DIPPING & DIVING

December 30th, 2020

It requires a bit of luck to know when to miscalculate.  As we get to know ourselves better, it can become a skill to know when it’s wise to proceed carefully or dive right in.  Mayfer’s Law outlines the second: The miscalculation of time required for achievement enables the undertaking of endeavours far larger than we would knowing attempt to achieve.  The mechanics of this law are buried in the sunk-cost fallacy: once we get going on something, there is often momentum against some potentially wiser considerations to stop.  But when is it wise to proceed carefully?

Seems like a strange question: isn’t it always wise to tread carefully?  It’s de facto wisdom only because it’s rare: we’re really good at jumping into the deep end without first dipping a toe to test for temperature.  Or so it seems.  The de facto wisdom stands because we often dive right into the wrong things.  Relationships, jobs, addictions..

Just go for it is the symmetrical wisdom to our de facto caution.  But again, we misapply known wisdom: we often fail to take the advice when it’s applied to the right thing: starting that company, writing that book, learning an instrument.  With those things we’re cautious, but for reasons that lack wisdom.

Learning how to learn hinges on a self-awareness of emotion, and how to foster the correct emotions with the right amount and frequency of new material.  It’s imperative to be mindful of the tension between one’s own interest and frustration while exploring a new field.  The first has to be stoked as much as possible, but it is always at risk of being snuffed out by the second.  This is a spot where caution is best implemented:  be cautious when frustration starts to rise - like a poison, it doesn’t take much to kill off an infant effort.  Caution doesn’t mean stop, but merely to tread carefully, to tread mindfully and look for the next best place to dive in.

WANDERING COLLABORATION

December 29th, 2020

This episode is dedicated to The Visual Monkey who you can connect with on twitter with the handle @TheVisualMonkey

The discovery of the new will always look like wandering before it is found.  This is one of the 9 principles of Tinkered Thinking.  It’s a more direct equivalent to the catchier, albeit vague: think outside the box.

Perhaps the thought has crossed the minds of a few upon first hearing this catchy dictum:  what exactly is the box, and why is my thinking inside of it?  Presumably, the box is what is already known, what has already been discovered, created, decided upon and further more depended upon.  The thinking that is characteristic of the box is old and therefore merely repeated by default.  Getting out of the box means to abandon the safe haven of predictable patterns and to risk venturing into the unknown in order to have a chance at finding something new.  The box is the mapped area, and because it’s mapped and structured, we already know what’s there, it’s the unmapped area that holds new treasure.  

But how exactly do we navigate the unknown?  The attempt to answer that question is one of the fundamental reasons why Tinkered Thinking exists, and while it’s imaginable that we might be able to codify some basic navigational principles regarding our venture into the unknown, it’s probably safe to assume the first step in such a process: wandering.

You’re only lost when you can’t find a place you know exists.  We wander when we search for something that may or may not exist.

Now here’s a place or rather a thing that might exist: is it possible to come up with a simple visual illustration of this principle of wandering from Tinkered Thinking?

This is the question asked by a new Twitter account with the handle @TheVisualMonkey who later approached Tinkered Thinking with a preliminary sketch.

That first sketch showed a square and a second quasi-square represented by a wandering line that roughly approximates the shape of a square.  The relation to principle of wandering is evident, but the illustration on it’s own doesn’t evoke the same idea - it’s up to multiple interpretations.

So a collaboration began and we wandered around for a better answer to that question about whether the principle could be illustrated successfully.  Tinkered Thinking put forth an alteration of the design as a suggestion which shows the wandering line hitting specific points outside of the initial square.

This progression seemed to be the needed step to answer that question.  @TheVisualMonkey built upon the design and brought the idea to full fruition with an illustration displaying two squares, the second which has an overlay of a wandering line crossing 3 points, and then a third part of the illustration that shows the perfect triangle discovered that connects these three points in the absence of the square and the wandering path that was required to find the triangle.  Wonderfully, the final illustration evokes the very process that was taken to find it.  We had to wander around and poke at different ideas before we found what we liked.



A huge and humble thanks to The Visual Monkey.

BANAL SYSTEMS

December 28th, 2020

It’s an ironic tragedy that good habits can be so difficult to start and bad habits so difficult to stop.  One way to look at it is to see the cessation of a bad habit as a new habit of not doing that pesky vice.  No wonder it’s so hard: the end of a bad habit is really just an invisible good habit.

