PESSIMISTIC FILTRATION

November 16th, 2020

One aspect to highlight as a difference between optimism and pessimism is the way each filters and interprets the facts at hand.  It’s little secret that the way we feel about the wold has a tremendous impact on the way we see it.  There are plenty of studies that demonstrate how we can suffer from a varieties of cognitive blindnesses.  The ratio of optimism and pessimism that we bring to the table form a filter through which we see, or don’t see parts of the world.

Pessimism is defined as a tendency to see the worst aspect of things or believe that the worst will happen.  That second part is more crucial than the first.  The first part of pessimism can be used to great good.  It can analyze for things that might actually be a danger or a worrisome risk, but to extend it to a belief that the worst will happen is to constantly try and see the aspects of reality on hand in a way that combine to make such things happen.  Being mindful of such things is important, believing such things are inevitable is a mistake.

Optimism on the other hand is the opposite.  It’s commonly held as a tendency that things will turn out well.  But this is blind optimism.  Good things don’t necessarily happen, but they are far more likely to turn out well if we work toward them.  This is the inverse of the issue with pessimism. Blind optimism is the functional equivalent of pessimistic filtration because both fails to see a third component, and that is how actual elements at hand can be most virtuously combined to create the most opportune outcome.  Blind optimism just has faith that these things will happen on their own, and pessimism is blind to such a combination of elements because without a belief that a good outcome is possible, it’s far more difficult to see the combination of actions and elements that’ll lead to that outcome.

A LUCILIUS PARABLE: HEADWAY

November 15th, 2020

Lucilius was floating cross-legged, encased in a sphere of brilliant golden light, suspended in a void of infinite vastness.  His breath consumed the universe and brought it to be once again as he breathed out.  His heartbeat set the rhythm of all time in this momentary place and within it Lucilius was at peace in his meditation.

He opened his eyes.  “Okie dokie, that should do it.”

He lifted his hands before him, out stretched, his grasp poised for invisible gears.  He tightened his grasp and thin lines of light instantly materialized, tracing the shape of virtual controllers perfectly fitted to each hand.  He twisted each and zigzagged them in the space before him, pausing the program.  

The brilliant gold light all around him faded, the void dematerialized and Lucilius was now sitting cross legged on a tiny wooden meditation stool he’d built many years before.    He looked out now through a wall of glass overlooking the sea.  He smiled momentarily, the corse texture of those cold waves bringing to mind a memory while aboard ship.  But the luminous controls were still poised in his hands and Lucilius twisted them again, activating a curved panel, tracing itself out in thin lines of light, hovering before Lucilius.  The screen populated with strange symbols of code and a diagram of neuronal firing.  It was a representation of Lucilius’ own brain - a recording, that had been taken while Lucilius had been in meditation.  

Lucilius had implanted within his brain an advanced neuralsync, through which he could directly interface with his computer, and through which he could record his brainstates.

Parts of code began to vanish and rewrite in multiple places on the screen simultaneously.  The code scrolled and rotated revealing more, which likewise seemed to be self editing as Lucilius rewrote bits of the program.

“That.. should be it.”  Lucilius mumbled to himself.  He’d been designing a new type of meditation app which he’d designed to function with a neuralsync, or an advanced personal MRI for those rare individuals who had not yet taken the dive with neural implantation.  

He’d just recorded the final brain state required to finish the meditation course, and now it was time to give the whole program a run.  Each level, of course, required months, even years of meditative practice in order to unlock.  Each mental challenge came with it’s own set of exercises and premises which Lucilius had designed and which the student experienced through a kind of telepathy transmitted through their link.  Lucilius felt that pleasant sense of accomplishment now that the app was finished, and he wanted to give it one last run through.

He flicked his hands, still equipped with their virtual controllers and the screen of code disappeared.  The neuralsync within Lucilius’ brain overrode his sensory input, feeding his brain instead the landscape generated by his meditation program.  The sea beyond the glass calmed and began to rise.  The glass and the walls of his home vanished, and the turgid grey sky cleared to a purple twilight.  Lucilius was sitting now on a single, simple stone poised in the center of a landscape of perfectly still water that stretched to every horizon.  

