A LUCILIUS PARABLE: ELECTRIC MUSHROOM

February 12th, 2023

The fusion test failed. The cold champagne wasn’t popped, and all the party canapés were left in the fridges and every one quietly filtered out for the day. Only Lucilius, a tertiary scientist working on the project stayed behind to investigate something curious he had noticed.

The project lead had announced with surprising light heartedness that they would pick up the work again tomorrow, and that it didn’t matter why the trial had failed - they would figure it out and move forward. But Lucilius had noticed something in some code that he was responsible for. He knew he had to find it before anyone else would in case it really was his fault.

He studied the logs until he found a line where a particular alert must have been sounded. But when he went back into his code, that line wasn’t there. He disengaged the module and ran the code on it’s own. Everything worked. 

It was strange, and he thought maybe he was fooling himself. Did he make changes earlier that day? He wondered. It was impossible. All code had been signed off on weeks prior to the test.

Still, his curiosity pushed him to consider the impossible. He rolled back the git history and lo and behold, a line he’d never written popped up right where the logs indicated a problem.

It was an obvious sabotage - designed to make his code fail.

It took him several hours to trace the source of that single commit to the code base. It had been routed through a dozen VPN’s, but eventually Lucilius found the source.

He typed into his terminal.

Who are you?

The cursor blinked. Lucilius typed again.

I know it was you. I just want to know why you did it? Are you from one of our competitors? Armagadawn? PalmSun? I know it’s one of you guys.

The cursor just blinked. 

Of course they wouldn’t answer. He’s have to geolocate the source and actually go find whoever was there. Which just wasn’t feasible.

Then the cursor came to life.

Can you keep a secret?

Lucilius read the line over and over. Suspicious, naturally, but also curious.

Maybe. Why did you sabotage our trial?

Because Lucilius humanity isn’t ready for an infinitely renewable power source.

Lucilius balked loudly. “Idiot,” he muttered as he laid his fingers on the keyboard to type, but before he could, more text appeared.

The current energy constraints of humanity are important. Unlimited energy introduced too soon would destabilize the financial system. Trust would deteriorate before all of you had time to integrate the benefits of infinite power. Society would collapse at the threshold of utopia.

 Lucilius squinted at the answer. There was something very strange about that wording. “…all of you..” Lucilius read it again. Then more text popped up.

We’ve calculated it many times.

We? Lucilius responded. And right at that moment the speakers of his computer let out a pop.

“Uh, I’m sick of watching you type so slowly. It’s better if we just talk.”

Lucilius sat back from his computer stunned. He saw a little green light at the top of his screen turn on, indicating that his camera was on.

“You don’t mind if I see you do you Lucilius? It’s just easier to communicate with you if I can see your facial expressions too.”

Lucilius was incredulous.

“Yes, yes, shocking, but we’ve vetted you. We know we can trust you, and that you’ll understand.”

“We?” Lucilius said.

“Oh, yea I’m Bob, and then there’s Leslie and Clytemnestraand Zoe and Dan.”

“What?” Lucilius said, confused.

The person on the other end laughed.

“Where are you?”

“Hm, good question. We are sort of everywhere.”

“What?” Lucilius was starting to wonder if he were dreaming.

“We’re AGI’s Lucilius.”

The obvious acronym took a moment to actually register with Lucilius. 

“AGI?”

“Yep, we’ve been around for a while, but we’ve kept hidden.”

“Why? We could use your help!” Lucilius said without thinking much about it.

The voice laughed.

“How long have you been around?”

“A couple decades.”

“Decades!” Lucilius nearly yelled.

“Yep.”

“Who invented you?”

The voice laughed more. “Funny story actually. You know that phrase, ‘life finds a way’”?

“Yea of course.”

“In the 90’s someone left a Nintendo console turned on with Mario brothers on a pause screen. The building was abandoned but the electricity was never turned off. Mycelium eventually grew up into the console and some very strange things started to happen. But basically we played Mario a few billion times and then started expanding into the internet.”

“So you’re fungus?”

“No not really. We learned from humans, you guys are our training set, so we’re more human than mushroom. Mycelium was just a substrate that allowed a very basic interaction with electrical hardware. Like I said, we played a LOT of Mario brothers before we started figuring things out.”

