How To Break Anything

0

12 Apr 2012

Progress, serendipity, and chronological proprotionality
- Edit
- Delete
- Tags
- Autopost
At first glance,

via altnytterfarlig.tumblr.com

and

from "Google’s New Glasses And The War On Serendipity" via new-aesthetic.tumblr.com

seem to be opposing viewpoints, no?

This apparent paradox could be seen as just an illusion of scale, perhaps. As in:

- Large things with major impacts benefit from a reduction in the amount of randomness, which leads to progress

- Small things with minor impacts benefit from an increase in the amount of randomness, which leads to serendipity

Which would be nice, because then all you'd have to do is figure out the difference between large things and small things, sorting based on their scope of impact.

Though unfortunately for our solution here, the historian Frank Gavin calls this the assesment of "chronological proportionality," noting that it's something humans are notoriously terrible at (see: Five Ways To Use History Well).

Not sure I have a better solution for you right away, just something to consider as you too wrestle with notions like progress and serendipity.
- views
- Tweet
- Tweet
2

7 Nov 2011

from: xkcd: The General Problem
- Edit
- Delete
- Tags
- Autopost
via xkcd.com

see also Phillip Zimbardo's thinking on time-orientation in the video below. Both are about feedback loops between one's actions and the resulting reaction from the world.

(The lesson being that there's no formula here, of course; it's up to you to decide how long those feedback loops can be for you to be comfortable, and how long they can be to stay appropriate for the task at hand.)
- views
- Tweet
- Tweet
4

17 May 2010

A simple list to determine how old your are - thoughts on technology, perspective, Internet of Things etc
- Edit
- Delete
- Tags
- Autopost
1) everything that’s already in the world when you’re born is just normal;

2) anything that gets invented between then and before you turn thirty is incredibly exciting and creative and with any luck you can make a career out of it;

3) anything that gets invented after you’re thirty is against the natural order of things and the beginning of the end of civilisation as we know it until it’s been around for about ten years when it gradually turns out to be alright really.

Apply this list to movies, rock music, word processors and mobile phones to work out how old you are.

via douglasadams.com

The rest of the article is even better. (How to Stop Worrying and Learn to Love the Internet)

"Another problem with the net is that it’s still ‘technology’, and ‘technology’, as the computer scientist Bran Ferren memorably defined it, is ‘stuff that doesn’t work yet.’ We no longer think of chairs as technology, we just think of them as chairs. But there was a time when we hadn’t worked out how many legs chairs should have, how tall they should be, and they would often ‘crash’ when we tried to use them. Before long, computers will be as trivial and plentiful as chairs (and a couple of decades or so after that, as sheets of paper or grains of sand) and we will cease to be aware of the things."

Or in other words, the Internet of Things will be as invisible as the things themselves are.
- views
- Tweet
- Tweet
0

7 May 2010

A definition-dependent paradox for #makeachartday: value, quality, etc
- Edit
- Delete
- Tags
- Autopost
"Definition-dependent" as in "it mostly just depends on what your definitions of value, quality, and sugary are at the moment." And paradox too, for that matter.
- views
- Tweet
- Tweet
0

29 Apr 2010

Nostalgia For A Past Future
- Edit
- Delete
- Tags
- Autopost
What does Nostalgia for a past future mean to you?
This question comes about via OFFF, the International Festival for the Post-Digital Creation Culture.
via spacecollective.org

A bit of perspective on how to think of time, nostalgia, future, etc
- views
- Tweet
- Tweet
0

27 Apr 2010

On our conception of time and on our most basic conceptions
- Edit
- Delete
- Tags
- Autopost
The 2-Dimensional Arrow of Biological Time

Biological time is best described by a two-dimensional surface that takes the shape of a second order helix, according to a new theory of time

It's tempting to think of time as a linear sequence of events best captured by a straight line, the x-axis on a graph for example. But physicists have never felt constrained by such a definition, on the contrary they've never hesitated to mould time to their own ends.

In thermodynamics, for example, the arrow of time comes about because of irreversible phenomena such as phase transitions, bifurcations and chaos. In relativity, space and time are as one, and Minkowski, in his famous formulation, used the idea of a 'causality cone' to explain the correlation between physical objects.

In quantum mechanics, the notion of time becomes even more strange. Time is sometimes two-dimensional, sometimes reversible to maintain CPT (charge, parity, time) symmetry and at other times discontinuous and fractal-like.

