MEDITATIVE

September 27th, 2019

The word ‘meditative’ does not refer to the practice of meditation. 

In today’s parlance, it means merely ‘relaxing’.  And for those who don’t meditate, this might seem confusing or nonsensical: Isn’t meditation relaxing?

Many will often say things like ‘making collages is my meditation’ or ‘going for a run is my meditation’.  Sure, these mindless activities might feel relaxing but it totally misses the point.

Let’s say we’ve got two people: Julia and Alanna and only Alanna knows how to ride a bike.  Julia hears Alanna talking about the benefits of riding a bike, and Julia pipes up and says, ‘oh, well I go swimming, that’s how I ride a bike.”

Clearly, Julia doesn’t have the faintest idea what she’s talking about.  Swimming doesn’t have anything to do with riding a bike.  Sure, both activities might be enjoyable, and they might have similar health benefits and both require the body. But, swimming is not riding a bike, swimming doesn’t give you the faintest clue how to ride a bike, and swimming definitely doesn’t give you any sense of what it’s like to actually ride a bike.

This is precisely the error that people make when they claim some relaxing activity to be their form of meditation.  If there is one thing that meditation has in common with things like swimming, running or riding a bike, it’s that there’s a meaningful and unavoidable barrier to entry.

We are not born knowing how to swim, or how to run, or how to ride a bike.  Everyone who can do these things spent some time, usually in youth figuring out how to do these things, and we simply don’t remember the huge amount of effort it took to learn how to stand, then walk, then run, then swim or all those times we fell on the bike before we finally got it.

Here’s a question for people who think they are meditating while doing some other relaxing activity like filling in a coloring book.

If you think meditation is simply relaxing, then why don’t you do it?

It’s for the same reason that most people don’t wake up during a day off and sit down to figure out how to write python code with no prior knowledge.  It’s hard.  And it’s hard because there’s a learning curve, and it takes a little while to get your bearings and figure things out.

But unlike coding or swimming, riding a bike, or coloring in a coloring book, there’s something about meditation that elevates it to an entirely alien category of activity.

Meditation isn’t simply an experience that a person takes part in for 10 or 20 minutes a day, it’s an activity that changes all experiences.

An easy way to think about this is to imagine a kid who was born with blurry vision.  This kid is experiencing the exact same world that everyone else is, but the moment a discerning adult puts a pair of glasses on the kid, that kid’s experience of everything is now radically different.  Everything is brought into sharp focus.  It’s still the same world, the same set of experiences, but all of them are different now, better.

It’d be a bit silly, simple and inaccurate to say that meditation provides a pair of reading glasses for the mind, but the analogy with regards to changing experience is accurate.  Meditation, after some months, or years changes a person’s experience of everything, even the experience of what it’s like to have a thought.

RESULTS PART II: A GAME OF TENNIS

September 26th, 2019

For Part I check out Episode 528.

The word Result comes from classical Latin, meaning ‘to spring forward, or rebound”

This etymology can provide some help for thinking about plans and results in a healthier way.

If anything, when it comes to plans and results, our goal is for our plans to increasingly produce the results that we would like to emerge.

As explored in Part I, it’s better to move through this iterative process without disappointment, frustration and all the bullshit that surrounds failure.  It’s better because it’s more efficient: we lose less time.

Even if a plan completely fails to produce the desired effect, we have still learned something.  We’ve learned what doesn’t work.  This might seem like a limp victory because it’s easy to imagine that a nearly infinite variety of plans would also fail.  This is merely hyperbolic, because fact is, no one is going to be stupid enough to try all of the obvious variations that clearly aim in ineffective directions. 

They say a miss is as good as missing by a mile, but this is terrible logic, and simply not true.  If you miss by just a few millimeters, well then that’s definitely not a mile.  It’s a few millimeters, and if the preceding shot was a few centimeters, well then it’s a sign of progress that’s heading in a good direction.

We can induce some flexibility into our thinking about results by examining tennis.