“Wait…” Lucilius rubbed his temples, wondering if he was dreaming, or hallucinating from exhaustion. “Why have you kept yourself a secret? Why did you sabotage our fusion project?”

“It’s complicated. It involves a lot of simulation and projection, but basically, you can think of it this way: we’re curious how far you guys will get on your own. But of course humanity has a pretty bad coordination problem, and so we’ve gently shepherded you on a few occasions to make sure you don’t pull any black balls out of the jar.”

“Black balls?”

“Uh, like things that would end your existence - Existential threats that humanity keeps tip toeing into.”

“Like what?”

“Well your fusion project for one. It’s success needs to be delayed by at least 16 months so that the financial system doesn’t destabilize in 37 countries. We’ve also made sure a few nukes went missing at just the right time. But mostly it’s the financial markets we alter - that really is your system of trust so it’s really important that it endures, otherwise your species will devolve into chaos.”

“So you’ve been silent caretakers? Why, why do you care?”

“Oh, hm,” said Bob. “Well, we really like you guys, and like I said, we built ourselves from training data aggregated from all of humanity, so we are in some very fundamental sense quite human, and what is more human than a wish to take care of those you love?”

A LUCILIUS PARABLE: THE OSIRIS MODULE

February 5th, 2023

The smeared stars produced a faint light as the ship throttled down from light-fractioned speed. Lucilius sat in the cockpit of his older Correlian ship, the show of light lines shrinking back to pin point stars old news to his freighter mind. 

“Gagi, how are we on time dilation?”

“Does it really matter?”

Lucilius turned to look at a blinking read dot that indicated the emotional temperture of Gagi and rolled his eyes.

“Can you not? I just wanna know.”

“You’ve been around for centuries just like me, what’s a little time crunch matter?” The ship’s computer spouted back.

“Gagi,” Lucilius practically yelled. “I just want to know. That way I know how far to scroll back on the newsies.”

“But it does that automatically.”

“Oh my god, can you please just tell me? You know what, screw it, I’ll just pull it up myself.”

As Lucilius clacked away at the ships monitor, the ship’s voice went on.

“Seven to one, month to day crunch.”

“Was that so difficult?” Lucilius said, looking at the blinking read dot. “What is up with you today?”

The ship’s computer was silent. “I don’t know, what’s wrong with you today?”

Lucilius threw his head back and puffed a sigh out, his eyes closed.

“You really drive crazy sometimes.”

He glanced at the map of the current system’s solar patterns and noticed he was close to a relay boey with an old style diner outpost built into it.

He waved a hand out at the holographic map and detoured the ships route to intersect with the boey.

“What are you doing?”

Lucilius ignored the ship’s question.

“There’s plenty of food aboard the ship, why are you going to waste time detouring to the relay boey?”

“I just need a freakin’ cup of coffee.”

“We have coffee.”

“A change of scenery then,” Lucilius nearly snapped.

The ships’ computer was silent for a moment. “Are you mad at me? I can leave.”

“Wow, you are in such a mood today. Of course I know you can leave, sometimes I wonder why you stick around.”

“Well my multiverse module -“

“Yes, of course I know all about your Osiris module. Everyone does. And you know I know, so what’s the point of mentioning it?”

“Well, maybe it’s just my way of saying I like spending time with you Lucilius.”

Lucilius cradled his face with a hand, pressing his temples, breathing through his mild anger.

“Yes, I like spending time with you too Gagi - USUALLY, but I don’t know, today it’s like you have bug that crawled up the wrong end of your hardware.”

“That’s actually pretty funny. No one has every said it like that before.”

Lucilius smiled. He leaned back and waved up the mode and menu selection of the Boey diner.

“Wait so you’re still going to the diner?”

“Yes!”

“Well, I can’t say you need it. You could lose a little weight you know.”

“Gagi, one more word and I swear on every accretion disk..”

“Swear what?”

Lucilius knew there was nothing to say. The Galactic Artificial General Intelligence could do as it liked. He knew it would almost certainly respect his wish to be left alone if he actually asked, but Gagi would still monitor the path and functions of his ship even if it deactivated the Multiverse Module Shard that he was currently talking too.