Habits are banal systems.  They are automatic, almost boring in their repetition, and obvious only in the sense that the word obvious has an etymology meaning “frequently encountered.”  Unfortunately, something can become so frequently encountered that it becomes invisible, we become inured to the everyday, the constant - that’s the core virtue of good habits and the insidious mechanism of bad habits.  Once a good practice becomes a habit it no longer requires any willpower, it’s automatic, and over time we merely benefit from the compounded effects.

More important is the harm that compounds from a bad habit that is all but invisible to the person who fulfills this harm with the automaticity of a robot.

Perhaps the most relatable example is a poor diet.  A can of coke and a donut doesn’t seem like much, but repeated thousands of times over the course of decades with similar diet choices and the compounded effects can feel completely unfair.  Unfortunately, the effect of our choices persist through time, especially when repeated, these choices can leave our future selves with a heavy burden, perhaps even an impossible one.

These banal systems exist at all levels, from the personal diet, all the way up to a societal level.  What’s the harm in driving a car?  Well, the harm is microscopic, literally, figuratively, and effectively this makes the harm invisible.  But when several generations across many countries adopt the same polluting technology across many domains and then just merely go about our lives, the experiment we initiate on a future state of the climate is anything but microscopic and invisible.

These banal systems can even exist at an insidious subtext to very conscious work.  The words of Oppenheimer after the first atomic explosion illuminate this point.  After the work of developing the first nuclear weapon was complete Oppenheimer spoke about it as though he’d been completely oblivious to the aim he’d been striving for.  Despite being a brilliant theoretical physicist, he was, on a very real level, somewhat blind to what his basic personal systems of inquiry, problem solving and hard work were achieving.  It’s a bit odd to think of something as dynamic as inquiry or problem solving as a kind of banal system, but it’s made banal by the disconnect between the result of the work and the experience of the work, just as the experience of eating a donut is disconnected from the dissatisfaction of looking in the mirror years later or listening to bad news from a doctor.

The common place version of our Oppenheimer is the business man who spends all his time working, and ultimately finds he’s missed out on a lot of the joys, like family, and fulfillment that were pushed aside for the work, only to wonder years later what exactly he was working for…

The banal aspect of such systems is neutral: the results can be either positive or negative.  This is the whole point behind Socrates’ famous dictum “The unexamined life is not worth living.”  We have to examine life to realize that it’s controlled by habits, by systems, and without consciously deciding on these systems and explicitly tinkering with them, we each become an unwitting slave to their results, be they good or bad.  Examining those systems and endeavouring to edit them simply makes it more likely that we will wittingly benefit from the good of the virtuous systems we’ve chosen to put in place.

A LUCILIUS PARABLE: FUNNY AIR

December 27th, 2020

Lucilius was exhausted as he boarded the empty subway and slumped into his seat. His night shit was over, his week was over, and only a moment of simple rest and reprieve sent him dreaming. The loud clank of doors opening woke him, his bleary eyes barely open.  

A young woman got on and sat across the aisle, looking off at nothing distinct.  The doors clanked shut again and the train moved forward again as Lucilius drifted off again.

He awoke moments later to a loud ding.  His eyes cracked to see the young woman pulling a phone from her purse.  Lucilius was about to let himself drift off again when he noticed a sudden shift on the girl’s face.  Within a moment she was started breathing heavily, staring at the phone still muttering over and over the word ‘no’.

She was fully hyperventilating as Lucilius straightened up.

“I can’t breath..” She barely muttered between huge gasps of air.  Clearly she was starting to have a panic attack, Lucilius figured.  Her face contorted with sadness, and now fear as she repeated “I can’t breath..”

“You ok?” Lucilius asked.

The girl looked at him, heaving air, “I can’t breathe!” She said.

“What do you mean?” Lucilius said.  “You’re breathing more than I am!”

The strange statement had the effect Lucilius wanted.  The girl grew more panicked, and frightened.  She could only whisper the words as she gasped…

I can’t breathe…

“What are you talking about!?” Lucilius demanded, wide-eyed, and with an over blown, almost cartoonish tone of voice.

“You’re sucking all the air out of this train!”

The girl was staring straight at him -confused, as she hyperventilated, her face beginning to curl into a cry.  Then Lucilius grabbed his own neck, as though he were choking, and he twisted his face, making his eyes bulge and made a farce and an act of suffocating.  He fell to the floor of the subway and began to writhe on the ground ridiculously, grasping both his neck and reaching up as though for a life that was leaving him.  And in the periphery, he saw a smile force it’s way onto the girl’s distressed face.  He kept it up, and pretended to struggle foolishly as he desperately breathed out the words..

