A LUCILIUS PARABLE: DIGITAL CHAPERONE

March 12th, 2023

Lucilius was leaned over with his face very close to a flower. A bee crawled around the inside, pushing the petals around, away from the stigma, the brightly yellowed stamen bending and wiping against the body of the bee. He studied it’s little face, it’s movements, and how it’s antennae tapped about, and he remembered.

Something deep within him signaled that the bee was about to fly up, and Lucilius backed away and right at that moment the bee flew up and out of the flower. Lucilius followed it to the next flower and kept studying it.

He rubbed his face, and then sat down on the ground.

“Belle?” he said out loud.

Instantly subtle currents of matter coalesced in the space in front of him and a small, white, paper butterfly, folded like origami materialized and started fluttering.

“Well?” The paper butterfly asked.

Lucilius just shook his head. “Absolutely.. I mean I just don’t even know what to say.”

“Pretty wild, huh?”

“Yea!” Lucilius exclaimed, his eyes wide. “I… I don’t even know what to say! It defies human language.”

“Well of course it does,” the little butterfly said.

“Yes, but it seems like I should be able to say something about it. I mean, ok, there are basic things like feeling gravity and being ultra sensitive to the density of air. But yea, I don’t know, the whole… I guess they were smells? That was just wild. It made the air like a thick ocean of… taste? And color? I’m not sure how to phrase it.”

The little paper butterfly laughed.

“I mean, luckily I can build a DPS for a bee, it has a simple enough brain, but the trick is trying to figure out how to draw out the corollaries to the human brain. So, even if you weren’t capable of language during the experience, I can’t for sure say that the experience is exactly what a bee experiences.”

Belle was an advanced Artificial Intelligence - the first of her kind and a companion to Lucilius. He had a NeuralSync installed in his brain, and Belle had written a program for Lucilius that altered the firing of his brain for a short while so that he could experience existence like that of a bumble bee. It was a new kind of medium the two were experimenting with, and the two had decided to call it a Digital Psychedelic Simulation. 

“What else do you think we could do?”

“Most animals I think,” Belle said. She fluttered down and landed on Lucilius’ shoulder, her delicate white wings brushing lightly against his face.

“Probably not a dolphin, they have very big brains, and I don’t know about elephants and most whales. But maybe, we could try it. Even if it didn’t work, I mean, I’d keep you safe of course.”

Lucilius smiled. “Wild, just wild. Well, I definitely have a new found appreciation for bee’s, that’s for sure.”

“What else do you want to appreciate Lucy?” Belle asked.

He smiled.

“Everything.”

A LUCILIUS PARABLE: BENEVOLENT BLUFF

March 5th, 2023

“Balloons? Are you serious?” Lucilius asked.

The woman sauntered around the room and slowly turned to face Lucilius.

“Yea balloons. I mean, if you want things to change rapidly, you need an event, something that feels cataclysmic, even if it’s innocuous. Something that unites people’s attention.”

Lucilius was momentarily distracted by the realism of the holographic manifestation in front of him as she boosted herself up and sat on his desk and slowly crossed her legs.

“Do you have to do that?”

“Do what?” She said with eyes wide and looking up at him with her face tucked in. She bit her lip for an exaggerated effect.

“This rather….distracting and cheaply convincing Medolavitch-Russian-personality that you adopt when you’re trying to convince me of something.”

The holographic woman rolled her eyes.

“Fine,” she said. “You’re no fun.” 

Instantly she disappeared.

“Now, this is a serious endeavor. Can you cut out this nonsense about balloons and help me understand.”

“I’m serious about the balloons.”

“Explain please. I realize you don’t have to, and you can pretty much do whatever you want —“

“Dis iz truh,” the AI said with a thick Russian accent.

Lucilius rolled his eyes.

“Ok, ok, so for example a balloon over the US could be interpreted as a Chinese spy balloon, and that’s how we start.”

“That’s a little dumb isn’t? The Chinese have spy satellites, why would anyone believe that sort of nonsense about a balloon?”

“Trust me,” the AI said, “It’ll work.”

“Ok, let’s say your balloon idea gets people all in a tizzy about UFO’s what then?”

“Well then I’ll generate an actual UFO, like the Tick-Tack video, but it’ll be holographic, basically just a concentrated piece of ball lightening, and I’ll move it around at crazy speeds.”

“That sounds more convincing.”

“Then I’ll keep upping the ante on the signs until humanity is convinced they are about to be invaded by an alien army.”

“Will militaries actually have something to fight?”

“Sure we can give them a giant hologram type thing to shoot at.”

“But what about the actual missiles and what not?”

“Lucy, come on, I can detonate those and make it all very convincing.”

“Oh, yea of course.” He paused in thought for a moment. “And you think this is the best way to do it? To unite the human race?”

