SPIRAL STAIRCASE

May 15th, 2020

This episode is dedicated to Kriste on twitter who goes by the handle @Garbo1614

A fairly intelligent person once pointed out that “we cannot solve our problems with the same thinking we used when we created them.”*

Sure sounds smart, and it seems to plug into the infamous marketing slogan from Apple,

Think Different.

Both seem obviously smart, a no brainer.  But how exactly do we make the shift?  How do we crack the old mold of thinking and stretch out into new territory?  Valid questions, but more importantly, what is the next step after such a question?  Do we jump from such a question straight to an answer, or do we need to a few more questions, like stepping stones in thinking, to leap away from the old and into the new?

If we have dug ourselves into a hole, the answer is not to keep digging down, and digging up is nonsensical.  But its exactly the sort of direction we need to go.  If the only direction for our effort is bound to make things worse, how is it possible to make progress in the opposite direction? 

In such a case, we are still not asking the right question.  The cognitive leap requires zooming out a little on the options available.  What about this question:  Are their any other directions available than just down and up?

Such a question expands the mind.  Our perspective zooms out, and this is where the old mold cracks.  Digging your own hole, the action of it, whether it be a real hole in the ground, or a dead end habit of binging tv, or bad nutritional choices, or calling up that same toxic person during weak moments.  In each, the decision always seems binary:  should I do it or not?  This is like being stuck in that hole.  It’s akin to asking: should I dig or not? 

When framed in this way, there doesn’t seem like much of a choice.  We are active living, restless, beings that want to make progress.  Given a choice between something and nothing, we’ll end up choosing that something, even if it’s ultimately bad.  The key is to wonder if there are more choices.  Is my only option to keep digging down?

As with many things, the answer is orthogonal.  We must not go forward or backward, we have to think laterally.  We need to ask if it’s possible to make progress going sideways.

If you’re stuck in the bottom of a hole, you can dig sideways and carve a spiral staircase into the round wall of the hole you find yourself in. 

Say for instance a person has decided to give up smoking.  The choice at first is binary: to smoke or not to smoke.  This is a terrible game, and for most people, it will wear down on the psychology until the only choice that is actually an action (aka smoking) will win.  But if additional options are added, something somewhat magical can happen.  If the choice expands to include going for a run, then the choice is do nothing, smoke, or go for a run.  That third option allows us to be proactive.  To move sideways and shift out of the old model of thinking.

Forming the right question is merely a way of reframing the perspective of the situation.  This is how questions can be so powerful and why it’s worth thinking about how we construct them and iterate them.  If a situation can be reframed correctly, suddenly a way out illuminates like an obvious path. And when we find ourselves finally headed in the right direction, we wonder how we could have been so blind.

PRINCIPLES

May 14th, 2020

Ray Dalio has famously published his book Principles where he outlines the methods and strategies for the way he operates on a personal level.  In the book he repeatedly invites readers to take on the same task, to write down the principles by which they operate. 

Tinkered Thinking is naturally poised to knock together some principles considering the hefty amount of pondering on the page that has emerged over the course of hundreds of episodes.  And certainly this episode is an initial attempt to fashion some principles, with conscientious plans to iterate these principles through time. 

Truth is, though, every one is well poised to take Dalio up on his suggested exercise of writing down a set of personal principles, whether we are accustomed to jotting down our thoughts or not.  We all operate on heuristics and codes of conduct, whether we’re conscious of it or not, whether we’d like to face them or not. 

Those who worry about what they might find when confronted with the question of how they operate, may in fact benefit from the exercise the most.  If we discover something we don’t like, the written word endures in a way that is much harder to ignore when we compare it to some fleeting action or statement.  More importantly, the written word can be edited, whereas the past cannot.  There is freedom in writing because we can tinker with the form and substance of our thought.  We can craft it, and sculpt it to approach an ideal.  Then, in the form of a principle, it can be something that we strive to emulate in action.  In this way, we can leverage our thoughts against our actions in order to change them for the better.

And without further ado:

1. Has the best question been asked?

2. Use it to boost it or lose it.

3. The discovery of the new will always look like wandering before it is found.

4. The ‘question’ is the only real tool. Questions allow for the creation of new tools and all tools are useless without the concurrent use of questions that unlock their use.

5. The sole resource of persuasion is the other person’s mind, a resource which can only be mined with the use of questions.

6. Time is not a resource. Money is a resource because it can be sourced again. Time is only a source because it depletes of its own accord without the option of renewal.

7. Understanding is knowledge in motion. In order to integrate knowledge, one must actively use it until it’s possible to produce predictable outcomes.

8. Honesty is the master variable and it is a skill. Honesty determines how much friction there is in human systems. The less honesty there is, the more friction exists.

9. Peace is a subtractive process. It requires simplification, like the surface of water, any attempt to actively create peace only generates more ripples.

SMART FOOL

May 13th, 2020

There is an entire spectrum of strategies for trying to achieve a certain end.  And while it’s clear the probabilities are fairly skewed towards one end of this spectrum, there are still some incredibly foolish things that pan out quite well.  But no one wants to be a fool.

Unfortunately our default strategy for avoiding the possibility of being a fool is itself a bit foolish.

