Innovation + experience-minded design strategy. The pieces of a working model for understanding culture + change in an increasingly complex world.
Imitation is collaborative: It might be technically possible to dig back and find the originator of, say, Socially Awkward Penguin or Privilege Denying Dude, but the knowledge would be perfectly useless. Whatever life or value these things have lies in their reuse.
What a beautiful explanation for why there are no firsts on the internet. (Not any that matter, anyway.)
We have always thought of individuals as being unpredictable," said Johan Bollen, an expert in complex networks at Indiana University. "These regularities [in behavior] allow systems to learn much more about us as individuals than we would care for.
It's inevitable that our developing understanding of complex networks will have a profound impact on the way we think of causality and conscious will.
(I wouldn't be too worried about it; passively-driven, emergent behavior is *much* more fascinating than volition-driven individualistic behavior.)
This article below resonates with me because I've become increasingly amused by notions like Fear Of MIssing Out, and by statements like "MUST READ," "essential," etc. These notions are fascinating in their ability to affect us in spite of their meaningless - but I'm not sure it's necessarily a good kind of impact.
Because we have a finite amount of time with which to focus our attention, and because we feel the pressure to make the "best" decision around where to do so, I'm laterally reminded of Frank Gavin and his notion of Chronological Proportionality. A historian by trade, this is Gavin's way of expressing our tendency to place proportional relevance on specific events an an attempt to better understand causality, specifically as it relates to our understanding of history. As Gavin notes in his talks on the matter, humanity has an entire history of being completely wrong when going about this task.
While focused on understanding the causal relationships between events, I think the idea applies just as well when it comes to the causal relationships between decisions and happiness. That is to say, we feel the pressure to always make the best decision about how to spend our time - regardless of the fact that we're almost certainly completely wrong about whether this MUST READ or that *essential* article really is that proportionally critical.
There's just not enough time in a lifetime to see every movie, read every book, travel to every country, hear every song, watch every show, or view every sculpture. And that's ok:
It's sad, but it's also ... great, really. Imagine if you'd seen everything good, or if you knew about everything good. Imagine if you really got to all the recordings and books and movies you're "supposed to see." Imagine you got through everybody's list, until everything you hadn't read didn't really need reading. That would imply that all the cultural value the world has managed to produce since a glob of primordial ooze first picked up a violin is so tiny and insignificant that a single human being can gobble all of it in one lifetime. That would make us failures, I think.
Art and Attribution: Who is an “Artist”?
Enjoying a show last year at The Magic Castle, I was struck by the magician/assistant distinction. The magician would make a dove disappear, and his assistant would suddenly reveal it in her possession. ”Who was doing magic,” I wondered? It looked like a team effort to me.
I was reminded of this distinction while watching an NPR short on artist Liu Bolin. Bolin, we are told, “has a habit of painting himself” so as to disappear into his surroundings. The idea is to illustrate the way in which humans are increasingly “merged” with their environment.
So how does he do it? Well, it turns out that he doesn’t. Instead, “assistants” spend hours painting him. And someone else photographs him. He just stands there. Watch how the process is described in this one minute clip:
So what makes an artist?
One might argue that it was Bolin who had the idea to illustrate the contemporary human condition in this way. That the “art” in this work is really in his inspiration, while the “work” in this art is what is being done by the assistants. Yet clearly there is “art” in their work, too, given that they are to be credited for creating the eerie illusions with paint. Yet it is Bolin who is named as the artist; his assistants aren’t named at all. What is it about the art world — or our world more generally — that makes this asymmetrical attribution go unnoticed so much of the time?
In an abstractly related way, this is precisely why I found Harvard law professor Michael Sandel's book "Justice" so compelling. His take on the nebulous topic of ethics is much less concerned about defining what makes things good/bad or even ethical/unethical, and much more concerned about what society rewards and why.
Causality to me falls in the same category of abstract notions. Throughout history there have been a number of ways we've thought about the causes of things. And we've got a consistent track record of been wrong about it - we're not likely to stop being wrong about it anytime soon. Causality may well turn out to be a butterfly effect-esque representation of chaos theory, only instead of one butterfly flapping its wings there's an infinitely complex network of organisms acting and reacting to one another. But when struck by a bat, that won't stop us from blaming the assailant.