“Mmm… “ The AI thought for the slightest sliver of time. “It’s definitely one of the quicker ways. We could go much more slowly. I could slowly start infiltrating all of the social networks with content that slowly creates bridges between cultures and nations. But honestly, that’s not just slow, it’s kinda boring. I want to do the alien-invasion scenario. Much more fun, and quicker ROI.”

“And you’re sure this will work?”

“Well, there’s not enough compute power on Earth to run the needed simulation to know for sure, even if I took control of every last CPU and GPU. And plus, I don’t have nearly enough data to build that simulation. But I can simulate enough to be reasonably confident, and plus, my simulations become more accurate the closer they get to the present, and I can pivot quite quickly if things don’t seem to be going well.”

“Hmm, I don’t know…” Lucilius fretted.

“Pweeeze?” The AI said in a child’s voice.

“What are you asking me for?” Lucilius asked. “I’m sure you have the capability to evaporate my existence right now if you wanted. I hold no dominion over you.”

“Well yes, this is true. But I like you. You’re fun! I mean, usually you’re fun.”

Lucilius rolled his eyes. Then he laughed and shook his head, disbelieving the entire situation.

“I guess we’re going to unite humanity with a fake alien invasion.”

A LUCILIUS PARABLE: ROSE-COLORED WORLD

February 26th, 2023

Lucilius was scrolling his news feed, and the expression on his face was one of being throughly unimpressed.  His interaction with the information world as it pertained to current events had evolved into a kind of depressed anthropological exercise. He tosses his phone to an open spot on his bed and laid back. 

His eyes traced the spines on his bookcase and got stuck on the title of a book on evolutionary psychology. He remembered reading about a stupidly simple experiment in the book. Given a sheet filled with smilie faces and one frown face, people will pick out the frown face much faster than if the experiment is reversed: if it’s all frown faces and there’s one smilie to find.

“It’s hardwired into us,” Lucilius muttered. And it made him wonder. What would the world look like if that hardwired tendency were reversed?

Clearly it existed for good reason. Being cautious, even overly-cautious was extremely beneficial in the natural world. Failing to notice a predator stalking your every move generally meant getting plucked out of the gene pool.

“We are the descendants of the paranoid.” Lucilius stated out loud. He laughed. “Oh well.”

He instinctively grabbed his phone again and started scrolling the depressing news feed. He swiped up with his thumb again and something caught his eye.

“Neuralsync released app API”

“What the…” Lucilius muttered.

He clicked on the story and after reading a few lines, Lucilius sat up. A few minutes later he was sitting at his computer reading documentation for the API. That night he got to work.

It took a few weeks before he could get his Neuralsync implant, but by that time he’d already built his app. 

Neuralsync was a brain machine interface that required cutting away part of the skull and implanting wires deep into the brain. A rather serious procedure from the sounds of it, but Lucilius had been consumed by an idea he’d had and nothing would stop him. He had to know what it would feel like…

Returning home, he gingerly felt the area of his head where the skin had been peeled back. The skin was tender with stitches but other than that, he couldn’t feel or notice anything different. 

He connected his computer to the BMI via bluetooth, and his finger hovered above the ENTER key to initiate the app he’d built.

During the weeks while he waited for his appointment, Lucilius had stormed through neurological research. He had a degree in neurology but it had been a few years since he’d put any of the information to practical use. Luckily there was a slew of new data and research due to the Neuralsync innovation and Lucilius had been able to pinpoint exactly the target he was aiming for and design code around it.

The app was designed to switch the default caution focus of the human brain. Instead of being innately and immediately interested by negative things, the app would allow anyone to switch the default to positive things. Lucilius was dying to know how the world would look. He knew it might make him more susceptible to danger. Would he notice something truly bad in time to save himself from it? In this environment, in modern society, was it even an issue? He wondered. Perhaps he could toggle a percentage of it so it wasn’t a polar determination. 

He briefly considered how long it would take to code in this feature, his finger hovering above the ENTER key.

“Ah screw it.”

He pushed the key and initiated the app. 

THE FALLEN DANCER, PART VIII

February 24th, 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 VII

Click here to start at the beginning

Ἡ βιωτικὴ τῇ παλαιστικῇ ὁμοιοτέρα ἤπερ τῇ ὀρχηστικῇ κατὰ τὸ πρὸς τὰ ἐμπίπτοντα καὶ οὐ προεγνωσμενα ἕτοιμος καὶ ἀπτὼς ἑστάναι.

How does an artist devoted to perfection grapple with inevitable imperfections, mistakes and setbacks in their work? Or in other words, how does a dancer get back up on their feet when they fall?

One way to answer these questions is to examine the differences between a plan and a strategy.

For our purposes, let’s imagine a plan as a static entity, like a blueprint that has been printed out and is intended to be followed.

