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!

MODERATING MODERATION

January 30th, 2021

Moderation in everything.  Or so goes the traditional wisdom.  Frankly though, it’s an excuse for being mediocre.  Many things improve due to extreme bursts of input - the farthest thing from moderation.  Exercise for example: a short intense workout does more good for the body than a lacklustre couple of hours at the gym.  A good diet actually isn’t balanced across all food groups but is ruthless in the exclusion of certain foods: sugar and processed, for example.  This lazy dependence on moderation perhaps gets it’s clearest censure from one of our oldest texts, the bible:


Revelation 3:16 states

I know thy deeds, that you are neither cold nor hot.  How I wish you were one or the other,  But since you are lukewarm and neither hot nor cold I will spew thee from my mouth.

The imagery is intense.  No one likes a room temperature frappuccino and hot buttered rum that’s been sitting out for hours is anything but delicious.

A lack of moderation creates a charge, a pent up energy that can be directed into power.  Where moderation dulls the blade to make sure no one gets hurt, a conscious lack of moderation keeps the edge so that when the need comes, the slice is clean.

Fact is, extraordinary results require extreme measures.  Sometimes the extreme measure is to work on something every single day without fail for years.  This is routine at work, and strangely the word routine feels as though it’s in the same arena as moderation.  Both evoke a sense of thoughtful control, temperance and general lameness.  But this is only because so many people have uninspiring routines.  An extreme routine compounds into extraordinary results.  A strict routine of maintaining an ironclad diet for 26 days of the month is anything but an example of moderation, and it’s immoderate measures such as these that achieve the results we pine after.

But the original axiom dictates all of this.  If we should exercise moderation in everything then this would include moderation itself.  Meaning, we should moderate our moderation, and therefore, with some things, we are wise to be extreme.

IMPATIENT FUEL

January 29th, 2021

There seems to be a subtle fantasy wafting about present culture that imagines a life with very few if any negative emotions.  Such fantasies draw inspiration, perhaps from the ecstatic images of other people who cherry pick their own photos and expressions so that it’s always the best aesthetic.  It’s an understandable decision, but the mass effects are perhaps a bit more subtle.  Or perhaps this fantasy of a life devoid of darkness draws its inspiration from the serenity that we see in Buddhists or others who have made a long practice of training the mind. It can be rather depressing to listen to someone wonder aloud about this issue:

Why can’t I just be happy?

Do I have to live with this anxiety and this depression forever?

There’s an underlying assumption these these sorts of sad questions that’s worth dredging up.  They function on a premise of either/or and assume that if a way to jump the emotional fence can be finally discovered than one would land exclusively and permanently in a life of positive emotions.  But the grass always seems greener, when in reality there’s bright spots on either side of the fence.

The fundamental lesson that is missing from these disheartened perspectives is that emotions exist for particular uses, and the key is understanding those uses and knowing how to exploit emotions to fulfill those uses.  

An easy example that perhaps isn’t so touchy is simple impatience.  Being impatient for a particular stock in the market to go up is a recipe for misery.  Pinning one’s hope and a sense of well being to something that can fluctuate so radically on a moment to moment basis is simply disaster.  We don’t have any control over stocks, and this lack of agency is key.

Being impatient about one’s progress on a particular project however….  can be a very useful.  

What we often fail to realize is that emotions can reorganized and redirected in a kind of plug-n-play fashion.  If someone pisses you off to the point where you feel as though you’ll explode, well then that’s an excellent time to go hit the gym and do a workout.  Instead of ‘taking it out’ on the source of the anger, take it out on a punching bag, or breaking a personal best.

Pervasive negative emotions like depression and anxiety are quite a bit more tricky because at the point of being pervasive such emotions have a bit of the upper hand against clear and productive thinking, not to mention even fuzzier concepts like will power and motivation.

As a default catch-all the best assumption to make in the presence of negative emotion is that something needs to be done.  Anxiety is, in some sense aimless motivation.  With a lot of energy and no direction to expend that energy it becomes rather uncomfortable, and we call it anxiety.  Depression in many cases likely points at a larger more circumspect problem, but again to generalize here is maybe even a bit dangerous.

It’s even possible that such negative emotions are…a bit of a habit, to be frank.  Thought perpetuates like thought, and negative self-talk only strengthens the neuronal firing patterns that enable it in the first place.  It’s not outside the realm of possibility that a good deal of emotional and mental difficulty might simply be bad habit, in a similar way to how a bad diet can lead to extreme conditions like diabetes or heart failure. 

Appropriately, the default advice is still fairly appropriate.  Doing something different is perhaps the only thing that has a chance of getting a wedge into the juggernaught of a bad habit.  Be it a new exercise routine or trying out meditation.

