ALARM

March 11th, 2020

What is the function of an alarm?

The most common type of alarm is probably a smoke detector.  Sprinkler systems might come in second.  The detectors sound their alarm when a certain level of particulate in the air is detected.  Sprinkler systems activate when a certain level of heat is reached.

These make sense on their own, but think of it in terms of money.

When we use our debit cards or credit cards, do we get an alarm when we hit a certain level? 

Most people know that anxious circumstance when they run a card hoping that it’ll go through.  The only alarm we get with these cards is when they are dead.  Either there is no more money in the checking account, or the credit card is maxed out, and both decline.  To be sure, these systems don’t really have alarms so that we are left to be more likely to spend money. 

Imagine if they did have an alarm.  Say your debit card gave you a notice when you were down to $1,000 in the bank, and then another when you hit $500, and another at $100.

This sort of staggered alarm system would also give you an idea about the rate of spending.  Rate is something that smoke detectors and sprinklers can’t do.

These detectors can’t tell you how fast your house is filling up with smoke or why it’s filling with smoke, they only sing at a certain point.  And because of this simplicity, such detectors can’t differentiate between some food you burnt while cooking, and a pile of dirty laundry that an angry lover has soaked with gasoline and lit on fire.

No one questions the use of alarms, and we readily invest in them despite this alarmist quality they have.

This is what alarmist means: exaggerating a danger and so causing needless worry or panic.  That word has been bouncing around a lot lately and as a result the ricocheting has put some dents in the meaning.  Are the alarmists of today just the silly hypochondriacs of society?  Or does smoke always mean fire?  Even when it’s just someone cooking a delicious meal?  Even a delicious meal, or the desire for one can cause a house to burn down.  But there’s a difference between the alarmists we roll our eyes at and the smoke alarm that complains about our cooking.  The thing is, we have to do something about the smoke alarm, and if we don’t know exactly why it’s going off, then we turn on to high alert for what danger might actually exist.  Do we pay the alarmists of society the same attention?  Do we check up on the details of the possible danger they detect?  Or do we just roll our eyes?

Look at the asymmetry here.  We don’t begrudge our smoke detectors of false alarms, because they also work when there really is cause to worry.  The detector might be crying wolf, but we diligently listen every time because we know the wolf exists and the detector is always looking for it. 

Even more importantly false alarms give us a chance to see how we’d react during a real crisis.  Schools, ships, and organizations of all sorts have drills designed to deal with these emergencies, and these drills are intentionally carried out with a simulacrum of alarm. 

Would you call a school’s fire drill alarmist?  No, not really.  They are preparing for the real thing.

The way the word alarmist is being used, is akin to calling fire drills a waste of time.  At the very least, acquiescing to an alarmists call to attention is an opportunity to explore our response in order to see what will happen when a real crisis hits.  Notice how the word ‘alarmist’ here completely undermines the meaning of the word ‘alarm’.  If we don’t perk up when the boy cries wolf, what happens when the wolf actually comes?  What if the wolf is on the hunt for something more than just the boy’s flock of sheep?  What if the wolf is looking for the entire town?

Panic distracts you from seeing the best course of action.  This is its real danger.  It obfuscates and clutters the mind with too much emotion.

On the other hand, remaining calm does not mean you take no action.  Being inactive in the face of danger makes you likewise vulnerable.

If anything, panic is a sign of someone who isn’t prepared.  And remaining dedicated to business as usual is perhaps a sign of someone who doesn’t even realize how unprepared they are.

As Upton Sinclair once observed: “It is difficult to get a man to understand something when his salary depends upon his not understanding it.”

Very few businesses are designed with real catastrophe in mind, which means they are often vastly unprepared, assuming that things will continue business-as-usual.

In a world where we only have one life to live, is there such a thing as needless panic and worry?  Or are such things indications of real problems that we haven’t yet solved?

HALF A MILLION WORDS

March 10th, 2020

Today we take a short break from our regularly scheduled programming to pause for a moment in order to celebrate a wee little achievement.