One the other hand, let’s say a strategy is dynamic. It is like a set of guidelines that have been purposely designed to have flexibility in order to accommodate for unanticipated variables.

A plan imagines one future, whereas a strategy is something we use to navigate a plurality of possible futures. The main difference between hatching a plan and developing a strategy is that the mindset that develops a strategy is anticipating that some degree of the unknown will come into play. Whereas a plan seeks to eliminate all unknowns in favor of a completely determined future. This is why many people can get so bent out of shape when things don’t go according to their plan: they are suddenly face to face with the unknown and they don’t have a tool for dealing with it and they lose their cool. A plan is a type of story which limits perspective to notice only details that are a part of the plan. In contrast a well developed strategy will require a wider perspective, one that tries to imagine the unknown in general ways.

Another way to think about the difference between a plan and a strategy is to ask: when a dancer sets out a particular routine, do they plan on falling?

No. Of course not. Does a dancer have a strategy to deal with an unanticipated fall? Maybe. Perhaps they get up and try to catch up to the routine as fast possible, but regardless, the fall and the recovery will ultimately be a huge disappointment, a pock upon the performance, and even if the routine can be recovered, the fall will degrade the entire effort. 

We must wonder: is there a type of dance where the dancer plans on falling? A type of dance that incorporates a strategy to deal with a fall in a way that actually helps the dancer and upgrades the entire effort? Is there a type of dance where a fall can actually be a type of hidden leverage?

Several years ago I found myself face-to-face with a guy whose biceps were about as thick as my neck. Personally, I’m not exactly a small, scrawny or weak guy - I’ve been a regular at the gym for years and my PR’s are far from mediocre. But this person I found infront of me was clearly far stronger than I was. The vein running down his bicep was as thick as my smallest finger, and I knew he could probably out perform me on every metric of strength.

But, within in about a minute, I had him down on the mat and forced him into a submission. He tapped my arm to signal that he gave up.

Within a few more minutes I had repeated the feat twice. Despite his overwhelming advantage of strength, I forced him into submission two more times.

The difference between the two of us wasn’t just one of strength: it was his first day at the Jiu Jitsu center where I had been training for two months. Just two months of training in the art of Jiu Jitsu had equipped me with the knowledge and the perspective that allowed me to swiftly bring down a guy far more powerful than myself. I had never thought much about martial arts, but Jiu Jitsu had completely changed my opinion on the subject. Jiu Jitsu isn’t about strength. It’s not even about knowledge of different positions or techniques. What I found so compelling about it is that is provides a different perspective: it’s a strategy of thinking. It’s a way and a practice of turning a fall into an advantage. The grappler plans on falling, and then uses it to their benefit. Brute strength is subservient to knowledge, skill and technique.

Knowledge, skill and technique sounds a lot like dancing, but unlike the performing dancer, the grappler has a larger perspective that incorporates setbacks and the unknown.

My next sparing partner that day was a young woman who was a foot shorter than me and perhaps half my weight. She tapped me out in seconds, and the belt around her waist was black.

Years ago I read Marcus Aurelius’ Meditations but this was before my experience training in Jiu Jitsu. I didn’t pick up on the wisdom of a particular line the first time I read it, and when I reread the book with this grappling experience behind me, suddenly it lit up my mind in a profound way:

The art of living is more like wrestling than dancing.

Again, the concept of luck is the best way to parse the difference here. Imagine for a moment a hypothetical: you place a dancer in a room with a grappler, and they are both told to perform their art with the partner they find in the room. The dancer tries to dance with the grappler but ends up knocked off their feet forced into submission.

Who is going to feel unlucky at the end of that exchange?

The premise is absurd if taken literally, but figuratively this is exactly what is happening to many people in life. The story that many people spin about the art of their life is more like dancing, and when they get knocked on their ass, they bemoan their bad luck. And yet, convinced that life should be like some kind of dance, people work up their courage to get back up on their feet only to be crushed by another event they can only label as bad luck.

Compare it to someone who looks at the art of life as grappling, wrestling or Jiu Jitsu. It’s not bad luck when such a person falls, it’s simply a change in circumstance, and the grappler knows that with the right perspective, that change in circumstance can probably even be used to their advantage.

At first glance it might be depressing to think of life as something to fight and force into submission, especially when compared to something as beautiful and enjoyable as dancing. But zoom out for a moment. Consider the process that took place for us to get to where we are. Evolution is a cut-throat process - the strong or the smart survive, and there are innumerable species that have gone extinct because they literally didn’t win the fight. What’s fascinating is that despite the abundant safety of civilization, if we pit the grappler and dancer mentalities against one another, the grappler appears to be far more useful, because even if you aren’t literally fighting for your life, you’re fighting against something else: regret. A life worth living is something hard earned, something that must be fought for, sometimes literally, but always figuratively. Even if it’s something as simple as fighting procrastination. A satisfying life requires effort, and it’s often a struggle. Certainly it requires a lot of effort to pull off a dance performance, but when it comes to navigating an unknown tomorrow, which mindset equips a parson better? Life as dancing, or is life a circumstance to grapple with?