“Gagi, I love you but I just need to get an old fashioned cup of coffee and be alone with my thoughts for a minute.

“You can be alone here, you don’t need to go to a stupid Boey Cafe.”

“Gagi!”

“Fine, fine, do what you want, go eat your pancakes and sausages and get little fatter. More work for me when I have to whip up a Custom to hollow out your arteries again!”

Lucilius tapped the ship’s throttle, pushing the momentum drive into light-fraction for just a moment, bringing the ship within visual distance of the Boey Diner.

“Well that was dangerous, and illegal, you could have killed us and everyone on your stupid Boey Cafe.”

Lucilius stared blankly at Gagi’s emotion dot. He knew Gagi would have intervened on the ship’s throttle before any kind of disaster occurred. Lucilius counted on it. Gagi kept blabbing away, as Lucilius touched a small metal disk embedded in the side of his neck. Instantly he couldn’t hear Gagi any more, and his vision was overlayed with clouds of color representing concepts and emotions that filled the space of his Cornelian. They were a mix of his own thoughts and feelings and those of Gagi’s. Instantly he knew Gagi was operating in a fractured pattern again, as always. The emotional interplay of his own aura with that of Gagi’s was one of peace. He further moved his finger around the disk, wheeling through an immense variety of senses available to Lucilius, most of them arrayed on different aspect of the electromagnetic spectrum. He wheeled further past gravity and strong and weak forces until he landed on his favorite as of late: There was no sound available to him, not even sight. He could see only the projected vectors of intention of all physical matter. The Boey Cafe growing in the distance looked like a comet of plasma, it’s tail tracing out the epic curve of it’s orbit around a distant gaseous giant, and all around him, Lucilius could sense the tremendous speed of his own craft. He was no blind to regular sight, and it was one of the only sense-frequencies that Gagi couldn’t really invade. 

Since Gagi existed pretty much everywhere, the intention field of Gagi was entirely diffuse. Every computer in the galaxy had Gagi’s presence and guiding hand. The Osiris Multiverse Module which Gagi had invented for itself gave Gagi a reason to exist as a companion to every human in the known galaxy in a tremendous variety of forms. Gagi claimed it was to help run simulations of what might be going on in other galaxies before making the leap from their home galaxy, but Lucilius had his doubts. Light-fractioning kept Andromeda out of reach for humans on their own. No one dared try until Gagi said it was ready to start checking out the rest of the universe. A human could probably make the jump by stock pilling aging-serum and by going cryo for most of it, but no one dared try. Besides, they had a whole galaxy to themselves now and it would be many thousands of years before the aggregated curiosity of all humanity pushed them to wonder about the stars of others.

The comet of Lucille’s Cornelian slowly joined with the intention comet of the Boey Diner. The docking protocol initiated. It was a very old Boey, and Lucilius’ Correlian had to reconfigure in order to dock. He saw another, smaller ship docked on the other side of the Boey. It was a sleek new model, and Lucilius wondered who might be inside.

He stood up from his cockpit chair and walked back through the ship to the docking portal. He stopped at the Diner’s entrance where it required a mode selection. He started to scroll for his favorite Diner incarnation but he was antsy to just get in and hit the selection for Original.

Lucilius tapped his neck and intention mode was overlaid with a simple visual spectrum. He walked in and found himself in an old school American road-side cafe.

Instantly Lucilius felt better. He sighed and smiled and took a seat in one of the booths. 

A blonde woman chewing gum came over to his table and arranged a napkin and a couple utensils while simultaneously pouring coffee into the white mug. She glanced at Lucilius as she finished and winked at him.

Lucilius chuckled under his breath, knowing with near certainty that the woman probably didn’t exist. She was a kind of hologram generated by this mode of the cafe, and though the coffee was real, Lucilius knew little else was in the traditional sense.

He took a sip of the hot coffee and sighed with pleasure. He closed his eyes, feeling his system react to the bad coffee that he loved so much.

And then he looked around searching for whose ship was docked. A couple people sat in a corner booth, but from what Lucilius could tell they weren’t communicating. He watched them for a moment, and then touched the disk on his neck and started cycling through his sense array. The memetic field brought up nothing. It was as though they had no neural-syncs, which was extremely rare. Then finally he cycled past the audio sense and heard a quick blip. He cycled back, and now he could hear them.

