A LUCILIUS PARABLE: THE DAY'S LESSON

October 4th, 2020

Lucilius hung up the phone, checked the time and then propped the door of his apartment open so he could keep an eye out.  He pulled the fridge open, stared idly at the meagre contents, then waved the door shut, thinking limply about delivery.  It was too much of an effort.  He walked back to the couch and slumped down.  His computer was sitting open on his desk, a window of unfinished work, broken code waiting infinitely for his attention.  He looked momentarily at his bookcase, seeing many titles he’d purchased but hadn’t yet read.  Instead, he just clicked on the TV.

It wasn’t long before he heard the elevator doors clank open.  Lucilius kept his eyes on the tall rectangle of hall he could see through his door.  

A little kid walked past, and Lucilius quickly jumped up and trotted to the open door.  He stepped half out and saw the kid fiddling with keys to the next apartment.

“Hey Kiddo,” Lucilius said.

The boy looked, slightly wary. 

“Your mom just called me, wanted me to let you know she’s gonna be late tonight.”

The little boy stared a moment.  “My mom has your phone number?”

Lucilius was taken aback a moment.  He’d only exchanged short pleasantries with the young mother, in the elevator, when running into one another at the entrance, but it was suddenly odd - they’d never gotten so far as to exchange numbers.

“I guess so.  Maybe she called the building manager?  Asked him for it?”

The little boy contemplated this a moment and then decided it was believable.

“Ok, thanks” the boy said, pushing the door open.  

Lucilius too started to retreat back into his apartment, but quickly thought better of it, and stepped half back out into the hall.

“Hey”

The boy stuck his head out.

“If you get bored or want food or something, you’re welcome to hang out over here.”

The boy paused thinking about this, and then nodded.  “Ok, thanks.”  Then the door shut and Lucilius was left to retreat back into his own home.  He thought of kicking the door wedge out, but thought better of it - to leave the door open in case the boy got lonely.  He didn’t want the kid to have to face another closed door.

He slumped back on his couch, and stared at the inane image on the TV.  He clicked it off and then just sat in silence, looking out the window, at the city sprawl.

“Hey,” came the boy’s voice as he walked into Lucilius’ apartment.  The boy was carrying a box of Mac’n’Cheese.  “Can you help me with this?”

“Yea, of course,” Lucilius said.  Lucilius got up and took the box and pulled out a pot and started filling it with water.

“Just get home from school, I’m guessing?”

“Yea,” the boy said, standing in front of Lucilius’ bookcase, looking at all the titles.

It had been a while since Lucilius had really spoken with a kid.  He felt a bit awkward.

“Uh, learn anything today?”

The boy looked another moment at the bookcase and then walked over to the couch and sat down.  

“Yea, I learned that school isn’t really for learning.”

Lucilius paused, watching the tiny bubbles hugging the bottom of the warming pot of water.  He looked over at the boy.

“How’d you learn that?”

“I got in trouble cause I shared some answers with someone who sits next to me.  He just has trouble paying attention, and then when we have to do work, he doesn’t know what to do.  I was trying to show him, but the teacher said it was cheating.”

Lucilius considered the story, impressed, then poured the pasta into the boiling water.

“Maybe if they taught us how to pay attention to boring stuff before trying to teach boring stuff, he’d do better, but they never went over that.”

Lucilius laughed, then nodding to himself.  “Yea, that would be pretty useful.  Been a long time since I was in school, but I seem to remember the same.”

“What did you learn today?” The boy asked, looking at Lucilius.

He was taken aback.  Lucilius thought over his day as he watched the pasta swirling in the hot water.  He’d woken up late after a late night spent watching some dumb show that had kept playing and playing without end.  He’d made coffee and then briefly tried to take a nap, and sat at his desk and barely looked at the code overwhelmed  by the immense task of even trying to start, and before he knew it, the boy’s mother had called him.  He looked at his mind - the bland malaise of thought that had barely mustered enough substance to even be thought.  It was like the opposite of a zen state, a sort of mindless decay.  

He looked at the boy who -in the absence of a response from Lucilius- had taken a book from the bookcase and was flipping through it.

“I guess I learned something I’ve always known.”

The boy looked up.  “How can you learn something you already know?"

Lucilius shrugged as he drained the hot pasta and then tore open the packet of powdered cheese.

“Well, everyone knows the things they should do, but I think you only learn it when you can do it.”

Lucilius added butter and mixed the tasty mess together.

“So what did you learn?” The boy asked.

“That no one can really teach you anything.  Learning is really a matter of where your attention is.”

The boy frowned a bit as Lucilius walked with two steaming bowls of Mac’n’Cheese.

“Isn’t that sort of what I said about school?”

