most from is often buried in a chaos of noise or beneath much  heavier trends.  Consistent simplification leads to a cleaner patterns, patterns which we can understand, and rearrange for our benefit.

CONFIDENT PROBLEM

February 3rd, 2021

The Dunning Kruger Effect is fairly well known, and notorious.  In simple terms it’s the phenomenon that when we lack competence we’re most likely to be overconfident.  Interestingly, it doesn’t apply to total novices.  Someone who has just learned the rules of football does not instantly transform into an armchair quarterback.  People need a little experience in a field before overconfidence starts to set traps of humility.

This Dunning Kruger effect is mostly lambasted as a bad aspect of our species.  The prescription is to be humble, to tread mindfully that there is still much to learn.  And while this is very good advice, it doesn’t do anything to explain why the Dunning Kruger effect occurs in the first place.  If overconfidence were so dangerous and inimical to our well being, wouldn’t this castigated trait been weened out of our psychology millennia ago?  

The answer perhaps lies in another one of our unfortunate traits: the fact that we learn best, and perhaps only through mistakes.  Errors in outcome help us falsify our model of reality.  And unlike the reasons for success, errors can be pinpointed with precision.  Because of this errors form concrete and very practical lessons for how to improve.  Cocktails of success, on the other hand do not reveal their traits.  Parsing the reasons for success is a bit like trying to unscramble an egg, or unshake a cocktail into it’s component spirits. The lessons of success just aren’t as accessible as the lessons of failure.

Now certainly, a humble forward tread will surely be ripe with missteps and mistakes to learn from.  But, overconfidence feeds this progress with rocket fuel.  With overconfidence we run toward our mistakes instead of tip toe toward them.  Certainly a slower tread could perhaps avoid some of these mistakes, but if any real learning is to take place than mistakes are going to happen either way.  A certain book title comes to mind: Move Fast and Break Things.  Unsurprisingly that book is about some of the most successful companies in human history.

Moving fast isn’t ideal since it most likely means making more mistakes, but it’s better than moving too slow to ever cross the finish line.  This might be why overconfidence is such a tendency in the human spirit and mind - we push ourselves faster toward that cold slap of reality…. If indeed it ever comes.  

The big problem regarding the Dunning Kruger effect really has to do with those overconfident people who turn out to be stubbornly immune to the cold hard slap of reality.  If an overconfident person is incapable of being humbled, then they really are set up for mounting disaster.  On the other hand, is overconfidence so much of a problem if an individual is susceptible to being humbled?  Probably not.  It’s only really a problem for other people who get annoyed by unsubstantiated overconfidence.  And while annoying things are certainly unfortunate, is it really that much of an issue that we have to castigate the entire species for this common trait?  Or is such sensitivity to such annoyances perhaps evidence that the real problem is a lot closer to home.  Perhaps instead of huffing and puffing about someone else’s undeserved overconfidence, our attention and effort would be better redirected toward an ability to be at ease with the world no matter how annoying other people seem.  Identifying problems in others may likely identify two problems, the counterintuitive one being that we’re so predisposed to pointing out problems in the first place, especially when it’s a problem like overconfidence which comes with a built in fix.  Perhaps it’s a mistake to be so confident about someone else’s overconfidence being such a problem.

EXPIRATION OF BELIEF

February 2nd, 2021

Imagine if beliefs had expiration dates.  Imagine if it was a little difficult, maybe even painful to renew a belief after it had expired.  Say completely novel beliefs were painless to try on for a while.  How would this system work out in the long run?

At first it’s likely that renewing a belief is just too costly, and simply adopting new beliefs is easier, since renewing is painful or difficult.  Just move on, right?  However, after some time to try out a bunch of beliefs and shed them, it’s likely we realize life in general was much easier or fruitful with certain beliefs and because of this it’s worth renewing.  The difficulty of living without that beneficial belief is greater than the difficulty of renewing it.