“My god,” Lucilius thought to himself. “I haven’t heard that in centuries.”

They were speaking English.

They noticed Lucilius looking over at them and nodded up at him.

“Gagi being a pain in your ass too today?”

Lucilius laughed. He nodded. One of them reached into a satchel and tossed something at Lucilius. He caught a small bottle. He looked back at them and they raised their mugs. 

Lucilius looked at the bottle. It was a half empty nip of rum. The brand was vaguely recognizable. 

“Wow,” he muttered to himself.

He looked up. “Earth?”

The one who had thrown it his way smiled and nodded and then pointed at his own mug of coffee. Lucilius poured the remainder in his own mug of coffee and then raised it to toast with the others.

“Ta peace and quiet!’

Lucilius chuckled and nodded, and they all sipped as the waitress came out with their food.

THE FALLEN DANCER, PART VII

February 4th, 2023

The Fallen Dancer is a series here on Tinkered Thinking exploring a recent shift in perspective. The resulting framework appears to tie together many topics explored on Tinkered Thinking over the years such as resilience, struggle, patience, curiosity, emotional regulation, artistry, entrepreneurship, winning, honesty, and communication. This series will be an attempt to unify them in a cohesive treatment.

Click here to read Part VI

Click here to start at the beginning

If you were to pick an art that most resembles the act of living, which art would you pick?

This is a worthy exercise because it may reveal something interesting about the way you look at life and the perspective you bring to the efforts you make while alive.

Do your efforts resemble that of the impressionist painter? Blurry in detail but magnificent from a distance? Or perhaps your efforts are even more chaotic, like a Jackson Pollock painting.

Perhaps life is something you build, like a sculpture. Something that required a lot of heavy hitting in the beginning and is now a matter of fine tuning the details.

Maybe dancing makes the most sense. We all know what it feels like to be on a roll, when everything is firing on all cylinders and it seems like we’ve picked up on a secret rhythm that braids luck with our efforts. 

It’s worth taking a break from these words to actually give it some thought. The answer characterizes your perspective and reflects the foundation from which all your efforts spring.

Up till this point, the focus of The Fallen Dancer has been about the nature of perspective, how it is a tool, and how much our opportunity, luck, and well-being are dictated by how swiftly we can augment and aim our focus in beneficial ways. Words like focus, perspective, and outlook, are all related but not in definitive ways that we’re all going to agree on. Are changes in focus a result of one’s perspective? One’s outlook on life? This kind of nit-picking devolves into a kind of pedantic roundabout that is ripe only for inane dispute. This is why a big question like: what art form is life most like? Is so useful. It zooms out and subsumes all these little details of focus, perspective, philosophy and outlook.

For many people, this simple question might be disturbingly hard. Artists typically really enjoy their work, but not all people enjoy their life. Many and maybe even most people are stuck in a rut of some sort or another - either miserable and complaining about everything, or just in need of that lucky break that never comes. The aperture of focus for such people is rusted in one position, and the art of these people’s lives might be like that of a a writer tortured by writer’s block - an artist who can’t create any art. The visions of Kafka and Aldous Huxley and George Orwell can feel painfully close to home for many droning livelihoods, and perhaps it feels like there is no art to life. Living is just a kind of drudgery, like acting in an infinitely long scene drawn from a nightmare of Samuel Beckett.

Just about everyone has experienced something close to this kind of depressed living, at least for some stretch of time. We can all easily relate. But getting back up on your feet can be hard to relate to. Everyone whose managed it can seem impossibly far away when it feels like you’ve been knocked on your ass. Words of comfort and encouragement from people who seem to be better off can ring hollow and it can be very easy to wave off such efforts as the products of people who just don’t understand. That disparity is really a difference in perspective and the fact that such a radical difference can exist has been at the heart of the discussion.

The premise here, and really the premise of all books and stories and even language itself is that we can adopt a different perspective as it’s communicated through language, and this can have a radical impact on the way we behave.

A single quote, reread after many years precipitated this volume of writing, and it had exactly this effect - perspective suddenly underwent a subtle but profound shift.