Lucilius smiled as he handed the bowl to the boy.

“Well, sometimes we forget to pay attention and need a little help.”

“But you just said we can’t teach each other stuff.”

“True, but we can nudge each other’s attention.”

“Isn’t that what teaching is?  Or should be, I guess.”  The boy said.

“Maybe, but who is the one paying attention?”

PEDDLING PLATITUDES

October 3rd, 2020

The word platitude comes from the French meaning flat.  Platitudes are generally perceived as stale truths - they fall flat.  They’re a bit like boring common sense that seems to deserve more of an eye roll than any serious consideration because, the sentiment has already been taken into consideration on account of the fact that it’s grown stale from overuse.

But are platitudes good for us?  And why do they grow stale?  

Even more importantly, if a platitude communicates something sensible that would be beneficial if turned into a behaviour, but currently isn’t something that our actions reflect, then would repeated exposure be good, despite our eye rolling?

Perhaps platitudes are a bit like eating vegetables.  Despite it being good, most of the time it just feels like a chore: 1 part healthy, 2 parts annoying.

The analogy can be developed a bit further: that new posh restaurant opens.  The chef is amazing, and the top recommendation is the brussel sprouts.  Wait.  The brussel sprouts?  This happens so often in the world of cooking.  The food we eat hasn’t really changed much if we ignore the speciation that’s occurred with the onset of the chemical industry half a century ago.  Aside from that experiment which is probably best typified by the birth of Twinkies and Cheez Whiz, most innovation in food - that is tasty food - is a continual reimagining of how time-tested staples can be remixed.

Sometimes the cover song turns out to be better than the original.  But is it a different song?  And are those brussel sprouts any less good for you if they’ve been artfully reimagined with a new set of ingredients to frame their flavor?

Those aphorisms that might be regarded as platitudes are often the mental version of the vegetables that we can grow so bored of - if not spiced up in a modern context.  This happens all the time with classics translated from other languages.  The times change, the culture changes, and even so does the language, and with those changes, an old translation grows stuffy and less accessible.  Classic texts from different languages benefit from new translations so that the original can properly fit within modern parlance.  This is exactly why it can take a few scenes of Shakespeare before the language clicks.  We are so far removed from Elizabethan English as it was spoken and written in Shakespeare’s time, that it’s akin to a dialect that takes a bit of effortful listening to get the hang of.  And naturally, it would be a gross poetic sin to try and ‘translate’ Shakespeare into modern parlance.  When this is done, the point of the play is quite lost, because Shakespeare didn’t really write original stories - they were all themselves adaptations of previous stories that he updated into a modern parlance with such poetic skill that it must be considered within it’s native context.  Otherwise the result is a Heath Ledger movie that has little if anything to do with Shakespeare.

General Insight, in a modern context is most often and most likely going to be an updated platitude that is worded and remixed in such a way that it resonates really well with the current shape of language and culture.

Peddling platitudes can easily devolve into just that.  It is, first and foremost an exercise in language.  The idealistic aim is to understand old principles deeply but within the flavor of a modern context so that when reworded, they sparkle like something new.

SYMBOLIC BRAND

October 2nd, 2020

This episode is dedicated to Scott Galloway who is a Professor of Marketing at NYU Stern, host of the Prof G show and Cohost of Pivot.

When the internet gifted the world the power of online anonymity, the first to take advantage were malicious actors.  Hackers and trolls, bullies and all other sorts seized upon the opportunity of this identity shield with the aim of conducting nefarious activity that has ranged from simple name calling and heckling to some of the most despicable activity we humans seem capable of.  It’s without wonder that the reputation of anonymous profiles as even a mere concept evokes unsettling negativity.  Certainly very few tether online anonymity with anything positive.

This is, however, changing.  Anonymity was the stuff of legend before the internet.  All our fabled superheroes of the last century were imagined complete with secret identities.  Anonymity allowed those characters to do two things: on the one hand they could do all the flashy hero stuff, and on the other, they could instantly retreat to the calm status of being just another face in the crowd.  There are of course those who have sought to be just this sort of vigilante, but with all the flashy action relegated to the acrobatics that a talented programmer can perform through the internet.

Beyond such extreme activities, a new sort of common anonymity is arising.  Increasingly, there are accounts online that are clearly operating with the intent to be some kind of positive influence.  Tinkered Thinking is certainly an example that humbly tries to figure out this role.  But the decision to remain anonymous has yielded a great deal of unexpected good.

As the online presence of Tinkered Thinking has grown, it’s become a bit of a brand.  As one early reader and listener noted in regards to the style and aesthetics Tinkered Thinking: you nailed the branding.  