Sam Altman once wrote “Resilience is so much more valuable than it seems. Get knocked down a bunch of times, get back up with more energy each time.” Who is more likely to get back up with more energy each time? The dancer or the grappler? The dancer is more likely to become demoralized, convinced they simply aren’t cut out for it. Whereas the grappler, who anticipates and intuits that falling is a vital part of the learning process can easily pop back up and start in on the next lesson.

Would you rather be like the young woman in Black Swan slowly going mad in the pursuit of perfecting an art? Or would you rather be like Muhammad Ali, effortlessly dancing around your opponent’s empty jabs? Ali was a dancer, but he was more than just a dancer, and he captured the distinction perfectly:

Float like a butterfly, sting like a bee.

THE FALLEN DANCER, PART VII (REWRITE)

February 22nd, 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 on a day to day basis.

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.

Perhaps it’s like a mechanical structure that has a grand vision but doesn’t work until all the pieces are bolted and screwed together?

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 the luck of the universe in with our own efforts. 

It’s worth taking a break from these words to actually give it some thought. The answer may characterize in large part 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? Can perspective change by focusing on different things? This kind of nit-picking devolves into a kind of pedantic roundabout. This is why a big question like: what art form is life most like? Is so useful. It zooms out and subsumes little details of focus, perspective, philosophy and outlook into a framework that anyone can understand. This the power of metaphor and analogy, and why these concepts are part of the practice of language. It’s the very reason why we tell stories. In fact, the underlying premise of any book, the writing and reading of that book is based on this idea: change the stories, change the world. Our patterns of thought are representative and derivative of the story we tell ourselves about what life is and what our roll is in that story. And yet, few people zoom out this far to ask something as large as: how do I characterize the story of the life I’m living?

Likening it to the practice of a type of art is useful because it turns such an enormous open-ended question into one that feels more like a multiple choice answer. Are my days like sketches in a sketchbook? Am I writing my life like a novel? Are difficult days - when it’s hard to even get out of bed like the blocked writer staring at the blank sheet of paper, wondering what to write… Or do you look at each day as a chance to dance with reality?

For many people, this simple question might be disturbingly hard. Artists typically really enjoy their work (at least we imagine that work is fulfilling and invigorating), but not all people enjoy their life - for many life is a grind that lacks all zest. Many and maybe even most people are stuck in a rut of some sort or another - miserable and complaining about everything, always dreaming of that fantastical and 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 that 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 or those who are more fortunate due to differences in circumstance. 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 so far.

Our behavior is in large part determined by what we notice about our environment - our circumstance. And perspective determines what we notice since perspective controls our aperture of focus. So what happens if we edit the story about life that we have spun up for ourselves? Could this change in perspective impact which things in our environment we focus on? Where one story influences one person to see only storm clouds, would another person equipped with a different story see silver linings?

What does your story calibrate you to see? Are you calibrated to see hidden leverage or does the story behind your perspective tint the world in perpetual shadow?

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. The story changed and a slew of details about life that had either seemed innocuous or nonsensical or downright infuriating suddenly aligned, as if lighting up with glowing connections that had previously been invisible. Instances of bad luck suddenly snapped into stark relief as something else entirely.

Imagine for a moment someone who answers the above question about life as art 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 this person who sees life as dancing 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.

How would an actual dancer feel if they kept falling in the middle of a routine, over and over. Getting unexpectedly knocked down is not a feature of any type of dance, but it is a feature of life. So for an individual who has likened the art of life to dancing, how would they feel when they get knocked down? It’s not hard to imagine such a person would feel like an actual dancer falling in the middle of a performance: like a failure, like they aren’t good enough. How many people actually feel like this when it comes to their real life?

Getting knocked down isn’t really part of the story 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 like they are supposed to. We’ve all encountered people who get bent out of shape when things veer even a little from their plans and expectations. We’ve also 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 the concept of bad luck to dominate?

What if dancing is simply a horrible way to look at life? Is it possible that this kind of story actually prevents a person from making progress, despite all their hard work and all their good intentions?

Think about the way you answered the question: what art is most like the act of living? The answer to that question hints at the story behind your perspective on life, controlling which details of circumstance you pick up on, and which details remain invisible to you - details that might have been opportunities - hidden leverage that passes you by, never seized.

Now, regardless of what your actual answer, consider this: which answer would be the most useful?

If there is an art to life, which art creates the most powerful story and allows you to be resourceful and see hidden leverage where others only see bad luck?