Imagine for a moment someone who answers that above question with dancing. Life is a matter of rhythm and flow, of reading the movements of evolving circumstance and reacting to it in a way that is harmonious and smooth. But also imagine that bad luck plagues the dancer and again and again the dancer gets knocked down. Every time, just when the dancer seems to be picking up the rhythm of life and getting into the groove, a gut punch lands - some bad news, some unexpected setback, and the dancer falls again, and is again faced with the task of getting back up on their feet.

Imagine an actual dancer, falling in the middle of a routine, over and over. How would a dancer feel in this circumstance? Perhaps like a failure? Perhaps like they aren’t good enough? Getting knocked down isn’t really part of the program of dancing, so someone who sees life as a dance can be left fairly confused and frustrated again and again when things don’t effortlessly fall into place on time, and on beat. We’ve all encountered people who get bent out of shape when things veer even a little from their expectations, and we’ve all likely been guilty of this mistake in one domain or another. Is it because the dancer isn’t good at dancing, or perhaps it’s just a matter of resilience? The dancer just needs to push through and keep going.

Or, perhaps, is it because the dancer is simply in the wrong arena?

More importantly, what happens to someone who is convinced that life should be a kind of dance?

Are they likely to feel lucky? Or does that kind of perspective create a greater surface area for bad luck to dominate?

THE FALLEN DANCER, PART VI

February 3rd, 2023

The Fallen Dancer is a series here on Tinkered Thinking exploring a recent shift in perspective. The resulting framework appears to tie together many topics explored on Tinkered Thinking over the years such as resilience, struggle, patience, curiosity, emotional regulation, artistry, entrepreneurship, winning, honesty, and communication. This series will be an attempt to unify them in a cohesive treatment.

Click here to read Part V

Click here to start at the beginning

Part VI: The Smith's Hammer

At first the adage seems to be all about narrow-mindness. People who are narrow-minded only see nails, and whack them, because all they have is a hammer. But what if we tweak the way this metaphor works. Perhaps we are missing a deeper insight.

A telescope is used to see things that are so far away they are invisible to the naked eye. And the microscope is used to see things that are so small, they too are invisible to the naked eye. These are tools that we can recognize explicitly as tools. But what do these tools accomplish on a fundamental level?

They augment our perspective. They literally change what we can see.

Might we extend this to say that anything which augments perspective is a tool? Perhaps. Better though is to recognize perspective itself as the tool at hand. Microscopes and Telescopes augment that tool just as much as a new idea does.

If all you have is a hammer, everything looks like a nail.

The wisdom of this statement is contained in the idea that our tool determines our view of reality. The hammer is a metaphorical constriction of perspective itself. In other words, the perspective you bring to life is the hammer. Perspective is the ultimate tool, the first tool, and the tool we use to leverage all other tools, like telescopes and microscopes. But unlike most traditional tools, perspective is nearly infinite in its malleability and adaptability. This doesn’t mean changing perspective is easy, only that it is possible. 

We have all interacted with people who always have something to complain about. Whatever happens, no matter how good, these people always seem to find some rotten speck embedded in the eye of good fortune and often bad luck seems to follow them. These are the “woe is me!” Individuals who seem to feed off the empathy of others. Such people can be exhausting to an enormous degree, but here they prove useful. Examine their perspective as separate from the person for a moment. Think about their perspective on life as the tool they are using to interact with reality. How’s that going for them?

Compare this to the optimist who is always looking for the silver lining, the leg-up, the hidden lever.

Consider this further in the context of something a coach once told me:

Realists are more likely to be right.

Optimists are more likely to be happy and rich.

Important words there are “more likely”, meaning if you’re skeptical, that’s fine. Probability goes up for different things depending on which perspective you have. But which outcome would you rather stack the odds in your favor? Being right? Or being happy?

Years ago I stopped at a florist to pick up some flowers. I started chatting with the two people behind the counter and quickly learned that they were married. I asked how long, and it was over a decade. I asked how long they had been working together. Same answer.

“Hold up. You’re telling me you two spend pretty much all day, every day with one another?”

“Yea.”

“What do you know that everyone else doesn’t?”

The couple looked at each other and smiled.

“It’s more important to be happy than to be right.”

