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.

THE ART OF LEARNING

January 26th, 2021

Many teachers fall into an understandable trap slyly laid by the ego.  Being the one in the know there is a pride in the ability to dispense and provide one’s superior set of knowledge to those in the role of ‘student’.  More than a few teachers, professors or just friends trying to help parade their privileged position with more than a little pomp.  It’s an understandable trap because teaching, by default, has an air altruism and generosity attached to it as though the credentials wipe away any flaws in actual performance.  The real world of course functions on the opposite principle, actual performance tops credentials every time.

The very best teachers understand that teaching is not a privileged position in terms of knowledge but a special liminal role.  The goal is to get someone who can’t or doesn’t know, to understand or do.  It’s perhaps poetic but a little quaint to say a teacher is a shepherd in the process of someone else’s learning.  This is true, but it goes beyond this.  A great teacher doesn’t teach any one subject but teaches a student how to learn.  The metaphorical equivalent would be a shepherd that trains all it’s sheep to be wolves, capable of taking care of themselves all on their own without the help of the shepherd.

Autodidacitism is a key to great teaching.  This is self-teaching, or learning on your own.  The double role that a person casts themselves in creates an important curve of perspective.  The self-learner isn’t just trying to figure out something new, but also paying attention to aspects and trends of their own learning.  The self-learner has to shepherd their own motivation, cultivating it and protecting it against too much frustration.  This is a crucial aspect that often isn’t present with an actual teacher who provides encouragement and reassurance that the next step of success isn’t far off.  The self-learner has to nurture motivation in the absence of knowing what’s around the next bend, and this skill, if honed becomes an exceptional asset when that self-learner in turn becomes a teacher for someone else.

The art of learning becomes a topic independent of subject, and the pure autodidactic clues in fairly quickly to the fact that if the art of learning can be honed than all the world’s knowledge and know-how suddenly becomes a split oyster.  There’s simply no contest between someone who learns one thing well, and another person who learns how to learn.  

Great teachers are themselves great learners, and because of this, the division between student and teacher remains forever blurred as the teacher learns alongside the student.  A classroom or a mentorship, no matter how behind or oblivious the student is an opportunity for the teacher.  Often that opportunity is to learn deeper about the subject at hand by exploring a student’s unique slow-motion capture of the topic.  Most likely a student asks a question never before considered by a teacher.  A weak teacher will freeze up at the idea of something they don’t know, and usually try to dodge the question.  Whereas a great teacher grows evermore curious with such unconsidered angles.  But beyond this, the opportunity to understand more about the art of learning is perpetually on hand in any classroom.  The swirl of student perspective, patchy in it’s blindness of the topic is the real object at hand for any teacher.

Knowledge is secondary.  The classroom as a laboratory is primary.  A teacher who is in tune with this meta-subject of learning irregardless of topic becomes doubly equipped for future students, by both having a deeper understanding of the subject and a deeper understanding of how students learn that subject.

The outlooks of the good and the bad teacher could not be more antithetical.  While the gatekeeper of knowledge is concerned with the ego’s pleasure of a power dynamic, the great teacher has never stopped seeing the classroom as a place to learn, not just for the student, but for that teacher who remains a student.

The great teacher becomes a student in the art of teaching, which is no different than a student who pursues the art of learning.