We read, we plan, we read more, we study, we observe, we educate ourselves, and we continue on this hamster wheel as if one day, we will have consumed all the knowledge of the universe and finally, the time will have come to finally do something.

The irony of such an outlook is that action opens up an new realm of information to analyze and understand, much of which cannot exist in books by default of the fact that books are always objects from the past.  While there exist frameworks and fundamental principles that persist reliably through time which can be learned from book, nothing can be understood without action.

Knowledge is static.

Understanding is active.

Understanding is knowledge in motion.

We understand only when we can apply knowledge to achieve predictable outcomes.  We create new knowledge by reversing this process.  We actively explore and as a result we come to understand something new, and then this understanding becomes knowledge when we share it, either by explaining the pattern of the new phenomenon we observed, or writing it down, or any other method of communication.  And here we strike upon a balance, a dance of give and take.

The fool just dives right in.

The smart one reads up on it first.

But the wise person knows how to be a smart fool.

TITLE

May 12th, 2020

How is knowledge categorized?  Of course, we have encyclopedias and dictionaries, but how is knowledge categorized on an individual level?

We take notes, we highlight, we summarize, we create folders, collections, collages and for the most part..

we forget all of it.

Perhaps there is an innovation in the arena of note taking that will substantially level-up our abilities to organize knowledge on an individual level.  But the flip side is that we might be growing weak leaning on a crutch.

A universal principle is use it or lose it.

Tinkered Thinking’s version of this is:

Use it to boost it or lose it.

As this applies to muscles, it’s likely to apply to memory.  The question of course is, how to use one’s memory.  Does the mere writing down of a desirable conceptual morsel relieve our mind of any sense of obligation to remember it?  Perhaps. 

If you regularly have to write a list of items with quantities in order to have them on hand a few minutes later, say it’s a dozen things, it doesn’t take much time and pain to verbally list those quantities and remember them.  The mind finds the way if it’s pushed in that direction.  This is only to say that memory is trainable in different ways.

The Homeric bards had epics consisting of tens of thousands of lines memorized by heart.  And even though it is an incredible feat of immense memory, those poems are riddled with mnemonic techniques to help the bard in that titanic task.

Here is a suggestion that has arisen during the creation of Tinkered Thinking.  Many times, when an idea of what to write about pops into the mind, it is then summarized in the smallest possible unit, usually, it’s summed up as a potential title for the post.  That word, or short phrase becomes a seed which collapses the entire subject, but also allows it to regrow once the time and space of a blank page is available.  This has become a valuable memory exercise because the expansion of the topic is expected to stay in the brain until the time to explore it comes around.

This brings up an even more important point. 

A collection of knowledge is useless if not used, and using it is the best way to winnow out the unnecessary and entrench the influence of the good.

This is one of the reasons that makes writing such a powerful tool on a personal level.  It is a medium of cognitive exploration.  A writer is quite literally exploring their own mind in a structured, captured way.  It’s a way to figure out what you really think about something, a way to edit what you think about something, and importantly here, it’s a way to integrate new knowledge, by putting it in your own words and mixing it in with other ideas that come to mind during the process.

Writing –in this way- serves us in two ways, as a memory exercise and as an evolution engine that gives rise to new ideas..

ANTILINDY

May 11th, 2020

The Lindy effect is a supposition that the future life expectancy of things like technology or ideas - things that are non-perishable, is proportional to their age.  In short, things that have existed for a long time will probably continue to exist for a long time.

There is a class of situations, perspectives, or rather phenomena that inhabit a unique intersection of what appears to be lindy but is inherently perishable.  They are,

problems.

Many problems are longstanding, they have existed for years, centuries and even millennia.  And given this life span, it can seem as though such incidences of reality are permanent.  The catch to this may in fact be the reason why the Lindy effect is observed with technologies and ideas.  Such developments may be solutions to problems that existed beforehand.  The Lindy effect is perhaps bolstered by the lifespan of the problem that existed before the solution in addition to the lifespan of the solution itself. 

This is perhaps a transformation of the Lindy effect as opposed to a negation, but the psychological implications are far more important.

A long standing problem can feel like an immutable fact of reality, but this is an illusion.  It’s a false effect of the seeming Lindyness of problems.   The longevity of any given problem becomes less likely over time as problems are solved and resources and time to solve problems expand to tackle other problems.  David Deutsch would likely call this The Beginning of Infinity.  All problems are inherently antilindy by default because of the way we identify and interact with these phenomena.  The concept of a problem is similar to a bull’s-eye.  It is something we have subtly or overtly marked out for future attention, with the aim of transforming the pieces of reality involved so that the situation is better fit to our liking and well-being.

This steamrolling power of progress is extremely important to hold in mind on an individual level.  It must be used as a defense and remedy for learned helplessness, an unfortunate phenomena that many people develop.  Learned helplessness is when a person comes to believe they cannot do anything about a particular problem or situation, that they are in fact helpless.  This tendency is likewise antilindy, a problem in it’s own right that bars an individual from dealing with other problems.  But as with any problem, with enough time, attention and effort, it will yield as do other problems.  Every solution and development should serve as a reminder both for the individual and the group that problems exist only as long as a solution doesn’t exist, and that there’s no downside to betting on the possible existence of a solution.  The very effort itself, at the very least solves that insidious individual problem since merely trying extinguishes any helplessness we have learned.