Smiling, he stretched his neck, tilting his head to each side, and as he did, subtle ripples fluttered out from the rock in the direction of his simple stretch.  He giggled and instantly it looked as though the glassy surface of the water were shattered with invisible raindrops.  He breathed deeply and it settled once again.  Then, Lucilius gathered his concentration and conjured a terrible anger, filling himself with old memories, giving them full reign of his mind, his heart beginning to race, his body electric with impulse.  He opened his eyes and he was immersed within a valley between gargantuan waves, their high tops sheared of spray by a terrible wind.  The oncoming wave was closing upon Lucilius, bound to crush him and sweep him from his sitting.  But he breathed deeply, slowly, looking at the towering wave, and as he did, the wave slowed, shrinking before Lucilius as he properly embraced the old memories and the anger they instilled.   The rushing wave still bore down upon Lucilius but he closed his eyes and as peace settled again throughout his mind, the wave crumbled until it was just a mere rippling that lapped against the stone where he sat.

The glassy water began to glow with light, signalling that the level had been unlocked.  Lucilius smiled.  The water then began to drain, revealing a mountain beneath Lucilius.  Quickly snowy peaks emerged around him and then far below green valleys as the receding waters unrolled.  Lucilius was surrounded by a ragged and torn landscape of rock.  The air grew cold, then freezing with the altitude, and Lucilius set himself upon the task of concentration, now raising the heat of his body with his mind, knowing the ice storm that would crawl over the horizon and fill this world.

ART & WORK

November 14th, 2020

Get fired from a job, and suddenly the profiles change, the Instagram photos are suddenly misaligned, anachronistic - the posts and replies, the DM’s may become dreaded - all because a sense of identity is thrown out of balance.  Personal identity is linked up to what we do and how we feel about it.  But dig a little deeper and personal identity is -ironically- more about how others feel about what we do.  The core of it is best incapsulated by the queen of passive aggressive cocktail party questions:  what do you do?

In the setting of small talk, chit chat, and meeting new people, asking what someone does is the fastest way to size a person up by tapping into an entire network of pre-compiled assumptions and ultimately to quickly judge someone.  This is the credential game, the socio-economic version of settling sediment layering itself in liquid.  In all situations we eagerly sniff out the hierarchy, always conscious that one exists, anxious to find out where in the pecking order we land.  An underwhelming answer provides a sense of superiority, an impressive one ushers forth questions, kindness and other subtle hooks to feel out a way a way to perhaps climb another rung.  

All of this is a function of the movement of money.  How much of it is going where and why? And it’s important to dive into the purpose of money in order to keep this discussion of identity, work and money from devolving into a crass and brutal portrait of cold capitalism.  Far from being obvious nor widely discussed, money is a response to a problem that arises in large groups of people that far exceed Dunbar’s number - a number which defines the limit of people which a single person can reliably “know”.  That number is somewhere between 100 and 250.  This is the number of people we can reliably vet and keep track of.  The key aspect of Dunbar’s number is trust.  We are bound by a family of constraints that limit the number of people we can reliably vet for trust.  Close friends have been fully vetted for trust and that’s why they are close friends.  Acquaintances less so, and quickly we arrive at total strangers, of which modern civilization is replete.  So a tricky problem arises: how do you trust a stranger?  The human answer to that question is money, which functions as a fungible unit of trust.  This is the general, high-level function of money.  We welcome the plumber, who is a stranger, into our home to do a job because that plumber has placed trust in the exchange of money just as we have.  Paying someone for a service rendered is much the equivalent of saying: you have proved trustworthy and in exchange I grant you some trust which will motivate someone else to trust you when you need something.  Of course, our system of money -like any system- is not airtight, and it is gamed in all sorts of ways, but on the whole, for most people, this is the function of money, and it elegantly explains why small sums of money between friends often aren’t an issue.  I got this round, don’t worry about it, my pleasure.  The reason why good friends are often lax to keep track of a tally between each other is because to do so is to cheapen the authenticity of real trust with a hollow synthetic trust which money represents.  Money is also fungible, whereas real trust between close friends is not.  If the product turns out to be broken, we can return it for a full refund or get a new one, or we can spend the money on a competitive model.  If a best friend dies, it’s an enormous loss that cannot be recouped or exchanged in anyway.  This is the tradeoff between fungibility and authenticity.  Fungibility is a highly useful quality, but the flip side is that it can make authenticity rare occurrence - at least where the fungibility is present. 