What’s most important is that such emotions never go away, and they need not go away.  All that needs to change is our relationship to such emotions.  When in the thick of it, in the heat of an emotion it can seem as though it’s impossible to renegotiate a relationship with something as embedded as a pervasive emotion.  But with time and consistent, dedicated effort, we can breath space in-between the emotions we have and our experience of them.  And once there’s room to shed a little light, then it’s far easier to figure out exactly what to do with an emotion, how it can be useful, regardless of how positive or negative it is.

INCENTIVIZED RECIPROCITY

January 28th, 2021

It’s a quaint and understandable fallacy to think that we do things out of the goodness of our hearts.  The truth is that almost always there is an underlying incentive at work that pushes us to act in a certain way.  Even something as spotless as altruism can easily be incentivized by a desire to look like a good person to others who know about our altruistic deeds.  Or even simpler, altruism can be incentivized by the positive feeling that acting altruistically evokes.  Incentives, can be rather wholesome and good, but they can also be sneaky, convoluted and nearly invisible.

One sly trick is to use the law of reciprocity to create incentive in another.  Say for example a person wants to take an extra day off work in the upcoming weeks and needs to ask the boss for time off.  It’s perhaps a crap shoot to just simply ask.  More devious, and perhaps just wiser, is to first curry favor with the boss.  The phrase means to create incentive reciprocity.  By being initially generous we preempt the receiver of our generosity to be generous in turn due to the law of reciprocity.  The law of reciprocity states simply that when given something we naturally feel impelled to return the favor.  The law of reciprocity incentivizes us to give back.  You scratch my back, I’ll scratch your back.  This is just a fact of human beings that is fairly well baked into our hardware.  Before asking the boss for a favor, it’s wise to go out of one’s way to help out the boss.  Once this is done there’s a trailing thread in the boss’s mind that he needs to pay back a favor.

Nowhere is such reciprocal incentive more depressingly portrayed than in political dramas, be they about actual governments or quasi-governmental structures like the mob.  Money is often the incentive, taking the form of a favor paid for.  In these environments relationships seem to be purely transactional.  Business also has this flavor, as with the catchall explanation for behavior: hey, it’s just business.  Incentive in these worlds is fairly cold, calculated and straightforward, despite how much denial might surround the fact.

The surprise is that these structures of incentive and reciprocity exist in every relationship no matter how formal or intimate.  It’s the loving relationships that feel particularly uncomfortable and even sacrilegious to apply a perspective of incentive and reciprocity.  But such discomfort  either assumes that any presence of incentive is bad which is naive, or, the worry is that we are perhaps not as purely incentivized in our more precious relationships as we like to believe, and would rather not look for fear of what we might find.

PROJECT NARRATIVE

January 27th, 2021

Traditional education equips students with the tools to succeed, supposedly.  Anyone who has been through the grinder of the industrial education system knows that this is vaguely accurate: there are a whole bunch of tools that we learn, but much of what such education attempts to impress upon students is quickly forgotten.  

How is it that years later when someone finally comes across an issue where calculus or trigonometry is useful, almost everyone has to look it up instead of just apply the tools that were handed over by school?  The issue is that such tools at the time of their apparent ‘learning’ lacked context.

We are story animals.  We understand our life and the way things work through a network of stories that we invent, learn and share.  A story is something constructed and pieced together.  We build stories in our mind, and we start doing this at a very early age, using them to understand the world we live in but also just for fun.  Kids alone at play will narrate the adventure of their toys aloud as they spontaneously generate adventure.  This is practice in cause and effect.  First this happens, and then the next part can happen.

All complex projects form a kind of adventure, a winding path toward fruition that ultimately sticks in our mind in the form of a story.  The tools picked up and learned along the way during this adventure stick and persist in memory because of their placement in a story structure.  

Some short time ago a tiny meme circulated in coding circles.  It captures the idea of seniority or expertise.  It’s simply when a senior developer looking at a problem can say “oh I’ve seen something like this before.”  Expertise often boils down to a good amount of experience.  (And no, the similarity between the words is not a coincidence, see Episode 63 The Etymology of Fear). The expert references their experience, that is, the narrative of their own life to quickly retrieve and unpack methods and strategies that can be reapplied in the present.  This is so natural that we don’t even see the presence of the story, memory simply hyperlinks into it.  This is the exact same mental machinery at work that dictates why the Netflix movie we recently watched is so much more memorable than any of the facts in the flashcard deck that we laboriously try to push into our minds: one has narrative, the other does not.

Narrative forms a kind of memory retrieval structure, and often important concepts are imbedded in it’s structure, like the idea cause and effect.  And this is how school fails, the tools we are supposedly given have no narrative, like the flashcard deck the tools have as much context as a pile of stuff dropped off for goodwill.

However, when tools are acquired within the context of a story, they stick.  A project that requires a student to find and learn specific tools in order to bring that project to fruition automatically embeds those tools in a context and a story where they are essential.  The story of how the project got done simply doesn’t make any sense without the tools and methods discovered.  

The narrative aspect of a project allows a person to later recall embedded tools by projecting the relevant part of the narrative up for the mind’s eye to reference.