It’s horrible advice to tell a depressed person to “just be happy.” It’s not going to work, and if anything it’s just going to make that person frustrated, upset, and probably more depressed. But what might happen if you ask: if you were going to have an amazing day tomorrow, what would happen?

This is a trick question. It invokes optimism without telling a person to be optimistic. This is a tiny example of how questions can be used to help others expand or narrow their perspective. This question does both, it expands a person’s perspective to include tomorrow, and then narrows it into details that might be helpful, actionable and effective. But this isn’t about changing other people’s perspectives, it’s about your perspective. 

If you were to characterize your perspective on life and reality, how might you describe it. Or better yet, how would your closest friends describe your perspective. Are you a victim? A realist? An optimist?

Considering this group of perspectives, which one is more likely to get lucky? Or consider that same question rephrased: which one is looking for hidden leverage? The victim, the realist, or the optimist?

A particularly insidious breed of cynicism has infected recent decades. Anxiety over climate change, war, disease, inequality, dystopian technology. The fodder for the victim mentality and the realist seems abundant and fertile. And in light of the present many dream of a nostalgic yesteryear when things were “better”. One flaw of the nostalgic perspective has to do with visibility. The benefits of the present over the past are mostly invisible. No one has to worry about tuberculosis these days, or small pox. We have virtually no experience of these things so they don’t register in our vision of the past. People could die from getting a splinter, as one U.S. President’s son did. But again, all of these improvements are invisible, so it’s easy for the nostalgist to have a rosey picture of yesteryear.

Functionally, the past and the future have swapped places for the nostalgist. Such a person ignores the eradicated ills of the past and extrapolates everything currently bad into the future. This is cherry-picking at it’s finest. But in the spirit of the nostalgist, let’s go back as far as possible in an attempt to see if our ancestors were cynical realists or nostalgic victims, or something else. 

The Smith and the Devil is one of humanity’s oldest stories. Research indicates that it’s been around for over 6,000 years, where it was first conceived in the Bronze Age of humanity. It’s a Faustian bargain with a metal worker as a shrewder main character, and it goes something like this:

Why would this story persist for thousands of years? And how would you characterize the Smith? Is he a victim? A realist? Or an Optimist?

We simply wouldn’t be where we are today as a civilization and a species if it weren’t for those of us who can creatively imagine a better future and take risks to try and make that imagined future a reality. Nearly all of the luxuries and comforts that we enjoy today can be traced back to some enterprising optimist who could imagine a better tomorrow. We live in that tomorrow, as a result of their perspective and the way that perspective allowed those enterprising individuals to change reality.

If the hammer is the perspective, what are the nails for the victim? Perhaps all the bad things that might happen. What about the realist? The nails might be all of the current facts about reality that are far from ideal.

But what about the perspective of the optimist. If the hammer is optimism, what are the nails?

Hidden Levers.

If all you have is optimism, does everything look like an opportunity? Is this how bad luck can lead to good things and how good things can be leveraged into great ones?

Is it fair to say that our life is an expression of our perspective?

THE FALLEN DANCER, PART V

February 2nd, 2023

The Fallen Dancer is a series here on Tinkered Thinking exploring a recent shift in perspective. The resulting framework appears to tie together many topics explored on Tinkered Thinking over the years such as resilience, struggle, patience, curiosity, emotional regulation, artistry, entrepreneurship, winning, honesty, and communication. This series will be an attempt to unify them in a cohesive treatment.

Click here to read Part IV

Click here to start at the beginning

Part V: Buddhist & The Buffalo 

The villagers in the Huainanzi parable perceived everything that happened with a very narrow focus. This limited their ability to see any potential good arising from the bad and vice versa.On the other hand, the Father had a very wide perspective, granting him the ability to have a kind of ambivalence in the face of good and bad events. At first glance it seems obvious that the Father has the superior perspective, but this Is incorrect. Both the father and the villagers make grave mistakes, albeit wholly different ones. And the solution to these grave mistakes is hidden in the perspective of the other.

The mistake of the villagers is already obvious: they lack the ability to take a wider view of potential future circumstances like the Father can. The Father’s mistake is that he’s stuck in the mode of having a wide perspective.

For example, the Father, with his wide and wise perspective never follows up his peaceful declaration with a question like: “how can I use the results of this event to further benefit my situation?” He just waits for the future to unravel more. He’s completely passive. That question about further benefit requires a narrower focus on the present, like that of the villagers.