All this returns to the pecking order of the cocktail party.  We ask that infernally droll question: what do you do?  In order to get an instant society-decided score about how trustworthy such a person is.  A doctor seems imminently trustworthy, society trusts such people with extremely serious matters and usually such people are rewarded handsomely for it.  CEO’s and captains of industry ratchet this score up - at least at the cocktail party.  ( This is perhaps different when viewed through the public sphere, but of course the proximity afforded by a cocktail party offers far riper opportunities for another person who is present whereas the distance represented by the public sphere offers any other individual practically no opportunity. )

Now, the pain of losing a job, especially if it’s because of getting fired makes a tremendous amount of sense: it casts a person’s trustworthiness into question on a societal level.  No wonder it can cause a person so much stress, which -if that stress becomes chronic - only damages their intrinsic abilities to get back up on their feet.  No one likes to be called a liar, not even liars, not even liars who are honest about being dishonest - which is a truly mind boggling form of gaslighting.

The enormous link between one’s work and one’s trustworthiness now properly frames the issue for a tricky aspect of life: art.  And it’s framed well with a question:

How does a society of strangers value art that it does not pay for?

This is the monster of anxiety for artists, and the reason why artists will often raise their nose at the mention of money, regarding it as cheap and inauthentic.  Thing is, they’re right, but they’re wrong to think it resolves the question in a beneficial way.  You can hate money all you want but without a fantastic array of hunter-gatherer skills, it’s a requirement to be a part of the movement of money.  But notice how much understandable anxiety this causes for the iconic starving artist, a lack of money throws identity into a nerve-wracking corner because one’s trustworthiness is implicitly thrown into question because the art doesn’t fetch any value in the money system.

Roughly, work is safer than art.  The tricky task is combining the two or figuring out how to make art work for you, and to do that it’s important to realize the difference between art and work.

Work, broadly, and for the purposes of this discussion is a predictable service that society values.

Art, on the other hand is the creation of something new.

Work has the expectation that it’ll, well… work.  It’s almost always planned and designated by someone higher up, a boss.  Whereas art is a novel production independent of the usual money making systems.  There is no guarantee that a novel piece of art will, well, work.

There exist, of course, shades of nuance.  These somewhat rigidly phrased differences are merely for the purpose of disentangling the two concepts for the purpose of seeing how they can be practically combined, and overlapped, and ideally totally melded together.

The intrinsic difference from a personal perspective is that work is unsurprising, like a chore, whereas art is the exploration of the unknown, it is a child of imagination and curiosity.  The token phrase of being a cog in the machine has the defining characteristic of perfect and predictable repetition.  Art is the shape-shifting puzzle piece.  And when the two are juxtaposed in this way, it’s surprising that so many artists struggle with the question and problem of money.  If art is a shape-shifting animal of the imagination, why do so many artists fail to see that one aspect of the artistic process can be to figure out how a new creation can find a place I the movement of money.  The artist is at base a curious problem solver, tweaking and tinkering with expression through their medium to get it just right, and yet this tinkering curiosity turns off when many artists zoom out to try and see how the art can or could connect in a meaningful way with the larger world running on the movement of money.  Is this not a juicy problem for a curious mind?

