QUESTION ABOUT THE QUESTION

May 10th, 2019

A surprisingly difficult question to answer is: what is a question?

We encounter them everyday, we form and use them everyday, but when asked to define ‘question’, most people are apt to pause.  For those who do not have a ready definition, the mind seems to break due to a kind of infinite loop.  What is a question? is… itself a question… which is a question about a question which ultimately references all questions, and hence the recursiveness that ensues which can turn this ponderance into a bit of a Zen Koan.

Other questions are fairly easy in comparison.  For example: what is a cat?  Anyone can answer this in countless and easily recognizable ways.  So here we have an initial way of differentiating at least two types of questions:  those to which the answer is readily available, and those questions that make us feel stumped. 

The first point to make is that questions to which we have ready answers are no longer really questions for us.  A child might ask: what is a particle accelerator? and for the child this is a genuine question.  But for anyone who knows what a particle accelerator is, this is merely a request to copy and paste some information.

Note for a quick moment the wording:  A child’s question to which we have the answer is to the person with the answer: a request.

The main root of both of these words is the key to answering that pesky query: what is a question?  The answer lies in lopping off the last three letters of the word question, in order to get the word quest.

Quest, is quaintly defined as a long or arduous search for something. 

Pause for a moment to think about whether this really applies to the child asking about the particle accelerator.  Pause further to reflect on whether or not this definition accurately describes most of the questions we use during the day:

did you take out the trash? 

what time is the meeting?

who is going to be at the party tonight?

These are more requests for information than they are long and arduous searches for something.  Naturally such a reliance on the root quest somewhat betrays the modern definition of the word question.  It is a tenet of this framework, however, that the current modern definitions of words are experiments in variation, like someone trying a new profession to see how they like it.  Words are constantly shifting, morphing and touching new semantic territory, but the history of a word often points to the reason for it’s existence, and this teleological core often casts the modern definition in a fuller context.  The difference is like that of a general who can see the whole battlefield as opposed to the sniper who is so concentrated, she fails to notice the enemy sneaking up from behind.  Narrow definitions that fail to pay tribute to the context created by that word’s history can fail us in the way the sniper is defeated.

To elucidate this point further, we can simply ask a question:

Which kind of question is generally more valuable?

The question to which someone else has a definitive and verifiable answer?

or

The question which no one knows the answer to, but which can be definitively figured out?

A couple real-world examples help clarify this juxtaposition:  Compare these two questions:

Did you take out the trash?

and

Will this business idea make money?

These comparisons seek merely to underscore the difference between a valuable question and a question which is merely a request for information.  While much of the modern world could benefit from increasing the efficiency of such request-questions (an effort to which Google has spearheaded with unparalleled success) it’s the answerable questions that we haven’t figured out that are of greatest potential value.

At this point, we arrive at a working definition of the word ‘question’ and an answer to the pesky query.

 A question can be defined as:

An open-ended concept that creates momentum.

This fits both the unanswered question which requires some sort of long or arduous quest to figure out and the request-question, to which we have the momentum to go find someone with the answer.

Making that definition deeply intuitive can solve motivation problems, free up stagnate progress on a project, and even build bridges between enemies – if only we extrapolate wisely on the open-ended concepts we create and the direction of momentum which they generate.  The next question of greatest utility that can propel us in a useful direction is simply:

Are you asking yourself the right questions?

BASKETS OF FIRE

May 9th, 2019

To have many irons in the fire is to have a lot on the go, projects, jobs, endeavors, explorations, hobbies, interests.

This last one: interests, might seem like the core of such a drive, and certainly it is the most fluid, efficient and natural drive behind such eclectic efforts. Such diversity is often based in a natural curiosity which can be one of the most powerful tools we can foster within ourselves.

This is a virtuous framework because it sets itself up in a way that naturally safeguards against risk and maximizes potential payoff.

To illustrate this aspect of curiosity and having multiple irons in the fire, we can juxtapose it with a similar idiom that functionally seems to say the same thing but actually conveys the exact opposite meaning. We’ve all heard it:

Don’t put all your eggs in one basket.

Why is it good to have more than one iron in the fire, and why don’t we say don’t put all your irons in one fire?

Because the risk of the basket does not carry over to the creative powers of the forge.

We don’t put all our eggs in one basket because if the basket is accidentally dropped, then many, if not all of our eggs will probably break.

Put another way, we might say: don’t put all your hope into this one endeavor, because… frankly, it might not work, and then all that hope will have functioned like expectation, now dashed to pieces, leaving only a mess of disappointment. It can take a while to bounce back from such an event, and this might just be from an emotional standpoint and says nothing of the financial and reputational fallout that might coincide with such unfortunate results. Many people fail to take into account the unknown forces that create unforeseeable randomness which can affect results in ways beyond our control, and such stiff perspectives can quickly place the blame on an individual who has honestly tried their best as opposed to greater influences of chaos that such stiff perspectives unwisely choose to ignore.

