How To Break Anything

Couldn't help but reblog this, given my propensity to think about things in terms of "a long enough timeline..."

Noted that the actual excerpt from the above linked post is: "On a long enough timeline, every decision is a success, in the "you learn something from everything" sense. On a short enough timeline, every decision is a failure, in the "you haven't accomplished your goals yet" sense."

The idea of course is that on an even longer timeline, every decision is a failure. Or a success. Whatever 300 years later happens to mean to you.

Eat the Big Fish is getting a second edition, looking at some of the changes in his thinking of the last ten years since it was written, and one areas he is looking to explore is "opportunity". 

"Do you know who invented the Cheeseburger?" asks Morgan. It was JWT in the 1930s, on behalf of Kraft slices who wanted to encourage the American population to increase their consumption of cheese slices. 

JWT suggested that they attach them as an ingredient to the most popular meal in America - the hamburger. They created something out of nothing." 

I love this story - the idea that an agency helped create a new usage occasion, a new reason to buy a product, and forever changed American culture - just by taking two existing things and putting them together. 

Another reason I love this story is that it's almost certainly not true. 

As far as Wikipedia knows, the Cheeseburger was invented in 1924 by a 16 year old fry cook called Lionel Sternberger [what are the odds?] at a sandwich shop in Pasadena, California. 

I very much doubt that this was the first time anyone added cheese to a burger, but it's the first recorded, [and as we know nothing is real until it has been recorded] and it certainly predates the 1930s. 

Assuming the Kraft/JWT story is at all true - I can find no evidence online, but that's not conclusive either way - what's way more likely is that some inspiring young Mad Man saw, heard or indeed ate a cheeseburger, stole the idea, and then, perhaps, the agency and the brand helped it spread. 

Stories are often more compelling than facts. 

No idea comes from nowhere. 

You may have heard me say that the problem with claiming "firsts" is (like most things) a problem of definition. I'll surely talk about this more later, but here Faris gives three excellent concepts to consider:

Nothing is real until it has been recorded
No idea comes from nowhere
Stories are often more compelling than facts

What I like most about this talk is not just the thinking on achievement through adversity, but that it speaks deeply to the counterintuitive and troubling problem of how to define what it is we "want" in life.

"If you had asked me at 15 years old if I would have traded prosthetics for flesh and bone legs, I wouldn't have hesitated for a second. If you asked me today? I'm not so sure."

I'll certainly continue asking the question: "what does it actually mean to 'want' something?"

I feel pretty depressed every time I watch people flip out about the dangers of talking to strangers. Strangers helped me become who I was. Strangers taught me about a different world than what I knew in my small town. Strangers allowed me to see from a different perspective. Strangers introduced me to academia, gender theory, Ivy League colleges, the politics of war, etc. So I hate how we vilify all strangers as inherently bad. Did I meet some sketchballs on the Internet when I was a teen? DEFINITELY. They were weird; I moved on.

Danah Boyd on ChatRoulette, above.

In addition to being about control of our identity, privacy is about protecting ourselves from strangers.

To which I have a similar reaction as Danah's here:

"I’m still not sure what to say except that I feel this weighted sense of Le Sigh. The same mix of depression and exhaustion I felt this morning when I was playing peek-a-boo with a smiley child in an airport and her parents whisked her away, glaring at me as though I was the devil incarnate. I realize that many parents think that they’re doing good by their kids when they choose to limit their exposure to the randomness of the world, but it just makes me deeply deeply sad."

I still vividly remember once upon a time when I was little, when I was watching Interview With A Vampire with my parents. There was a family friend there as well. I couldn't have been more than 10 years old. As I remember, there's a part where one of the female characters is nude for some reason (If I remember correctly it's part of some gruesome performance where she's devoured by vampires).

I don't remember the exact comments, but I remember the family friend making some objection about me being there (not because of the gruesome scene, but because of the nudity), and I remember my parents making some response about exposure and reality.

And I remember it because it so deeply reflects the world I grew up in, in which exposure to the world mattered above all, for all it's grittiness and for all it's conflicting, differing, and paradoxical views that constantly change the way I think about things.

At some point I'll explain the idea of defining intelligence as "efficient cross-domain optimization," as I ran into at this weekend's NYC Future Salon. But for now, suffice to say that this exposure has made all the difference to me in the cross-domain realm, in the same sense that Danah expresses above: were it not for exposure to weird and scary strangers, it's likely she'd never be the academic she is today.

Essentially, the idea behind time-orientation is that the decisions we make have a lot to do with our perspective on time; specifically: what matters when. Phillip Zimbardo has some excellent thoughts on this here:

Worries about information overload are as old as information itself, with each generation reimagining the dangerous impacts of technology on mind and brain. From a historical perspective, what strikes home is not the evolution of these social concerns, but their similarity from one century to the next, to the point where they arrive anew with little having changed except the label.

These concerns stretch back to the birth of literacy itself. In parallel with modern concerns about children's overuse of technology, Socrates famously warned against writing because it would "create forgetfulness in the learners' souls, because they will not use their memories." He also advised that children can't distinguish fantasy from reality, so parents should only allow them to hear wholesome allegories and not "improper" tales, lest their development go astray. The Socratic warning has been repeated many times since: The older generation warns against a new technology and bemoans that society is abandoning the "wholesome" media it grew up with, seemingly unaware that this same technology was considered to be harmful when first introduced.

Are you under the impression that what you presently believe about privacy/identity/morality/anything is special?

Your brain is wired to tell you that it absolutely is. Your brain will tell you that its experiences are more important than any other set of experiences, and it will call your experiences "truth."

This is perfectly fine, so long as you recognize that this applies to everyone else's truth as well.

Learning from failure is not intuitively rational, but only because of the context we assign to the event of 'failing.' Like many problems of context and definition, it is one of time perspective.

This isn't too profound of a concept; essentially the reason time perspective applies is simply because if you're conceptually judging an decision as a 'failure' or 'success,' the only thing that matters is whether you're looking at the the immediate consequences of the decision or the distant consequences.

On a long enough timeline, every decision is a success, in the "you learn something from everything" sense. On a short enough timeline, every decision is a failure, in the "you haven't accomplished your goals yet" sense.

Obviously there's a balance to be struck here. The best part: where that balance is found is entirely within your perceptual control. (somewhat related: "If you have control over conditions, you have control over decisions)