NUANCE OR NOT?

November 3rd, 2020

A dichotomy is best represented by an either/or statement.  They represent one of the simplest frameworks for making sense of life.  It’s with dichotomies that we begin the process of teaching children language: up/down, yes/no, good/bad.  It’s this last dichotomy which becomes the master umbrella under which many if not all other dichotomies directly fall.  At the very least they gain a loose association.  

For example, even the 3 dichotomies already listed represent this association quite well.  Moving upward is associated with good.  Moving up in the corporate later through promotions, and it even has the spiritual reference of apotheosis - that of ascending to the heavens to become a god.  Whereas, the opposite - moving down - has the exact opposite association.   

It can be difficult to move beyond this dichotomous way of looking at the world and develop a perspective of nuance. 

Nuance is the antithesis of the dichotomy.  Or rather, it is the synthesis of a dichotomous pair.  The primary difficulty with dichotomies is that the choice of one over the other is often an attempt to negate the existence of the one not chosen.  This is innocuous for some situations that work well with a dichotomy, like

Do you want to eat Thai tonight?

No.

Injecting nuance into these sorts of questions often just creates more trouble than it’s worth.  But notice how it’s exactly this sort of situation in which we are most likely to inject nuance in an attempt to show consideration for the other.  

Notice further that nuance is exactly what is needed in situations when it’s most likely rare.  For example when countries are on the brink of war or political parties are at a stalemate.

The hunt for nuance itself becomes a dichotomy that we forget to consciously incorporate into our retinue of consideration.  More explicitly that dichotomy is a choice between using an either/or perspective - or - diving in deeper to find if there is a subtle shade between the two that needs to be uncovered.

One of the oldest sets of dichotomies is useful for picking through this notion of whether to use a dichotomy or not: virtues & vices.

Temperance and Gluttony make for a good selection.  Doing only one or the other both result in a life that is perhaps not all that great.  Pure gluttony leads to some pretty gross places and absolute temperance isn’t.. well, fun.  So perhaps, we might wonder if there’s some nuance between the two that makes for better living?

The middle road between these two highways is often phrased with the modern aphorism:  moderation in everything.

The one thing this moderation forgets to moderate is, of course itself.  What if, instead of constantly borrowing a bit from both temperance and gluttony, the two were pulsed.  For example, celebrating gluttonously after an intense couple of months of hard work and diligent temperance, as opposed to dulling the intensity of work with a constant meagre stream of half-assed gluttony.

There’s another modern aphorism that’s best used to edit the first: go big or go home.  And that’s not injected here to apply just to the gluttonous celebration as is often assumed, but also it’s to apply to the stringent period of work before hand: if you’re going to do something, do it.  And don’t let anything else slow it down or get in the way.

Already it should be obvious that there can be nuance even in the way we apply a dichotomous framework.  And this occurs primarily due to time.  These frameworks exist through time, and because of that there are some situations where one is appropriate and not the other, and other situations where some mix in the middle is best mandated.

But in spite of the blatant obvious fact that we exist through time, we speak of life as a static thing.  We regard our political parties, our views, our beliefs, even our decision making process as static entities, and because this is the way discussion has evolved to describe these things, it truncates our ability to communicate by allocating descriptions to primarily dichotomies.  

To remember the variable of time and the inevitable ingredient of change which it brings is to realize the key flaw in  all dichotomies:  it’s never either/or, it’s always somewhere in the middle, a mix of the two.

KERNEL

November 2nd, 2020

Virtually any piece of writing is a sprawling, branched animal that weaves sentences through the foaming cacophony of thought ricocheting throughout the brain.  Even something as simple as a Haiku, or a single sentence response dives like a harpoon down into the catacombs of meaning inherent in each of us, stitching together sense and reaction.  Each piece of writing begins, literally with a single word, but before that word is even written, where does that piece of writing exist?

The perennial bemoaning of writers block owes an unfortunate homage to the individual who came up with the concept.   It seems most likely Percy Shelley conceived the kernel of the idea that would bloom into what we know of as writer’s block.  