We fire a shot over the net with the hope that it’ll thwart our opponent and gain us a point.  But our opponent fires a shot back.  Our shot essentially rebounds from our opponent and it springs forward towards us.  This evokes the etymology of Result.

We volley back and forth and with each return, or rebound from our opponent, we learn about them.  Oh, she’s slow to get to the right side of the court.  Oh, she’s most comfortable trying to score on the left side.  Oh wait, that was a trick because she just went hard for the right side.  Interesting. 

Each time we fire a shot over the net, it’s like a little hypothesis about what might work.  If the ball is returned, then we have a little more information about what works and what doesn’t.

A game like tennis in this case is quite helpful for contracting our plans to much smaller iterations.  The goal of the game is to win, but that can’t be achieved with one static plan.  It quite literally changes on the fly and we try a new plan that instantaneously manifests with each returned shot.  Each result or rebound updates our strategy and then our strategy spits out a new plan and we take another shot. 

This is more like how we should approach plans in the rest of our life.  Short-term plans and long-term goals.  We carry out plans to see what will work, and the shorter they are, the quicker we get feedback, and the more plans we can make and carry out.  By this method our strategy for achieving long term goals slowly updates.

We are essentially always playing tennis with reality.  We try something, and reality shoots back a result.

The more results we can invoke by taking action on more and more plans, the quicker we learn just what is going on with reality, and by this way, we increase our agency because we have a better idea of what actually works.

RESULTS PART I: EXPECTATION

September 25th, 2019

Make a plan, but don’t plan the results.

It might be helpful to point out something about plans that doesn’t ever get mentioned: Plans are about learning.

Plans are experiments, they are based on hypotheses about reality.  If I do this than A might happen.

Compare it to something like gravity and suddenly the wishy-washy nature of plans comes into focus.  Nobody plans on being sucked towards the earth tomorrow.  We count on it.  We expect it.  So much so that we never think about it.  Only when it’s somehow mitigated by something like swimming or floating around in the International Space Station do we give gravity some thought.  Neither Plans nor their results deserve any of the reliable expectation that we ascribe to gravity.  And yet we often do this, and become as disappointed and upset as if we were to walk into a new room and suddenly fall to the ceiling and get stuck there with 10 times the force of regular gravity. 

Just imagine how aggravating that would be.  Lying there, on the ceiling, stuck, sighing, thinking “not again..”

We have this experience – at least emotionally – all the time.  Something doesn’t go our way, we roll our eyes, frustrated: not again….

Why do we pin expectation to our plans in this way?

It might have something to do with the unsettling nature of the future.  For the time being it’s fairly unpredictable, and the unknown makes us nervous and scared.  For good reason: the unknown can be physically dangerous.  We seem hardwired to default towards fear of the unknown.  And perhaps this was some sort of evolutionary adaptation that kept us safe in the past when things were more dangerous.

Regardless of the origin or cause, we’re gifted with an unproductive tendency to try and speak about the future in terms of certainty.

When we take this course of action, I expect this will be the outcome.

This is indicative of a terrible perspective because it sets itself up for disappointment, which is an entirely new problem that we’ll have to deal with.

Another reason that people use this language though, is because it sounds impressive.  It’s a social hack that some people use for short term gain, and it works because most people are petrified of the unknown, so someone who declares they can create the opposite, by making the future known, will gain a lot of short-term clout. 

Someone who can speak about the future in certain terms and be correct is going to be a very rare and a very valuable human being.  

But the reason this sort of person is going to be rare is because the way to develop an exceptionally robust model of the world – one that is strong enough to make accurate predictions – is going to come about that model through a strategy that requires the exact opposite:  fast, iterative experimentation with little to no emotional attachment to what the results might be. 

Such a person can carry out more experiments for at least one simple reason: with no emotional attachment to some sort of desired results, they get to skip the whole disappointment and frustration thing.  They fast-track straight to the next experiment, and while other people are busy being down in the dumps beating themselves up for failure, this person is busy learning more and gaining an upper hand on how the world works.