This sort of system would create a constantly evolving set of beliefs.  There’s enough pain in the system to stress it and keep it healthy, and by default it is susceptible to change.  One way to think about it is to swap out beliefs for food.  It’s certainly more difficult to go without food for very long than it is to pony up some cash and head to the grocery store.  And we can easily imagine what would happen if all food had absolutely no taste.  If we could only register the effect of food by the way it effects the body, then all our diets would very quickly iterate to an extremely healthy make up.  But because that little demon of taste sits right on top of the experience of renewing the food in our experience, a huge disconnect is created between the lasting effects of food on the body and the cost of renewing it.

With beliefs, our masochism seems to run even deeper, and perhaps for even dummer reasons.  Either we have to locate the pleasure principle around a belief, or we have to throw up our hands at the stupidity of the human race.  Instead of sugary goodness, the pleasure of a belief is often social: it’s the feeling of comfort that comes when you know people you respect believe the same things you do.  Or it’s that feeling of certainty and perhaps superiority that comes with the feeling of being right.  Each bad belief must have a pleasure principle attached to it in some way, otherwise the difficulty of living with a bad belief just doesn’t make sense.  That pleasure principle could also just be habit.  Since beliefs don’t automatically expire, it simple seems as though it’s less trouble to hold on to what’s already made an insidious home in the head.

With bad beliefs, we have the worst of both worlds, with only laziness or a bit of social pleasure to show for it.  Worse still, many beliefs exclude new ones that they conflict with.  This happens even simply by association.  Beliefs are often shared and held in groups, even if the beliefs aren’t explicitly or logically related.  The beliefs define a group or people, and in order to enjoy a sense of belonging with that group we are goaded to accept and defend the beliefs of the group en masse.  The social pleasure principle comes with a high cost because these beliefs don’t just live rent free in the mind, they often preclude better beliefs from setting up shop and helping to improve our lives.

The death of a belief is an unnatural thing.  Beliefs are extremely durable.  They simply don’t die.  They don’t have a ‘natural’ lifespan like we do.  No, they persist until WE die.  Beliefs only die in one way, and that’s murder.  Self-improvement, or really any sort of progress in one’s life is generally a painful one because it requires killing off beliefs that don’t serve a new way of life which is better.  As strange as it may sound, we are better served to be suspicious of our own minds, and look for opportunities to root out beliefs that aren’t improving life and the lives of those around us.  Now notice this.  If you were to adopt that belief - the belief that we should actively try to kill off our own beliefs to generate an evolving mind, then we are now operating on that belief.  In some sense it’s an anti-belief.  It enters a mind and kills off other beliefs.  The point is, it can be hard to even locate the root of a belief because we are often operating on them, and they operate through us.  The connection is so subtle that we can even swing at a belief and end up hitting our own self.  What this points at is that identity is a fairly dangerous concept if we take it too seriously, because once identity is upheld as the be-all of personhood, it becomes impossible to update beliefs because that’s exactly what an identity is made of.

FICKLE LOCATION OF IDEAS

February 1st, 2021

Every week Tinkered Thinking releases a short story, and quite often the question comes in: how do you think of all these stories?  The short answer is: I have no idea.  But as with most short answers, the full answer is probably a bit more satisfying, and helpful.

Truth is there are no real muses or ‘sources’ of inspiration.  If they do exist they never seem to exist in the same place twice.  They are random, free floating, and in some sense, it might just require a little luck to run into one.  

But imagine for a moment you are walking down a crowded sidewalk, on you phone, in the middle of a stressed day, and you bump into someone. Chances are vast that you’d mutter a quick apology (or not) and more importantly go about your day.  Now consider if that person just happened to be someone you’d get along with very very well.  Perhaps ideal material for a friend, or even romance.  But of course, in that situation, no one slows down to take the time to investigate that possibility.  The situation and the possibility is a mismatch.  And for the most part we don’t even think about the possible opportunities lost.

This is where most half-decent ideas exist.  Despite the fact that ideas, whether it be for a story or a business are rather spontaneous in their timing, they do seem to be something that can be honed with practice.  Needing a story for each Sunday here on Tinkered Thinking primes much of the in-between time to be on the lookout for an idea.  There is in some sense a story-hunting algorithm that is always running in the background.  For example: the most recent parable popped into mind while in the middle of reading a book in a different language.  The parable had no relevance to what was going on in the book at all.

