Close Encounters of the Missing Kind

July 16, 2014 By

My daily routine is a strange attractor.  Every morning, I decide whether to hit one of the cafes on my regular circuit or work at the desk I rent from a local business. After lunch, and sometimes a nap, I pick a different location for my second work session. My most frequent cafe choices are as follows:

  • A downtown  cafe inside an office high-rise, patronized mainly by the herds of people who work there and ebb and flow through it, guided by the invisible pilot waves of office rhythms.
  • A somewhat dingy cafe that has some mix of locals, homeless people, tourists and what I suspect are gang members who seem to hang out there in the afternoons.
  • A cafe a few blocks from downtown inhabited by a mix of office workers getting away and a few sad people, obviously impoverished, who sit for hours nursing a coffee and browsing on cheap laptops or smartphones.
  • A self-consciously alternative cafe staffed by attractive, tattooed goth baristas, which attracts more conventional looking people apparently looking for a change of scenery, as well as the tattooed classes.
  • A rather precious hippie cafe with an ideological menu of offerings, which seems to be a crossroads for the local crunchy and nightclub sets.

If I decide to take my bike, or am in the mood for a longer walk, my range expands to perhaps twice as many locations.

There are enough cafes in my bike-accessible prowling territory that I could probably go months without repeating myself, but I don’t like either a routine that’s continuous exploration or complete predictability. A strange attractor seems to work perfectly for me. I’ve been doing this for perhaps fifteen years now, and my circuit has generally ranged from two to a dozen work locations. Home, surprisingly, has rarely been on my circuit. Home offices are really hard (read “expensive”) to get right.

It’s a lifestyle on the edge between settled and nomadic and between unsociable and sociable. I think my days of experimenting with true nomadism are over. My circuit is still more cloud mouse than metro mouse, with more big-chain cafes on it than indie, but I think I’ve become more willing to self-localize lately, and less freaked-out at being recognized by baristas.

I think a lot more people, like me, are starting to lock onto a strange attractor routine: it’s more stimulating than a regular routine, but not as demanding as full-blown nomadism. The third place is not a place so much as a pattern of movement in a socially fertile zone.

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Effort Shock and Reward Shock

July 9, 2014 By

One of the most useful concepts I’ve come across in recent times is the idea of effort shock. It’s in a great post by David Wong of Cracked, How ‘The Karate Kid’ Ruined The Modern World.  

It seems so obvious that it actually feels insulting to point it out. But it’s not obvious. Every adult I know–or at least the ones who are depressed–continually suffers from something like sticker shock (that is, when you go shopping for something for the first time and are shocked to find it costs way, way more than you thought). Only it’s with effort. It’s Effort Shock.

We have a vague idea in our head of the “price” of certain accomplishments, how difficult it should be to get a degree, or succeed at a job, or stay in shape, or raise a kid, or build a house. And that vague idea is almost always catastrophically wrong.

Accomplishing worthwhile things isn’t just a little harder than people think; it’s 10 or 20 times harder. Like losing weight. You make yourself miserable for six months and find yourself down a whopping four pounds. Let yourself go at a single all-you-can-eat buffet and you’ve gained it all back.

Effort shock captures the nature of what I called the The Valley in Tempo, which roughly corresponds to the montage phase of many movies built around the character learning something. The insight Wong adds to the party is the tendency to actually think of the phase as a five-minute montage set to music, instead of the long, arduous phase with no music. Due to this tendency, we vastly underestimate the effort involved even in modest projects, to the point that when we actually understand what’s involved, we wonder whether the reward is worth it at all.

The good news is what I’ve started calling reward shock. In some (not all) domains, it is more than enough to offset effort shock.

When you overcome effort shock for a non-trivial learning project and get through it anyway, despite  doubts about whether it is worth it, you can end up with very unexpected rewards that go far beyond what you initially thought you were earning. This is because so few people get through effort shock to somewhere worthwhile that when you do it, you end up in sparsely populated territory where further gains through continued application from the earned skill can be very high.

Programming, writing and math are among the skills where there you get both significant effort shock and significant reward shock.

A Koan is not a Riddle

July 9, 2014 By

The following is a break from my Marginally Acceptable series. Venkatesh asked for a review of Gilles Deleuze’s Difference & Repetition. This is what he got instead.