Today, Tinkered Thinking hits half a million words.

This officially marks the halfway point for the initial experiment, which was to write and produce at least 1,000 podcast episodes and write 1 Million words.  Naturally, it’s taken a bit longer than anticipated to hit half a million, so it looks like Tinkered Thinking is destined to go at least 1400 episodes, pending any unforeseen disaster of course. 

To be clear, the Tinkered Thinking website doesn’t actually have half a million words.  There are projects that are underway behind the scenes that will be released in coming months and later this year, but all told and combined, this little side-hobby project has hit the milestone.  Not like anyone would ever count anyway.

It’s reasonable to think that the number of people who have a 1,000+ page word document stuffed with half a million words is pretty small.

So what does it feel like to have this in my possession?

Honestly, it feels much like if I were to ask you how it feels to have taken a breath half a million times in a row. 

Once something becomes a non-negotiable part of your day, it ceases to require effort.  And this extends to the point where you notice it negatively if it’s missing.  Several times I have prepared episodes for weeks in advance in order to take a little vacation from the project, only to find that I was writing gargantuan text messages to friends and in response to people on Twitter. 

Not writing, has become a bit like holding your breath.  The system starts to get a little squirrely without the practice.

Considering how little effort the project actually takes, it’s hard to imagine life without it going, but then again, it seems even more ridiculous to think about this project going on for something absurd like decades. 

But we will see.  This project has already garnered far more of an audience than I ever imagined and it was not even undertaken with this goal.

If, however, enough people find value in Tinkered Thinking and the number of supporters, readers and listeners continue to grow, there’s many directions this thing could go.

And if you’re curious about where Tinkered Thinking might go, please share it with family and friends.  While monthly and one-time donations are always a truly tremendous help, growing an audience for something like this is far more powerful in the long run. 

Many goodies for subscribers are in the works. 

So stay tuned.

AUTOSEND

March 9th, 2020

This episode is dedicated to David Perell, who is often referred to as “The Writing Guy” and he is an absolute powerhouse when it comes to motivating an instructing people to write.  You can connect with him on Twitter @david_perell

Here’s a simple exercise that has tremendous effect: write a letter to yourself.  Write that letter with the intention that you’ll read it at some point in the future.  Say maybe a year from now.  You might have an idea of where you want to be in a year, and if you don’t, this gives you a quick and easy opportunity to think about it.

You begin to realize that what you do now is going to create the life that you’ll be living next year.  And so in some sense, you have some explaining to do:

What sort of life are you going to leave for the person you’ll be in a year?

Are you working hard to make life better for that person?

Or will that person be confused why you didn’t keep up with your efforts.

Writing a letter gives you an opportunity to explain yourself, not just to the person you’ll eventually be, but also to who you are now.

If you’re about to give up on something.  Maybe something you’ve put a lot of time and energy into, then it’s a chance to either clarify why it’s a good idea to stop, or it can be an opportunity to rev yourself back up with the core reasons why you should keep at it.

We often only reflect quickly, on the moment, or maybe what happened yesterday, or that frustrating encounter last week.  But a year is an excellent length of time to look back on.  You can get a lot done in a year.  You can set things up for a solid crack of the bat.  Or get it all done, and wonder about aiming higher.

Not only can this become a productive dialogue over time, but the best thing about writing a letter to yourself is that it’s sent as fast as it comes into existence.  It’s an exercise for the present moment as much as it becomes a point of reflection in the future.

A LUCILIUS PARABLE: DATABASE

March 8th, 2020

Lucilius sat hunched over a portion of code, puzzled.  He was designing a database for himself.  Quite literally.  He was trying to build a database the he himself would inhabit, and so he had set out to make a perfect mirror of his own mind.

In order to do this, he was transferring parts of his own mind into the database as he built it in order to make sure it’s relational connections were an actual reflection of the way he thought.

What Lucilius could have easily seen coming was that if he removed too much of his mind into the database he would cease to be able to think properly, or even function.

