TO HURT A BELIEF

July 29th, 2019

Ideas do not care about you.  Not even an idea like love.  Though it might seem built into the concept, its not.  We need only look at the long tradition of heartbreak and heartbreaking to see just how hurtful this loving concept can be.  In fact, few things cause more acute emotional pain then this concept and the way it can renege on the tempting lure of its advertisements.

The same follows for most all other beliefs, and this fact is compounded by a very imbalanced fact:

Belief can hurt you, but You cannot hurt a belief.

Beliefs can only be used to help guide and direct our behavior.  Whether this cascade of influence results in our environment becoming better - whether that be from a financial point of view, or in terms of relationships, or even our physical natural environment - depends solely on the quality of the belief and how well it accords to reality. 

In spite of this ruthless one-way street, it’s a wonder why we aren’t more discerning and rigorous with the beliefs that we choose to adopt and nurture. There is a sort of Stockholm Syndrome at play when a person holds on to a belief that is clearly doing them some harm. The most extreme example of this is the religious suicide bomber who quite literally does the most self-detrimental thing possible. . . because of a belief.

There’s an analogy here to be drawn with a parasite. The definition of a parasite is ‘an organism that lives in or on another organism and benefits by deriving nutrients at the host’s expense.’

This certainly seems to fit snuggly with the example of the religious suicide bomber whose belief benefits from the ultimate expense.

But other beliefs can be used to great personal benefit.  A rigorous study of physics and mathematics is grounded in the belief that the theorems and systems within physics and mathematics can be applied to reality to great manipulative effect.  Watching a rocket fall from space and land itself on a launch pad is one of the most awe-inspiring recent examples of much yield we can get from beliefs that have a tight relationship with the physical reality in which we find ourselves.

While it would be immensely beneficial and efficient to toss out beliefs that don’t have a tight accord with reality, doing so often comes with heavy social consequences.  We hinder one another by expecting each other to be consistent, and this consistency manifests itself primarily as holding on to the same beliefs.

We are stubborn to change, not so much because of who we are as individuals but because of how we are tied to one another in communities. 

This episode references Episode 33: Rose-Coloured Cuffs

A LUCILIUS PARABLE: TAILED BY GHOSTS

July 28th, 2019

Lucilius was hiking along a trail he’d heard lead to a high and beautiful view.  He stopped to drink some water and as he began to continue again, a woman who seemed in quite a hurry came up along the trail towards Lucilius.  She matched his pace pretty quickly, and Lucilius made a friendly observation.

“My my, you’re in a hurry.”

It was as though the woman hadn’t even noticed Lucilius until he’d spoken, so concentrated as she was on the ground in front of her.

“Oh,” she said, “yea, I like to get up there as fast as I can.”

“Why’s that?” Lucilius asked.

The woman slowed a little to Lucilius’ pace, and a somewhat confused look came over her.

“Well, I find that I’m happiest up there, and so the faster I get up to the top, the sooner I can be happy.”

Lucilius puzzled over this logic for a moment. “What’s so special about the top that makes you happy?”

The woman looked once more confused, as though the question had never occurred to her.  “I guess maybe the view?  It’s a good one, and it’s usually so quiet, and everything is so still.”

She said this as Lucilius struggled to keep up with her furious pace.  “Well,” Lucilius said.  “Don’t let me hold you back.”

The woman gave a limp sort of smile.  “Maybe I’ll see you at the top?”

“Maybe,” Lucilius said.

He watched the woman move up through the woods at her restless speed and once she was out of sight, he became aware of himself again.  The good labor of his breath, the squeeze and burn of muscles working, and always the living landscape around him, enclosed by the canopy of trees, moving past him. The moment, as it moved, as it bloomed forward in time seemed so lovely to Lucilius.  Thoughts of projects, about the future and memories came and went, but always Lucilius was able to somehow pause and see the details and design of the moment and somehow breath it all in, feeling a wide sense of gratitude.

As Lucilius reflected on the moment between his other wandering thoughts, there came the hurried footfalls of someone else coming down the trail.  He looked to see a young man, practically running down the trail.  As he came close to Lucilius, he was startled by Lucilius’ presence and tripped, falling harmlessly to the ground.

“Are you ok?” Lucilius asked, himself startled by the sight.

“Yea, I think so,” the young man said as he took hold of Lucilius’ proffered hand.  Lucilius hauled the young man up.

“Going pretty fast there,” Lucilius commented.

“I dunno, just gotta keep moving, I guess.”

“What do you mean?” Lucilius asked.

The young man sighed, looking back up the path, as though there were something there.  “It seems if I stay in one place for too long, I just start feeling this dread and panic. I went for this hike because I thought it would feel good, and I thought maybe I could get some rest at the top, with a good view, far away from everyone.  But just sitting up there for a minute or two and suddenly, I’m just filled with dread and panic again, and I just want to leave.  It’s like it catches up with me again, and I just have to keep moving to feel ok.”

“Maybe these feelings are trying to catch up in order to tell you something important?” Lucilius offered.

The young man sneered.  “Yea right.”