The forge for our irons, on the other hand carries no risk of ruining our projects. Metaphorically. this is where projects grow, where we build, where we experiment, iterate and ultimately produce results. As anyone who has tried their hand at multiple projects - even projects as humble as knitting or simple woodwork – such individuals know how everything comes with a learning curve, even those things we have some experience with. The craftsman or artisan puts no huge and final hope in any one project, but uses projects as a way to get better. The attainment and continued exercise of a skill is ultimately driven by the mind’s desire to increase personal agency, to change reality to be as close to the wonders we dream up.

This iterative practice is the symmetrical antithesis of being too emotionally tied to one single plan. Each iteration in the practice of some given skill, each project is a small plan, one through which we learn from the results and from which we form new plans based on the discoveries of such experimentation.

The blacksmith with several irons in the fire is running multiple experiments at once: keeping this iron in a little longer to see what effect it has, taking another one out sooner to observe that effect, having all of them run at slightly different temperatures to again note the difference of results. If one turns out particularly good, it’s a pleasant surprise, but it’s also knowledgably founded on the experience of what happened with all the other slightly different iterations.

The equivalent mistake of having all eggs in one basket for the blacksmith would be to have only one iron in the fire and to expect it to turn out perfectly.

Concurrently, the equivalent for carrying eggs would be to have a basket for each egg given to different people and thereby raising the chance that someone will make it to the destination without dropping their basket.

CRACKING THE MAELSTROM

May 8th, 2019

Modern life is replete with all manner of vicious cycles that can gently grasp a person and slowly nudge them into a quickening whirlpool that descends towards velocities and forces that become harder and harder to escape.

Debt

Depression

Addiction

These can all gather unto themselves in such powerful ways that some people quite literally do not ever escape such a fate. 

It is perhaps no surprise that these three vicious cycles in particular can often have overlap.  All three of these revolve in some way around chronic forms of stress.  Debt can easily cause this stress, such stress can be a major contributing factor to depression, and addiction is often a short-term solution to such stress and depression.

The neuroendocrinologist Dr. Robert Sapolsky has been at the forefront of elucidating just how toxic chronic stress is for people.  From digestive problems to accelerated aging to diminished portions of the brain crucial for learning and memory, stress, if activated for sustained periods slowly kills people.

With regards to the vicious cycles that we might encounter and get sucked down into, it should seem like an obvious catch-22.  The more chronic stress a person experiences, the less equipped they become to invent a viable way out of the situation that is causing such stress.    

It’s well correlated that financial stress lowers fluid IQ.   And this is the kind of problem where utilizing as much intelligence as possible is crucial if not fundamental to changing and improving one’s financial situation.   Such a correlation makes it far more likely, indeed increasingly likely that the more stress a person feels on account of debt, the less likely they will be able to muster some ingenuity and see a solution out of such a situation.

This is a positive feedback loop, pure and simple.  But for the individual who gets sucked into such a vicious cycle there is absolutely nothing positive about it.

The symmetrical view here is to say that a person’s intelligence, under the influence of such chronic stress enters a negative feedback loop.  As stress begins to have an effect on a person’s ability to make good decisions and therefore make bad decisions more likely, the fallout of such bad decisions again make more bad decisions even more likely.  It’s reasonable to say that fluid intelligence in this case is stuck in a negative feedback loop where less optimal decisions hobble available intelligence for future decisions.

This horrible Maelström, like the one in Edgar Allen Poe’s short story, does have a few counter-intuitive hacks embedded in it’s nature.

In Poe’s short story a sailor gets sucked down into a Maelström and as he’s swirling round and round, clinging to the deck of the ship he’s on, he becomes calm and merely begins to observe the chaos around him.  In that calmness he observes that objects of a certain shape get tossed out of the Maelström back up to safer waters.

It would seem crazy to abandon a ship, but the sailor lashes himself to an object like the ones he sees escape the Maelström and he jumps overboard, and inevitably his observation serves him well.  He escapes the Maelström.

The counter-intuitive aspect of this situation is key, and it can serve anyone who likewise finds themselves trapped in some vicious cycle.

It’s perfectly reasonable to think that if the sailor had remained in a state of panic he never would have made his key observation.

Poe intuits a truth about stress that is exactly what researchers like Dr. Robert Sapolsky have illuminated.

For the person suffering from financial stress, or any other whirlpool of stress, the first solution is not necessarily to meet the problem head on.