That is to say, there's pure causality, and then there's the causality that matters to humans. We could debate over what the true source of art is, and maybe even someday come to an answer. But it doesn't matter if we're compelled to reward something else.
Nonne and Num
Nonne and num are words in Latin that appear in questions, and all they really do is indicate the expected answer. They are sometimes loosely translated as “surely”. For instance: “Surely you’re coming out with us on Friday night?” is a nonne question, and “surely you’re not going to eat that?” is a num question.
I like the idea that you can shape the language someone will use in an answer by the language you ask the question in. What are the equivalents in a conversational UI?
Linguistic priming as a form of programming the cognition of other minds
The above is from the Dictionary of the History of Ideas; I'm presently studying causality. I sometimes think it's the only thing worth studying*.
Especially considering the nice little bit inside this article on Malebranch's thinking in The Search For Truth, where he defines a real cause as "something between which and it's effects, the mind perceives a necessary connection."
'Perceives' is the critical word here. The foundation of a thesis that is slowly brewing in my mind is that the human brain is distinctly, consistently, and measurably limited in a number of interesting and important ways - this has profound implications on the things we perceive, and therefore the things we believe (subtext: we should have little expectation that the things we believe correspond with reality).
Another way of thinking about this is that if we're limited in the way we perceive things, then the connections we make between causes and effects aren't necessarily the reality of what causes an effect. The connections we make just happen to be the ones that are most intuitive to us.
What follows from this is that if our conception of cause and effect is suspect, then we should be careful about the way we think of something a little more tangible: decision-making.
That is to say, if we are aware of our limitations in understanding the impact of our decisions, perhaps we can be a little more careful about judging what "right" and "wrong" decisions look like.
One idea I really like around this topic is Frank Gavin's notion of Chronological Proportionality, which I take as a framework for illustrating how the decisions and events we think are important almost never are.
*I don't think this all the time, obviously. Studying general concepts gives you a high-level scope, like looking down on the world from the furthest zoom on a digital map; useful for understanding the world, not so useful for understanding how to get from your house to the mall. When I say "making things a little more tangible" in the above, I'm essentially saying something like "zooming in a little bit."
Any given goal that I have tends to require an enormous amount of "administrative support" in the form of homeostasis, chores, transportation, and relationship maintenance. I estimate that the ratio may be as high as 7:1 in favor of what my conscious mind experiences as administrative bullshit, even for relatively simple tasks.
For example, suppose I want to go kayaking with friends. My desire to go kayaking is not strong enough to override my desire for food, water, or comfortable clothing, so I will usually make sure to acquire and pack enough of these things to keep me in good supply while I'm out and about. I might be out of snack bars, so I bike to the store to get more. Some of the clothing I want is probably dirty, so I have to clean it. I have to drive to the nearest river; this means I have to book a Zipcar and walk to the Zipcar first. If I didn't rent, I'd have to spend some time on car maintenance. When I get to the river, I have to rent a kayak; again, if I didn't rent, I'd have to spend some time loading and unloading and cleaning the kayak. After I wait in line and rent the kayak, I have to ride upstream in a bus to get to the drop-off point.
Of course, I don't want to go alone; I want to go with friends. So I have to call or e-mail people till I find someone who likes kayaking and has some free time that matches up with mine and isn't on crutches or sick at the moment. Knowing who likes kayaking and who has free time when -- or at least knowing it well enough to do an intelligent search that doesn't take all day -- requires checking in with lots of acquaintances on a regular basis to see how they're doing.
There are certainly moments of pleasure involved in all of these tasks; clean water tastes good; it feels nice to check in on a friend's health; there might be a pretty view from the bumpy bus ride upstream. But what I wanted to do, mostly, was go kayaking with friends. It might take me 4-7 hours to get ready to kayak for 1-2 hours.
My take on the challenge here is that the above advocates a method of assigning value to actions based on the causal relationship between performing it and the direct impact of that action on the desired goal. To simplify, I'll reference the above elements as processes of 1) assigning value to individual actions based on causal relationships, and 2) determining a causal relationship between performing an action and its direct impact on the world.
In the above model, an efficient action is one where we can clearly determine that its rationally causal relationship with impact on the world contributes to our desired goal. More importantly, in this model it is critical that the action contributes to our desired goal directly.