Philosophy has long had two distinct approaches, embodied in the approaches of ancient Mediterranean, China, and India. The first, and most commonly recognized, is that of positing answers to elusive questions, an approach that has given birth to religions and the sciences. The second, however, is oriented towards the transformation of the disciple, sometimes radically so. In many cases the two are conjoined: Socrates’ questions about the order of the world were entwined with questions about how to live; Buddha’s wheel of becoming was implicated in his guide to right living; the metaphysics of the Stoics grounded their prescriptions.

In later centuries, these two functions were less closely coupled. The success of the sciences after the Baconian revolution and Boyle’s experimentalism led to frantic, productive activities in the former philosophical method. The latter wasn’t simply left to the moralists, however, but was intellectualized. Kant’s writings on deontological ethics were intended primarily to persuade, rather than form. It wasn’t until the late nineteenth century that a philosopher explicitly privileged formation over intellectualization: Nietzsche’s “transvaluation of all values” was communicated in aphorisms and parables in part to make the reader complicit in the idea’s expression.

In the late twentieth century, Deleuze’s concerns and methods are likewise complicit; his method the embodiment of the ideas he hoped to make manifest.

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Roundup: January – June 2014

July 2, 2014 By

Here’s the mid-year roundup. Not counting procedural posts, we’ve had 23 essays in the first six months. The Now Reading page also been updated for the year, check it out for the current state of the ribbonfarm reading radar.

  1. Free, as in Agent
  2. Consent of the Surveilled
  3. The Poor Usability Tell (Jordan)
  4. Technical Debt of the West (Kevin)
  5. An Information Age Glossary
  6. From Cognitive Biases to Institutional Decay (Kartik)
  7. The Cactus and the Weasel
  8. Demons by Candelight
  9. Immortality in the Ocean of Infinite Memories
  10. Authors and Directors (Sam)
  11. Love Your Parasites (Jordan)
  12. Ritual and the Productive Community (Ryan Tanaka)
  13. The Legibility Tradeoff (Kartik)
  14. A Life with a View
  15. Product-Driven versus Customer-Driven
  16. Replaceability and the Economics of Disequilibrium (Sam)
  17. Science! and Other Off-the-Wall Études
  18. Power Gradients and Spherical Cows (Jordan)
  19. The Logic of Uberreaction
  20. Saints and Traders: The John Henry Fable Reconsidered
  21. The Deliberate Practice of Disruption
  22. The Physics of Stamp Collecting
  23. Portals and Flags

Language and Strategy

June 25, 2014 By

This fascinating article (HT: Mark Maxham) explores a Star Trek: TNG episode where Picard and crew meet a species that communicates entirely through metaphor and narrative. The article draws a smart (and in my opinion, correct) lesson from the episode:

“Strategy” is perhaps the best metaphor of all for the Tamarian phenomenon the Federation misnames metaphor. A strategy is a plan of action, an approach or even, at the most abstract, a logic. Such a name reveals what’s lacking in both metaphor and allegory alike as accounts for Tamarian culture. To be truly allegorical, Tamarian speech would have to represent something other than what it says. But for the Children of Tama, there is nothing left over in each speech act. The logic of Darmok or Shaka or Uzani is not depicted as image, but invoked or instantiated as logic in specific situations. In some cases, apparently, this invocation takes place with limited transformation, such as in the application of Darmok and Jalad at Tanagra depicted in the episode’s main plotline. In other cases, those logics are used in situations with more play, as when Dathon reassures Picard after the former’s injury, “Kiazi’s children. Their faces wet.” 

Incidentally, such languages might not be as alien as they sound to English speakers. It seems like Chinese might actually have some of the characteristics of Tamarian, especially in written form.

Portals and Flags

June 25, 2014 By

The point of complex debates is not to prove your side right and the other wrong. Smart people make this mistake most often, and end up losing before they ever get started. The point of complex debate is always seduction: winning-over rather than winning. You do this not through logic or even novel insight, but by demonstrating a more fertile way of thinking. One that promises to throw up an indefinitely extended stream of surprises within an ever-widening scope. 