And this is exactly what happened.  Lucilius had expanded the database to such a size that he had to move a large portion of his mind into it in order to see if it functioned properly.  Lucilius initiated the process and as a result there was too little of him left in his body, and not enough in the database to fully function without external help.

In short, Lucilius crashed.

THE SIZE & SHAPE OF PROBLEMS

March 7th, 2020

Any new obstacle or confusing result must call up the question of scope.  If all the pieces involved are fairly familiar then perhaps it’s a small local issue, like understanding a nuance of dialect: in this town pop means soda, and in this other town next to it, pop has a violent meaning.  But walk into a third town and suddenly no one seems to be speaking the same language?  The comparison here is one of size.  Figuring out the meaning of ‘pop’ is small and quick.  Figuring out a new language?  Not so fast.

This example using languages makes the scope of the confusion easy to see.  But when we have our head buried in a project, it’s not necessarily so easy to know if you are looking at a small stumbling block, or if you’ve suddenly discovered a giant hole in your understanding.  Even the small stumbling block is a hole in understanding, but again, it’s a matter of size.

And shape.

The questions that we explore upon realizing there’s a hole in our understanding determine how fast we make progress.  Those initial questions can be either about size or shape, and it makes a big difference which one’s we pursue first.

Think of echolocation.  Like how a submarine locates other submarines with a ping, or bats as they fly through the air, or dolphins, and even whales.  In all of these examples, a sound is produced for a call and response.  The response is the same sound bounced back off of the object they are trying to get a sense of.  Depending on how long the sound takes to get back gives a clue about how far away the object is. 

Electron microscopes function in a similar way.  An extremely tiny object is bombarded with electrons from all around, and these electrons then bounce off of the tiny object and the angle produced by the bounce is recorded by the electron microscope.  Each little bounce marks a plane in space, and when all of these tiny planes in space are put together, we get a complete image of the tiny object. 

Think of each sound used by a bat to echolocate as a question.  And each response is not an answer, but a clue about what the answer might look like.  Same with each electron in the electron microscope.  Each electron shot at the tiny object is a small question, and the response is a clue.  It’s important not to think of these responses as answers because our goal is to figure out what the object is.  A single question almost never achieves this unless the hole in our understanding is very small.  Often we have a big question, something vague like: What am I looking at here?  And it spawns an entire race of smaller and smaller questions that poke at the shape and size of the unknown.

So which should we start with, size or shape?  And what does this have to do with the sort of questions we ask?

Think of it this way:  If the ‘unknown’ you are looking for is the Titanic at the bottom of the ocean, would you use an electron microscope to find it?

Think about how ridiculous this would be.  Electron microscopes are used to gain a very clear picture of incredibly tiny objects.  Even if we were to somehow build an electron microscope big enough to fit the Titanic inside of it, the thing would require an absolutely stupendous amount of electron bombardment in order to get a complete picture.  Instead we used a much larger form of echolocation to find the titanic.

But when we are buried in a project and we come across an unexpected result, we often poke at it as though we were using an electron microscope to get a sense of the shape of the titanic.  This can quickly become demoralizing because if you were to take an insanely small portion of the titanic and look at it, you’d have absolutely no idea you were looking at a giant sunken ship.

This is why it’s important to form questions that give you an idea as to the size of the gap in your knowledge first.  Then query for shape.

Zooming out a little and asking question the get’s you an equally confusing result probably indicates the the unknown is still quite a bit bigger than you think it is.  Zoom out more until you get a response that makes some sense.  And then start zooming in a little in order to get an idea of the shape of your unknown.

So much time is wasted in these tiny dead ends, asking the wrong sort of question for the type of situation.  We have to remember the incredible breadth that our mind is capable of.  We don’t need to physically back away from a thing in order to get a better sense of what we are looking at.  We can change the size of our mind, and likewise the size of our questions.

Our mind is constantly shape shifting, and by being a little more mindful about this process we can zero in more quickly on that vague unknown that is holding us back.