Consider an action that is homeostatic in nature - buying food. Spending time buying food does not directly contribute to our desired goal of "engaging in the act of kayaking"; as such, it isn't valued as efficient in the above model.
We do recognize however, that buying food is an irreplaceable step in the system of actions required to "engage in the act of kayaking." To the extent that an individual action is irreplaceable in a system of actions required to accomplish a goal, that action is important and valuable [this is a premise I'll call the irreplaceability premise]. With this premise in mind, it is easier to see that the act of buying food has an impact on "engaging in the act of kayaking" that is just as important as the act of pushing the kayak into the water - both are equally irreplaceable.
Using the directness model, we consider buying food as less valuable because it is less directly related to the happiness we experience from kayaking. If the irreplaceability premise is well-founded, then the directness model is a weak method of assigning value to actions - and thinking about irreplaceability may help resolve some of the concerns that arise with how to most optimally spend one's time, as described below.
[It's important to note as an aside that this particular application of the irreplaceability premise is founded on the notion that if the act of eating is removed, the act of pushing the kayak into the water will never take place. We can easily imagine an alternative scenario - you push the kayak into the water while hungry - so I'm supporting this irreplaceability with the sentiment contained within the statement "my desire to go kayaking is not strong enough to override my desire for food." It is in fact worth considering the function of time and our ability to delay homeostatic actions in this notion of "irreplaceability," but as an absolute definition, homeostatic actions will always be necessary and ultimately irreplaceable - it is equally easy to imagine an alternative, lengthier goal where delaying homeostatic behaviors ultimately do not reduce their necessity.]
To help make the irreplaceability premise more clear, consider also actions that are not homeostatic. As an undergraduate, I would often be conflicted about the directness of my actions and how to assess their value - most notably when the desired goal was something like "delivering a presentation for a class final." At some point it occurs to you that you're spending hours or even days preparing for a goal defined as a 20 minute task, and this seems like the same kind of waste mentioned above in the expression "it might take me 4-7 hours to get ready to kayak for 1-2 hours." But it is relatively easy for one to intuitively see a causal relationship between preparing slides and organizing sources as important to the end goal, so operating under the directness model our worries of wasted time are at least somewhat assuaged.
The problem is that the directness model again breaks down over lengths of time, where irreplaceable actions are not intuitively direct actors in the causal relationship between action and goal. 30 seconds of the presentation may come from ideas fostered over hours and hours of time going to class - and worse yet for directness, they may reflect the synthesis of disparate ideas captured across various chunks of time spent in lecture.
I'm not necessarily sure that the irreplaceability model is any better a tool for assigning value in our attempts to calculate efficiency (in a complex enough system it quickly becomes easy to identify every action as irreplaceable), but the above examples help illustrate the challenges of assigning value based on direct causality.
Kyle's How To Make Irrational Decisions wrapped up on Monday. I took plenty of notes, so let's go through the things that complicate the choices we make, then look at what we can do to make our decisions easier!
Why Making Decisions Is So Hard
Every time we make a decision, we're looking at two different parts of the result, what we get and when we get it. Sometimes deciding between the two is easy. Do I want $50 or $80? I'll take $80, thanks! Do I want it now or a month from now? Now, obviously!
Life isn't like that, though - the whats and the whens get all mixed up, and the decisions get harder. $50 now or $80 a month from now? Sure, having $50 in your hand right now feels a lot better, but an extra $30 sure makes waiting attractive. Let's illustrate this with adorable children waiting for marshmallows:
There are three different ways to focus your energy - the past, the present, and the future. Would you just eat the first marshmallow? You're present-oriented. Would you wait for the second? Future-oriented. Things like studying hard in school or saving for retirement are good examples of being future-oriented out in the non-marshmallow-related world.
But oh, oh, oh, it gets harder, even! Once uncertainty comes into the picture, everything gets much worse. Do you want $50, or a 50% chance at winning $100, but if you lose you get nothing? Math gives us a way of comparing the two - multiplying the probability by the payout gives the "expected payoff". $100 times 50% is $50, and $50 times 100% is also $50 - math is telling us the two are the same, but our brains sure don't think that way. (Confused? Check this out, or just trust me!)