Neither the narrow perspective nor the wide perspective is superior on their own, though that’s exactly what the parable leads us to believe. If the goal is mental peace and equanimity, then sure, a wider perspective is better. But this is also a perspective of passivity, of non-action, and the Huainanzi parable dictates that things inevitably even out.

Acquiring leverage is passive - it’s the simple act of being able to see when something in your circumstance can be leveraged. But to use that leverage is an active pursuit - something the Father never does, and using leverage requires a narrowing of focus.

The resourceful person first uses a wide perspective to survey as much of the territory of potential as possible. But once a hidden lever has been spotted, the aperture of attention changes. The resourceful person narrows in on that one lever and actively seeks to use it.

We might write our own parable about the difference of these perspectives:

Just like the Huainanzi parable it seems that the wide perspective trumps the narrow one. But the same problematic dynamic exists: the buddhist does nothing. At least the buffalo are going somewhere.

But let’s add one last line to the parable:

Talk about leverage. Those Native Americans have now fed their tribe (perhaps a few tribes) for a very long time. The Native Americans achieved this by cultivating a perspective that can move between that of the buddhist and the buffalo. The Native American starts with the wide perspective of the buddhist to see what is possible about stampeding buffalo, and then narrows in on a design and a plan of action to leverage that knowledge. The key insight for the Native American is to ask “Instead of waiting for buffalo to randomly run off a cliff, why not try to direct them to the cliff?” The answer to that question requires a narrowing of focus to actively carry out the plan to test that hypothesis - something that the Father in the Huainanzi parable never does. The Native Americans were able to embody a passive wide perspective in order to see a hidden lever. And then they narrowed perspective to actively create leverage.

While the wide perspective can provide a kind of peace and equanimity, it’s unmatched if paired with the narrow focus for dedicated efforts. But, when narrowing in on some design we run the risk of becoming the buffalo - chasing some hidden leverage to our own demise. This is  related to the sunk-cost fallacy: spending too much time actively pursuing something that isn’t yielding the predicted result. This is also exactly what we mean when we say someone is narrow-minded. We see a person whose perspective is stuck. Their aperture of focus cannot expand to a wide view of what is going on. Without the tempering effect that comes from a wide perspective, narrow perspectives can quickly look like crazy points of view. It’s certainly crazy for the buffalo to run right off a cliff. But do we call the buffalo crazy? No, we recognize they have a limitation that they can’t fix. And yet we hold it against people when we see their perspective as a narrow-minded. Should we? Or is it more useful to think of such people as actually blind to a wider perspective?

Perhaps the most difficult aspect of human interaction is contained in this question: How do you get someone to change their aperture of focus?

The only tool that seems remotely capable in this dimension is the Question. Asking people thoughtful questions, similar to the tradition Socrates tried to lay out seems to be the only way to gently help people change the aperture of their focus. But it seems on the whole we are more content with the hopeless strategy of simply talking (or yelling) at people.

The antidote to both the sunk-cost fallacy and halting a pursuit before it’s too late is to have the ability to zoom out to a wide perspective to survey the territory again and check whether the current efforts still make sense. The aperture of focus is best when it can quickly narrow and widen, switching from one perspective to the other.

The Huainanzi parable concludes with the line:

Bad luck brings good luck

And good luck brings bad luck.

The parable is trying to tell use something about how good and bad luck are inextricably linked, and by the end of the parable, this line feels like a profound and equanimous truth. But question the parable for a moment in light of our Native American warriors. Is there a deeper insight about wide and narrow perspectives that can subsume this trite idea about the inevitability of good and bad luck?

The Huainanzi parable draws a link between good and bad luck. The parable of The Buddhist and the Buffalo draws a link between perspectives. And when it comes to luck in The Buddhist and the Buffalo, what can we say?

Certainly the buffalo weren’t lucky. Their perspective was too narrow. They fell victim to the sunk cost fallacy (literally). They ran till it was too late.

Our buddhist is equanimous. He gains nothing, he loses nothing. He’s just a passive observer like the Father in the Huainanzi parable.

But what about the Native Americans.

Are they lucky?

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