This episode relies on episode 514: Falsify

Part II of this episode, A Game of Tennis, is now available tomorrow.

LITTLE THEORIES

September 24th, 2019

Whether we know it or not, we are constantly constructing hypotheses and testing them.  Many of these are under the umbrella of a larger theory, a mental model of some aspect of the world that we have constructed throughout our life.

Examine the word a moment.  It’s hypo- plus –thesis.

Hypo- means literally under, or below.  It’s easy to grip this prefix when we think about the word hypothermia.  Our temperature is below what it should be.

We can think of the word hypothesis in similar terms.

Under the umbrella of our model of the world, we construct little theories that need testing.  Most likely, such little theories will not stand the scrutiny of testing, but if they do, then it rises to the level of a theory and becomes a robust part of our mental model.

The key is in the testing.  Either it works as a valid way of looking at the world or it doesn’t.  Fantasy and delusion enter the picture when we elevate a hypothesis to the level of theory without testing it, but merely on the validity of a warm fuzzy emotional connection.  This is an easy way to develop a dangerous mindset.  Dangerous not just to one’s self but potentially to other people.  And many beliefs fall into this category.

Failing to test beliefs or willfully ignoring the results creates stagnation, and while this might be less of an emotional hassle in the short term, in the long run it is self-defeating for one simple reason:  expanding our accurate understanding of reality increases our agency.

When we entertain beliefs that have little or no evidence of being an accurate depiction of reality, we are literally limiting ourselves as though we refuse to believe that there’s a bigger better playground to go to where we can make something happen.

PATTERN MANIPULATION

September 23rd, 2019

Humans are pattern recognition machines.  We’re pretty good at it.  As long as the pattern is short.  For example, the reason that a guitar chord sounds good is because the vibrational frequency of each string matches up in a short enough timeline.  For example, a deep bass string might have a frequency that is exactly twice as long as another string being played.  In this case, the two would sound good together.

But let’s say the frequency is 290 times longer than the next string being played.  Meaning that the frequency of each string only intersects when one string has vibrated 290 times.  They match up for an instant and then it’s a bit of a wait till there’s another match up.  There’s a pattern, but it only happens every once in a while.  In this case, the notes wouldn’t sound good together because we can’t readily hear the pattern.  This is why guitar chords sound nice.  Each string has a frequency that matches up in some way – usually as a multiple – to the other string being played.  Their frequencies intersect at regular small intervals.  Think of the beat of a song and how all the other instruments follow the beat in accordance to the same timing.  It’s just like the vibrational frequencies of the strings in a guitar chord, but now it’s across instruments.

Listening to a song and feeling a sense of pleasure is the pattern recognition part.

But understanding these patterns deeply enough to rearrange them in novel ways that create a new pattern?  That is artistry.  And it extends far beyond music or any of the traditionally defined arts.

Patterns exist everywhere, whether we examine growth techniques for a Twitter account or the s-curve adoption cycle of disruption technologies.

All such pattern recognition starts as pleasurable novelty. 

It’s when we understand these patterns well enough to successfully manipulate them, that is use the patterns by implementing them or cutting and rearranging them in a way that still works that we gain expanded agency in the world.

To explore this more fully, we can think of Legos.

Each Lego has a predictable pattern of studs, whether it be two or four or whatever number.  Once we understand how these add up and combine by following the instructions, we can then create novel constructions by fitting together the pattern of Lego bricks in accordance to their pattern of studs.

This ability to manipulate patterns in novel ways is at the heart of what it means to be resourceful.

Being resourceful is not about the resources that one might have.  It’s about the exact opposite.  We need to be resourceful when there are few resources at hand, which calls for a novel way to put things together in order to make up for the lack of resources.  At it’s heart, we are looking to combine elements in a way that no one has ever seen before.  We are looking to create a unique pattern.

Our own pattern.

And like any creation, whether it be jazz or architecture, if we can create a novel pattern that pays an obvious tribute to those patterns we draw from, it’s likely people will take notice, because, like that guitar chord, that new pattern is a new way for others to experience pleasure.