UNSOLVED WEAR

January 15th, 2021

It can be exciting to take those first few swings at a problem, full of hope that an answer might be near by, and if only delivered, rearranged, clicked into place, the problem evaporates and instantaneously we live in a better universe.  Of course, not all solutions yield to those first few attempts, and some may elude us for quite some time - time that grows disheartening as we struggle to endure.

It’s as though there is a timer, like a time bomb on our ability to persevere.  Slowly we lose steam about our prospects and our optimism that we might bring about that marginally better universe.  As we search for a solution, more problems seem to pop up, and it becomes necessary to solve totally unexpected problems just to further the course toward a solution that might not even work out.  Like a prospector digging holes here and there hoping to hit gold, or a kind searching for a playmate talented in the ways of hide and seek, our psychology can be quick to let the most useful of emotions deflate, giving room and rise to those that are ultimately, self defeating.

We wear ourselves down with the experience of not knowing.  The solution, wherever it may be has no feeling nor any real connection to us, especially our subjective experience of the hunt.  Like the set of keys we’ve searched the house twice over for, it just sits there, waiting with infinite patience.  And that’s the difference, problems are infinitely patient, but we are not.  Many of the most wonderful solutions that have aided humanity came about after a very long time and after a great number of people took swipes at the issue with hope of finding a solution.

The good news is that problems, well solved, only need to be solved once, and those solutions, once found, can be forever uncovered.  This is also the process of learning, which is primarily an experience of confusion and frustration.  Our ability to understand is a function of our strategy surrounding confusion.  If our strategy enables us to enjoy confusion, then we call that experience curiosity.  But in many cases the frustration wears down the mind and the heart, until, we give up.  The solution to this problem of endurance and wear is to merely become aware of it.  Once the pattern is laid bare, it’s far easier to just keep pushing toward the goal.  As with anything it takes practice, but with a few difficult grinds to prove the solution, we can being to turn a curious eye to the issue and wonder how long the unknown will manage to elude our effort.

FALLING BEHIND

January 14th, 2021

Having a daily practice that compounds output is an experience replete with lessons to learn.  It’s often how books are written, how bodies are sculpted and how mastery is formed.  None of these things can be done any a single heroic effort. ( Granted, perhaps a book can be written in all one go, but this is exceptionally rare - so rare in fact, that it’s negligible. Most books take a tremendous amount of time consistently spread out in smaller units.)

The tremendous result that can occur from a compounding daily practice often feels quite disconnected from the actual activity.  Writing a fat book doesn’t seem like it would feel like a 40 minute session of writing, but that’s exactly what it is when repeated enough times.

One insidious lesson to learn from the daily practice is encapsulated in the stress of falling behind.  Tinkered Thinking is behind - quite behind on writing and posting.  Now regardless of the cause, be it a worthy one like a high velocity project dropping out of the sky, or simply laziness (in the case of Tinkered Thinking it’s luckily the former) the mounting anxiety of a good practice falling behind is something to be thankful for.  In some sense it’s a horror of something good slipping away.  And the more it’s allowed to slip away, the more it seems like it’ll require that mythical and impossible heroic feat of catching up all in one swoop.  

For small things, like a blog and a podcast that’s not out of the range of possibility.  The technical record for Tinkered Thinking in terms of number of episodes produced in a single day is somewhere around ten (in harried anticipation of a planned vacation), but that sort of record is not one worth trying to break.  It defeats the virtue of a daily practice to catch up or get ahead.  The point is to live one great day, everyday and the daily practice is what contributes to that day being great.  Otherwise we are talking about unsatisfactory obligation.

We cannot catch up on days lost to a lack of being seized.  Though we can catch up on the quota of a daily practice, the time and those days are forever lost.  Falling behind isn’t really something that can actually be caught up - it’s not falling behind at all, it’s missing out entirely.  Facing that bitter pill can help ensure that when tomorrow comes, it doesn’t just slide by.

DIGITAL CARTOGRAPHY

January 13th, 2021

We are spatial animals, not encyclopedic.  It’s no surprise that physical health - specifically, how we move or don’t move our body has a tremendous impact on brain health, and these effects only become more and more exaggerated in later years.  The brain is not an island, as much as it can sometimes feel like that: a cage for the mind, strangely separated from the outside world.  We remember the dance but fail to recall the instructions.  We know where that lovely hole-in-the-wall is but the address escapes us.  We operate through narratives of space and its geography.

Oddly, and probably sadly, the internet has no geography, at least not in the sense that it can be visualized and navigated.  This is despite the language we use around the internet:

Where do I go to see that?

How do I navigate this site?

On an actual website, the problem is concrete, and therefore less of a problem.  Webpages have actual geography because they exist as shapes on a screen.  The literal analogy to geography is all the more appropriate when the occasional problem of redesign is encountered.  Few things are more obnoxious than looking for a button that is no longer where we remember it to be.  Just imagine trying to commute to work via a different route everyday.  In fact, that scenario doesn’t even encapsulate the problem very well because the point of departure and the destination are still in the same absolute relative position.  More appropriate would be: imagine commuting to a different place every day… without directions.  