The Maelström can be cracked if we first Pause and address the root cause of inability: stress.

This is the true whirlpool that is perpetuating many bad situations, and if that stress is first addressed, than our minds can become more able and adept at solving the external problems of our life.

But how we might wonder if it’s an external problem that is causing such stress, as with debt?

Luckily, the most effective forms of stress-reduction are free: such as meditation.

It may seem somewhat absurd that a person with debt spiraling out of control should meditate.  Such a person should work harder, right?

Though, would it not serve such a person better to work smarter instead of just harder?

What if we can work harder and smarter?  Might we resolve our problems quicker?

Probably.

The tiny amount of time required each day for meditation to have a substantial impact on the reduction of stress can pay compounding dividends in terms of a person’s ability to then think more clearly and with ingenuity.

Like Poe’s sailor who becomes strangely calm, meditation, with a couple short months of dedicated practice can bring a calmness to a person that may enable them to make a key insight, one that might help them crack the Maelström and escape it, instead of fruitlessly trying to fight it.

This episode references Episode 386: White Diamond and Episode 23: Pause

PLANS & PROGRESS

May 7th, 2019

These two concepts are at odds with one another.  One of these concepts is an honest assessment of how far we have come whereas the other is often an imagined certainty about the future.  Progress is that honest assessment, however it too is mapped forward into the future, as in, the progress we hope to make.  It is an active verb that we push forward with into the future. 

We do so presumably with plans, however a plan is a cold and static noun. And because of that, plans should be kept relatively short so that we can quickly gain any result and feedback generated by acting on such a plan and forgo the risk of marching off in unproductive directions for long periods of time simply in the name of the plan. 

The longer we spend marching off in an unproductive direction, and the more we invest in a sunk cost of such a direction, the longer it takes to make a useful pivot away from such an ineffective plan.  This pivot also becomes less likely as the cognitive fallacy of sunk-cost accumulates in the mind. 

Plans are somewhat confused with instructions.  They appear extremely similar in their make up.  Both are a blueprint for some achievable end.  The difference of course is that instructions are tried and true ways of a achieving whatever ends they instruct.  Plans, on the other hand are educated guesses at best.  The similarity between these two is unfortunate because people can easily fall into a false sense of security about the efficacy of a plan in the same way we can often rightfully rely on instructions.  Any plan, however, is far from tried and true.

Progress, as an active verb that describes the future we aim to create, requires a strategy that is equally active and agile. 

Our strategy is ultimately and ideally an arsenal of mental models and evolving cognitive frameworks that should change based on newly acquired information.  Once an understanding of this information is integrated into these models and frameworks, that combined strategy then outputs a plan.  The smaller and more concrete the better. 

If however our plans are large, vague and reach far into the future, there is most likely gross weaknesses within our cognitive framework and the mental models that it employs.

This lack of robustness and antifragility within our cognitive framework leaves us vulnerable to many cognitive mistakes, namely in this case, the sunk-cost fallacy wherein we follow a plan irrespective of new information that indicates that abandoning the plan would be a better plan.  In such a case our strategy lacks the ability to cut emotional ties to such plan and print out a new plan that successfully incorporates new information. The mental skill here is the ability to continually question one’s current efforts and size them up against the core aims that we seek to achieve.  If they cease to match, than we need to slip such anchors and sail in new directions.

Progress and the perseverance to pursue such progress require a strategy that can evolve plans quickly.  An absolute necessity of taking action on quickly evolving plans benefits both from our ability to emotionally distance our self from current lines of action, but also from shorter plans.  The shorter the plan, the quicker it can be carried out and the faster we can potentially receive more information to update our strategy and pivot –even if only slightly- towards a tighter range in which direction we sense our goal may lie. 

Progress, in retrospect looks like a set of instructions.  The narrative is always clear and seems obvious after the fact, but progress while looking forward has none of this clarity nor certainty.  Looking forward, progress is a probability cloud that we are constantly seeking to shrink as we take action and integrate information.  The smaller and tighter our plans that we formulate to carry out this process, the quicker and more efficiently we shrink that probability cloud of the future where our goals may exist.   Ultimately, if our goal is possible and we can pivot intelligently towards it, or stumble with luck on to it, that probability cloud vanishes as the future becomes the present where our goal emerges.

This episode references Episode 37: The Instructions are Always Written Afterwards and Episode 72: Persevere vs. Pivot

WHITE DIAMOND

May 6th, 2019

First a quick explanation of the title for this episode.  The symbol of the white diamond represented on playing cards is not intended to be a diamond but rather two instances of the letter ‘V’, one flipped and stacked on top the other.  This may sound a little convoluted right now, but this image is a perfect synthesis of two cycles that are often explored on Tinkered Thinking – so much so that they deserve their own episode so the concept can be properly explored, explained and so that future references can be more efficiently directed to a thorough and definitive explanation of the concept. 