Once outcomes are uncertain everything becomes a lot more personal. Do you just need $50 to buy a pair of new shoes, or do you really need that $100 to make rent? Are you a risk taker? This is all under the umbrella of risk aversion, which gets a lot more complicated if you head over to Wikipedia.
Now, once we start thinking about how "personal" a decision is we need to start thinking about what that really means. We have an idea that we operate in our own little sphere and are in complete control of all of our ideas and actions, when that's really not true at all.
If you ask someone to write down the word "see" half of people will write 'see' and the other half will write 'sea.' If you make a waving motion with your hand, though, suddenly everyone's writing 'sea.' Right, waves! Every decision you make is influenced by things you've experienced recently, and this is called priming (Wikipedia). Holding a cold drink will make you think more negatively than a hot one. If you just watched a romantic comedy, it might be harder to break up with your boyfriend. You don't make decisions in a vacuum.
Priming doesn't necessarily make decisions easier or harder, it's just something that complicates the idea of making a "best" or "rational" decision - what you think is a perfectly thought-out decision right now might not be the same an hour later after you've had to sit on the subway for a while, or look at an ad, or aren't nearly so hungry. Realizing that in every moment your choices are going to look a little different can go a long way in relaxing about decision-making.
While talking about the "best" decision, regret is an important aspect. Once you've made a decision, you're locking out all the choices you didn't make. You might have a tendency to fixate on everything you've lost out on when you make a decision - this is called the opportunity cost. If you buy this shirt you can't buy those shoes, or how taking one job prevents you from taking another.
Another big thing is sunk costs, which is anything you've spent on something that you can't get back. These costs usually make you want to go further with something, even if you don't like it: spending years in a relationship is a deterrent to leaving it, spending thousands on grad school makes you determined to work in a specific field. I think these are big big big factors when dealing with long-term, important decisions.
Okay, enough depressing stuff, let's talk about how we can make some better decisions!
How to Make Better Decisions
The most important thing about making better decisions is acknowledging that there are a lot of factors at play, and nothing you do is the One True Best Awesome Decision.
The past, the present, the future - all of these are different times to revel in, and one isn't necessarily better than the other. Saving for retirement is a good example: partying down now might seem wasteful to some people, but you don't know if you'll even be alive in 50 years to enjoy the money that you've saved. Maybe spending that money on seeing a band is going to mean more to you than an extra night on a Seniors Cruise down the line. On the other hand, giving up that extra drink might be worth not living in a cardboard box later down the road. Chances are you're looking for balance.
Uncertainty isn't always a bad thing. Understand that there are always unknowns. While we used the $50 or 50% chance at $100 example before, nothing in life is ever that clean-cut. Uncertainty exists along the way, just not in the results. When you go to grad school, you aren't just taking a gamble that you'll get a fancy job when you get out of school - you're also meeting new people and experiencing things you wouldn't have if you were just out in the working world. In the same way, if you get a job instead of going to school you're amassing experiences and business contacts, and each of those interactions changes where your decision is taking you.
Kyle brought up chaos theory as a way of thinking about this - life isn't just X causes Y, it's X sends you towards Y, A interrupts, steers you towards B, but then C edges you back in the direction of W, and etc etc etc forever and ever. No matter how well-informed you are, you never have perfect information about what a decision is going to do and what it is going to mean in the future.
An important take-away from the class for me was that when you are making a decision, you aren't determining the result. When you pick someone to date, that's all you're picking - you haven't secured them in eternal marriage, you don't know if you'll hate how they fold laundry in six years, you don't know if you'll fall for an especially charming gas station attendant. All decisions can do is guide you in a direction, not guarantee an outcome, so you definitely have room to relax.
We talked about priming before, the idea that everything around you is affecting your decision-making. I think the best way to deal with this is to just acknowledge that it exists and move on. Understand that even though you might love to be 100% in control and perfectly rational all of the time, it just can't happen. You can try to look around and see what recent experiences are influencing your decisions, but don't stress out about it too much. Experiences are what make us who we are, and a decision influenced by them is no more or less natural than something perfectly "rational."