This is why changing an icon or an app or webpage layout can be so infuriating for people who visit regularly.  There’s another vestige of our geographical minds: we do not see websites, we visit them.  But answer this question:  Where is Reddit in relation to Wikipedia?

This is an impossible question to answer.  Describing the spatial relationship between two words in a dictionary is easier despite the oddity of the task.  There is no way to see the internet as a whole as it relates to itself, the way we can overlook a city from the top of a tall building.  The internet is encyclopedic, but it’s an encyclopedia that has no definite order.  It appears only in the order that we stumble through it.

There is one area of life that has a similar geography or non-geography that is identical to the internet, and that is the mind itself.

Thoughts have no order or spatial relation to one another.  One thought might remind us of another related thought, but this isn’t an explicit spatial relation.  It’s the equivalent of a hyperlink on a webpage.  The two are associated but the association is dimensionless.  

If time is taken to watch the manner of thought closely, the experience of moving from one thought to the next isn’t like moving at all, it’s straight up teleportation.  Even the Television has more spatial structure than the internet.  Everything exists on a channel and those channels have a numerical order.  But the internet is a sea with no bottom and no surface.  We can easily forget that a website exists just as we can fail to remember that great idea we had while waking up but which now escapes the conscious gaze.

Imagine, however, if every time you visited Twitter you had to pass by a meditation app in order to get there, because it was just on the way.  (This might sound like an advertisement, but advertisements are far more fickle and prickly.  If there’s any mental equivalent of advertising, it’s probably that negative self talk, or that evil demon trying to lure you back into bad behavior.). The closest thing we have to this is the placement of apps on a phone.  Notice how we rarely forget where  on the phone a particular app is, but we can forget about a favourite blog that was never bookmarked.  One exists in space, the other only exists in time, and time has a geography more akin to thought than the linear order we try to associate with it.  As much as things may proceed one after another, we don’t remember them that way.  The past is mostly relegated to the same soup as most thought.

The irony of digital geography is that all of this stuff does actually exist within a complicated set of relationships that even do exist spatially, in the physical world, but these microscopic configurations are meaningless to us, meaningful only to the innards of a computer.

As the power of hardware increases and areas like Virtual Reality and Augmented Reality become more of a…. reality, It’s worthy if not just merely fun to imagine the entire digital world spatialized.  What if Twitter were suddenly a landscape of hills and mountains, each representing it’s own niche as with Money Twitter or VC Twitter or Tesla Twitter.  Those with the most followers in each of these niches have clambered their way past others by communal merit to top so they can be seen and heard by all who gravitate to that highpoint.  

Scrolling then is a bit like a high-speed flyby through the valleys and canyons created by these voiced peaks.

Perhaps it should not be a surprise that it’s so easy to get lost in these digital realms.  Like an IKEA which has specifically designed their store to be a maze that requires seeing everything in order to escape, the digital world is a place with no landmarks, and no exit signs.

Putting down the phone or getting off the computer is a bit like trying to wake up from a dream on command. It’s a skill more than it is a reliable set of directions, and perhaps this is because - like a dream - there is no definitive and reliable spatial geography.  The “way out” entails a wholly different reality.  It’s not just teleporting, it’s more akin to sobering up at will or remembering that good idea that escapes the mind.

In the absence of landmarks and exits, the experience of the digital world highlights more than anything, the importance of attentional navigation.  Like a compass that orients itself based on something that exists on a far larger magnitude than trees, rocks and other landmarks, our attention can be trained to orient in relation to itself, examining it’s own direction and content and placing on offer the chance to choose, something different.

GEARS OF INCENTIVE

January 12th, 2021

Large projects can slow and stall.  The enormity of the task paired with the agonizingly distant incentive of life where the project has been realized can make the going slow, and slower.  The marathon can turn into a race that seems to take longer and longer as each step gets shorter and takes more time.

Just as it’s wise to work up to large projects by chunking the necessary learning with smaller more bite-sized projects, it can be just as useful and invigorating to pause that huge project in order to sprint on something smaller and easier.

A drastic switch of gears can be a reminder that those smaller ones for accelerating still exist.  This applies on multiple levels.  An hour and a half of focused work often gets far more done than a full day of distracted swings at the goal.  

Even evolution works in a similar way.  We tend to think of evolution as this gradual process that occurs over the course of tens of thousands of years, but in fact the evolution of organism occurs in fits and spurts, with long periods of stagnant morphology.  Usually it’s a sudden change in the environment that necessitates this jump in evolution.  Suddenly the temperature rises, or falls, and most of the population dies off, unable to cope with the new situation.  But a few outliers who have just the right cocktail of genes and mutations survive and eventually thrive, giving rise to a new direction in the species.