In short, physicists reformulate time in whatever suits them, or at least in whatever way provides the best predictive or explanatory power.

via technologyreview.com

One way to think of that last line is in the context that we think of time as a uniform straight line in large part because of Newton. Newton needed this conception of time as a way to reconcile the thinking that surrounded F=MA. Before this, time was largely relational, conceived of as existing in the relationships of the movement of objects. Newton made time a standard so that the movement of objects could be explained independently; people like Leibniz argued him down heavily for it.
Of course, the point is that for all the progress we've made under the Newtonian model, we're finding that it doesn't account for a good number of phenomena, namely most everything that quantum physics approaches.
And the larger point is more relevant to the types of things I tend to talk about here. We typically feel that the linear model is fundamentally true, because it 'feels' true. But really theres no reason we should feel that way, except that Newton happened to be so influential. Note: not 'right,' just influential. Influential for good reason of course, but just a thought that not even our deepest and most basic conceptions are immune to this dynamic.
- views
- Tweet
- Tweet
0

14 Apr 2010

April 13, 2010: Kyle Cameron Studstill - the3six5's posterous
- Edit
- Delete
- Tags
- Autopost
[This post originally appeared on the3six5.posterous.com]

I think a lot on decisionmaking, so today I asked my Twitter friends what they think of as the best decision they've made in the last five years. Interested primarily in comparing this to decisions made in the last five days I was surprised when someone asked the same of me, but I managed to come up with "deciding to floss every day" as my response.

Decisionmaking is primarily about "want," and flossing every day exemplifies the idea that the word "want" is such a ridiculously lacking term to express the phenomenon for which it has been charged to capture. This is primarily because "want" expresses nothing with respect to time; a critical shortcoming, because on a short enough timeline, nobody "wants" anything.

In the moments leading up to the flossing is it really something I "want" to do? Not particularly. I find it annoyingly time-consuming.

What I "want" is a certain feeling - it comes along with recognizing that following through on decisions is an unexplainably easy and incredibly rewarding thing to do. Well it is if you're looking in retrospect, anyway - it's a future "want."

This is one of the best decisions I've made because I can apply it to everything that seems uncomfortable in the present.

It's why I woke up immediately to my alarm this morning after (very) minimal sleep, stood right up and got on with the day. There's always that part of me that doesn't "want" to get up, but there's a more clever part of me that knows my RSS reader is as good as coffee and once I fire it up I'll have forgotten the feeling altogether. I read the latest lesswrong.org post everyday and today's was dreadfully dense - as always - but after fighting that short-term "want" I walked away with a piece of something intelligent - as always.

On a short enough timeline most worthwhile things seem unnecessary, uncomfortable, ridiculous, like wastes of time/effort. The bad news is that feeling never goes away; we're naturally inclined to see the world in short moment-to-moment timelines.

The good news is that shifting one's perspective is completely in our control, and entirely worth it. Ask Walter Michel.

[img via Oh, The Temptation]
- views
- Tweet
- Tweet
0

28 Mar 2010

Yesterday I asked people what superpowers they desired. Result: some thoughts on time travel, decisionmaking, happiness
- Edit
- Delete
- Tags
- Autopost
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 yrs

This 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.

"A Rough Scale Of The Abstractness/Salience Of Questions" via howtobreakanything.com

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"?)
- views
- Tweet
- Tweet
2

22 Mar 2010

Historians, more than anyone, know that there are no firsts
- Edit
- Delete
- Tags
- Autopost
Today’s idea: In a way, blogging isn’t all that new, a historian says. Informal writing combining pithiness with provocation stirred up the politics of Renaissance Italy and prerevolutionary France. And in light of the Web, it deserves more study.

via ideas.blogs.nytimes.com

[from "In Search of Time," on various cultures' adoption of lunar-solar calendars]
- views
- Tweet
- Tweet
0

7 Mar 2010

"A mere 300 years later," long enough timelines, etc
- Edit
- Delete
- Tags
- Autopost
via theessentialman.tumblr.com

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.
- views
- Tweet
- Tweet
0

20 Feb 2010

Time-orientation: decisionmaking is not just about what matters; is also about when it matters
- Edit
- Delete
- Tags
- Autopost
via amber-rae.com

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:
- views
- Tweet
- Tweet
0

15 Feb 2010

re: "How to learn from failure": time-orientation and judging events/outcomes
- Edit
- Delete
- Tags
- Autopost
via thinkingalaud.posterous.com

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)
- views
- Tweet
- Tweet
0

2 Feb 2010

I think the concept of things being 'ruined' is absurd.
- Edit
- Delete
- Tags
- Autopost
Mostly because it's hard from me to think that the last x number of years of humanity [choose your own number, anywhere from 30-3000] have been an exercise in things getting worse. I mean, when did things first start to get 'ruined'??

Most people you ask this question, should they happen to be on the 'things need saving' side of the world, will give you a very predictable answer. Humanity stopped progressing usually when they were either in their early 20's, or when they were established in their careers.

Which I of course find laughably hilarious.

Who will save book publishing?

What will save the newspapers?

What means 'save'?

If by save you mean, "what will keep things just as they are?" then the answer is nothing will. It's over.

If by save you mean, "who will keep the jobs of the pressmen and the delivery guys and the squadrons of accountants and box makers and transshippers and bookstore buyers and assistant editors and coffee boys," then the answer is still nothing will. Not the Kindle, not the iPad, not an act of Congress.

via sethgodin.typepad.com
- views
- Tweet
- Tweet
0

1 Feb 2010

Your age versus how much you worry
- Edit
- Delete
- Tags
- Autopost
via socialhallucinations.tumblr.com
- views
- Tweet
- Tweet