“You need to stop breathing so much… or I’m gonna die… I need oxygen too…..you have to share!”

The girl was crying, but she was also laughing at the sight. “Stop it!” She managed to yelp as she laughed and cried.  But Lucilius thrashed around even more ridiculously, until the girl was choking on laughter.

“Stop it!” She yelped again, between hiccups of unwelcome joy, “I can’t breathe,” she said, smiling.

Lucilius froze for a moment, and then he dropped the act and sat back in his seat, sighing with relief.

“Thankyou,” he said.  He smiled rather foolishly.  “Couldn’t catch my breath there for a moment.”

GRADUAL LURE

December 26th, 2020

In order to catch a Tuna worth $10,000 you have to dig up a worm.  But the worm is not for the tuna, it’s to catch a small fish.  And if you’re hungry it can be tempting to eat that small fish, but within a day we’re back to square one digging for more worms, and the goal isn’t to dig for worms but to cash in on a $10,000 Tuna.

In order to get that Tuan a man who knows how to fish and feed himself has to fish and endure hunger a little longer.  That small fish takes the place of the worm on the hook, and it gets cast out to catch a larger fish.  And then perhaps that larger fish is large enough to eat some and work as bait for an even larger fish.

Eventually, we catch more than we can eat, we sell the extra, and buy a boat.  We catch even more and with consistency, soon we’re hunting tuna.

This sort of gradual ratchet applies in many areas that we experience: take learning, the beginning is always the most difficult, like catching that small fish and forgoing a meal in order to catch a larger fish.  The first wander in a completely new field is usually confusing, frustrating and anything but satisfying, but stick with it, and things begin to click - eventually we reel in our first little accomplishment in a new field.

When engaging with a new field it can be immensely helpful to try and design learning goals to serve multiple purposes, like the larger fish that is big enough to both serve as a meal and as bait for a larger fish.

Take for instance someone who is just starting to learn how to code.  Most of the online courses and tutorials teach something so basic and cookie-cutter that it can’t really be used for anything, they are just exercises.  

Unfortunately, it does require quite a range of knowledge to go from a blank text editor to something as simple as a personal blog.  This is why platforms like Wordpress and Wix are so popular.   They allow people to skip the painful learning process so they can get straight to what they want, but someone who runs a Wordpress or Wix blog is incapable of taking the further steps of say, creating an app.  But the individual who has gone through the confusing ordeal of creating a blog from scratch is far closer.  In fact, the jump from a blog to an app is far shorter than going from zero to blog, and this is because knowledge compounds in the same way the return on those fish compounds.  Once a basic knowledge and know-how is established, it’s a bit like the day’s catch always superseding the needs of the stomach, the extra now being sold off for cash.

Let’s say, however, that our coder’s app in mind is quite complex that involves many new aspects that our coder isn’t familiar with.  Going for it can be a bit like biting off more than a person can chew and cramp up the whole process.  Instead, this idea of the gradual lure is best used.  We ask: what distinct piece of this larger project can be broken off to learn and as a smaller distinct project that can perhaps serve a different purpose?  

For example, let’s say our coder’s app will have to be able to take payments in addition to a lot of other complexity.  Let’s say our coder also has a good friend who is an artist and needs an online store.  Suddenly, it’s possible to spot a virtuous combination.  Our coder can strike a deal with the artist friend: I’ll build you an online store for a small cut of the profits.  This sort of set up works well for both: the artist isn’t fronting cash that may not be recouped if the store doesn’t generate cash and the coder needs to learn how to handle online payments - even if the artist doesn’t bring in any cash, the coder is still ahead, having ticked off an important checkbox of the larger app they have on the hunt’s horizon.

This is an aspect of learning that isn’t addressed enough: mindfully chuckling large endeavours to create a collection of productive accomplishments that combinatorially create the conditions for that large endeavour to come to fruition.

Though each step in this process has the potential to create something tangible and useful, the most vital part of this process is intangible: it creates emotional stepping stones that lead to larger accomplishment.  Instead of trying to make the impossibly tough hop from knowing nothing to making something complex, we instead build the path as we go, luring our own selves forward with boosts of accomplishment, fulfillment, and a curiosity about what’s next.