The two cycles in question are namely:

Vicious cycles

and

Virtuous Cycles

Each one begins with the letter ‘v’ and the letter ‘v’ as a symbol is evocative of a pictorial representation of what each cycle looks like if we were to try and form a graphical image of these processes.

A Vicious cycle is most easily visualized as a whirlpool, the cross-section of which looks like a ‘V’ with concave sides.

We are all familiar with that mythic image of the primordial sailor clinging to some piece of wreckage while going round and round and getting sucked down faster and faster into some monstrous vortex.  This is the most literal example of a vicious cycle. 

Edgar Allen Poe’s short story ‘A Descent into the Maelström’ is a visceral and tense example of the sailor’s story.  

Our own personal bad habits are the closest and most intimate examples of vicious cycles.

Such vicious cycles are what propel people to eat themselves into obesity, or smoke until cancer fills their body, or complain, bicker and berate in their relationships until they are lonely and bitter.

Vicious cycles have two main aspects that are notably insidious:

They are slow in the beginning.  Like the subtle trends of current moving in the water, a sailor does not even notice that such a current is having much effect on the course of the boat.  Those beginning outer edges of the vicious cycle are akin to the long tentacles of a jellyfish – seemingly innocuous, silently present and inconspicuous as to where they are rooted.

The second aspect of vicious cycles that is of even greater cause for worry is that once we are stuck in a vicious cycle it becomes increasingly difficult to fight against the current and influence of such a vicious cycle through brute force alone.

The behavior we have performed everyday for the last thousand days is very likely to happen tomorrow.  A clean and lasting break from such behavior is rare because there is so much momentum behind it in the form of neural structure and firing pattern.  Parts of the brain even seem to be wired to help us fall into such vicious traps.  The most ready example is sugar; since it was so rare during the large majority of our physiological evolution, that physiology structured itself to predispose our behavior towards chasing after such caloric resources.  There was never a risk of over-indulging as there is today because such caloric abundance was simply non-existent, and so we never evolved any kind of built-in safeguard against today’s over-indulgence.

Financial stress, primarily in the form of debt is also an accessible example of a vicious cycle in action.  For the vast majority of people, financial insecurity creates a chronic source of stress.  While stress is actually very good for the brain in small punctuated doses, continuous stress creates the opposite effect.  Chronic stress impedes the brain’s ability to function well, and predisposes a person to making decisions based on short-term outcomes, as opposed to long-term benefit. 

Simply, the process – once in place – entrenches itself deeper and deeper. 

The phrase, digging one’s own grave comes to mind:  the deeper we dig a hole, the harder it is to climb out.

Many such vicious cycles, if not hacked and cracked, can ultimately cost people their relationships, their health, their careers, and ultimately their lives in direct or indirect ways.

Virtuous cycles, on the other hand have the exact same structure, but in the reverse direction.

Instead of a vortex in the sea that pulls a sailor down into death and oblivion,  we can picture a mountain, shaped like a cone.  And in this case, we have a mountain climber who walks around the base of the mountain while slowly aiming upwards.  Each circuit around the mountain increases the climber’s altitude and each circuit is also shorter, making the time to the top shorter and shorter.  If we picture the top of the mountain as some sort of goal, than each circuit around the mountain gets a person closer to their goal faster as each succeeding circuit grows smaller.

It’s also perfectly reasonable to simply visualize switchbacks up the face of a mountain as is usually the case.  At the bottom the switchbacks are long, and each switchback gets shorter until the trail is pivoting back and forth so quickly that the hiker is nearly walking straight up.

While such images work well with regards to goals that we accomplish, the definitive peak presents a slight allegorical inconsistency if we apply the image to good habits.

Whether it be diet, exercise, or something like meditation, there is no final and definitive goal. Maintaining might be a more appropriate word, though the hope with all three areas is to have continual improvement.

In this case the rise upward is more like an asymptote.  To visualize this we might imagine a mountain that continually gets narrow towards a point, but also has infinite height.  In such a case, there is simply no end to the amount to which we can improve.

Just as we can have a perfect storm of bad habits – all vicious cycles that together overwhelm us to some final and tragic end, we can also have a collection of good habits that compound with one another to create results that are unachievable with one alone.  The whole is greater than the sum of its parts in this case.

Turning one’s life around by turning vicious cycles into virtuous ones is the difficult and innately counter-intuitive hack that we are all looking for in one way or another, and to which the rest of Tinkered Thinking seeks to explore.