The Daily Ugly

May 21, 2012 By

The Russian proverb, morning is wiser than evening (MWTE) is one of my favorite ideas about tempo management at the daily level. It makes a more abstract idea (avoid making decisions when you are tired or depressed) more evocative.

MWTE is a simple tempo management heuristic that works for most people, most of the time. If you are a typical sort, and you use it systematically, you’ll slightly improve your decision-making quality by introducing a timing bias. Most of the time. Sometimes, you are smarter at night-time. And there are people who are always wiser in the evening. Good heuristics have this robustness. Even if you proselytize them with no qualifications, on balance you’ll do more good than harm. Really robust heuristics can even handle being rhetorically exaggerated into absolutes (“If you practice MWTE, you will succeed, guaranteed!”). They are also very forgiving: if you execute partially, you get partial results. There is no all-or-nothing effect.

The 24-hour  circadian rhythm is usually the easiest one to work with when you first start to practice tempo management. This is the reason take it one day at a time is such a robust heuristic for tough times. The world of motivational speakers and self-improvement gurus is choked with circadian advice. It is useful to sort out the torrent of circadian tips this world throws at us. A decent classification is good, bad and ugly heuristics. It is the last category that determines the quality of your daily life.

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Discussion Note: Sartre’s Nausea vs. Future Nausea

May 17, 2012 By

This is a guest post by Christina Waters, who writes about art, wine, and food for the greater Bay Area community at christinawaters.com and teaches Critical Theory and wordplay at the University of California, Santa Cruz.

In last week’s post I idly wondered about whether the notion of ‘future nausea’ that I talked about had any relationship to the term in the sense of Jean-Paul Sartre’s famous 1938 novel, Nausea. Reader Dan L. suggested a connection between Sartre-nausea and the idea of mindfulness, which further intrigued me. Christina, who did her PhD work on Sartre’s theory of the imagination,  posted a comment confirming my suspicion that there was indeed a relationship. So I asked her to do a guest post highlighting some possible connections worth exploring.

So here you go. You may want to read the Wikipedia entry about the book, linked above, for context first.

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Venkat muses about Sartre’s Nausea seen as a perspective on mindfulness. Perhaps, perhaps not—and we’ll return to that idea a bit later. But nausea is a perspective which makes him (or rather his literary avatar, Roquentin) sick.

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How Life Imitates Chess by Garry Kasparov

May 14, 2012 By

I’ve been slowly working my way through Garry Kasparov’s excellent How Life Imitates Chess.  I had rather low expectations, since in my experience superstars in a very narrow activity generally do not have the breadth of perspective to adequately situate what they know in broader ways.

But Kasparov’s book is excellent, a pleasant surprise. It is heavily focused on competitive decision-making of course, but he manages to abstract out lessons from chess encounters very well, so you can read the book even if you aren’t a player. It is helpful to know the basic rules of chess and the general nature of chess strategy (for example, it helps to know that openings and endgames are thoroughly studied and well-understood, while mid-games are complex), but you don’t need to know specifically what the Sicilian Defense is.

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Welcome to the Future Nauseous

May 9, 2012 By
This entry is part 1 of 6 in the series Thinkability

Both science fiction and futurism seem to miss an important piece of how the future actually turns into the present. They fail to capture the way we don’t seem to notice when the future actually arrives.

Sure, we can all see the small clues all around us: cellphones, laptops, Facebook, Prius cars on the street. Yet, somehow, the future always seems like something that is going to happen rather than something that is happening; future perfect rather than present-continuous. Even the nearest of near-term science fiction seems to evolve at some fixed receding-horizon distance from the present.

There is an unexplained cognitive dissonance between changing-reality-as-experienced and change as imagined, and I don’t mean specifics of failed and successful predictions.

My new explanation is this: we live in a continuous state of manufactured normalcy. There are mechanisms that operate — a mix of natural, emergent and designed — that work to prevent us from realizing that the future is actually happening as we speak.  To really understand the world and how it is evolving, you need to break through this manufactured normalcy field. Unfortunately, that leads, as we will see, to a kind of existential nausea.

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Creative Desks versus Administration Desks

May 7, 2012 By

For many of us, desks are where a lot of life happens. I realized about a year ago that psychologically, there are two different types of desks, which most people combine into one physical desk.

The two types are creative desks and administration desks.

Even if you have multiple desks (at home and at the workplace for instance) chances are, you combine both psychological types in each.

Creative desks are where you do serious maker work. Writing, coding, design, pen-and-paper math, spreadsheet analysis and so forth.

Administration desks are where you do all the overhead stuff. Expense reports, invoicing, book-keeping, contract signing, faxing, filing, travel arrangements, GTDing, certain kinds of email and calendaring, and so forth.

The two don’t go well together because people who get a high off  creative work are generally depressed by administration work, and vice-versa.  Basic systems and processes are also different around the two desks. If you consider emotion/energy aspects and system-process aspects, you could say that the two types represent very different field-flow complexes, with different tempos. Mixing them up results in a cacophony.

So how can you cope with both kinds of work? The solution is to separate the psychological desks physically to the extent you can afford to.

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Rediscovering Literacy

May 3, 2012 By

I’ve been experimenting lately with aphorisms. Pithy one-liners of the sort favored by writers like La Rochefoucauld (1613-1680). My goal was to turn a relatively big idea, the sort I would normally turn into a 4000-word post, into a one-liner. After many failed attempts over the last few months, a few weeks ago, I finally managed to craft one I was happy with:

Civilization is the process of turning the incomprehensible into the arbitrary.