The antidote is of course to repeat the exact same sort of instance: to conceive just the kernel of an idea.  This very piece of writing, for example was spawned from such a kernel while thinking about how yesterday’s story, The Lucilius Parable entitled On the Page came into being.  The kernel was extremely simple, fitting into a single sentence.  The story - that piece of writing - is merely an extrapolation on that idea, like a kernel cracking and sprouting and growing into a plant or a tree.  Considering it literally: all of the information of the tree or the plant is inherent in the seed, in the kernel - very little if any of that information actually changes as the plant or the tree grows - the growing is merely an extrapolation.  It’s the kernel on a different level of resolution, but instead of zooming in, it’s blown up to a size that other things can interact with.

Of course not all pieces of writing materialize with that pristine and perfect kernel being present in the mind before a first word gets written.  This is part of magic of the writing process: writing can be used as an exploration tool, like a pick for a prospector, or a flashlight in the dark.  Sometimes, it’s necessary to write off in random, uncoordinated directions until that kernel is found, after which the real writing can begin.  

For the beginner with writing, all that random, uncoordinated writing can feel like a waste, or more commonly - something to save that is perhaps not worth saving.  That stuff is slag - the useless rock moved in order to find the diamond.  But even then there are usually valuable traces of the kernel as we search for it, and sometimes that detective process of looking for the kernel actually works as a nice piece of writing in of it self - the kernel forming a kind of punch line unexpected by both the reader and the writer looking for it.

Writing as a tool has a sly set of edges that both honour the same aim: it’s used to nurture a kernel of an idea and make it bloom, or it can be used to dig around for that kernel.

A LUCILIUS PARABLE: ON THE PAGE

November 1st, 2020

Lucilius paused to breathe, having exhausted himself with a winding and long winded argument about simulation theory.

“And that,” Lucilius said, “is why I think we are probably in some sort of simulation.”

Lucilius’ friend who had been listening all the while shook his head gently with a smile.

“I am literally on the same page with you.”

Lucilius looked at his friend a little sideways.  “That a sly joke?”

“What do you mean?”

“Well,” Lucilius said, looking around at their surroundings.  “It doesn’t look like we’re actually on a page, I mean, literally, does it?”

Lucilius’ companion looked around, still a bit puzzled.  “I’m not sure what you mean.”

“Well, you said you’re literally on the same page with me, correct?”


“Yes.”

“To literally be on a page means that there would have to be an actual page, like in a book, and we’d have to be on it, physically, literally.”

Lucilius watched the pieces slowly click together in his friend’s mind.

“Duh, yea I think I meant figuratively.”

“I figured.” Lucilius said with a bit of a chuckle.  “People love to swap it out with literally, because I think it has a bit more of an authoritative crispness to it.  A bit like underlining a word.”

“You’re probably right.  But…why did you think I was making a sly joke when I said ‘literally’?”

“Well,” Lucilius said, “this goes back to what I was saying about the possibility that we might be living in a simulation.  In fact..” Lucilius trailed off, gazing into that invisible middle space of memory. “Had a weird encounter with someone once that reminds me of this.”

“What happened?”

“Someone recognized me in a crowd and they knew who I was, knew my name and everything, because they said they’d read about me in a book.”

“You have a book about you?”

Lucilius shrugged with an expression of nonchalant unknowing.  “I don’t think so.  Certainly haven’t been able to find one, and you’d think I’d have known if someone was writing a book about me.”

“Weird.”  Lucilius’s friend gazed off for a moment.  “But what’s that got to do with simulations?”

“Well, if that book does exist, who’s to say it doesn’t have a story about the two of us sitting here and talking.”

The eyes looking at Lucilius grew suddenly wide.  Lucilius’ companion looked around.  “Certainly doesn’t look like a book to me.”

“Of course it doesn’t, you’d be a character in that book, and just like I was saying about simulations, the concept of a character in a book applies perfectly: does a character in a book have anyway of knowing if they are actually a simulated person contained within the words on a page within a book?"

“I suppose not if the author wants them to know.”

“Exactly,” Lucilius said, then he burst out with a short laugh. “I suppose it’d be more appropriate if I recycle your unintentional joke: 

I think we are on the same page, figuratively… and, maybe even literally.”

BAMBOO

October 31st, 2020

The most common definition of insanity is doing the same thing over and over and expecting a different result.  This commonplace notion is unfortunate because it betrays most long-term thinking.  Many things that we undertake with a framework of long term thinking have the property of yielding no meaningful results for a great deal of time, hence, long-term thinking.