Self-motivation boils down to a curation of incentivizing emotions.  But it can be incredibly difficult to constantly bombard that internal mental environment in ways that charge anew those always deflating feelings of determination and ambition.  But just as with the organism evolving in response to situation, we can consciously place ourselves in a new situation to stimulate an evolution in the emotions that incentivize and motivate us.  Whether this be as simple as taking on a short but high-intensity project, or even just going for an hard workout, there are many ways to engineer the conditions for the mind that we need in order to move forward.  What’s important to realize is that the mind isn’t always capable of engineering it’s own conditions alone, but it is always possible to figure out ways to provoke the environment in ways that poke back.

INFORMATION PROMINENCE

January 11th, 2021

There is all sorts of stuff flying around right in front of our eyes that we are entirely blind to.  In the literal sense we can only see a pretty small portion of the electromagnetic spectrum, and the sliver of it that we see we call - appropriately - the visual spectrum.  It’s only with the advent of technologies that can pick up other parts of the electromagnetic spectrum that we can be sure those frequencies outside of what’s seen even exist.  For a moment just imagine if everything outside of the visible spectrum could be seen.  If infrared and ultraviolet were all merged upon the canvas of the rainbow we see.  And beyond that, the Gamma rays of distant stars visible like a different light, and even the radio waves bouncing against the atmosphere, pulsing from wifi routers.  Imagine if even beyond the electromagnetic spectrum we could the unceasing torrent sea of Neutrinos that bombard every square centimetre of space we fathom.

Life would certainly look a bit different.

What we understand is a sad function of information prominence and complexity.  Compare two instances: seeing a baseball that’s flying toward your face, and the amount of carbon in the atmosphere.  

The baseball is very obvious once noticed, and we generally react very well to this sort of problem.  But what about that carbon?  Can you even see it?  Aside from the quick and deceptively ephemeral blast of black cloud that pours from exhaust pipes, we just can’t see the stuff.  The prominence of the information regarding it’s concentration in the atmosphere is nill compared to the notification flash from your phone, the ding, or that baseball getting larger at an alarming rate.  We have to rely on technology and a decently complex understanding of chemistry in order to gain a sensible picture about what’s going on with the invisible problem up in the sky.  Imagine for a moment if we could actually see that carbon, if the clear blue sky was darker because of it.  Needless to say we probably would have grown alarmed about such a change many decades ago, and our alarm would have rose in pitch like the flight or flight response that initiates at the sight of a baseball on course for an unwholesome kiss.

This issue of information prominence extends even to something like learning.  Undertaking any course of study with any reasonable complexity or obscurity is an exercise against information prominence.  It’s often the unnatural and difficult task of avoiding the obvious distraction that tempts a certain kind of fun information, like “what happens next on that show?” in favor of a piece of information that is far less obvious and often difficult to find, like “what does this obscure coding error that turns up no results in Google mean?”

It’s worth wondering what the industry of education could learn from the industry of entertainment.  Unfortunately, the efficacy of one is well tied to incentives, whereas the other is not.  Entertainment is nearly always in a state of being highly tuned to the current culture - it has to be, otherwise it ceases to be interesting and fails to make money.  Education on the other hand has some incentives but they are not nearly as clear cut nor prominent.  The incentive for a teenager to pay attention to the revelations of Euclid are, well, piss poor.  Grades don’t end up having ironclad consequences for how life is going to turn out.  But even paying a kid for good grades fails to meet the point.  We don’t pay viewers to watch the movies.  It’s the other way around.  Imagine what school would have to be like for a teenager to be willing to pay out of their often meagre stash of cash in order to go.  This would require school to be more captivating and fun than socializing, movies, music, drugs, and all other variety of shenanigans that populate those younger years.  Simply put, education has some crushing competition.  But it still begs to wonder.  There are loads of people, and kids who become fascinated by a topic and dive deep, retrieving all manner of information and revelation that is anything but obvious.  Do such people just get lucky with the right mindset at the right time being exposed to just the right variety and amount of material on the subject?  

It’s fun to wonder if the future of AI might not be able to read individual psychologies with this exceptionally high degree of sensitivity and tailor the speed, direction and process of an educational program in such a way that it gives rise to a fascination that supersedes all the other superficial nonsense we waste time with.  

It’s hard to think the issue of education isn’t simply a matter of the correct information at the right time.  Indeed, this is exactly what much entertainment boils down to.  Be it a video game, or an episodic show.  All of them are telling highly crafted stories which are tailored to pull at our attention and nurture that connection.  It’s not just a matter of making information prominent, but toggling the availability.  If it was just a matter of information than we’d all be just as satisfied with the wikipedia plot synopsis of acclaimed shows and movies.  It’s not the information of the story, but the way the information is revealed.  When it comes to education, the only thought that’s given to the way information is revealed is merely order: algebra is required to learn calculus, certainly, but mere order again fails to tap the nuance that is constantly honed in the world of entertainment.  The best teachers don’t just know the information, they entertain with it.