In the context of anonymity, the question of what a brand is begins to carry some interesting nuances.  For example, when we think of ‘brands’, we generally think of corporations.  An excellent brand, like say Apple might deliver delightful products that integrate usefully into our lives while all the while projecting something like a good aura.  Then on the other hand we have the insidious corporation, one that is purposely faceless and that seems hellbent on undermining people for profit and the greed of shareholders.  The aura of the later is remarkably similar to that of those anonymous profiles online with ill aims.

Much is also said about the ‘personal brand’, one that is at the core of one’s career and advertised with LinkedIn profiles, Twitter profiles and Youtube Channels.  The aim here is nearly always virtuous: pumping up the good juju of a personal brand is likely to pay off.  In the age of cancel culture, however, many people with self-built personal brands are discovering the weaknesses of putting a face to the name and having that name be your own.  If, however, we take the ‘personal’ out of ‘personal brand’, what exactly does that begin to look like?

Though Tinkered Thinking started and mainly remains a curiosity project, the exercise of what it is as a brand has a remarkable impact.  One example is the way Tinkered Thinking maintains a presence on Twitter.  Twitter gets a ton of heart for the amount of verbal garbage that people pour into it, and rightfully so.  In the context of an anonymous brand, however, the way I personally find myself interacting with Twitter is far different.  Many times I’m tempted like all the rest to make a comment that doesn’t really add to the conversation, and may in most instances take away from the conversation.  But the brand of Tinkered Thinking provides a powerful psychological filter.  Like a kid who has been cast as the captain of a ship while playing with others, the thought of what to do and what not to do in this role comes to the forefront.  While others often suffer the understandable mistake of being too personal with a personal brand, Tinkered Thinking isn’t a person: it is an idea, one that anyone can explore and try to integrate.  Much of the inane human drama that propagates online simply isn’t inline with this idea, and most people don’t behave in perfect accordance with their values and principles.  We as humans are understandably fallible.  But a symbol can have a sort of incorruptibility that transcends what we grant our fellow man, despite how corrupt some of the organizations might be that hide behind brands with excellent PR.

We think of these brands as masks to conceal, but such masks can also have an effect on the actor wearing that mask.  Our assumption likely defaults to some kind of malicious effect because this is what we’ve mostly seen with anonymity, but more and more the effort of individuals to craft a brand as a symbol to stand for an idea or a set of ideas and principles, the more the effect of that symbol can backtrack in virtuous ways.

MENTAL MODULES

October 1st, 2020

Our own reasoning can play some fairly devious tricks on us.  It’s perhaps not hyperbole to say that we are in a constant state of conflict our elaborate talents of self-deception.  We reason our way back into bad behavior, and later look back with an almost amnesic astonishment at our own stupidity, impulsivity or mindlessness.  The question Why did I do that?  Seems suddenly unconvinced by the reasoning that premeditated our ill-advised decision.

Because that’s exactly what it often is: ill-advised reasoning.  Benjamin Franklin once wrote: So convenient a thing to be a reasonable creature, since it enables one to find or make a reason for every thing one has a mind to do.

All he’s really saying is that the human mind is great at coming up with a good story about why anything is a good decision.  This story-telling ability, phrased in such a way, sounds eerily similar to a new technology that recently became available to a limited public called GPT-3.  Tinkered Thinking was fortunate enough to gain access to the limited access api of this new technology and did a few collaborative episodes with GPT-3.  In short, GPT-3 is really good at continuing any sentence that you give it.  It generates languages that sounds really plausible, and in many if not most cases it’s impossible to tell if something was written by a human or if it was generated by GPT-3.  For a more in-depth discussion of this technology, check out Episode 828: What is GPT-3.  

Now what’s very important to realize about GPT-3 is that it can ‘talk’ in any direction.  Give it a topic like “the future of humanity” and it’ll talk about gloom and doom, but re-prompt it with the exact same thing, and you’re very likely to get the opposite: GPT-3 will start spinning up a new perspective about how there’s so much hope for humanity and that we’ll soon populate the stars.  And in many instances of this generated text, there will be the semblance of reasoning. In short it’s very good at generating a believable and cogent story.  In one moment it can sound like an awful racist, and in the next it can generate a humbled and caring perspective.  If you remember back to high school English class and the assignment of writing a ‘persuasive essay’ you’ll perhaps recall the exercise of coming up with the argument for the ‘other side’ of the point you’re trying to argue.  GPT-3 is essentially excellent at this exercise.