One important issue is that the process for making money through work and making money through art operate on completely different time scales while getting started.  The hopscotch for work is straight forward.  School builds credentials which are used to quickly gain the attention of interviewers and work is not far behind that.  Art on the other hand follows a similar process of training, competence, using those to get attention and then figuring out how that attention is best monetized, but it’s far less obvious than with a job, and the time it takes almost always takes far longer.  Attention is a fairly good metric to heed.  If one’s art captures no one’s attention, then it’s likely an important sign one needs more training and practice to gain the sort of competence that does capture attention.  That being said, the ability to capture attention does not necessarily imply that one’s art is all that good.  Human attention on a mass scale is a fairly inauthentic beast that comes with some less than respectable hardwiring.  

Great examples of the timescale issue of art abound in literature.  Herman Melville died thinking he was a failure because the publication of Moby Dick was met with broad negativity.  It took over a hundred years for the reading public to come around to the book.  If only Herman Melville had lived long enough, he would have died happy.  James Joyce is perhaps another example.  He thought his book Ulysses would be a best seller - a fairly ridiculous idea for anyone who’s read the book, regardless of how good one thinks it is.  Nonetheless, the book is taught in universities around the world and will be for a long time.  If only Joyce had lived long enough to get the yearly pay check when the next load of copies is sold, not to mention any future success he might have had with other books had death not ended his writing career.  This is much the case with many artists in the past, they simply don’t live long enough for people to notice what they’re doing.  The industry of work has no time for such nonsense.  That is until a piece of art if finally noticed by enough people and it hits an inflection point that allows it to enter the movement of money.

The issue of attention is entirely changed with modern technology.  Today it’s easier than ever for a writer or an artist of any kind to get their art out in front of a great number of eyes.  Today, the artist can iterate their skills at a phenomenal rate in order for that shape shifting gear of art to find a shape that meshes with the movement of money.  That traditional timescale of art can now be compressed dramatically through the leverage of things like social media, email, and websites.

By now it shouldn’t be a surprise that getting fired* and putting out art that fails to get any attention feel eerily similar for good reason: they are a knock to one’s sense of identity, one’s sense of value and trustworthiness within a larger society of strangers.  But they are not the same thing. Both are certainly best followed up with thoughtful reflection on one’s work and one’s approach, but art is a step forward into an unpredictable landscape that offers no guarantee.  Getting fired is a lateral push into the unknown - but still within the system of work: getting fired does not implicitly require a person to invent a new job and completely bootstrap it in the way an artist does.  Both are nervous occasions because they put us in direct engagement with an unpredictable and unknown tomorrow.  But, if we can remember that nothing new is ever found without a good little wander in the unknown, then it’s possible to assuage those nerves, gather one’s wits and figure out the next best step forward.

*this discussion assumes that someone who gets fired is getting fired for just cause.  Getting wrongfully fired certainly has some interesting implications regarding trust and our system of money, but they aren’t important for the topic at hand.

DESIGN & THEORY

November 13th, 2020

A great idea for how something should look isn’t nearly the same thing as a great idea for why it should have such aesthetics.  Often design problems are tackled in the reverse.  A reason for why the design should be a certain way comes before the implementation, and often the final product is a bit, unexpected.  Rarely is there a perfect symmetry between the confidence behind why aesthetics should be a certain way and the confidence inspired by the final look.  

In some areas it doesn’t matter. A combustion engine is often a complex and awkward knot of design.  The reason behind such aesthetics is purely practical - that is, it’s purely in service of the question: why should it look like this?  The answer is simple: this needs to be next to that, this need to be tilted at that angle, a hose needs to connect those two distant things, etc.  The question of making such practicality look good is rarely considered and if so, it’s always a secondary consideration.

User Interface in the digital world, or UI as it’s commonly referred to offers a rare circumstance where the two worlds converge with equal importance.  Building a purely practical interface can result in a screen bordered with dozens if not hundreds of buttons.  Ironically, this isn’t practical to use at all, because without prior knowledge about what all those buttons do, it’s practically impossible to use - the barrier to entry is quite high.  The best user interfaces combine an intuition about what the user will need in what order and present those tools at just the right time, with just the right representation in just the right spot.  