Meditation as a practice that yields such delayed beneficial fruit falls into this long term category.  It simply takes quite a long time of daily, consistent practice before the benefits of meditation begin to show themselves.  MRI scans show it takes a minimum of 3 - 4 months of daily consistent practice in meditation before changes in brain structure can be detected.  Anecdotally, 2 years of consistent practice also seems to signal another inflection point of benefit in the practice.

Endeavours, practices and investments undertaken for the purpose of long-term benefit are a lot like growing bamboo.

A perennial grass, bamboo is one of the most useful and fastest growing plants on the planet.  But it requires a long term perspective.  Most trees grow steadily.  A sprout pops up in a few weeks and slowly and steadily it increases in size and height.  

Bamboo is a totally different animal.  It is a long term animal.  For the first four years bamboo doesn’t break ground.  And then, relatively over night in a period of just 5 weeks… just under 3% of the total time it’s spent growing, it breaks the ground and achieves a height of 90 feet.  It grows so fast when it actually does break ground that it’s almost visible to the eyes growing an inch and a half per hour.

This sort of asymmetry is available to us individually in all sorts of ways.  Investing years ago when a stock was cheap can yield tremendous results with enough time.  Engaging in meditation for weeks upon weeks upon weeks can suddenly begin to change the way we experience reality.  

Contrary to popular and commonplace belief, some of the best things we can do for ourselves and for others fits snuggly into that original definition of insanity: doing something over and over and expecting a different result.  Fact is, when it comes to those actions we can take that do eventually have a long term benefit - these things do look insane, practicing without any reward, holding an investment without any growth, and then with enough time, persistence and faith in the process, changes begin to amount rapidly.

REASSESS

October 30th, 2020

There is always more than one way to do something.  It can be extremely difficult to remember this, especially when hours upon hours have been invested in a deep rabbit hole scheme that seemed like a promising avenue towards success.  There’s a sort of knack that anyone can develop in order to figure out when a rabbit hole of exploration has gone too deep without yielding the goods of progress.  But to develop this knack - this intuition - requires a bit of a cost: it requires venturing along a good handful of unproductive avenues in order to know what to avoid.

The ability to reassess a situation isn’t difficult at all: it’s merely an intersection that anyone with any level of competence can navigate.  The real trick is the timing.  Spending days upon days trying to make a suspected solution work may very well feel like a lot of wasted time when the situation is reassessed and a new avenue begins yielding productive fruit far faster.  In that situation, the question isn’t why wasn’t this new direction sought out first, but why wasn’t it sought out sooner.

Progress on any project or within any field is really a matter of perseverance through pivots.  But the trick to faster progress has to do with the placement and timing of the pivots we make.  The sooner and faster we are willing to pivot might seem like the wisest option to find a viable pathway, but if we are too quick to pivot again, we might abandon a good thread of thinking before it has time to yield fruit.  This sort of timing depends on the field.  Compare for example the world of coding with the field of woodworking.  Learning to code is best done with a very rapid and quick ability to pivot.  While woodworking can take a while before potential success is realized.  Compare these two to something that takes even longer like winemaking.  The wine needs to ferment, then age, and in that case it can be years before an experiment gives up it’s result. 

Each of these have a different average time or distance between pivots in order to make progress.  This is an area of meta-learning, that if in awareness while dealing with a new project becomes a useful framework for questioning what is happening and what might be a better direction to explore.

When in doubt, it’s generally better to reassess sooner rather than later.  Most people default to this.  We have short attention spans and lose interest quickly in anything that doesn’t yield results with a reasonable amount of immediacy.  The problem is that most people apply this on a level that is too high.  Instead of pivoting within a field of possible interest, many people are most likely to simply pivot away from that field.  There is a tremendous gulf between pivoting within a field and pivoting to other fields.  Each one has some sort of barrier to entry and even with some beginner’s luck there are nearly always bound to be levels of competence barred from entry without the persnickety process of pivoting between different potential avenues of advancement.  

The ability to reassess isn’t necessarily the question of whether to abandon something but rather a question about how to pivot along the path of perseverance.