Lucilius could see the young man was starting to feel uneasy again.

“Well, I’ll let you get a move on, so that you can feel better.”

“Thanks,” the young man said as he move on down the trail.

Lucilius paused for a moment as the young man drifted out of sight.  The leaves of the high canopy swayed in a high breeze, flashes of sun blinked in the wobbling gaps.  Lucilius felt the fresh air fill his lungs.  He could feel even his heartbeat, radiating pulses out through his body and limps.  It was a beautiful, simply perfect day, Lucilius thought, as he started up the trail once more.

CATCHING IDEAS

July 27th, 2019

Quantity in creativity leads to quality.

The creator who makes quantity a priority will inevitably stumble upon quality and therefore have both.  The creator who only concentrates on quality may never achieve either.

The most illuminating example of this would be the great composers like Beethoven and Mozart.  The quantity of musical output that these composers had was not simply double that of mediocre composers, nor even ten times the amount.

On average, the great composers produced one hundred times as much work as mediocre composers.

To put this in perspective, let’s make up some numbers. 

Let’s say a mediocre composer produced 10 large pieces of music, symphonies perhaps.

This means that a great composer would produce . . . . 1,000 symphonies!

But total size is not the most interesting part of these made up numbers.  Let’s say that only 10% of any given composer’s work is really good.  The cream of the crop, you might say.

For the mediocre composer, that’s about…. 1. One piece of music that is considered that composer’s best. 

But for a great composer, their best 10% is 100 symphonies!

These numbers are hypotheticals, but the magnitude of quantity becomes particularly poignant.  A great composer’s top 10% is the size of other mediocre composers’ entire output. 

But here’s the thing.  No one really knows how good their work is going to be when they start out on it.  We all have hopes that we’ll produce something great, but that can’t really be planned nor guaranteed.  We can certainly get better with practice, but this again supports the quantity as a higher priority than quality. 

Qualityemergeswith quantity.  It akin to saying that there’s a 1 in 10 chance of producing something awesome. if you only try once, then odds are slim that it’ll happen.  But the more often you try, the more likely it is to happen.

Simply: those who make creative output a habit are bound to create something worth while…. eventually.

NETWORK WEB

July 26th, 2019

We are our networks.  In total isolation we can function, say in a cabin in the woods, but all the things necessary to actually live and function in that isolation still depends on our prior experience as social creatures that can learn how to build a cabin and forage, tend a garden, hunt and all that good survival stuff. 

We are raised, we do not simply grow up. 

Infant humans in total isolation apparently turn out to be feral.

One huge aspect of this social web that we create and which creates us is that it catches ideas and  allows for the implementation of ideas that would otherwise be impossible to explore if our species lived as isolated individuals in the same way that cheetahs or albatross do.

The business world is constantly harping on about the importance of creating and maintaining a network.  And the reason is obvious.  Who you know in large part determines who can help you, and how. People are viewed in a depressingly pragmatic way in this sense.  It’s a game of who you can call in order to help you get what you want.

But we can flip this scrip into a far more generous one when we take the frame that networks enable us to explore ideas. 

The best example of this is a group of young kids who go on an adventure together.  The idea is just to have fun, and it’s only really possible with the group of friends working together for symbiotic joy.

As is often said, when shit hits the fan, that’s when you find out who your real friends are.  This is just to say that networks have degrees of concentration. Just as we are all a few degrees away from Kevin Bacon, stripping away those degrees highlights the most powerful core of our network.  Inevitably, that core network is key to any idea you might come up with. 

Instead of networking, perhaps we should just look to make a friend. 

PESSIMISTIC TIME KEEPER

July 25th, 2019

Hofstadter’s Law states:  It always takes longer than you expect, even when you take into account Hofstadter’s Law.

This law is comically and infuriatingly recursive. We project how long a project will take, one we’ve never undertaken, and invariably we grossly underestimate how long it will take.    Construction projects present a fabulous example of this.  With so much work contracted out, and the whole process becoming decentralized, getting a handle on how long each part will take becomes more and more difficult.

Add to this the strange way that time dilates from a subjective point of view.  Some minutes can drag on forever, while a fun day seems to evaporate before we can really sink our teeth into it.

In addition to this, work also seems to expand to fill the time allotted for it. 

All three of these phenomena combined, it seems impossible that we can ever get a clear idea of what we can and will get done.

We have two options.  When it comes to deadline agreements with other people, we can inflate the time with the hope that we will deliver before, or we can give a tighter deadline and risk missing it.

Giving a later deadline might seem wise, but as mentioned, work has a strange inflational quality and will probably fill this buffer time.

It stands sensible to reason that the opposite is also true.  If work can expand, then perhaps it can be compressed.  The risk is that lower quality work will result from being rushed..

So which to go for?

Is there anyway to have our cake and eat it too? Can we compress work so that we have time left over?

The question remains open and probably depends on the project and the situation.  For those things that we have enough experience doing, we might be more accurate with our realistic timeline.   But for the unknown, chances are we’ll ned to work fast and with a generous deadline.