Such intellectual seduction settles the original issue not by establishing an unassailable position around it, but by turning it into a portal to a hidden universe of thought. You cannot win over everybody, only the adventurous. But winning over an adventurous minority that joins you in passing through a portal, on a journey of discovery is enough. It allows you to eventually overwhelm those who prefer to plant a flag on a conquered hill of browbeaten minds, and sit around by it awarding each other medals of honor. Because adventures tend to yield riches that make whatever was originally being contested seem worthless by comparison.

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The Physics of Stamp Collecting

June 18, 2014 By

Ernest Rutherford’s famous line, “all science is either physics or stamp collecting,” has bothered me ever since I first heard it. I’ve used it to make fun of biologists, and I’ve used it as a critical perspective on physics.

Rutherford almost certainly meant it as an insult to non-physicists, but there is a deeper and non-prejudiced philosophical thought underneath the dichotomy. To get there you have to ask: is there such a thing as a physics of stamp collecting?

I’ve discussed the quote once before, in my extended post on foxes and hedgehogs (short version: foxes are stamp collectors, hedgehogs are faux-physicists), but let’s dig a little deeper.

Turns out, the distinction between sustaining and disruptive variants of deliberate practice, which I discussed last week, is a consequence of the distinction between physics and stamp collecting.

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Time, Money and Bandwidth

June 16, 2014 By

The NYT has an interesting piece on the psychology of poverty, No Money, No Time:

My experience is the time equivalent of a high-interest loan cycle, except instead of money, I borrow time. But this kind of borrowing comes with an interest rate of its own: By focusing on one immediate deadline, I neglect not only future deadlines but the mundane tasks of daily life that would normally take up next to no time or mental energy. It’s the same type of problem poor people encounter every day, multiple times: The demands of the moment override the demands of the future, making that future harder to reach.

When we think of poverty, we tend to think about money in isolation: How much does she earn? Is that above or below the poverty line? But the financial part of the equation may not be the single most important factor. “The biggest mistake we make about scarcity,” Sendhil Mullainathan, an economist at Harvard who is a co-author of the book “Scarcity: Why Having Too Little Means So Much,” tells me, “is we view it as a physical phenomenon. It’s not.”

“There are three types of poverty,” he says. “There’s money poverty, there’s time poverty, and there’s bandwidth poverty.” The first is the type we typically associate with the word. The second occurs when the time debt of the sort I incurred starts to pile up.

Worthwhile perspective on time, decision-making and scarcity of cognitive resources. Similar in spirit to the research on decision fatigue I reblogged a while back.

Everyone is Special

June 12, 2014 By

Found this interesting article on national grand narratives (ht Mick Costigan):

It follows that understanding a country’s exceptionalism narrative is key to anticipating how public opinion might move or be moved there, or to communicating effectively with the people of that country. Lack of this understanding makes it all but inevitable that U.S. statesmen and officials at various levels miss important signals and commit needless diplomatic missteps. Regardless of how any American assesses the accuracy, legitimacy or uniqueness of America’s own exceptionalism narrative, it is critical that we understand what other countries think is exceptional about themselves.

Read the whole thing: Everyone is Special. Covers Russian and Chinese exceptionalist narratives among others.

In related news, this narrative based business intelligence outfit looks interesting: Narrative Science.

 

The Deliberate Practice of Disruption

June 11, 2014 By

Recently, I concluded that our understanding of expertise, especially in the sense of the 10,000 hour meme, is seriously flawed. Even though there is something real there. And I don’t just mean the understanding conveyed by Malcolm Gladwell, who popularized the idea. I include the primary researchers such as K. Anders Ericsson on whose work the popular accounts are based.  

The problem isn’t what you might think. It’s not the basic model of 10,000 hours of practice coupled with metacognition that’s the problem. The observation that you can get to useful levels of skill short of mastery in less time doesn’t fundamentally challenge the model. Nor is there a serious problem with the ideas that practice is necessary or that practice without metacognition is insufficient. That’s all true enough. Nor is the idea vacuous and tautological as some suggest.

The real problem is that research on expertise focuses on fields where “expertise” is a well-posed and objectively codified notion. This means mature fields that are closed and  bounded, and can be easily observed, modeled and studied under laboratory conditions. So it is not surprising that the work of researchers like Ericsson is based on fields like “medicine, music, chess and sports” (Wikipedia) or “music, science, golf and darts” (Ericsson’s own website).

Notice something? They’re all sharply circumscribed and regulated domains.

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