Many hours of thought went into this 11-word candidate for eternal quotability. When I was done, I was tempted to immediately unpack it in a longer essay, but then I realized that that would defeat the purpose. Maxims and aphorisms are about more than terseness in the face of expensive writing technology. They are about basic training in literacy. The aphorism above is possibly the most literate thing I have ever written. By stronger criteria I’ll get to, it might even be the only literate thing I’ve ever written, which means I’ve been illiterate until now.

This post isn’t about the aphorism itself (I’ll leave you to play with it), but about literacy.

I used to think that the terseness of  written language through most of history was mostly a result of the high cost and low reliability of writing technologies in pre-modern times. I now think these were secondary issues. I have come to believe that the very word literacy meant something entirely different before around 1890, when print technology became cheap enough to sustain a written form of mass media.

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The 6-Hour Maker-Manager Work Day

April 30, 2012 By

There are some ideas that keep popping up. They’re like Rome. All roads lead there, and you end up finding different viewpoints for the idea depending on the path you take.

The Maker-Schedule/Manager Schedule idea from Paul Graham is one such. It may be his most fertile idea.

Once you get used to thinking of work-tempo management around the idea of two fundamental frequencies (4 hour maker upcycles and 1 hour manager upcycles) you have a  framework for analyzing many different types of creative class work. One conclusion I’ve reached is that if you do both kinds of work, you’ll end up working 6-hour days. Here’s why.

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Thinking in a Foreign Language

April 26, 2012 By

This is an idea that simply refuses to go away. Ever since the Sapir-Whorf hypothesis and its debunking in the original naive form, the idea that language shapes thought keeps popping up. Now the behavioral economists weigh in to show that decision-making changes when you switch languages. The research is reported in a Wired article, Thinking in a Foreign Language. 

This looks like it is primarily about the mere fact of shifting gears to a different language causing greater deliberation. But I strongly suspect there are going to be patterns related to mental model construction and use in the to and from languages as well (i.e., specific ordered language pairs, (A, B), will likely have measurable and characteristic effects on the nature of decision-making).

You’d need more subtle tests for that though.

The researchers next tested how language affected decisions on matters of direct personal import. According to prospect theory, the possibility of small losses outweigh the promise of larger gains, a phenomenon called myopic risk aversion and rooted in emotional reactions to the idea of loss.

The same group of Korean students was presented with a series of hypothetical low-loss, high-gain bets. When offered bets in Korean, just 57 percent took them. When offered in English, that number rose to 67 percent, again suggesting heightened deliberation in a second language.

To see if the effect held up in real-world betting, Keysar’s team recruited 54 University of Chicago students who spoke Spanish as a second language. Each received $15 in $1 bills, each of which could be kept or bet on a coin toss. If they lost a toss, they’d lose the dollar, but winning returned the dollar and another $1.50 — a proposition that, over multiple bets, would likely be profitable.

When the proceedings were conducted in English, just 54 percent of students took the bets, a number that rose to 71 percent when betting in Spanish. “They take more bets in a foreign language because they expect to gain in the long run, and are less affected by the typically exaggerated aversion to losses,” wrote Keysar and colleagues.

The researchers believe a second language provides a useful cognitive distance from automatic processes, promoting analytical thought and reducing unthinking, emotional reaction.

 

Go Deep, Young Man: 2012 Call for Sponsorships

April 25, 2012 By

It’s that time of the year again. Last year, sponsorships amounted to about $2000 (not counting  the “buy me a coffee” micro-payments, which added another $400). This year, they’ve already crossed the $500 mark without me doing a call.

Sponsorship and “coffee” money represent a fairly small fraction of my income, but on a dumb-money to smart-money spectrum, it is the smartest money I make.  I’d trade two dollars of any other kind of income for a dollar of sponsorship income any day. The “smart” in the smart money is the unadultrated goodwill it carries. Though there are no strings attached, I feel a strong urge to reinvest sponsorship income back into the blog and related activities rather than using it to pay the bills. In a way, the money comes with the opposite of a moral hazard attached.

So if you were considering sponsoring this year, consider this your cue and sponsor away.

When I did the call last year, I shared a line (the only line, actually) from my fledgling business philosophy: go where the wild thoughts are.

This year, I’ve added another line: go deep, young man.  At 37, I think I get to call myself young man for at least another three years.

Read on for more, if you are interested in my evolving philosophy of blogging. If you are a blogger yourself, chances are you won’t learn much. I am increasingly realizing that my approach to blogging says more about me than about blogging. If you’re not a blogger, this is your annual peek behind the scenes.

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Hacking the Non-Disposable Planet

April 18, 2012 By
This entry is part 4 of 15 in the series Psychohistory

Sometime in the last few years, apparently everybody turned into a hacker.  Besides  computer hacking, we now have lifehacking (using  tricks and short-cuts to improve everyday life), body-hacking (using sensor-driven experimentation to manipulate your body), college-hacking (students who figure out how to get a high GPA without putting in the work) and career-hacking (getting ahead in the workplace without “paying your dues”). The trend shows no sign of letting up. I suspect we’ll soon see the term applied in every conceivable domain of human activity.

I was initially very annoyed by what I saw as a content-free overloading of the term, but the more I examined the various uses, the more I realized that there really is a common pattern to everything that is being subsumed by the term hacking. I now believe that the term hacking is not over-extended; it is actually under-extended. It should be applied to a much bigger range of activities, and to human endeavors on much larger scales, all the way up to human civilization.

I’ve concluded that we’re reaching a technological complexity threshold where hacking is going to be the main mechanism for the further evolution of civilization. Hacking is part of a future that’s neither the exponentially improving AI future envisioned by Singularity types, nor the entropic collapse envisioned by the Collapsonomics types. It is part of a marginally stable future where the upward lift of diminishing-magnitude technological improvements and hacks just balances the downward pull of entropic gravity, resulting in an indefinite plateau, as the picture above illustrates.

I call this possible future hackstability.

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