Now in the context of our own self-deception and the logic that underpins it at different moments, it seems we too are quite good at this game.  In the brain, there’s a location that’s referred to as Broca’s Area, named after Pierre Paul Broca.  This area is located on the frontal lobe, usually on the left side, and it appears to be responsible for generating language.  It’s a bit strange to realize that we don’t use our whole brain to produce the things we say, and that it’s primarily the product of a small area.  Certainly we are using other parts of our brain when we do talk, but the fact that Broca’s Area exists makes it seem like our brain is more like a set of modules, and when we speak about something visual, it’s as though the language module and the visual module at the back of the brain link up.  It’s as though our language module can spin up a convincing rationale for anything, but it depends on which other modules have hijacked our own personal GPT-3.  We think about getting on a better diet, and Broca’s Area rattles off a bunch of very sensible reasons why this is an excellent idea, but then a day or so later, when the receptors that usually get a regular dosing of dopamine from the sugar we have so regularly, suddenly Broca’s area gets hijacked by the limbic system, and we start hearing an excellent rationale for why it’s a good idea to buy that lava cake that is on the menu.

Seen with this framework, it suddenly seems to make a lot of sense why so many people undermine themselves constantly.  The brain has a bunch of modules or modes that are in conflict with one another when paired together, but seem totally sensible if listened to one at a time.  The day trader buys the low, thinking it’s a good price and that the long game will be excellent, but then sells a day later when the price has continued to drop and the logic has changed because the feelings around the situation have changed and those feelings spin a much different story when linked up to our language module.  We convince ourselves twice in opposing directions and we fail to move forward because our rationale lacks consistency.  

This is why a practice like mindfulness can be so powerful.  Many people think meditation grants a person control over their mind, which isn’t necessarily correct or incorrect so much as it is just poorly worded.  In this context of self-deception, and rationale and language modules and it’s best thought of as an additional module - a mindful module.  And in this context, what it does is that it allows the mind to take a bird’s eye view of itself.  Instead of being constantly intoxicated by the cadence of our own moment-to-moment rationale and self talk, the mindful module regards that deceptive song in a larger context and pauses the process in order to commandeer that language module for a moment and say: wait a minute, this doesn’t really fit exactly, in fact, that reasoning is just plain bullshit.

Just imagine for a moment if you could accurately call your own bullshit.  How much more efficiently would you move toward your goals?

OPTIMAL OBSTACLE

September 30th, 2020

There comes a moment when a child who cannot climb the stairs gets just big enough to heave consortium of limbs up on to that first step.  After that, it’s game over.  At least for the chronically worried parent who must now track the movement of a child up and down a dangerous set of stairs.  The problem arises because the other steps are exactly like the first.  If one can be climbed, then they can all be surmounted.  But what if, for abstraction’s sake, we made the next step a little larger than the first, and the third a little larger than the second, and so on and so forth?

There would, imaginably be a lag between the time when a child can climb the first step and then get up to the second.  For a bigger, more formidable obstacle, we must grow a bit more.

The image here is simple, and the logic requires no stretch, but as a metaphor for the obstacles that we come across in life, we fail to apply the same requisite logic.  We’re somehow coddled into the expectation that adulthood should initiate like the first step in a staircase earned by age and default growth, and each step from then on isn’t harder than the last but merely a part of the grind, and this staircase will lead -inevitably- to some idealistic promised land of retirement or ‘making it’.  

This escalator grind may have seemed like a sustainable metaphor in decades past when someone could do reasonably well as a ‘company man’, but every hierarchical organization has a limit to the number of steps every employee can take.  Those who were or are able to ascend higher recognized either consciously or unconsciously a new level of problem to be solved. In the present day where the idea of being a ‘company man’ looks less and less sustainable, the underlying rubric of constantly needing to level-up becomes more and more apparent.  

Two issues hold people back on this adventure of levelling up, and the solution to one unlocks the solution to the other.  One issue is that we come up against an obstacle that isn’t an optimal challenge.  It’s just too big, and too difficult to tackle, and so we stay put and settle and stagnate.  

The other problem is that we stop growing by default.  This is perhaps the easiest way to demarcate the border between childhood and adulthood: the second begins when growth either stops or continues only through conscious effort.  

Children pick up languages with an ease that seems completely effortless, whereas adults struggle to gain even a modicum of ability with new languages.  But an adult can, of course, learn a new language - it just takes a lot of conscious effort.

The experience of learning and working through difficulties goes from being a bit of an escalator as a child… straight to the sheer side of a rock face to be scaled with a huge variety of effort and skills that must be acquired and invented on the fly.

But when this difference, and the way to deal with it is honestly confronted, when a person decides to consciously push their mind through the challenges of new difficulties, then the next large step before which most people stop and stagnate begins to reveal subtle handholds, a logic of solution and soon someone is standing atop a new level of life and experience, having made an optimal obstacle out of something that previously felt like an iron ceiling.