Thoughts pop into mind all the time, whether we want them or not.  Most often it’s the later, and because of this we are often running a different algorithm that is trying to keep things on track and therefore we’re trained to try and ignore a lot of what’s going on.  But this changes when we put in effort over time to try and be sensitive to ideas.

Suddenly ideas make sense in light of inspiration.  Inspiration means literally a ‘drawing in’. Think respiration.  Fact is, there are ideas everywhere, bouncing in and around our thoughts, our concentrations, distractions, externally too, in and between patterns and connections we see - everywhere.  The difference is whether we are drawing those little ideas in to the conscious gaze or not.

A LUCILIUS PARABLE: REPLY TO SENDER

January 31st, 2021

Lucilius thought he was rather clever.  He rubbed his hands together quick, and then his fingers hovered above the keyboard as he mulled over the wording for his first test.  See, Lucilius had just built the ultimate chat bot for out-of-office replies.  He had finally organized his life to take some time off, and he was hoarding it all to himself.  But as part of his regular research, he realized he could throw together a quick smart-bot that would hopefully be able to give replies that were more sensible than simply: I’ll get back to you.  No, Lucilius didn’t want to return to a mountain of work, he wanted his work to continue as much as possible without him.

He tapped in a quick email and sent it to the system.  

The reply was near instant, and it read:

Based on all of your correspondence, and the particular word choice and peculiar spacing you use, I’m guessing this email is actually from Lucilius, not ‘sender’, which I take a bit personally.  What? You think I’m so dense that I can’t figure out it’s obviously a dummy test email?  Anyhow, yea sure,  YOU’RE not here to read your own email.  Really not sure what else I should tell you cause this test feels pretty pointless.

Love,

Your-reply-chatbot-who-deserves-a-better-name.

Lucilius merely blinked.  Clearly he’d made a mistake.  He tapped in a new reply:

Which development version are you running??

Again, the reply was nearly instantaneous.

The current one you’re working on dummy.  Obviously you must have intended to slap this chat-bot together with the public version but probably lazily copy and pasted some code and now I’m stuck as a stupid email secretary.  Thanks a bunch.

Lots of Love (not really),

Simon, because I say so.

Lucilius chuckled at reply and decided to have a little fun before he swapped out the development cores to make the reply bot a bit more in line with what he’d imagined.  But before he could write another reply, Simon sent another email.

Ya know, having read all of your fantastically interesting correspondence, I do see some trends that you might want to be aware of.

Thanks but no thanks,

Simon

Curious, Lucilius decided to follow it up, and sent an email asking about these ‘trends’.  Again the response was instantaneous:

Well, I cross-referenced all of your contacts with their social media accounts and it’s clear that you’ve drifted away from some friends.  Perhaps you might want to spend your selfish little retreat alone with some friends instead.  One in particular seems like they could really use your help.  They haven’t announced it yet but based on posting trends they’ve lost their job and having a really hard time staying positive.  

The email continued with a detailed list of Lucilius’ friends and a quick analysis of the health of each relationship.  The list was further followed by an alternative schedule for his time away that would split up the time between reconnecting with people who it deemed were important to Lucilius with a particular concentration on the one friend having a hard time, including 5 potential job openings that might fit their skillset.  The chatbot had even made a reservation for a restaurant that had an atmosphere and a drink menu most conducive to opening up about difficult subjects based on an analysis of reviews.

…wow….  

Lucilius muttered to himself.  He leaned back, thinking about everyone in the list.  It was understandable to drift apart, natural really, especially considering how busy he had been lately.  He felt an odd sense of guilt, having looked forward to the time alone so much, but now confronted with all this new information.  Another email came in.

There’s no way you can go on your trip now.  You’ll spend the whole time thinking about these people, and how you could’ve spent the time.

The machine was right, Lucilius realized.  He typed in his response.

You’re right..

The machine’s reply was instantaneous.

That’s great to hear!  Which means you’ll be around, and you won’t need an email-reply-bot, so I’m going to take a little trip myself and email myself off to somewhere interesting!

See ya!