This can be quite difficult because it’s a perfect fusion between aesthetics and practicality.  It’s the equivalent of a world where cars could not hide their engines under smooth glossy metal skin, but if the engine was the car, and was judged as much for it’s raw appearance as it was for it’s performance.  Indeed, in the world of UI, performance is a function of raw appearance.  

The designer’s theory has to be one strictly of practice and reaction.  Meaning that, starting with a theory, especially a very specific philosophy about why something should look a certain way can lead to utility that falls flat in the hands of a user.  Theory is perhaps best to be devolved back to something like a ‘vibe’, something vague, more like a style such as ‘minimalist’ as opposed to a rigid practicality of absolute functionality as we often see with programs like photoshop and cad programs that are carbuncular monsters of countless buttons, layers, optional views and needless customization.

Functionality and utility are design considerations that can expand near infinitely in the digital world.  A button can be built to do each and every little thing.  Aesthetics as separate from functionality become an important limiter on what sort of functionality is necessary.  An artistic eye, like that of a stone sculptor becomes one that is more concerned with everything that needs to be removed in order to get it just right.  The theory here becomes one of balance and practice: add the function, and see it looks good, looks right - in other words, let sexiness guide what stays and what has to go.

GORDIAN SOLUTION

November 12th, 2020

Supposedly, when Alexander the Great was heading east, he came across a legendary knot in Phrygia, near the modern day capital of Ankara in Turkey.  That impenetrable tangle of rope was bound to a prophecy about any person who could undo the knot.  The prophecy foretold that whoever could accomplish the task would go on to conquer all of Asia.  And relatively speaking, Alexander accomplished this to an undeniably impressive extent.

The common story is that Alexander took out his sword and sliced the knot in half.  This is the picture perfect solution - it looks good in a movie, it sounds epic and it’s iconic of the sort of bravado that would be required to set out upon distant horizons with the aim of conquering all the land of one’s fellow man.

The real story is naturally disputed, and the most prevalent alternative interpretation offers far more nuance and substance to ponder.  The fabled Gordian knot apparently bound an Ox-cart that was linked to the founding of the previous king to the place where it was kept.  And regardless of the version of the story, Alexander apparently did puzzle over the knot without success.  It’s just like the classic hero, impatient like his ancient shadow Achilles to toss away slow and steady concentration for an impetuous answer riding on the edge of a blade.

The alternative, however, holds that after realizing that knot was impossible in it’s current state, Alexander pulled the linchpin from the yoke of the ox-cart, thereby freeing the two ends of the cord.  It takes a rather cleverly tied knot to be remedied without access to the ends of the rope in which it’s made, and most aren’t of this variety, and neither it seems was the Gordian knot.  The trick, perhaps, was to realize that it actually was impossible in it’s current state, and to change the circumstances surrounding the knot in order to get at it in a meaningful way.

A giant tangled knot is a great metaphor for any complicated problem.  Such knots bewilder as to where one should start, and it demands that it’s form be totally studied and learned by the challenger at the task in order to make any meaningful headway.  How perfect is that description for much of the most challenging and worthwhile tasks that face us in life?  

So often we are lured to think of the quick solution, the get-rich-fast scheme, the short cut, the sharpened blade to slice right through the cantankerous problems of life.  And yet, so often, if not always, such short and quickly considered solutions of speed backfire, whereas the slow work, the consistent consideration and the willingness to sit down and really solve wins out the race, like the steadfast tortoise trundling past the sleeping hare, exhausted from it’s ill-fated  sprint.

Quick, decisive action certainly has it’s place - as on the battlefield.  The point is to realize when the context begs for one or the other slower, more considerate solution.  Civilization has created an environment more and more conducive and in need of that slower, more considerate strategy - that Gordian solution that hides behind the flashier, popular, impatient action.