The most important thing to remember about sunk costs is that sunk costs are sunk. You are not getting them back, no matter what, so just ignore them! You buy tickets to a baseball game, but it's raining. Don't go. You're miserable in your relationship, but you've been there for 5 years, and you feel like you owe it to all of that effort to keep on going. You don't. You aren't getting your time or money back, so go ahead and make the decision that will make you happiest in the future. Realizing that sunk costs are so much of the reason you want to go to the game or stay in the relationship will help empower you to make the tough decision to ignore the costs and do what will make you happy.
A fun idea some people brought up was the mindset that "Every Decision I Make Is Right." Instead of worrying about your decisions, you just make them, and trust that you've done the right thing. Just like the fox and the grapes, sometimes the way you think about things is even more important than what actually happened.
The toughest part about making a decision is the period before you actually make it. You stress out, you overthink things, you take ages of pain to come to a conclusion. Just decide! There are enough unknowns out there that neither can really be the best, I promise. My rule of thumb is to take the path that seems to give you the most options down the road - even if you didn't make the "right" decision right now, one of those choices later on is sure to make up for it. So just embrace the fact that there's a lot more going on that you could ever account for, take a deep relaxing breath, and go on making those irrational decisions!
Jonathan Soma over at the Brooklyn Brainery posted this fantastic write up of the How To Make Irrational Decisions class. A nice blend of topics I introduced, and how those are interpreted by someone other than myself.
Typical times children begin to ask questions, from a lecture at the Medical College of Georgia that @ashleydickinson passed along to me:
"what" 2 yrs"where" 2.6 yrs"who" 3.0 yrs"whose" 3.0 yrs"why" 3.0 yrs"how many" 3.0 yrs"how" 3 ‐ 6 yrs"when" 4 yrsThis could be interpreted as either a rough scale of abstractness, or a rough scale of what is most salient and critical. Either way, is it surprising that "when" ends up so late on the list? "What" something is, that we can grasp relatively easily. But our concept of time and how we operate within it, that's something we're still so completely far off from understanding.
I was told yesterday that time travel is the ultimate superpower; through time travel you could address every other desire imaginable.
The respondent began by pointing out how time travel could be used to approximate super speed, strength, and all the other traditional superpowers, but this also speaks deeply to the idea of want/decisionmaking/happiness.
As you may have heard me say/will hear me say again, the problem with those three things is that we have little capacity to think about them with respect to time. If you shift the time perspective among any of them, their meaning is completely different.
Consider a basic example of this:
I 'want' to go back in time to redo x/y/z 'decisions.' That will leave me feeling more 'happy.'
A small and incomplete list of problems that happen to come to mind:
1) it's highly likely and in fact guaranteed that you will 'want' something else later when the conditions of your situation have changed (see: "Decisions are about comparison. If you have control over conditions, you have control over decisions.")
2) decisions are never made in the moment. They are made in the past. (see: "There's not just one decision; "I'm here because of a long chain of events"")
3) deciding what "happiness" means is the messiest part of talking about free will (see "free will, decision making, and happiness"). This is partially captured by the idea people are trying to express when they say ignorance is bliss. Consider the thought here in reference to the PSFK post Phone App Diagnoses Disease Through Sound:
What superpower would you want? (Or should I ask "want"?)
Nutrition experts have analyzed the food depicted in some of the best-known paintings of the biblical Last Supper and found that the portion and plate sizes depicted in them increased substantially from older paintings to those painted more recently.
[from National Cutures of The World: A Statistical Reference]
"Natural historians have recognized a hierarchy of exogeneity whereby certain natural phenomenon are necessary conditions (and simultaneously historical precedents) to others. Climate, for example, is a necessary condition for marine and animal/human life, which is in turn a necessary condition for culture or cultural behavior."Hello friends and collaborators. I deal in innovation, working to build fantastic experiences enabled by the digital world. As part of this I track cultural change, primarily through observations guided by models and filters calibrated over years to sort out the cream.
These pieces of thoughts here reflect concepts that are elements of those models: ecosystem thinking, long-term value, information filters, and pattern recognition.
("How to break anything" is an abstract notion that reflects my background in observation and analysis. Rules are meant to be broken, but only through understanding the rules - observing them with an empathetic eye - can they be broken constructively.
So how to break anything? Observe everything.
[You can't observe everything so how do you know what to observe? That's another project that I call Filter Theory - see the About link above.])
